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How Our ‘Level Up Your Relationship’ Course Can Help You Build a Strong Foundation

Are you and your partner ready to take the next step in your relationship but not sure where to start?

Whether you’re thinking about moving in together, getting engaged, or simply wanting to deepen your connection, building a solid foundation is key. The Level Up Your Relationship course is designed for couples like you—those who want to invest in their relationship and create a strong, lasting partnership.

Let’s explore why this course could be the perfect next step for your relationship and how it can guide you through essential conversations that matter most.


Why Building a Strong Foundation is Essential for Lasting Relationships

At the heart of every great relationship is a strong foundation. This isn’t just about chemistry or shared interests—it’s about having meaningful conversations and aligning your goals. Couples who discuss important topics early, like communication styles, finances, and conflict resolution, are more likely to navigate life’s challenges with resilience.

Addressing these topics before problems arise creates a roadmap for a healthy future. When couples are proactive, they build trust and clarity, laying the groundwork for a long-lasting connection.


What is the ‘Level Up Your Relationship’ Course?

The Level Up Your Relationship course is built around 11 essential conversations—the kind of conversations every couple needs to have for a healthy, thriving relationship. Topics range from managing conflict and finances to exploring family dynamics and setting future goals.

The course includes:

  • Video lessons guiding you through key relationship topics
  • Workbooks to help you reflect and build actionable plans together
  • The Prepare-Enrich relationship questionnaire, a research-based tool designed to identify your strengths as a couple and areas where growth is needed

This course is completely self-paced, meaning you can work through the lessons at a rhythm that fits your schedule. Whether you prefer to dive in all at once or spread the conversations over several weeks, this format is ideal for busy couples looking to grow together on their own time.


Key Benefits of Taking the ‘Level Up Your Relationship’ Course

  1. Improve Communication
    • Learn how to express yourself openly and listen actively, especially during difficult conversations.
    • Practice communication skills that promote understanding, empathy, and respect.
  2. Strengthen Your Emotional Connection
    • Gain insights into each other’s emotional needs and stress responses.
    • Discover how small changes in communication can nurture intimacy and trust.
  3. Clarify Goals and Align Your Future
    • Develop a shared vision for finances, family, and relationship roles.
    • Explore values together and set intentional goals to guide your relationship forward.

How the Course Helps Couples Moving Toward Commitment

For couples moving in together, getting engaged, or preparing for marriage, this course provides the tools to navigate the transition from dating to deeper commitment. These major life steps can bring excitement—and challenges. The Level Up Your Relationship course helps couples anticipate potential friction points, so they feel confident in the decisions they make together.

Client Success Stories:
“Before taking this course, we thought we were on the same page about everything—until we had some surprising discussions about finances and family dynamics. This course opened our eyes and helped us become better partners.”
— Sarah & Tom

“We learned so much about each other. I never knew how much stress my partner was carrying until we did the Prepare-Enrich questionnaire. It gave us a way to talk about things we’d never considered before.”
— Alex & Jamie


Is This Course Right for You?

If you’re in a relationship that feels strong but you want to take it to the next level, this course is designed for you. Whether you’re looking to move in together, tie the knot, or simply feel more connected, the Level Up Your Relationship course will guide you through the essential conversations that help build trust and alignment.

Who will benefit most:

  • Couples who want to grow closer and align their goals
  • Partners who are transitioning to new stages (like moving in or getting married)
  • Those who are not in high-conflict situations but are looking to deepen communication and strengthen their bond

If your relationship is currently facing serious issues, couples therapy may be a more appropriate option for now.


Ready to Take the Next Step?

The Level Up Your Relationship course is an invitation to build a strong foundation for your future. Through thoughtful conversations, practical tools, and self-paced learning, you and your partner can cultivate a relationship based on trust, respect, and mutual understanding.

Sign up for the Level Up Your Relationship course today and begin your journey toward a deeper, more connected partnership. If you’d like to learn more, book a consultation to explore how this course can benefit your unique relationship.


Building a great relationship doesn’t happen by chance—it takes intentional effort, meaningful conversations, and a shared vision. With the Level Up Your Relationship course, you and your partner will have the tools you need to communicate better, connect more deeply, and create the future you’ve always dreamed of—together.

1 Powerful Step to Improve Communication

As I mentioned in a previous post, the most common reason people give for seeking couples counselling is problems with communication. Communication is a pretty broad area and making change generally requires being able to address small pieces at a time.

John Gottman, psychologist and relationship researcher, has done a great job of breaking down communication into smaller, more manageable pieces. An important piece of communication, according to Gottman, is bids. He defines bids as a “fundamental unit of emotional communication” specifically “a question, a gesture, a look, a touch – any single expression that says ‘I want to feel close to you.’

