Lets "talk" about love (Languages)

But first I need coffee, do you need coffee, tea or something more?

SO recently my Spouse and I did a day-long seminar with Danyelle Lynch of Illuminate Psychological Services where she talked about the 5 Love Languages; which you can learn about here. The program was awesome and it helped us gain a better understanding of how "love languages" affect us and our children. The class was geared toward how children show the love languages, how they might act out when they are craving different types, and how play can fill the "love buckets" of our children.

As for what the different languages (or buckets) are here the list:

1. Physical touch

2. Acts of Service

3. Quality time

4. Words of affirmation

5. Receiving gifts

If you visit the official website for the Languages you can do a test to learn what your primary language is or you can get the app "Love Nudge" which has really cool features and even informational videos about each language to help you understand them better. Additionally, the app helps you set goals to help you express love in the language(s) most important to your spouse to ensure that they feel your love.

I hope they eventually come up with a family app that can be used to tack and make gaols for your different children or even your own parents.

What things did we learn that merit this blog today? One of the takeaways that I want to share with you is the idea that we as parents need to ensure our children are getting all the different love languages. especially the ones that make us the least comfortable, because chances are those are the buckets least filled in our children. I feel it goes without saying, but in case I'm wrong, your children under 7 are going to show a craving for every language as they learn the world and who they are; after that, though they may generally lean towards one more than the others. it is still our job to ensure all the buckets are getting their fair share of our love. A cautionary lesson learned was the fact that we need to be sure that our buckets are being filled from other people and places. Why? Simply put it is our children's job to be a child, not spend their time filling your buckets for you. Once they are adults if they choose to fill your buckets that's great, but, it will be their choice, not a burden placed on them. It should also be mentioned that the primary language you use may change over time, in fact, they all may shuffle around. So watching for signs of priority shifting in your kids can be very important.

When we step away from children-specific lessons we get into things like how our primary language is the greatest weapon against us. In the same way that our top needed/desired language can make us feel the most loved it can just as easily make us feel the most hurt if ignored or blatantly used against us. In a recent twitter conversation with fellow podcaster and #ESOFam member Kyle Dempster, I revealed how my Love language had hurt me, and caused (some) of the disengagement from my content creation. (not including being away working as I talked about in the last blog)

"My own love language was a catalyst in disengaging me from my content creation"- @crowness0

It makes sense to start with what my love languages are right? The top two I have are Quality Time and Acts of Service. What is interesting is that I am far better at showing/ expressing Acts of Service than I am at giving Quality Time. For myself, Quality Time can be found in proximity to those I love, my spouse working at her Scentsy business at her desk while I am at mine here in the studio as an example, so it can be filled easily for me. That being said a conversation was had, at the height of personal life things happening, where my Spouse offered the opinion that I was not spending enough time with my family and that I was too often in the studio. I was told, or how I felt about it, I was not giving enough Quality Time to my family.

So I sought out to ensure my children and my spouse had my time every chance I could give them until I became weary of my studio. I knew that I wasn't creating content and I justified it as prioritizing my family over my hobbies, it wasn't until one night that Andy had told me I should go to the studio and get some work done that I realized I had become afraid of working there causing people to feel like I didn't want to give them my love. Moreover, it took me a while longer to even admit or understand that this is what happened, but I knew there had been a trigger to cause me this negative emotion towards my work/workspace. This past week I have been working really hard to make myself comfortable with the studio again, beyond just my login rewards for ESO.

I won't bore any of you with how exactly we are fixing the issue but we are, so I hope this blog is going to be the first in many things coming from myself in the way of content creation soon.

#ContentCreation #LifeStory #5LoveLanguages