The power of praise. From time to time, couples come to see me before their wedding,

and sometimes they ask me whether I have any advice to give them as to how to make their marriage strong.

In reply, I give them a simple suggestion. It is almost magical in its effects.

It will make their relationship strong and in other unexpected ways it will

transform their lives. They have to commit themselves to the following ritual. Once a day,

usually at the end of the day, they must each praise the other for something the other has done

that day, no matter how small, an act, a word, a gesture that was kind or sensitive or

generous or thoughtful, and the praise must be focused on that one act, not generalized.

It must be genuine, it must come from the heart,

and the other must learn to accept the praise. That's all they have to do. It takes at most a minute

or two, but it has to be done not sometimes but every single day. I learned this in a most unexpected way. I've written before about the

late Lena Rustin, one of the most remarkable people I've ever met. She was a speech therapist,

specialising in helping stammering children. She founded the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering in London, and she had a

unique approach to her work. Most speech therapists focus on speaking and breathing techniques

and on the individual child. The one she worked with were usually about five years old.

Lena did more.

She focused on relationships and worked with parents, not just children.

Her view was that to cure a stammer, she had to do more than help the child to speak fluently.

She had to change the entire family environment. Families

tend to create an equilibrium. If a child stammers, everyone in the family adjusts to it.

Therefore, if the child is to lose its stammer, all the relationships within the family will have to be renegotiated. Not only must

the child change, so must everyone else. But change at that basic level is hard. We tend to settle

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