Bids could include:

Verbal Non Verbal
Thoughts Affectionate Touching
Feelings Facial Expressions
Observations Playful touching
Opinions Affiliating gestures (eg. holding door open)
Invitations Vocalizing (laughing, sighing, chuckling)

 

So making bids and recognizing bids are the first two ingredients, responding to your partner’s bid is the third. Gottman describes 3 types of bid responses:

Turning Towards Turning Away Turning Against
Passive (Nod, uh-huh) Preoccupied (non-response) Contemptuous (put downs, insults)
Low energy (Sure, okay) Disregarding (irrelevant response) Belligerent (provocative, combative)
Attentive (Validation, opinions, thoughts, feelings, questions Interrupting (introducing unrelated info or a counter bid) Contradictory (arguing with or without hostility)
High energy (Enthusiasm, full focus, empathy) Responses may be mindless or intentional Critical (character attacks)
Domineering (control, overbearing)
Defensive (fake helplessness, victim stance)

Gottman’s research findings show some interesting trends:

  • Husbands heading for divorce ignored their wives’ bids for connection 82% of the time
  • Husbands in stable relationships ignored their wives’ bids just 19% of the time
  • Wives heading for divorce ignored their husbands’ bids 50% of the time
  • Wives in stable relationships ignored their husbands’ bids 14% of the time

Experiment: If you are looking to improve your communication, becoming familiar with bids, both how you make them and how you respond to them, is a great place to start. Over the next few days don’t try to change anything about your interactions, just observe when you make bids and recognize when your partner makes bids and notice how you tend to respond.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on bids or your experience with this experiment in the comments section.

Fight or Flight = Bad Communication

Once your nervous system gets escalated and moves into fight/flight/freeze response, it’s next to impossible to have a useful discussion. And for many of us, we don’t even know when that response has been triggered in ourselves let alone in our partner. So we continue trying to communicate with little success. This state of nervous system arousal causes us to perceive almost everything in our world as a possible threat to our survival – we tend to see everyone and everything as a possible enemy. You both may still be engaging with words, but at the core all you can focus really on is self-protection – its pretty hard to be curious when your nervous system thinks you are under attack. Our hearts are closed. Our prefrontal cortex – related to empathy, is disengaged. Our systems become focused on fear and self-protection, not love and connection.

Because nervous system arousal can happen so quickly an important aspect of improving communication is to become more aware of when your nervous system has escalated into fight/ flight/freeze.

Here are some of the signs that the nervous system is in fight/flight/freeze:

  • We experience an adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol surge
  • Breathing rate increases.
  • Awareness intensifies and our impulses quicken.
  • We become hypervigilant, “looking for the enemy”
  • Fear becomes exaggerated and thinking becomes distorted as we see everything through the filter of possible danger.

Dr. Dan Siegel offers a nice demonstration that can help to make this brain process more concrete. Once you start recognizing some of the signs that you have moved into fight/flight/freeze you can start to experiment with ways of calming your nervous system before continuing a discussion with your partner. More on some of those strategies in the next post.

Healthy Conflict = Healthy Relationships

Client: hello, my partner and I are interested in couples counselling
Me: I’m glad you guys are looking for some support – that takes courage. What’s led you to seek counselling?
Client: hmmmm it’s hard to put into words….ummmm….I guess communication….

Communication difficulties are cited by 90% of people who contact me for couples counselling. Couples know that something isn’t working and can give me lots of examples of communication going sideways. While hearing about the content of their conflicts is a starting place, in order for insight and change to occur it’s necessary to go deeper and that takes some dedicated work. How does each person view conflict? What is happening in her/his nervous system? How was conflict handled in his/her family of origin? How well can each person regulate his/her own emotions?

Conflict is a natural and needed part of building and maintaining an intimate relationship. So the goal isn’t to get rid of conflict but to help couples to find ways of engaging in and repairing conflict in order to increase feelings of safety, connection, and intimacy.  That can sometimes feel like a tall order! But luckily there are lots of amazing tools and strategies for helping people change how they communicate.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to talk about some of the tools the couples I work with have found particularly useful: Stop-Replay, Regulating your Nervous System, and Emotional Bids.

Communication Going Sideways? – Take Two!

Do you ever wish you could rewind a conversation and say something differently to get a better outcome? Changing communication patterns can be quite difficult since our nervous systems can become so primed to react and move into a state of defensiveness based on our reactions to what we hear our partner saying.

In order to start shifting those communication patterns couples require space to experiment. How does your partner want to be communicated with? How do you prefer to be approached? One tool that couples often find useful for experimenting with conversations that are going off the rails is to stop and replay. This technique may seem awkward at first, but if you and your partner can agree to experimenting with it you will likely be surprised with what you learn both about your partner and yourself.

Here is a video by Ellyn Bader and Pete Pearson from the Couples Institute demonstrating this technique: