During the course of a long-term relationship, priorities shift and sometimes your partner takes a back seat to health, family, or work stressors. Sometimes they are in that back seat for a very long time.

If you’ve been an absent partner and want to reignite the intimacy you and your significant other once had, it can feel awkward broaching that desire — and understandably so, says renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel.

The author and podcast host recently released “Esther Perel’s Desire Bundle,” a duo of online courses that teach you how to reignite a romantic flame.

But the only way to improve the situation is to address it.

“It starts with a conversation, verbally or non verbally,” she says. “You reach out with words, or you reach out with your eyes or with your hands, but you have to take the initiative.”

Here are three steps to help you start owning your mistakes and rekindling your partnership.

To start the conversation, Perel offers the following script:

“Yes, I’ve been gone for a long time and I’m reappearing and I take full responsibility for my behavior.”

Maybe it’s that you were depressed or attending to a dying family member. Acknowledge that regardless of how consuming the reason was, you understand the experience for your partner has been less than ideal.

You can say something along the lines of:

“I checked out for a long time. I was [insert reason here] and it took me completely out of the equation. And now I’m back, and I know that I have neglected you and us.”

After resentment builds, one apology often isn’t enough. Perel says a good rule-of-thumb is to take responsibility three times.

“If your taking responsibility and ownership is not received, the burden of forgiveness passes over to the other person,” she says.

After the third apology if your partner still will not accept your contrition, it is up to them to figure out why and how they want to proceed.

If they do agree to work on reinvigorating the relationship, start making some plans.

“If you do things you enjoy that are familiar and comfortable, then you will often reinforce your friendship,” Perel says. “But if you want to bring the lovers into the center, then you need to do things that are more new, with more risk, with more uncertainty.”

If watching a movie every Friday night is part of your routine, perhaps opt to see a live show instead. Maybe your Saturday mornings are dedicated to household chores. Let the dishes sit for a few hours and take a bike ride at the park or brunch at a new restaurant.

Introducing, or reintroducing, some variation into your lives can help reignite the spark.

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One of the biggest challenges for any leader is figuring out how to hold people accountable for their mistakes without creating bad blood. In those situations, playing the blame game is always a losing strategy, according to leadership expert and bestselling author Michael Timms.

The secret to calling out poor performance while maintaining a positive relationship with employees is to own up to your own mistakes first so you can inspire others to do the same, Timms said in a TED Talk in January. It’s a strategy called “modeling accountability.”

Timms, the founder of management consulting firm Avail Leadership, noted that he and other leaders often fall into the same trap: “blaming other people for a problem without considering my part in it.”

″[This is] something I teach management teams: You can’t inspire accountability in others until you model it yourself,” he said.

He provided an example from a construction company he’d previously advised, where team meetings often devolved into a series of accusations, as blame got spread around without any viable solutions being presented. This typically resulted in distrust among co-workers while mistakes kept being repeated.

Taking Timms’ advice, the general manager started their next meeting by taking personal responsibility for his own contributions to problems, which inspired other workers to chime in and admit their own mistakes.

“The mood in that meeting changed instantly,” Timms said. “Before others will allow us to hold them accountable, they must first see us hold ourselves accountable.”

Timms shared an example from his own family. His three daughters weren’t ready to leave the house in time to attend an important event, despite Timms and his wife “nagging [them] long before it was time to leave,” he said. Timms was “starting to lose it.”

Then he paused and, rather than chastising his kids, he realized he should take accountability for his own contributions to the problem and come up with some solutions.

“I put big clocks everywhere and posted the schedule in a common area,” he said. “You know what? It actually worked. Now we’re not perfect at getting out the door in time, but it’s much better than it was.”

Timms recommends adopting three simple but “powerful” habits to help improve other people’s performance without turning them against you:

“Habit one: Don’t blame. Habit two: Look in the mirror. Habit three: Engineer the solution,” he said.

Putting these habits into effect “has an almost magical effect on other people’s behavior,” according to Timms. “You get better results. But this isn’t just for CEOs and managers. We’re all trying to help others be better, right? As a parent, a coworker or a volunteer.”

It’s an important lesson for leaders who want to inspire better performance from employees without creating lasting damage to morale, Timms said. When leaders focus too much on doling out blame, it “kills accountability,” and create a toxic atmosphere where accusations fly back and forth while the root issues often get overlooked.

