Stop trying to fix your relationships. Start creating space to feel them.
I’ve just returned from a transformational business retreat in Mallorca. In the beginning, I was a bit reluctant, since I didn’t know the coach and the setting; it was my wife who took me with her. In preparation, I had worked through a workbook, answering questions on different areas and aspects of my life.
In terms of business goals, I had a tough time describing what I was aiming for—and what I expected as a result from the retreat. I outlined a concept I’d developed from observing people over the last couple of years who had built a personal brand and developed a lean, minimal-effort group coaching business as their main source of income. I liked the overall idea—hence, I began creating a similar community myself, the Renaissance Society. But it always felt a bit off and effort-intense, with baseline reluctance.
The first three days, we did more creative exercises paired with—to my great joy—vipassana meditation facilitated by a former monk.
All of this took place in a serene setting: an impeccable Mediterranean villa with ample space for everyone. Everything was taken care of—food, schedule, all the details you’d usually fuss over. To sum it up, I technically didn’t HAVE to think about anything. Combine that with plenty of sun, music, dance, movement, and fresh air, and I got a sensation I hadn’t felt in a long time:
Space. And time.
There used to be a legendary club at the waterfront in Berlin called Bar25, with parties lasting 72 hours and more. One of their famous music collections is called “Days Outside of Time” (highly recommended, by the way), because that’s exactly what they created—days outside of time.
This was the feeling I had again.
As I sat there one morning journaling over one of the prompts, it suddenly happened. I reconnected fully to myself and one thing became crystal clear to me:
All I want is to get on stage.
This insight felt incredibly relieving. I realized I had been barking up the wrong tree for quite some time. In that particular area of my life.
I’d had that urge and wish before, but I didn’t have enough courage, knowledge, or experience to act on it properly. And then I forgot.
When I returned home to my kid-sitting parents and told them, my mother simply said:
“That’s interesting. Now you are back to where you were 35 years ago, when you announced that you wanted to speak at Olympia stadium in front of a big audience.”
Life is funny and the universe a joker.
This episode reminded me of Lao Tzu’s famous saying: “Can you wait, quietly, until the mud settles and the water is clear?”
The thing is, for a long time I hadn’t made space or time to simply wait, quietly, and let the mud settle so I could have a good look at the water—that is, myself.
To really go into relationship with myself, to feel and listen to what’s underneath. The voice that got buried by reasoning, moral, and forgetfulness.
Scientific research consistently shows that the quality of our relationships is the single most important predictor of happiness and longevity. The 75-year Harvard Study of Adult Development found that “close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.
Meanwhile, a 2018 Gallup poll found that approximately 50% of employees left a job to “get away from their manager,” highlighting that people leave organizations not because of pay, but because of relationships.
During the retreat, I gave a short talk about the importance of personal relationships for your entire life. If they are not good, nothing else is really good.
It’s not productivity hacks or perfect morning routines—it’s relationships (with ourselves and others) that run the whole show.
Relationships aren’t just ‘important’—they’re everything.
Think about your own life. If your personal relationship with your partner, spouse, child, sibling, parent, or any other important person is unbalanced, it directly impacts your overall quality of life. It usually consumes much of your feelings and thoughts.
Take a moment—think about which relationship is “off” right now. How much does that occupy your mind?
But as so often, it’s obvious with outward relationships—they fuel much of what we call culture: art, music, architecture, maybe even technology.
But underneath all that sits the relationship you have with yourself. For most people, it’s—let’s just say “complicated,” if they’re aware of it at all.
(In my book on effective planning—Super Effective Planning—I elaborate on the idea that any task you want to get done needs a place and a time. Otherwise, it won’t get done.)
Similarly, on a much larger scale, the task of getting into relationship with yourself—or in deep relationship with others—requires space and time.
The Problem: Starving in a Sea of Contacts
Which are exactly the two things most under attack in our lives today. We live in times of hyper-mobility and hyper-connectedness. The promise of every technological advancement was “saved time.” And yet, where is that time? Since we allegedly have more of it, we feel compelled to fill it. To do more. To make “good use of it”—because, as we all know from countless fortune cookies and calendar quotes, time is our most valuable asset.
This is our modern dilemma. We can be almost anywhere, anytime. But we end up being nowhere for real, ever.
We live dispersed, away from family members; friends are cross-country. We have 800 followers on Instagram, 1,500 connections on LinkedIn, but no one who just knocks on the door for a chat.
We are afraid of the silence. We are afraid of the space in relationship with time. Silence could make us realize we don’t know anymore who we are, what we want, and that we are more alone than we like to admit.
Obviously, these are simplifications. It would be naive to think everything was better “in the good old days” when villagers watched your every step and you were stuck at home with a hostile stepmother.
