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Cruise Ships – Coaching Lesson

Hi, I’m AJ. Welcome to this month’s coaching lesson. I remember just sitting in a lounge on a cruise ship. And to my right there was a window and, of course, the ocean through the window. It was night and I could see the moonlight reflecting off of the ocean, kind of a magical image. Now next to me was my wife, Tomoe, and on the other side of this small table was Kristin, you know Kristin, and Kristin’s mom, Susan. We were all on a cruise together.

Off to our left there was a bar and they were playing some music so there’s a little bit of music going, kind of light music at that time in the evening. And the lighting was a little bit low in the lounge, so a very relaxed atmosphere with the view of the ocean off to my right, very nice. And for some reason, this moment sticks in my memory. Nothing dramatic happened. We just sat and relaxed and talked together for a few hours, just sitting there in the lounge.

And I remember it, I think, because I felt a strong feeling of connection to each of those people that I was with. Certainly with my wife it was kind of a romantic moment, y’know, with the ocean and the moonlight. And even with Kristin and her mom, not romantic, of course, but still it just was a very nice moment of connection, just having that time to just sit with no distractions, nothing to do. We were on the cruise ship, nowhere to go, so just sit and talk.

Y’know, I felt I got to know Kristin’s mom even better. I’ve known her for many years but I really had a nice conversation with her. We all had a nice conversation together. Just a simple but very positive moment that still sticks in my mind from that cruise.

Now that cruise, I think it lasted four or five days, I can’t remember exactly. But during that whole cruise we had many moments like that where we had the chance to just talk and connect with each other. This is, I believe, one of the benefits, one of the most positive things about cruises, in particular, is that you have time to really relax with the people that you’re with. That might just be a girlfriend or boyfriend or a spouse, or it could be family or it could be friends.

But one of the great things is, y’know, you can imagine, you’re on a cruise. You’re out in the middle of the ocean so you’re away from everyday life. You are cut off from everyday life completely. There’s nowhere to go. You’re on the ship. There’s nowhere to go. There’s really nothing to do. They have some activities on the ship but, y’know, there are no jobs to do. There’s no pressure. There’s no stress.

And that’s a good environment for relaxing, of course, but it’s also I think a very nice environment for connecting with people, right? Because we get so busy in our daily lives, our normal lives, that sometimes we don’t get to connect with people in that way where you really are just looking at them, focused on only them. And so I felt that, in general, from that cruise that I got a closer connection with my wife, with Kristin and with Kristin’s mom. I felt like we all, all four of us developed a stronger connection and relationship as a result of going on the cruise.

I’ll be honest, personally, I’m not really all that excited about cruises. It’s not the kind of travel I generally like to do. But what I do like about cruises is, as I said, that opportunity to connect with people. It’s having that shared experience. We call this in English, there’s an idiom, we call it a bonding experience, a bonding experience.

Bonding, the word to bond, it can be a verb, to bond means…it’s like glue. It means a strong, strong connection. If you imagine glue, if you glue two things together, like two pieces of paper, you glue them together, right, they stick, they’re stuck together. They’re connected very tightly. We call that, the connection is called a bond, it can be a noun, or to bond.

So a bonding experience is an experience that causes a connection between people. A stronger, positive connection between people. A bonding experience. So that cruise was a bonding experience for me and Kristin and her mom and my wife.

Now, of course, as ACC members you have heard some recent lessons about the Camino de Santiago, the walk across Spain that Joe and I did together. Now that is an even better example of a very powerful bonding experience between Joe and I. That was a 32-day walk. In addition to the 32 days, we also were in Barcelona together for several days before and after the trip. So the whole thing was quite long.

And every day Joe and I were together. Y’know, we would wake up from our hostel or our hotel and we would…had kind of a little daily ritual, daily pattern, that we would repeat each day. We’d usually go and get a café con leche together which is coffee with milk in Spanish. So we’d go and we would both sip our little coffees together. And then put on our backpacks and start walking.

And, y’know, it was usually fairly early in the morning, at least for us. And, y’know, we’d be still a little sleepy, still waking up, the coffee helping us wake up. We would chat for a little bit, have a little bit of small talk, chat a little bit about how we were feeling, what we wanted to do for that day. We might look at the map to see where we were going for that day, where we wanted to stop next for a break, for maybe a snack or maybe for breakfast or lunch.

