You’re competent and confident. People listen to you and respect you for your knowledge and experience. You’ve achieved a high level of success in your career.

But none of this means that you excel in building and maintaining healthy relationships or that you’re a good lover. Here are five aspects of intimacy that may be missing from your toolbox:

1. Flexibility and adaptability are key. Your confidence and trust in your interpretations can get in the way of the humility needed to try new things and hear your partner, even when it doesn’t match your experiences or perspective.

You may have already adopted a “growth mindset” in your career, and this is the same mental framing (of openness to learning, willingness to mess up, and dedication to self-agency) necessary for you and your relationship to evolve and grow over time.

Regarding sex specifically, being adaptable means you acknowledge and work with the circumstances of ever-changing lives, bodies, hormones, and needs. This requires creativity, open-mindedness, and compassion (for self and partner).

2. Emotional vulnerability is worth it…but requires courage and strength. The topic of emotional vulnerability continues to gain value and recognition for business leaders. For everyone in all contexts, it is an ongoing process of having the courage to study your insecurities and patterns of behavior and make new (and ideally, healthier) choices.

If you were raised with the belief that the characteristics inherent in traditional masculinity are the way to succeed in business and life, you likely learned that emotional vulnerability indicates weakness. Reframing vulnerability, as a skill requiring courage and strength, gives you access to responsibly facing difficult and deeply uncomfortable feelings and beliefs.

When it comes to sex, there are so many potential vulnerable beliefs and emotions for you and your partner, ranging from love, trust, and surrender, to shame, fear, judgment, and insecurities. Cultivating vulnerability in yourself and facilitating safe spaces for your partner to access vulnerability, are invaluable for long-term satisfying sex life.

3. Stress can deplete sexual desire. Carrying the weight of stress and responsibility in your career can deplete your sexual desire. Only about 20% of people get hornier from stress; the rest of us feel less desire and less motivated intimately.

With limited time and a busy schedule, one way to start addressing this is by building brief moments of stress-reducing activities into your day (like the 4-7-8 breathing technique, 5-minute guided meditations, walking while listening to an entertaining podcast, or exercise time). This can make a difference in both physical and emotional health, as well as sexual desire.

4. Letting go of power may be the hottest thing you can do sexually. Intentionally playing with power dynamics with an intimate partner — and perhaps taking on a role that is very different from your workplace demeanor — could add a new, vulnerable, and sexy dimension to your sex life.

Playing with dominance and submission can stimulate a sense of newness, excitement, and unpredictability, just like at the beginning of a sexual relationship. In practice, power play can look like being on the giving or receiving end of: adding to senses or taking them away, physically moving your partner to where you want them to be or telling them what to do (only with consent and conversation ahead of time, though), physically or mentally teasing them, or “dirty talk” that chastises or sexually “demeans” (e.g., “You’re my little whore.”)

5. All those “silly” little things that your partner cares about really do matter…if you want to maintain a strong connection and meaningful sex life. It’s not uncommon to become used to focusing on big picture topics while dismissing the smaller ones. But sometimes those smaller ones build up over time and become massive issues that your partner cannot or will not accept anymore or forgive you for.

What’s small and trivial to you is actually quite meaningful to your partner and their well-being. This is another aspect of being humble and realizing that there are many things that can make or break a sex life or a relationship overall…not just the things that matter most to you.

Some of these may already be strengths of yours, but others might not. Like anything that’s important to learn in life, you need to allocate time and space to learn and practice these skills, even if it’s just 5 minutes a day. These can be particularly uncomfortable, but worth it in the long run for your pleasure, connection, and relationship satisfaction.

~Dr. Jenn Gunsaullus — Intimacy Speaker, Relationship Coach, & Sociologist