“In cultures of blame, people hide problems or point their finger at someone else,” he said. “No one is going to take accountability if they think they’re going to be blamed for doing so. Blame destroys teamwork, problem solving, learning and initiative.”

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In 2017, Leena Pettigrew was gifted her first houseplant — a golden Pothos, notoriously easy to care for — and killed it.

Five years later, she tried again. She and her husband Marquise were redecorating their home in Houston, and they needed to fill its empty corners, she says. She drove to Lowes and bought a couple of succulents.

The hobby blossomed into an obsession, and then a side hustle: After her home became “overrun” with 8-feet-tall Monsteras, she looked for ways to sell her extra houseplants online. She found home décor marketplace website Palmstreet, and started auctioning off her plants on livestreams there last June, she says.

From July 2023 to July 2024, Pettigrew brought in nearly $148,600 in revenue, or an average of $12,380 per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. She stores up to 1,000 plants at a time in her garage, she says.

DON’T MISS: The ultimate guide to earning passive income online

Pettigrew, 44, works about 20 hours per week sourcing, selling and shipping the plants — in addition to her full-time I.T. job, where she makes roughly $90,000 a year, she says. She also is a paid consultant for Palmstreet, where she helps train new sellers.

The side hustle is profitable enough to replace Marquise’s former full-time income, they say. The couple now runs the Palmstreet side hustle together, along with five contract employees, from their garage-turned-greenhouse.

Here’s how Pettigrew built and maintains her lucrative side hustle:

To develop her green thumb, Pettigrew spent a lot of time on YouTube, she says: She and her husband would lay in bed on their phones, watching plant-care and bass-fishing videos, respectively, before going to sleep.

Selling her houseplants proved more of an administrative process, she says. As she unloaded her extras, finding local buyers on Facebook, she realized she enjoyed the interactions. But creating an actual business — sourcing and buying inventory, keeping organized track of each customer sale — took time and effort.

“I spent hours and hours tracking every purchase and expense in spreadsheets,” says Pettigrew.

At PlantCon Houston, a fair for houseplant enthusiasts, she met another seller who convinced her to try Palmstreet, which was called PlantStory at the time. The platform, which promised to take over much of Pettigrew’s administrative work, offered two options: a traditional online store and a livestreamed auction system, where she could sell plants on camera in real time.

Pettigrew listed a couple plants on her online store, but taking photos and writing descriptions for each one took time. She tried the livestream feature, and her on-camera presence felt awkward and stiff — until Marquise, who was arranging plants next to Pettigrew, started making jokes.

He made Pettigrew laugh, which made her appear more at home to the livestream’s 55 viewers, the couple says. That auction lasted about four hours, and sold 53 plants, according to a Palmstreet spokesperson.

Two months and several successful livestreams later, the couple sat down to develop a more comprehensive business plan, says Pettigrew.

Today, Pettigrew sells roughly 100 houseplants per livestream. With an established audience and reputation, she can sell larger, more expensive plants, she says: starting at $30, rather than her old starting price of $5. Her Monsteras go for upwards of $115 each.

The extra income allowed Marquise, who now occasionally hosts his own livestreams, to mostly step away from his full-time job: running an auto repair shop co-owned by the couple. He still works about six hours per week there, largely for friends and family who “coax” him to take their appointments, says Pettigrew.

Running the auto shop full-time was stressful, Marquise says. Employees were dependent on the couple for their livelihood, and customers were often unhappy — concerned about their car, the bill or when they could get back to work.

In contrast, managing contract workers for Pettigrew’s side hustle — she started hiring people this past spring — is a less stressful experience, she says. The workers only rely on them for part-time work, so the business’ success doesn’t feel life-and-death. The job is less labor intensive, and the customers are largely easier to work with, says Pettigrew.

Together, the couple has five streams of income: Pettigrew’s I.T. job, Palmstreet selling and consulting, the auto shop, and a virtual mechanic gig Marquise picked up with his spare time.

The money helps keep the auto shop open. It’s also recently funded a couple weekend trips around Texas to preserve their sanity, they say: When you both work from home, with your side hustle in your garage, it can be hard to unplug.