And then usually each of us would put in our earphones and we’d listen to Spanish for a couple of hours while we would be walking along through the Spanish countryside. And after a few hours we’d come to our first stopping point and again we’d sit together and we’d usually meet other, other pilgrims, other travelers who were walking the Camino. And we’d all sit and chat together and share experiences.

And this is what Joe and I did together every single day. At some point in the day we would look at our guide or look at a map and figure out where we were going to stay for the next night. And we would decide who had to call, who was going to call ahead and try to make a reservation in Spanish, practice our Spanish, using our Spanish a little bit.

And, y’know, we did this for 32 days. And, of course, we had a lot of experiences. We had some challenges and some very tough, difficult days. And we had some, lots and lots of very positive experiences and met lots and lots of great people together. And, again, the end result was a stronger relationship. It was a very powerful bonding experience for Joe and I. Very strong.

And so I kind of relate this to the cruise ship experience because in a way, y’know, they have a lot of similarities. They seem quite different if you look at it, go on a cruise, walk the Camino de Santiago. But they do actually share a lot of characteristics. And in both cases, both the cruise and the Camino, they both were very strong bonding experiences where I ended the trip, ended the experience, with a stronger, more positive connection with other people, the people I was with.

And for me, that is the key point about our lesson this month, cruise ships. It’s not just go on a cruise and have fun, which you certainly can do if you like cruises, if that sounds great, yeah, go enjoy it. But I think the deeper meaning for me that I would like you to think about is this idea of bonding experiences. Because I think we all have people in our life that are important to us.

Of course, spouses, if you’re married, or girlfriend and boyfriend, whatever. But even beyond that, y’know, parents, if your parents are still alive. Or if you have children, older children especially, adult children. Or even uncles or aunts and especially, of course, friends and long-term friends. So in all of these cases, we have relationships in our life and I think all of us have at least some relationship that we’d like to be closer, that we’d like to be stronger.

Maybe we’ve just been too busy. Maybe you live kind of far apart from each other now and don’t get to see each other so much. And I think this kind of bonding experience is a great way to reconnect or to create stronger, deeper connections with people, especially those people you might feel that you’re not close enough to right now, that you want to make a better relationship with.

So shared journeys can really create closer relationships, these shared journeys. And that’s what I think is the common thing between a cruise ship and the Camino and you could do this in many different ways, but it’s a shared trip of some sort. And if you’ve been in our Advanced Conversation Club or in VIP for a long time, you know that I quite enjoy travel and I feel that travel has a lot of benefits, and this is one of them. This is the kind of travel, a shared journey, that I believe can really bring you closer together with people you care about.

Let’s talk about, first of all, why? Why is that? Why is this powerful? And then how, specifically, do you do it? Because, unfortunately, a shared trip together also has the potential to break apart your relationship. Because if it goes badly you may end up being farther apart rather than closer together, so you have to do it in the right way.

But first, let’s talk about why…why is this powerful? Why are these kind of bonding experiences, why do they work psychologically? Number one, when you think about it, a shared journey, any kind of journey or trip, is what we call a pattern break. Now in NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which is a type of psychology, it’s a psychology system for success. To make it simple I call it success psychology. It’s the psychology of studying successful people, NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

But there’s an important idea, an important concept in NLP called a pattern break…break. A pattern is something that you do repeatedly, right? Something that’s repeated again and again and again. In our normal lives, of course, we have so many patterns, right? If you’re working a normal 9 to 5 job, for example, then you know you get up at a certain time and you have your sort of normal everyday pattern, maybe you get up, you take a shower, have breakfast, brush your teeth, put on your work clothes, walk down to the train station, get on the train, y’know, and then you go to work.

And we have these patterns that we repeat day after day after day after day. And some of these patterns actually are beneficial and positive and quite useful. For example, brushing your teeth, that’s a good thing. It keeps your mouth clean. It keeps you healthy. That’s great. Some people have very good patterns or habits of exercising every day. Again, great. So patterns are not necessarily good or necessarily bad. They’re just part of our life.

