What We Carry Into Every Relationship
Day 111 - 117 / 1000
Some relationships end. Others stay with us, even when the person is no longer in the room.
This week made me look at what we inherit, what we expect, and what we may need to let go of.
Not only in our relationships with others, but in the one we have with ourselves.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
The Manager I Became
The Men Who Built the Roots
The Amount You Have Today
We Play by the Rules
The Wins I Don't Celebrate
The Brutal Question
What Forgiveness Frees
1. The Manager I Became
Can you think of any negative relationship habits?
Something that might have come from your parents, maybe.
A habit that you are actively trying to break now.
The other day, I was walking around the apartment for ten minutes, trying to think of any negative habit that I might have inherited.
It is kind of hard to find something specific, to be honest.
It may be the difficulty of the question, or it might be the fact that spotting these kinds of habits is difficult to do on your own.
As I tried to dig deeper into it the other morning, I found one habit.
On one hand, it is not a negative one when I have it under control.
On the other hand, it can be a really tough one to control.
This habit I have in relationships is expecting the same amount of effort and perfection from others as I expect from myself.
As I said, there are moments when it can yield results, especially in professional settings.
But there are many moments when it is unrealistic and inappropriate to do so.
I have one strong example from my life.
This is a very personal story of mine because it taught me a lot in life.
It goes back to the time when I lived in Copenhagen.
I was working as a restaurant manager in a Michelin-recognized restaurant at the time.
It was the peak of my hospitality career.
I wanted things to be perfect, and I was pouring my whole heart and energy into it.
That habit I described earlier reached the point where I was sometimes too harsh on my staff.
But I did not know that back then.
I was completely unaware that I might be like that.
My expectations of them were always rising.
At first, it really worked.
During the first six months, we really stepped up as a team.
Booked-out evenings were smooth, and we could move in synchronization instead of running around.
The moment reality hit me was when one of my waiters announced that she was leaving because she never felt appreciated enough.
Things clicked in my mind instantly.
I realized that I had become the kind of manager I had always hated.
A manager for whom nothing was ever enough, despite the fact that all my intentions were good.
All I wanted was to get better, personally and together as a team, to push the limits just a little above the bar again and make the restaurant better.
But what I did not see was that some people were already doing their best, and I did not acknowledge that.
This was and still is a very strong experience for me.
Lessons from this time are still coming to me even today.
In retrospect, I tend to look back on that time and examine it deeply to find anything valuable I can learn from and make sure I can be better in the future.
What about you?
Can you think of any negative relationship habits?
Where did they come from, what do they look like when they show up, and what does it cost you to interrupt them in the moment?
2. The Men Who Built the Roots
Do you know which part of life many people are most afraid of?
Death.
I am not going to be somber here, I promise.
I think that for many of us, it is very hard to process the loss of someone close.
Everyone deals with it in their own way.
It is complicated because no one really taught us how to process these emotions.
Despite the fact that it is a natural part of life, the same as birth, we tend to fight with death during our entire lives.
In the last decade or so, I have been to three funerals.
All of them were men.
My great-grandfather and both of my grandfathers.
Men who built the roots of my family.
One thing that I have not understood yet about these departures from my life is that I did not cry during any of them.
I always thought, mostly because of movies, that people should cry at funerals.
For some reason, the way I felt was different.
Without getting too much into any woo-woo, I felt that it was not the final goodbye.
I felt that I should be strong in those moments instead, hold my family high, and support them.
Looking back on the lives of my ancestors evokes multiple emotions in me.
But mostly, it is gratitude, respect, and motivation.
I am where I am thanks to them and my parents, who laid the foundation for me to chase my dreams and build my own legacy.
No one in my family was ever wealthy.
But everyone I remember and know about was a hard worker.
From working in the fields and taking care of animals, through serving in the police, all the way to working for the town services.
That is my heritage, and I am proud of it.
Now it is my time to take over the steering wheel and make sure the next in line will be proud as well.
What legacy are you trying to build?
3. The Amount You Have Today
Some days are just tough.
There are moments when it does not matter what you do.
They are just going to be tough.
Sometimes we do not want them to be tough, but life presents them in a way that leaves no way around them.
I was moving out of my previous apartment a couple of months ago, and that day was one of those days for me.
I finished my previous job and needed to clean the apartment so I could move out.
There was just so much stuff to do.
Even writing these hundred words afterwards felt like something extreme.
Despite knowing the date and knowing it was going to be tough, I still tried to prepare myself mentally and physically so that I would be ready when the day came.
Sometimes, even when we try to prepare for a day like this, it is still going to hit us with demanding tasks and things we did not expect, and the timing is completely off.
I thought I was going to be done by midnight, but it was already one in the morning.
I had not even put everything in the car, and I still needed to clean the bathroom.
It was a lot, but luckily, after every storm, there is always sun again.
As hard as these days are on your mind and body, there are going to be days and moments when things feel much better.
On days like these, you can give yourself a break.
You are not a robot. You are still human, and there is only so much you can do in one day.
You can give yourself a pass not to be perfect.
Your ceiling might be today only 60% instead of 100%, and that’s okay.
It is still fine as long as you show up.
4. We Play by the Rules
Continuing from above.
This part is all about being completely honest for a moment.
