Building Better Relationships

Building Better Relationships

Do you want help building better relationships? Have you ever left relationship books lying around, or put a relationship podcast on hoping that a certain someone may reflect on their behavior and be a better partner or friend for you? Have you ever dropped a hint (or SEVEN) to a coworker, boss, or friend about how you feel in your relationship with them, and how you hope they might change?

As a therapist and healthy relationships coach, I know that so often, we feel helpless about how to improve our relationships, because we feel like the quality of our relationships depends on what OTHER people are doing or not doing. Relationships are frustrating when it feels like people aren’t communicating well with you, or aren’t meeting your needs, or respecting your boundaries, or are just being plain annoying.

It is totally natural and normal to think that our relationships would be better if only the other person got it together. (And hey, that would be much easier! I hear you!) However, needing the other person to be the change you wish to see in your relationships is not just frustrating, it’s disempowering. If you believe that having better relationships are all about how to get someone else to change it deprives you of the ability to actively build better relationships, and leads to a cycle of hurt and resentment.

Not knowing how to improve our relationships can lead to feelings of disappointment, resentment, and frustration. When relationship problems go on for too long, these feelings can begin to erode the fabric of our relationships. Hurt and resentment can lead to conflict in our relationships, or even worse, lead us to withdraw.

You don’t have to struggle with frustrating or disappointing relationships. There is an empowering path forward, and a way to build better relationships. A way YOU control.

Improve Your Relationships, Improve Your Life

Research shows that happiness is strongly correlated with the quality of your relationships.

You deserve to have fantastic relationships. You deserve to feel loved and cared for. You deserve to have your friends, family, and partner show up for you. Our relationships — particularly the quality of our relationships — can be the single greatest source of happiness… or pain, anxiety, and frustration. Building better relationships with your family, your friends, your coworkers, and your partner can be one of the most powerful strategies to improve your mood, self esteem, and overall happiness and life satisfaction.

Research shows that happiness is strongly correlated with the quality of your relationships. (As does health, and longevity for that matter.) The key to building better relationships with everyone starts with you: YOUR ability to communicate, to listen, to be assertive, to handle conflict, to manage your emotions, and to understand others. In short, your soft skills.

What Are Soft Skills and Why Are They So Important?

This may sound counter-intuitive, but by focusing on your own “soft skills” you can transform your relationships single-handedly. What are soft skills, and why are they so important? Soft skills are communication and relationship skills that contribute to high-quality, harmonious relationships.

Soft skills are vital to success in the workplace, happy, healthy marriages, and fulfilling, supportive relationships with friends and family. As a matter of fact “soft skills” are tied for first place with creativity, for the most important qualities that employers are looking for. But aside from your ability to get ahead in your career, investing in improving soft skills can lead to immense rewards in every area of your life. Why? Because although you cannot change others, you can change the way that people respond to you through developing excellent communication and relationship skills.

Building Better Relationships: It’s All About Empowering YOU

So today, on the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast I’m taking to my colleague (and relationship expert), Kathleen C. Kathleen is a life coach, individual therapist, and couples counselor here on the team at Growing Self. She is the facilitator of our Online Relationship Skills Group, and is here today to share her system for how to develop yourself so that you can build better relationships with the most important people in your life.

Whether you’re hoping to have better relationships with your coworkers, wanting to heal rifts with your family, develop more close friendships, if you want to get better results in dating, or have a better relationship with your partner, you get some ideas about the communication skills and relationship skills that will empower you to get better results with other people.

How To Improve Your Communication Skills

Listen to our interview to learn how to develop the communication skills and relationship skills that can help you build better relationships. Specifically:

Foundational Relationship Skills

• Self awareness – How understanding yourself, your needs, your feelings and your personal values can help you build better relationships with others.
• Emotional regulation – How being able to manage your feelings can help you communicate more effectively in relationships.
• Self respect – How having healthy self-esteem and self-love helps you have stronger and more authentic relationships.
• Assertiveness – How to develop your voice and your truth in order to communicate your needs, rights, and feelings to others.

Intermediate Relationship Skills

• How to improve your communication skills by cultivating both self-expression skills as well as listening skills.
• Setting boundaries – How to set appropriate and healthy limits with others.
• How to manage conflict.

Advanced Communication Skills and Relationship Skills

• Identifying our triggers – How to use our self-awareness, self-respect, and communication skills to avoid situations that would be bad for us and bad for our relationships.
• Empathy – Learning how to understand the needs, rights, feelings and perspectives of others, and how to use that awareness to improve communication and build better relationships.
• How to cope with relationship challenges including dealing with toxic people, how to deal with criticism, and what to do with bullies.

We sincerely hope that this episode of the Love, Happiness and Success Podcast helps to give you some direction for building better relationships in your life!

xo,

Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Kathleen C., MEd, LPC

Resources:

Quiz: How Healthy Is Your Relationship?

Book: Crucial Conversations

Video: Brene Brown on Empathy

Personality Test: Enneagrams

Website: Self-Compassion