But we have these patterns and one of the problems, however, is that we can start to get too stuck in our patterns and we stop being open to new things. This is the danger of patterns. If we get too deeply in them, even if they’re positive, they can sort of close our minds a little bit so that we’re not open to change.

And one of the great things about a journey, a shared journey together, is that it’s…boom…it automatically breaks your normal daily pattern, even something as simple as going on a cruise. I mean it’s totally different than your normal life, unless you live on a ship, it’s completely different, right?

You go off. Suddenly you’re on a ship and, y’know, even just physically you feel the ship move a little bit. Your whole environment changes. Your daily schedule completely changes. Everything changes completely when you get on a cruise ship. The kind of food you’re eating changes. Everything. That’s a good thing.

See, one of the good things about pattern breaks is that they open your mind to change. In fact, it’s really one of the, the key first steps for making a change in your life, especially positive changes. We usually want positive changes in our life, right? Well, one of the first things you have to do is you have to break your patterns. This psychologically opens you up. It makes you open to do something new, to consider new ideas, to change behaviors.

Breaking patterns is really an important first step. And a very simple way to do that is to take a trip. It automatically removes you from all your normal daily patterns. So that’s one of the key reasons this works. A shared journey is automatically a pattern break. Another reason shared journeys work, very simple, is this…you end up spending a lot of time together. It’s just time.

This is one of the problems in modern life is that some of our most important relationships, we just don’t spend enough time, especially quality time, when we’re really focused on each other, right? Y’know, sometimes even with spouses, husbands and wives, if they’re both working and very busy and they come together maybe at night, but maybe if you have kids then they’re distracted doing other things.

And the amount of time that they’re actually just sitting face to face, looking at each other, deeply listening to each other, can actually be quite small. It can be a small amount of time. So another great advantage of a cruise or any kind of shared journey is it just gives you a whole lot of time together, right? It’s a very concentrated experience where suddenly, even if you just go camping, for example, you’re with each other for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. Just that can help to create a stronger relationship.

Now, another very powerful part of shared journeys and why they can be such powerful bonding experiences is that they create shared unique experiences. Shared, meaning you both participate in them, unique experiences. Let me give you an example of this. Joe and I, we have so many shared unique experiences. It means that they’re experiences that only he and I share. It’s kind of like they’re ours, our special experiences from the Camino. Nobody else can really understand them. Nobody else knows about them.

Even that simple daily habit I told you, like getting up in the morning and sharing café con leche together. Y’know, that’s like a special experience that Joe and I have together, just he and I. And these kind of shared experiences, they do, they bring us closer. There’s a feeling of, of bonding when we share an experience together that’s unique, that only we know about.

So now, of course, Joe and I, we can get together and we can talk about all these different stories we have and memories we have from the Camino. And, y’know, it’s only he and I, or maybe somebody that was there, but not many people know those experiences. And there are a lot of them that are only he and I together. And that’s created a much stronger relationship between us. So shared experiences, when you go off and you do something unique together, whatever it is, it will bring you closer together. It can, at least.

And finally, sometimes, with some kinds of shared journeys, there’s also the experience of shared problem-solving. Now on a cruise, usually you don’t need to solve many problems. They take care of everything for you, so this is not usually an issue. But with other types of trips, problems can arise. Certainly, on the Camino, Joe and I had plenty of problems we had to deal and then we had to communicate together and figure out what we were going to do, even simple things like where will we stay tonight. So for all of those reasons, shared journeys can be powerful bonding experiences.

So how do you do it? How can you do this? I mentioned earlier that shared journey can, means there’s the potential, can be a powerful bonding experience. But unfortunately, a shared journey can also be an experience that drives people apart and I’ve known of friends and other people who’ve gone off and traveled together and then they end up not liking each other at the end, which is what we don’t want. So when you take a shared journey, there are a few things you should keep in mind so that it becomes a positive bonding experience and not a negative experience.

Number one, it should be fairly long. You need that pattern break, right? So for it to be a good pattern break, it needs to be, I say at least four days. Now that’s not a hard and fast rule. It means it’s not an exact rule. It’s a general idea. If you don’t have the time, then maybe you could do it for three days or even a weekend. But if you can, if you have the time, four or more days is best and, of course, the more time that you spend together, the more likely that you will have a strong bonding experience.

