Taking the "s(t)uck" out of Relationships
IAR is a comprehensive toolset for individuals, groups, and conscious communities to move into a new paradigm of fluid, functional, and joyful relationship dynamics, while exiting the patterns and programs of thinking which create drama, confusion, misunderstanding and pain.
IAR is an antidote to co-dependency and works by repatterning consciousness through language.
IAR provides a new framework for how to think about all types of human relationships – romantic bonds, friendships, business relationships, partnerships, family ties, companionships – a new system which inherently “short circuits” the old programs and patterns that ultimately set us up for disappointment and pain. There is a better way!
A Simple Formula: Clarity + Sincerity
The approach of Intentional Autonomous Relating might seem quite weird at first based on the typical ways that most people have unfortunately been taught to view relationships with each other through our mainstream culture, but IAR will seem natural and obvious once you try it. The simple idea is to be radically honest with yourself and with everyone else about what your feelings and needs are, to speak clearly and from the heart, and to celebrate the true alignment with other people that feels good and joyful to you both. IAR provides a helpful framework for getting clear with yourself about all this, and then communicating clearly and sincerely with others.
Supportive Guidance
My goal and heart’s desire is to help everyone create joyful relationships by using a modern framework that combines guidance on communication, safe relating practices, and intention-based interactions. Whether you and your person are new friends, old friends, monogamous, polyamorous, seeking new connections or married for years, IAR has something to offer you to make your experience even better and more fulfilling. I’m here to walk with you every step of the way, and my intention is to be the most sincere advocate for everyone involved to create the best possible scenario for happiness, love, peace, and success in relating.
A New Perspective on Old Patterns
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt unclear about your “relationship status”? Do you sometimes wish that you could be more open and clear with people about how you’d like to relate with them, but not sure how to have the conversation? Have you ever had a pattern of finding yourself in relationships that don’t seem to be serving you or meeting your needs, but don’t know how to break the cycle? Are there people in your life that you love and want to share more love with, but feel afraid to talk about your true feelings and intentions?
IAR is meant to open up a whole new world of possibilities for the kinds of relationships we can have and is meant to set a new standard for how happy, fulfilled, satisfied, and safe we can feel. It switches us from thinking about relationships like a game with winners and losers (“deprivation-obligation” mindset) and into a new frame called “cooperation-celebration” where everybody’s a winner because we all get more of what we want, and nobody has to sacrifice themself in the process.
If you’re ready to flip that switch and try something wildly different with your important relationship(s) that maybe feel stuck or looping, or if the phrase “stop dating, start relating” resonates for you, then IAR is ready and waiting to help.
Program Details
The Intentional Autonomous Relating (IAR, or Intentional Relating, for short) program is designed to help anyone to achieve a massive level-up and personal breakthrough for their own relationship experience and relating skills in all areas of life: romance, friendships, business, and family. This program includes a mix of standardized and personalized elements with a focus on the specific needs and objectives of each client. Based on the selected program length and an initial assessment, goals will be tailored to achieve the best outcomes within the scope of the container.
Key Program Outcomes
Overall, the goal of the program is to help every client achieve dramatic improvement in the realms of relationship communication, clarity, harmony, stability, balance, and mutual fulfillment. As a typical experience, clients can expect to make significant gains in one, several, or all the following areas:
Clarity of needs, desires and intentions.
Ability to self-assess and discover one’s own deeper needs and desires which drive relationship tension or evolution, and frame one’s own intentions with clarity.
Mastery of productive communication.
Ability to shift naturally into various communication modes and styles which allow for effective connection and dialogue toward fruitful mutual exchanges.
Mastery of healthy boundaries and agreements.
Ability to re-orient to one’s own experience and the present, empathetically set constructive boundaries, and cultivate mutually stabilizing agreements.
Reduced co-dependency and conflict.
Replace ambiguity, uncertainty, dependency and fear with clarity, deeper bonding, mutual satisfaction, and fun while enjoying individual and shared growth.
Typical Program Flow
Discovery and Evaluation
- 1–2 sessions: state evaluation, objectives, rough schedule
- Self-paced materials/surveys to maximize live session time
Intentional Relating Cycle
- Interactive Sessions (In-Person or Remote)
- Teaching
- Coaching
- Consulting
- Co-Play
- Notes & Home Play in Client Portal
- Self-paced resources & async updates between sessions
- Facilitator reviews & adapts plan for next session
Review and Closeout
- 1–2 sessions: review progress, re-evaluate, and closeout
- Final report with next-step recommendations
Key Program Features
Teaching
Teaching is included as a standard feature of the Intentional Relating program, with the following topics considered essential elements to provide a baseline for healthy relationships. Each client will have the opportunity to learn and practice these foundational systems and frameworks throughout the container and these will be adapted to the length of the program and the starting point of the individual.
- Foundational Communication
- Foundational Psychology
- The Intentional Autonomous Relating Method
- Personal Development and Introspection Tools
- Conflict Resolution and Negotiation
Coaching
In combination with Teaching, Coaching provides a feedback loop to integrate the new patterns and frameworks of healthy relating as a lifestyle. After the initial assessment of current state and future goals, each aspect of Teaching is integrated with a cycle of evaluation, advisement, practice, and reporting to support all aspects of improvement in the following areas.
- Self-Awareness
- Emotional Regulation
- Communication
- Negotiation
- Care and Nurturing
- Growth and Play
Consulting
As a key differentiator of Intentional Relating compared to traditional relationship counseling or therapy, iEvolve Life takes a hands-on and problem-solving focused approach to achieving rapid and lasting improvement in relationships of all types. Consulting can take the form of facilitation to help clear internal blocks and obstacles (Transformation Games) for one or more individuals in relationship, assisting with facilitated conversations or problem-solving exercises, and providing any/all of the relationship partners with direct helping-hand guidance in the practice of the techniques, processes, and methodologies of the program.
- Needs Assessments
- General and Specific Intentions Processes
- Conditions, Boundaries, and Agreements Structure
- Guided Conversations
- Conflict Resolution
- Values and Vision Alignment
Accountability
Intentional Relating includes a personal portal for clients to interact with their facilitator (and partner, if applicable) for the duration of the program. In addition to live teaching, coaching, and consulting sessions, the client portal provides asynchronous communication and a point of accountability to help maintain progress on goals and objectives. After each session, and throughout the program, clients have real time access to their personal (secure, confidential) notes, supporting documents and resources, and ongoing “Home Play” opportunities provided and reviewed by the facilitator.
- Private Chat
- Resources Library
- Virtual Private Notebook
- Virtual Private Whiteboard
- Client Planner (Home Play Tracking)
- Previous Session Recordings and Transcripts (When Appropriate)
Deliverables
Session Notes
Session Recordings
Training Materials and References
Custom Homeplay Plans
Periodic Progress Reports and Recommendations
Explore a new paradigm of relationships with Intentional Autonomous Relating
The comprehensive toolset for joyful relationships.
IAR is a comprehensive toolset for individuals, groups, and conscious communities to move into a new paradigm of fluid, functional, and joyful relationship dynamics, while exiting the patterns and programs of old-systems thinking which create drama, confusion, misunderstanding and pain. IAR is an antidote to co-dependency and works by repatterning consciousness through language.
What is the purpsose of IAR?
To short-circuit old patterns and set a new standard for joyful relationships.
The purpose of IAR is to end the useless cycles of drama that plague most human relationships. IAR seeks to provide an entirely new Operating System for all types of human relationships – romantic bonds, friendships, business relationships, partnerships, family ties, companionships – a new system which inherently “short circuits” the old programs and patterns that ultimately set us up for disappointment and pain. One purpose of IAR is to show that relationships don’t have to be hard, messy, and complicated. There is a better way.
IAR is meant to open up a whole new world of possibilities for the kinds of relationships we can have and is meant to set a new standard for how happy, fulfilled, satisfied, and safe we can feel in our relationships. It switches us from thinking about relationships like a game with winners and losers (“deprivation-obligation” mindset) and into a new frame of a new game called “joyful-celebration” where everybody’s a winner because we all get more of what we want, and nobody has to sacrifice themselves in the process.
Assumptions
The new paradigm begins with 4 somewhat radical assumptions:
Intention
All relationships occur through choices which are the result of humans pursuing their needs, wants, preferences, and desires.
Autonomy
All humans are whole and complete in themselves and have inherent agency (freedom) in their choices and actions (inclusive of the universal right to consent).
Mutuality
Humans flourish most abundantly when they come together from heartfelt desire and joyful celebration in sharing experience while helping to meet each other’s social needs.
Non-Judgement
All relationship preferences are equally valid, and there is no “right way” to do relating.
What is the Approach?
The IAR approach is simple. To get clear, be sincere, and let go of fear.
The approach of Intentional Autonomous Relating might seem quite weird at first based on the standard games and patterns that most people play, but it will seem natural and obvious with practice and experience. The idea is to be radically honest with yourself and with everyone you relate with about what your needs are, your true heart’s desires, what you want from the relationship, what you’re willing to do or not do, how you want to show up, and how you want the other person to show up for you. And to speak clearly, and from the heart, and to be unafraid of the consequences of sharing your true intentions.
IAR provides a helpful framework for getting clear with yourself about all this, and then communicating clearly to others.
The IAR system utilizes 3 Levels of Intention (Open, Closed and Seeking), the 4 concepts of Conditions, Clarifications, Boundaries and Agreements and 10 Channels of Relating.
Using these simple tools, an entire Old Paradigm of co-dependency, drama, misunderstanding and pain can be taken apart and put back together in all the ways that fulfill the most needs for everyone.
Philosophy
The IAR is based on the philosophy that personal autonomy and mutual understanding are foundational requirements for the most healthy and happy human relationships.
Personal Autonomy
In IAR, autonomy means freedom of choice and action, but also it means a sense of wholeness or completeness in oneself. In our culture, we’ve been taught to value self-sacrifice and the idea that we aren’t truly “complete” as an individual –without a “partner”, a “person”, a “community” or perhaps a “family”. We’re taught –quite literally –that we are supposed to be searching for a “special someone” (or if you prefer, someones) who will “complete” us. This is a problem.
When we enter relationship from a position of believing in personal incompleteness –not just having personal needs but lacking in terms of our personhood–we automatically show up with a host of dysfunctional patterns which will plague the relationship for as long as we can sustain it. Attachment theory, Co-dependence theory, Transactional Analysis, and many other systems describe various features of this underlying phenomenon which in IAR we can simply refer to as “Non-Autonomy”.
When we show up to relationship comfortable in and with ourselves, prepared to take care of ourselves, and clear with ourselves on our personal needs, wants, and desires, we are standing in a place of Personal Autonomy.
Contrary to what we’ve been taught, generally, as a culture, it is only from a place of mutual autonomy that we can fully show up for each other with love, care, generosity, respect, empathy, support, and joyful celebration. When we can each (or all) stand in our place of personal power and meet each other as equals of being and spirit, then we can experience the full potential of what relationship can be.
This may seem counter-intuitive because of our cultural conditioning, but it is only when we are truly prepared fully to be ourselves that we can be fully together. To put it another way –it is only when in our heart-of-hearts we know that we can leave and be okay, that we are truly ready to choose to stay. And from that place of “I’m okay”, we can make that choice again and again, in every moment, every day.
Mutual Understanding
Mutual understanding is the second foundational principle of IAR and is defined as a sincere heartfelt desire to understand and be understood.
In recent years, much importance has been placed on the role of empathy in productive communication and healthy relationships. Empathy essentially means to earnestly seek to understand the experience of another person.
In IAR, empathy is a very important concept and an excellent foundational tool for healthy relating, but the concept of mutual understanding transcends (and includes) empathy in the sense of present-moment experience.
What we’ve been taught in our culture is to guard our true desires, feelings, and intentions from each other. We’ve learned how to play “games” with each other, and we’ve learned that these games are normal, appropriate, and even necessary (!) strategies for getting our needs met. We play the Guessing Game, “I’ll pretend to want one thing, but you’ll have to guess what I really want!” Or the Bluffing Game, “I’ll pretend like I don’t want what I want, but I bet you’ll give in, and I’ll get what I want!”. Or the Mind Reading Game, “I won’t say I want anything, but you try to figure out what I want!” This is a problem.
Games are supposed to be fun, and if playing these types of games with yourself and other people is fun for you, have a blast. But if you’re played out on these types of relationship games, and you’re ready to get to some other fun times like satisfaction, happiness, and flourishing, you might want to try the Mutual Understanding Game.
When we come to relationship ready to open-up to each other honestly about what we really need, what we’re willing to do, what we’re not willing to do, what we want to give, what we want to receive, how we want to treat others, how we want to be treated, and with sincere desire to know another person and to meet them in the place of their true heartfelt desire, we are seeking Mutual Understanding.
It is only when we truly understand each other and ourselves, that we can meet each other’s deepest needs, realize our wildest dreams, and co-create our most beautiful lives, together.
Words from the Founder
"It seems to be common wisdom or a fact of life that relationships are inherently hard. I certainly have had the experience of challenging relationships in all areas of my life, from romance to friendship, business, and family. The great news is that relationships don’t actually have to be hard. That’s not to say that they won’t take effort, but there is a different way to approach relating and it happens to be pretty easy to learn and understand."
Vision Battlesword
Olivia MacDonell
I found IAR to be incredibly insightful and comprehensive. In our modern dating culture of ambiguous language and game playing, IAR provides a simple framework for communication. I think sometimes it can be challenging to ask for what you want, much less know what you want when it comes to relationships. IAR, not only defines the different channels of relationships, but gives clarity in how to understand which ones best fit your own life. It has been the best relationship workshop I have taken to date!
Fidencio Love
IAR has been a powerful positive influence in my life. It taught me to relate to people differently and have a different perspective that makes sense. As a result I feel more whole as a person. Since taking the workshops I now know what needs I currently have that are being met or not being met in all my relationships. I’ve learned how expression of these needs and my boundaries around these needs is both powerful and freeing.
Gabrielle Rose
I am so thankful to have received this wisdom! The IAR method has helped my husband and I connect on a deeper level and taught us how to communicate our needs and feelings with appreciation for each other’s boundaries in ways we never thought possible! This impressive and exquisitely created method that comes from Vision’s own embodied experience and brilliance is a phenomenal catalyst that I highly recommend to anyone seeking a quantum upgrade to their communication skills and relationships. Thank you!
Alexander Ryker
IAR is a transformation technology for establishing, creating and enhancing rich relationships. It has helped me remove any and all negative patterns in my personal relations and create meaningful relationships. If you haven’t explored IAR you’re missing out on what I’d consider the most revolutionary material for happiness, fulfillment and success in sex, love and romance.
Serena Kelley
Learning about IAR completely changed my view of how I look at and approach personal relationships. We often hear about the importance of communication but we’re don’t really know HOW to do it properly. IAR breaks this down in a clear way on how to communicate with your partner and what your intentions are for the relationship. It’s changed the way I relate to bonding and how to differentiate various needs. This enables me to create meaningful containers with shared goals and desires.