I had zero motivation and energy to write on the next day.
The night before, I slept for five hours, cleaned the apartment the whole morning, and moved all my stuff to another country.
I was exhausted, both mentally and physically.
All I wanted to do that evening was eat pizza and watch a movie.
Yet here I was, making sure the part of me that set this challenge for myself will not be disappointed.
The cursor was blinking as the word count says 92 words.
We play by the rules. When I say I will write 100 words every day, I do not mean 92.
On days like these, it is tough to keep up with your promises because your body and brain are fighting against you.
My will determines whether I win or lose.
This is where personal integrity gets shaped.
It is something I try to pay attention to.
One thing I would not recommend is sleeping for five hours on any occasion.
It sucks.
What keeps you accountable on the hard days?
5. The Wins I Don't Celebrate
How would you describe the relationship with yourself?
Or an even better question: What do you give to others that you withhold from yourself?
Very often, we focus on managing other relationships in our lives but forget about the one we have with ourselves.
When you reflect on this question, you might find a certain pattern in your behavior or simply see more clearly how you have treated yourself lately.
Something I have discovered through this reflection is that I tend to celebrate the wins of others much more than I do my own.
Why is it like that? I do not know.
I am genuinely happy to see my friends and family win and celebrate their successes.
The most recent example from my life is one of my friends who started a new Instagram profile 4 months ago.
With his skills and knowledge of AI, he was able to build a system that allowed him to reach 1,000 followers in matter of days.
Now, he can already make a living from what came afterwards.
All I can say is that I am excited for him and really want him to win.
When I flip the cards and it is time to celebrate my small wins, it is somewhat harder.
I wrote about this before.
My own expectations are sometimes the roadblock itself.
Learning how to celebrate even the small things in life is an underestimated skill.
It lets you build much greater confidence and momentum on your journey.
What about you and your relationship with yourself?
6. The Brutal Question
Let us talk about love today for a bit.
Our romantic relationships often seem complicated to many of us.
I would not say they are complicated by nature.
We just make them complicated in our heads, on our own.
It is because our emotions toward this person make it much more difficult to see reality.
I would sometimes describe it as being blind and paralyzed when making certain decisions.
I have a question for you.
Actually, two questions:
What are you still learning about love?
What is the actual ongoing confusion?
The things about love that keep surprising you despite everything you think you understand.
Let me go first here.
I am still learning how to recognize real love versus short-term love, and whether there is any difference between them.
The question I am asking myself is whether there is a difference between loving someone for a short period of time and loving someone for an unlimited amount of time.
If there is, do you feel this difference? Can you recognize it inside you?
The actual confusion is this: How do you know if this is really the person you want to spend your life with?
How do you decide?
I think it is a brutal question.
There is nothing easy about going this deep inside yourself and asking these questions while you are in a relationship with someone you love.
Because if you do not feel anything toward this person anymore, the reality and decision may be clear.
But what if you still love this person and, at the same time, you are unsure?
How do you navigate this?
No one is perfect, and I guess no one ever will be.
That is not a bad thing.
It is part of life and the beauty of it.
I think relationships are one of the hardest things to navigate in life.
They are complex, yet not complicated.
One simple rule that can help you decide on many things in life, including relationships, is to ask yourself one question.
It can be about making a decision before you buy something, deciding whether to take the job, or deciding whether you want to keep this person in your life.
You can ask yourself: Is it hell yeah, or no?
I think it is clear what the outcome looks like here.
It is either hell yeah, or it is no. That is it.
No more overthinking.
It is a sharp blade to use for decision-making.
But as with everything, it does not work for every situation.
Yet it can still be used as the last stage of the decision-making process to seal the deal.
So tell me, what are you still learning about love?
7. What Forgiveness Frees
How hard is it to forgive someone?
We have all experienced situations where someone said something that felt unforgivable at the time.
They touched a nerve that was really painful for you.
Or they did something that felt like betrayal.
You feel furious and hurt.
You do not want to have anything to do with this person anymore because of the way they made you feel.
It does not matter if it was a friend, family member, or colleague.
Some time has passed.
How do you feel now?
Are you still mad at this person, or did you make your peace with what happened back then?
Forgiving someone can be hard.
Especially because of the initial strong emotion it caused inside you.
Your brain connected the dots in a way that now makes this person equal pain.
And your brain wants to protect you from encountering this again.
What do you do then?
Well, I do not think there is a universal way to forgive someone.
Each situation is different and special because each of us experiences things differently in our minds.
What helped me forgive one of my family members was trying to see the situations from his perspective.
I tried to live through his lens.
Because we might feel hurt, misunderstood, betrayed, or even manipulated, we cannot always see reality from both sides.
Especially not in the heat of the moment.
But when time passes, we have the opportunity to give it a chance.
We get the chance to find a way to forgive this person.
When I did this, it opened a different angle for me.
I was able to see that what the person did was not meant to be bad or painful.
It was his inability to communicate things and express his emotions in a way that I would understand.
It took some time and a lot of effort to come to the point where I was okay.
Sometimes, in this whole process, we find that the goal is to let go.
Not because of the other person, or even because of forgiveness, but because it frees you and your mind from something that was causing pain somewhere inside.
Are you carrying a burden, or have you made your peace already?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade.
As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
Lukáš