12 Jul The Foundation of Extraordinary Love: A Lifebook Research Study

Finding and maintaining an extraordinary love relationship is one of the greatest challenges and opportunities in life. There’s simply no deeper joy than when two people fully commit to living their lives together – and do it successfully.

But what, fundamentally, IS an extraordinary love relationship? What are the main attributes upon which it depends? And perhaps most importantly, if we all WANT an extraordinary love relationship, why do so few of us actually HAVE one?

Our research study started out with this simple question:

What do couples with an extraordinary love relationship have in common that sets them apart from couples with a mediocre or poor love relationship?

The results of our analysis surprised us…

We began our study by defining the criteria for an extraordinary relationship. Participating couples must have the following 4 traits firing on all cylinders:

* They ADORE each other. Yes, the word is adore… and not passively. Mutual adoration comes radiating off of them as a couple.

* They COMMUNICATE honestly, easily and openly, as a result of the deep trust they have in each other.

* They are highly “connected,” personally and professionally. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re business partners… They might very well have two separate careers, but they DO NOT have two separate lives. They know what’s going on with each other at a deep level.

* They put each other first.

While this is not exactly scientific criteria, we know “extraordinary” when we see it – and that is what extraordinary means to us.

We then identified 12 Lifebook couples that have an extraordinary relationship according to these criteria, and asked them all to take the Intra-Spect Assessment again.

As we began analyzing the data, the first thing we discovered is that some of our original assumptions about extraordinary love were simply wrong.

Namely:

Based on experience, we expected most of the couples to have similar Life Quotients (for example, his LQ is 124 and her LQ is 126). We’ve seen this pattern before with extraordinary couples. However, this was NOT the case study-wide. Three of the couples had LQs within a point or two of each other, but overall we found MAJOR discrepancies in LQ scores from couple to couple… The highest being a 30-point difference between a husband and wife, which is HUGE… So we eliminated “similar LQ scores” as a prerequisite of an extraordinary love relationship.

Second, we believed that the Love Category would see the highest overall scores in this study. Seems reasonable, right? Well, that was not the case. Though the Love Category scores were all relatively high as you might expect, ONLY ONE participant had love as the highest score. Only one… That is a pretty surprising statistic, considering the participant set. A statistic that clearly points to the fact that the key to an extraordinary love relationship lies, at least in part, in the other life categories.

So we began to look elsewhere and found 2 fascinating data points.

RESEARCH FINDING #1:
BACKGROUND FACT: Your Life Quotient is an AVERAGE of your 12-category scores. So, in most cases, half your category scores will be higher than your LQ and half will be lower than your LQ. That’s why we sometimes refer to your LQ as “your relative average”.

When we looked at the Category scores of our 24 participants and compared them to LQs, there was only one category that was above “relative average” in 100% of our respondents. Only ONE.

What do you think it was?

The CHARACTER category.

This totally validates a premise we hold STRONGLY at Lifebook: Extraordinary relationships require extraordinary people.

Here’s a short excerpt from the Love Relationship Category of the Lifebook Program:

“You can’t make anything good without good ingredients. You can’t make good wine without good grapes. You can’t have a great sports team without great athletes. And you can’t have a great relationship if you’re a broken, dysfunctional person. You must be a good person to have a relationship with.

So, the most important thing I can do to have a great relationship is to be the best person I can possibly be. Stay healthy and strong. Live intelligently. Create quality emotions consistently. Consciously develop a good character. Try to knock every Lifebook category out of the park.

That’s more than half the battle. Extraordinary relationships require extraordinary people, so I need to be one.”

We now have objective data to validate that premise.

RESEARCH FINDING #2:
BACKGROUND FACT: Your Category of Strength is the category in which you score the highest. Usually when we do a Category of Strength analysis for a given group (e.g. stay at home moms, entrepreneurs or chiropractors), the category of strength percentages within that group will closely reflect the general population. For example, roughly 14% will have Intellectual as their highest score, roughly 5% will have Emotional as their highest score, roughly 6% will have Health and Fitness as their highest score etc. We’ve never encountered a study group that had a major deviation from the general population… Until now.

The most shocking data point in this study was that 87.5% of the respondents had the SAME CATEGORY OF STRENGTH. That’s 21 out of 24 people. We have never seen anything like this before…

And what was the Category of Strength for these 12 Extraordinary couples?

Life Vision.

Extraordinary couples, it seems, are crystal clear on the vision for the life they want to build together. They have clarity and agreement on how to handle their finances, how to parent their children, how to be physically, mentally and emotionally fit… and they know exactly the kind of love relationship they want to build together.

The couples in our study have spent a tremendous amount of time designing their lives together. Just TALKING about a common Life Vision is a huge value in itself, because it creates feelings of intimacy and connectedness all on it’s own. But the biggest benefit is “getting on the same page” in every life category, so you’re working toward common outcomes in every important area of your life.

Why is this so incredibly important?

Because 90% of the problems a couple will encounter in their Love Relationship is the result of different VISIONS in one or more of the 12 categories…

Different opinions on how to raise the children… Different expectations on the balance between career and family…. Different opinions on how to handle money… Different opinions of what a good love relationship is all about… Different visions of the future they’re trying to create together.

Our study clearly shows that extraordinary relationships are made up of two extraordinary individualswith a singular life vision.

Two people who have put a tremendous amount of work into themselves as individuals, and who have thought deeply and focused a great deal of energy on the life they want to create together.

While that might sound simple and obvious, maybe even like something we already knew, we now have a data driven understanding of the key attributes upon which an extraordinary love relationship rests.

We can see that extraordinary love does NOT come free or easy. It must be earned through diligent self-work and a high level of combined consciousness, focused on a common Life Vision.

And its achievement represents a remarkable accomplishment.

So if you want to create an extraordinary love relationship and you’re not there yet, you now have the recipe… Make YOURSELF the best person you can possible be, and clearly define and agree on every aspect of the life you want to create with your partner.

And all of our extraordinary couples agree with the following statement…

Lifebook is the ULTIMATE love relationship tool to help you do that.