Modern life can be wonderful—if you have your relationships in place and they’re healthy.
That requires awareness. And for that, you need to be able to sit still (see Why You Can’t Sit Still: The Missing Link in Modern Meditation). Once you can do that and have reconnected to your inner workings, your feelings and sensations, you can begin communicating them, as we explored before using sensual honesty (see Sensual Honesty). This is how you fix your relationships.
I had to learn these tools and techniques before I was able to find and keep the one core relationship outside myself that forms the bedrock of my life: my wife.
I had to learn to meditate and to communicate with sensual, radical honesty. Everything before had failed.
The Relationship Feedback Loop: Self, Others, World
They say nobody can help you but yourself. If you don’t fix your relationship with yourself first—if you seek the fix outside, in a partner, a child, a profession, a religion, whatever—you will fail.
When I was in pre-med school, one of my professors told me before failing me, “Physics is the root of medicine. If the root is sick, the tree dies.” He was wrong, but the parable holds true.
The relationship with yourself is the root of life. If it is sick, your life slowly dies. Fix it, and your tree blossoms and grows, radiating into all your other relationships. Ultimately, it will define your relationship with the world.
Wouldn’t that be great, if those were all great relationships?
Relationship Neglect: The Downstream Dominoes
As mentioned above—if your core relationship has issues, you will feel it in every area of your life. Maybe not all at once. Maybe only subtly. But like a wave slowly building, if left unchecked, it will come crashing down eventually.
It can have many names—it can be physical or mental. It can come as burnout, depression, anxiety, stress. It can manifest as pain, allergies, or chronic disease. You might have “it all” by conventional standards, yet enjoy none of it.
At the end of the day, something is not being taken care of.
This is so sad. The explosion in mental health issues, divorce rates, and work dissatisfaction are a testament to that. (According to the American Psychological Association, workplace stress is at an all-time high in recent years, strongly correlating with relationship strain both at work and at home.
It is neither the things themselves, but our relationship to them.
Now, typical advice includes “follow your real passion”—usually identified after expensive coaching or therapy sessions, often resulting in quitting the job or the partner or both. Often, this process breaks through when you can’t contain it anymore, manifesting as a midlife crisis.
It typically doesn’t solve anything—just recreates a new setup for the same issues to play out again after a time. I call that the problem-donkey. When I had my first quarter-life crisis—for the above reasons—I fled to Italy. Life was great; I was living the dolce vita, no more problems. Until one day, a few months later, I heard a subtle knock at the door. I opened it, and there stood a donkey with a faithful, sheepish look. When I had left Berlin, he had collected all my problems, put them on his back, and taken the long, cumbersome land route to bring them to my new place. And there I was—same problems, different country.
Since I refused to believe it, I tried again, fleeing to France, and then again to Berlin. But every time, with some delay, the problem-donkey showed up.
Only then did I realize I had to face my relationship with myself. It was then that I began to learn to sit still, to get out of my head and into my senses, and to communicate my sensations honestly.
What Actually Works: Simple Shifts That Change Everything
After my most recent reminder, I can’t stress enough the importance of actually making space and time to retreat regularly—whether through a retreat or other means.
A digital-detox weekend most likely won’t suffice.
How to Begin:
Start a meditation practice. (If you don’t know where to start, see (Why You Can’t Sit Still)
Practice communicating with radical honesty. (See Sensual Honesty for more.)
Create space and time intentionally. The quieter you become, the more space you reserve, and the longer you allocate to it, the clearer the answers will be.
Key Tip: Do the little steps. Find a daily check-in with yourself: “What am I feeling right now?” Schedule moments—literally put them in your calendar—for self-reflection or meaningful conversation with someone close.
Grounded in evidence-based relationship science, use these three questions to reflect on and improve your most important connections:
Do I feel genuinely seen and heard by those closest to me—and do I actively listen in return?
How am I showing up emotionally today—in my relationship with myself and others?
Have I taken a moment today to express appreciation or affection to someone I care about?
Try asking yourself these questions each day to cultivate awareness, gratitude, and authentic connection—a foundation for happiness and resilience.
I have talked a lot about “The Renaissance Life.” A life where you can have it all. It is a life deeply rooted in relationships.
If you know what’s important to you, and you are in touch with your emotions, you can communicate accordingly. You’ll do more of what you want and less of what you don’t—within obvious limits. This creates the space and time to build a life in which you “have all the things you want”—whatever that means for you.
Work, family, creativity—they’re not separate silos, but a single, interwoven tapestry powered by connection. It is meditation—or call it contemplation—and honesty practices that make these connections possible. These build the relationships where the magic lives.
Build a life where success and connection never compete—they amplify each other.
To more in life,
Nicco
Sing your relationship song here: