Settle for More in Your Home

“The Merrills are meeting a critical
cultural need—the need to learn the daily
details of how to live in truly loving living rooms!”

Most of us are acutely aware that our societal and world problems are escalating to the point that we no longer assume we can fix them.

A serious cultural flaw in our approach to dealing with these problems is that we have historically looked to our leaders and others to address and solve them for us with the hope that their success will improve our lives. But we—Tom and Bobbie Merrill—have discovered that the reverse is true and that starting at home in our own living rooms is the only way to truly impact our global problems or create the world we would like to have. Even more important is our discovery that we can do this rapidly and with surprisingly good results simply by learning to live in truly loving living rooms on a daily, moment-to-moment basis.

Once we grasped the importance and power of this, we dedicated our time as well as our financial, spiritual and emotional resources to inspiring a new standard and helping to elevate the state of interpersonal relationships in as many living rooms across the country as we have been able to reach.

The need for intervention in the area of all of our relationships is indisputable, and starting with the critical breakdown in so many primary partnerships is a good place to begin. Here’s why…

• 50% of first marriages end in divorce
• 66% of second marriages end in divorce
• 90% of third marriages end in divorce
• Of those remaining in marriage, 93% self report experiencing their relationships as unsuccessful
• This leaves over a hundred million Americans and their children living in an atmosphere of dissatisfaction—with little hope for change

Our failure to maintain long-term, intimate, and loving relationships in this most important and highly valued center of our lives reaps significant economic, social and health consequences for our culture and its people, with children being the most vulnerable and frequent casualty of this failure.
Yet, despite the plethora of mental health professionals, self-help books, workshops and advice columns providing non-stop information, the statistics reflecting the breakdown of relationships for the most part remain unchanged and are now considered the norm—a norm we strive to accommodate to, rather than change. Failure of this magnitude in any other arena of our society would be declared a national crisis!

To address this crisis, we offer a demonstrably different remedy in terms of approach as well as outcomes. Our model grew out of our accidental discovery of how to make our own personal relationship work in a completely new and different way than we had learned in our graduate programs or had taught to others during our long tenure as successful therapists.

It is a discovery we then used effectively with couples in our couples therapy practice and in couples workshops and became the basis for our book, Settle for More: You Can Have the Relationship You Always Wanted...Guaranteed!

In addition, our combined abilities and experience qualify us to effectively help parents raise loved and loving children through a variety of venues—including parenting classes, and private parenting consultations. These programs are based on our newly re-released books, More Parachutes for Parents and TheRip Cord, both drawn from the bestselling and highly acclaimed Parachutes for Parents.

Our Settle for More model holds out the promise—and delivers the information and tools to fulfill that promise—that we can develop and hold a consistently higher standard for all of our relationships, starting in our own living rooms, then expanding out from there, and in so doing, experience our true human potential and become a higher level humanity.

Our credentials also qualify us to help educators—ranging from the classroom teacher to school and college administrators—as well as those wanting to develop completely new, expanded and inspiring ways of relating to and educating our children. See Section on Four Global Projects for more information on our ideas about how we can Settle for More for our Children—At Home, At School and in the world.

Anytime this Model is applied, it quickly, easily and consistently transforms all human interactions from competitive to cooperative, from adversarial to assistive, and from defensive to open and communicative. According to the Merrills, “The success of this Model is mind-blowing … even to us!”

In addition, the Settle for More model has been repeatedly endorsed by both professionals and laypersons and has proven highly successful with couples, families, schools, churches, corporations and other organizations. Thus, it is our unwavering intention to develop the broadest, most powerful methods for delivering this model to as many people in as short a time as possible. To this end we are fully committed.

To teach this to others, we have developed a model that we share through a variety of venues, including our partnering book, Settle for More, You Can Have the Relationship You Always Wanted … Guaranteed! and our parenting book, More Parachutes for Parents, Raising Loved and Loving Children for a Joyful Worldas well as the The Rip Cord, Pantsing the Boogieman, Taming the Undertoad, and several other books in our “Settle for More” series. We also offer Partnering and Parenting Seminars, Classes, and Private Consultations as well as School Consultations and Corporate Consultations.