This next one, a very key point, if you do a shared journey with someone and you want to create a closer experience, how you deal with conflicts and frustration is important, very important, very, very important. So there may be conflicts that come up. There may be frustrations that come up. It’s very important to deal with them without anger, or if anger comes up, to let it go and then communicate with each other in a way that’s positive and calm.

It’s not always easy. There were times with Joe and I, I’ll give you a small example. It seems small now.

At the time, it seemed very big. Joe can snore sometimes. So when he sleeps, kind of…quite loudly. And I guess he told me that I could, too, sometimes, to be fair. But anyway, I’m a light sleeper. I tend to be a pretty light sleeper.

So during the Camino, through the first week or so, we were sharing rooms together but he would be snoring loudly and then I couldn’t get to sleep and man, it was just…it was, I was getting more and more tired and it was really starting to get me very frustrated and upset because I don’t do well when I don’t get sleep. So if I go a couple nights without sleep, I become very grumpy and then not fun to be around. I need sleep and I don’t function well without sleep.

So I was getting very, very upset and negative and frustrated because I couldn’t get to sleep. Of course, he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. He can’t help it. But finally, I just had to…had to just deal with it in a positive way and so I talked to Joe and we just decided that rooms on the Camino were cheap enough and I just told him, y’know, I need to get my own separate room because I just need a quiet space where I can get a good night’s sleep so that I feel rested the next day and we’ll have a much better experience together if I feel good and I have sleep.

So I talked to him about that and the rest of the trip, most of the rest of the trip, we had separate rooms. I slept well and everything worked out much better. So it’s important that you deal with those things without getting angry with each other, screaming at each other. Because it’s that anger and frustration that can cause the relationships to break apart. It’s not always easy, but do your best.

Another key, of course, is to take a journey that will get you away from your normal everyday habits. It needs to be a pattern break. So don’t do something that is close to your everyday life because then you’re not really breaking the habits. You’re not really going to create the best potential for a close relationship.

And finally, this seems like a small point, and obvious, but still choose a trip that you know everyone will enjoy, especially the other person. This is very, very important. For example, I love doing hiking trips. I love to get out in the mountains and walk in the mountains. My wife likes that, too, thank god, so that’s a great bonding experience for her and I. We love to go hiking and walking in general, even in cities, we walk, walk, walk a lot.

However, Kristin’s mom does not like to walk so much. I think she has kind of…one of her knees kind of hurts here. She can’t walk much. So a hiking trip for Kristin’s mom, that would be a terrible idea. Even though I like it, it would not be a bonding experience with Kristin’s mom, but a cruise she enjoys. It would be the same for my own mother, my own mom does not like walking. So if I wanted to have a bonding experience with my mom, I would need to choose a journey that would be pleasant for her, right? Not just thinking of myself. And for her, actually a cruise or something like that would be much better. So keep everyone in mind when you decide to do this.

Let’s talk about your homework. Time to take some action this month. I encourage you this month to decide on one or more people, one or more people, that you want to be closer with. So just think about your life and who you would like to have a closer relationship with. It might be your spouse or it could be, y’know, some friends. Maybe it’s friends or family that live a little bit far away from you, you don’t get to see enough. Whatever it is, just choose one person or more than one person that you want to be closer with.

Number two, think of an idea for a shared trip together with them, some shared trip. It could be very simple. It could be a little simple walking trip or it could just be a trip to some little town or city nearby. Or it could be a cruise or it could be some huge thing like the Camino, like we did. It’s up to you. You know yourself and you know your friends so, the key thing, choose something that you think that everyone would enjoy and that everyone could do with their schedules.

Number three, talk to your other people, friends or family or whoever, and schedule it. Schedule the trip.

And then number four, do it. Take that trip with that other person or with those other people.

And number five, tell us about it. Tell us about your experience. Tell us about the bonding experience and if it indeed brought you closer together with those other people. I think you’ll find it will, especially if you follow my guidelines and especially deal with any frustrations in the most positive way possible. It will bring you closer together with other people and maybe will become one of your most positive memories in your life. I hope so.

So I look forward to hearing about your shared trips or shared journeys together with other people. I’ll see you on our social site. See you again soon. Bye for now.