If the side hustle ever outpaces her full-time salary, Pettigrew wants to sell the auto shop, move to Florida, open her own greenhouse and hire enough staff for her and Marquise to only need part-time work. It could happen within the next year or two, she says.

They’d spend their remaining time on other passions, like volunteer preaching work, adds Pettigrew.

Clarification: This story has been updated to reflect that Pettigrew says her reputation on Palmstreet helps her sell more larger, expensive plants.

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Adriane Schwager has interviewed thousands of people during her 20-year career working in recruiting — and she’s made hundreds of hires as a result.

Finding the right people for her team is all the more important now that she’s the CEO and co-founder of GrowthAssistant, a hiring platform that uses global talent to fill roles.

That means she has her guidelines for hiring superstars down to a T. She recently posted a thread on X detailing how she can spot what she calls a “10 out of 10 hire.”

In her post, Schwager says top-tier hires have “extremely high agency,” can wear many hats at once and demonstrate expertise in their specific domain, among other skills.

But she says two specific traits are “underrated” and help her figure out if she’s hiring the right person: resourcefulness and proactivity.

“They kind of go hand-in-hand here but are slightly different,” Schwager tells CNBC Make It.

To gauge proactivity, Schwager listens for candidates who can give examples of how they solved a problem they weren’t asked to solve.

Relatedly, she prizes people who can be resourceful to help grow her startup with limited funds and staffing. “I need to know that you’ve solved problems that didn’t require money,” she says. “I need to see an environment where you were resource-constrained so that I know you have that thinking capacity — that tool in your toolkit.”

Early-career workers with limited experience can find creative ways to show off these skillsets in an interview, Schwager says.

Consider any previous internships. Maybe you weren’t considered for a bigger team project, but rather than sit back, you took the initiative to approach your manager and take ownership for a small contribution, for example. “That shows proactivity to me,” Schwager says.

You can also discuss skills you learned at a part-time job during high school or college. Schwager recently interviewed an intern candidate and asked about a time he had to be resourceful.

The candidate was working for Papa John’s making deliveries in Chicago when his car broke down. Knowing that he needed to deliver the pizza within a certain time frame, he rented a bike for the remainder of his route “and delivered the pizza with two minutes to spare,” Schwager says. “So that shows resourcefulness, and I will say commitment” to getting the job done.

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You don’t need a quiet, harmonious household to raise the next Steve Jobs or Frida Kahlo.

Kids who grow up with parents who regularly disagree — in a constructive fashion — can become more creative adults, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania recently told the “What Now? with Trevor Noah” podcast.

Such children can also become more mentally resilient, Grant wrote in a 2017 New York Times essay — a skill that highly successful adults often develop early in life, experts say.

By arguing, Grant doesn’t mean yelling and screaming. Instead, the idea is to model productive discussions for your children, ones in which both parties engage in conversation, hear each other out and, ideally, reach a healthy consensus.

Growing up in a household with productive tension can show children that arguments don’t necessarily create lasting conflict, and can lead to creative ways of solving problems, said Grant.

“Instead of just defaulting or deferring to whatever an authority figure tells you, you realize, ’Well, there are two different authority figures … and they don’t agree,” he said during the podcast episode, which published on August 15. ”[It can] lead to cognitive complexity, but it can also lead to more courage when it comes to challenging the status quo because there’s not just one right answer.”

Constructive disagreements help mold creative kids in multiple ways, research shows.

One such study asked adults in their early 30s to write “imaginative stories,” and found the most creative entries correlated with their childhood exposure to parental conflict. Another found that the most innovative architects and scientists experienced some amounts of friction within their families.

“If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones,” Grant wrote. “Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink … there’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and take it.”

Building creativity doesn’t have to sacrifice a child’s sense of security: A 2009 study observed 235 families and found that children ages 5 to 7 felt more emotionally safe when they had parents who argued constructively. When observed again three years later, they showed greater empathy and were friendlier in school.

“A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the rope,” Grant wrote in his 2021 book, “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.” “It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed … If you can adapt your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to end up in rhythm.”

Want to master your money this fall? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course. We’ll teach you practical strategies to hack your budget, reduce your debt, and grow your wealth. Start today to feel more confident and successful. Use code EARLYBIRD for an introductory discount of 30% off, now extended through September 30, 2024, for the back-to-school season.

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