The value of physical fitness has been drilled into our heads for good reason: regular cardiovascular exercise reduces the risk of chronic disease and alleviates stress, while weight training boosts bone strength and tones muscles. But according to Olga Sheean, hardly anyone thinks about “relationship fitness”. The Vancouver life coach says that people who are hoping to be lucky in love need to get in shape for it.

“People often go into a relationship in a needy way,” Sheean says on the line from Dublin, Ireland, where she’s on vacation. “The only way for us to cultivate a healthy relationship is to operate fully as ourselves. It’s not about positive thinking, but about a self-acceptance and self-worth.”¦Once you find a strong sense of self, that’s when the perfect partner comes along.”

To find your true self, you must first find your “missing pieces”, says Sheean, author of Fit for Love—Find Your Self and Your Perfect Mate (Inside Out Media, 2005). (The book is available on her Web site.)

In Sheean’s view, the missing pieces are qualities you needed as a child but may not have gotten, such as respect, trust, acceptance, and support.

“Without those in our formative years, parts of us never fully develop,” Sheean explains. “Our missing pieces determine how we act and the choices we make. They also cause us to distort ourselves, to hide certain parts of ourselves for fear of rejection, to suppress our individuality, to deny our value, to diminish our creativity, and, most frustrating of all, to attract partners with the same missing pieces as us. This creates a cycle of unfulfilling relationships that causes many people to give up on ever having the love they want.”

Once people define what their missing pieces are, they can start being themselves and living life on their own terms.

“To identify their particular missing pieces, people need to ask themselves this question: ”˜What has been missing for you in your relationships?’.”¦Once you identify those triggers, you can heal them. It’s not about blaming the other person, but about finding what’s missing in us.

“You can start saying yes to yourself and no to compromise,” she says. “From there, life starts to flow much more easily. When you make healthy choices, you start to see things shift.

“Being powerful is being yourself,” she adds. “Once you are yourself, you’re able to let love in. The two go together. Love comes when you’re being fully yourself, without compromise or distortion.”

Sheean’s book also explores power dynamics, spiritual consciousness, and ways to keep long-term relationships vibrant and nurturing.

Of course, there are countless self-help books on the topic of love, but some are worth the coin. Take David D. Burns’s Feeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships Work (Broadway, 2008). The adjunct clinical professor emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine’s psychiatry department is best known for 1992’s Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, which has sold more than four million copies and continues to be recommended by health professionals.

Burns is a proponent of cognitive behavioural therapy, which aims to eliminate distorted thinking. In Feeling Good Together, he takes CBT a step further with what he calls cognitive interpersonal therapy. It’s based on the idea that we all provoke the very relationship problems we complain about; we deny our own role in the conflict; and we have the power to transform troubled relationships if we’re willing to stop blaming other people and—echoing Sheean’s philosophy—are willing to change ourselves.

“Do you blame your partner for the problems in your relationship? If so, you may be in for a tough time,” Burns writes. “However, if you’re willing to examine your own role in the problem”¦the prognosis for a rewarding, successful relationship is extremely positive.”

Burns is quick to point out that the antidote to blaming someone else isn’t blaming yourself. Rather, a crucial element of a healthy relationship—whether it’s with your spouse, a family member, a coworker, or a neighbour, he argues—is personal responsibility.

Burns’s approach to making relationships work is no-nonsense. He nails down common distortions that trigger conflict—such as all-or-nothing thinking, jumping to conclusions, and magnification of faults—and outlines step-by-step ways in which people can develop better relationships using effective communication. Best of all, his words are clear and encouraging.

San Francisco, California’s Zhi Gang Sha—a medical doctor, doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, and “soul leader”—has an altogether different view of troubled relationships. He claims that there is a spiritual reason for such problems: karma in your relationships from previous lives.

In The Power of Soul: The Way to Heal, Rejuvenate, Transform, and Enlighten All Life (Simon and Schuster, 2009), the founder of the Institute of Soul Mind Body Medicine explains that if you had struggles with someone in a past life, chances are you will struggle with one another in this life.

Whether or not you follow Sha’s philosophy, it’s easy to grasp his advice for healing relationships. “You have the power to transform your relationships,” he writes. “The golden key to transform relationships is unconditional love and forgiveness.”

Heal the soul, Sha says, and the healing of the mind and body will follow, and relationships will be transformed.

See? Simple.