Learn at Lunch Staff Assembly Session - Slides and Summary

Over 100 attendees to the session

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About the Event

On March 5th, the UCLA Relationship Institute offered a one-hour Learn at Lunch session to the UCLA Staff Assembly. Over 100 staff attended the session. What follows are the presentation slides and summaries. Click on any slide image to enlarge it.

Please note: the Learn at Lunch session was a brief overview of certain aspects of relationships. A complete discussion of the ideas mentioned during the presentation requires more than a one-hour session. In addition, this material is most effective when taught to couples, rather than individuals.

If you are interested in learning more about how your relationship works and what you can do to make it stronger, we recommend attending a full-day seminar offered by the UCLA Relationship Institute. During these seminars, you will have the opportunity to assess yourself and your relationship, and participate in exercises with your partner that are designed to help you better understand the many different facets of your relationship and how they all work together. You will also see videotapes of couples demonstrating key positive and negative relationship dynamics.

Register for our next seminar on June 6th. Members of the UCLA community receive additional discounted rates.

Click on any slide image to enlarge it.

LA Times example

Slide 1

A recent story on the front page of the LA Times asserted that it did not matter which diet you were on - as long as you were on a diet in which you had reduced calories, few saturated fats, and ate lots of fruits and vegetables, you would be able to manage your weight well.

Simple rule for health

Slide 2

This provides us with a simple rule that will allow us to maintain fitness. If you follow this rule, you will lose weight. This one rule allows us to achieve a goal that is both important and very good for our health in the long run. This will not come as a surprise to most of us. The real mystery is why is this so difficult?

There are three reasons why it is so hard for us to follow this simple rule.

  1. The task itself is hard:
    Hamburgers taste better than carrots. Exercising is not always fun.
  2. Our circumstances make it difficult:
    We may work long hours and have very little time to eat right and exercise the way we know we should.
  3. We have individual characteristics that make it hard to follow the rule:
    We may have learned unhealthy habits about food or possess a genetic predisposition that makes it difficult to eat right or exercise regularly.
Is there a rule for relationships?

Slide 3

Is there a rule for interpersonal fitness? Is there a simple rule that if followed regularly would allow for a strong and healthy relationship?

Simple rule for successful relationships

Slide 4

Research shows that there is such a rule. In order to have a strong healthy relationship, the best thing we can do on a regular basis is to try and communicate three things to our partner:

  1. We understand him/her
  2. We value who he/she is
  3. We care about him/her

That is the rule. If you follow the rule you will have a good relationship. However, just as with diet, we have to ask what makes it so hard to implement this rule on a daily basis in our relationship?

  1. The task is difficult:
    We have to coordinate our actions around our partner, sort out strong emotions in our relationship, and often have differences of opinion that we need to work through. Our relationships also have lots of facets to them. We have to deal with finances, children, sexuality and intimacy. These issues and others require us to communicate well with our partner. And that is not easy to do. Relationships by their very nature are inherently difficult.
  2. Our circumstances often conspire against us being effective communicators:
    A stressful day at work, a chronically ill child, losing retirement money with drops in the stock market, or having to take care of an aging parent - these and many other circumstances make the difficult task of communicating warmth and understanding to our partner all the more difficult.
  3. We all bring unique models, perspectives, and expectations to our relationship:
    We learn about relationships from the families that we grow up in and that can be part of the legacy that we bring into new relationships.
Example video of a couple

Slide 5

At this point in the presentation, we showed a video example of two newlywed partners talking to one another. They were videotaped in a laboratory here at UCLA several years ago. The woman was asked to talk about something she wanted to change about herself, and she identified losing weight as her topic. The man, her husband, was asked to respond in a way he ordinarily would respond at home. We saw in this video clip that the husband had great difficulty understanding, validating, and caring for his partner.

Stress affects two key things in relationships

Slide 6

The remainder of the presentation focused on stress. Dr. Karney discussed how stress affects two key things in relationships:

  1. Stress changes the content of what we talk about:
    Instead of talking about nice enjoyable things with our partner, when under stress couples have to talk about the problems they face.
  2. Stress makes us emotionally aroused, which makes it easier to react and more difficult to have an effective discussion:
    In stressful situations, we focus less on our partner and more on getting our own way. Stress also makes us narrow our focus and fall back on bad habits. In relationships, when we need to employ effective strategies the most is often the time when it is most difficult to do so.
5 key strategies to deal with stress

Slide 7

The Relationship Institute has developed a list of five key strategies that couples can use to respond to stress constructively:

  1. Get Stress on Your Radar. Make no mistake: stress is potent. Stress affects us physically, and it can leave us feeling depleted and more short-tempered than usual. As a result we are more likely to criticize our partner, exaggerate flaws in our relationship, and bicker more. To make matters worse, stress is invisible and easy to overlook. Partners in healthy relationships know how to recognize stress, and they make allowances for it. Know the ways your partner shows stress, and when you see those signals cut him or her some slack.
  2. Step Up. When your partner feels overwhelmed, it?s time to do more: drive the kids, go to the grocery, cook dinner, pay the bills, whatever. But be careful about taking credit for your good deeds. If you crow about how helpful you are, you can make your partner feel worse, not better, because you are sending the message that your partner is really not up to the task, or will owe you a favor in the future. So don?t pat yourself on the back ? at least in front of your partner. Just do more of what needs to get done, and take the personal satisfaction that comes with that.
  3. Set Up a Firewall. Every couple experiences aggravation and frustration, and stress only makes these feelings worse. Partners in healthy relationships keep their frustrations in check, not allowing them to spill over to erode the good feelings that they have for one another. So build a firewall around all of the great things that you and your partner share, and protect them against all the minor annoyances that life sends your way. Remind yourself of all the wonderful qualities that first drew you to your partner ? and make an effort to see those qualities, even in those moments when he or she is driving you nuts.
  4. Get Back to Basics. Remember that good relationships are fundamentally about two people taking care of each other. Know what it takes for your partner to feel secure and happy, and do your best to give it to them ? on their terms, not yours. Make an extra effort to show appreciation and affection -- even in small ways, and especially when you disagree. Regardless of how stressed they are, healthy couples rarely resort to yelling, name calling, being selfish, or delivering ultimatums. They know that they can weather storms best when they reach out to each other.
  5. Get Active. If stress is eating away at you and your relationship, do something about it. You don?t expect to achieve good physical health by sitting on the couch, so don?t let your relationship get out of shape either. Consider taking a class to get ideas on how to keep your relationship fresh, sexy, and energized. Make a commitment to take a walk together every weekend. If you are really struggling, get professional help; talk to your close friends or consult the yellow pages for a good therapist.

Keep in mind, stress provides an opportunity. Couples can either join together to manage the stress in their lives and grow closer as a result or couples can deteriorate and become more divided in the face of stress.

If you have any questions, or if you have any suggestions for a kind of seminar you would like to see offered by the UCLA Relationship Institute, please contact us.