Photo by Kalandrakas

I received a lot of positive feedback about the previous post, Upgrade your Relationships, but many of the comments pointed out that although the concept was sound it was lacking in practical advice on how to begin making these changes.

As a follow-on from the original post, I wanted to share with you some of the best ideas and techniques that I am aware of, which can be applied to your life now to help you follow this process.

1. Acceptance

The first vital change to make is a change in perspective – In all your relationships, including the one with yourself, you must practise acceptance, and accepting the other person completely for who they are, not who you would want them to be.

This means accepting their good points and their bad points – both are equally valid parts of who that person is, and they would not be the same if one were missing. Genuine acceptance is seeing someone as whole – seeing their good and bad sides, and realizing that they are more than the sum of their parts.

True acceptance is seeing others without judgment. You attach no labels, no conditions or opinions to that person; you simply see them as who they are – perfect, whole and complete.

2. Tell the Truth

Truth elevates relationships, falsehood damages them. When you intentionally keep the truth from someone, even yourself, you are devaluing the worth of both parties – you are subconsciously saying “we cannot deal with this”, meaning either the facts of the concealment, or the expected consequences of the truth.

Telling the truth is a conscious choice – Even when the truth may have difficult or painful consequences. By sharing the truth consciously, you are affirming that the people involved are both worthy of hearing the truth and can handle it. Even when the truth is hard, sharing it strengthens the relationship.

3. Take Responsibility

All the relationships in your life, whether you sought them out or inherited them, are your responsibility. How you treat that relationship, as a pleasure or a chore, is completely down to you – the condition of that relationship is directly related to the way you see it and the energy you put into it.

For each relationship in your life, take some time to think, and consider whether you are putting everything you could into it. Are you taking responsibility? Are you putting in the effort that relationship is worth?

Taking responsibility for your relationships sometimes means having to let go – of your expectations of the other person, and sometimes the relationship itself. I’ve consciously released several friendships over the years, not because anything went wrong, but simply because the relationship wasn’t a good fit for me anymore.

4. Understand the Plus

Following on from taking responsibility, is understanding what you get from a particular relationship. It might be something simple, like companionship or shared interests, or it could be quite complex – a particular challenge for you to overcome. No matter what the relationship, there should always be a tangible benefit you derive from it – a plus, even if it is often hard to find.

I believe that every relationship, even the difficult ones, holds a benefit for us – Something that soothes our spirit, brings us joy, or helps us grow. You can come to appreciate your relationships better by finding that benefit, and in doing so your relationship becomes less transactional, and more transformational.

5. Nonresistance

Nonresistance is the next level up to acceptance – Once you can accept someone as complete, you stop resisting who they are, the next step is to stop resisting what happens between you. This isn’t the same as simply giving up and not getting involved, it’s more consciously allowing what happens to happen.

Wanting to be “in control” is a pervasive and destructive impulse that a lot of people cling to in their relationships – trying to make things go the way they want it. Trying to control their relationships is the main way people resist what is happening – it’s an outlook based in fear, which, like concealing the truth, devalues the worth of both parties. Overcoming the need to control is the main part of nonresistance, and can have a substantial positive impact on the quality of your relationships.

6. Synergy

By practicing acceptance, responsibility and nonresistance with those around you, you will experience a deepening of those relationships as a clear space begins to develop around the relationship. This space allows all parties to be themselves, without fear or judgment.

The bigger the size of that space, the more creativity and playfulness can emerge as a result – The people involved can bring their individuality, strengths and inventiveness to bear, and can express themselves more freely. This cultivates synergy – that interdependent creative force which becomes more than the sum of it’s parts, more than what individuals alone can create.

Synergy cannot be made, it has to grow of it’s own accord. The most important task for you in the synergistic process is ensuring you create space for synergy to grow, by allowing everyone to be themselves and bring the best of who they are to the endeavor.

7. Listen Fully

Listening is a distinct art in the world of communication – one that many of us overestimate our skill with. We all like to think we are great listeners, when all we are really good at is making the noises and gestures that make it seem like we are listening.

True listening is more than just having your ears open and hearing what is said, it’s about allowing the other person to have the space to express themselves, and then paying attention – with your whole self. When you align yourself completely with what that person is communicating, you notice more, you understand more and the other person will mirror that alignment. Your communication deepens from just words into full rapport, where deep meaning and important ideas can be shared much more openly and effectively.

8. Build Integrity

Integrity means “wholeness” or a sense of being complete, and congruent. Your personal integrity is your ability to walk your talk, and your ability to do the things you say you will. Stephen Covey describes personal integrity as your ability to make and keep promises.

Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do
Don Galer

If people perceive you as saying one thing, and doing another it damages your reputation and how you are seen. If you are asked to do things, and you don’t – not only do you damage your own integrity, but you devalue the other person – your choice says that you don’t value what they have asked you for.

By building your integrity within the sphere of your relationships, you will be reinforcing who you are and what you do. You will not only feel better about who you are, but your relationships will gain a deeper measure of shared trust and responsibility.

9. Cherish their Uniqueness

Like understanding the plus (#4 – above), no matter who your relationship is with, there is something unique, valuable and wonderful about that person. It might be a sense of humor, a confidence or a kind way of speaking – it could be an intangible, heady mixture of character traits that result in a special, but hard-to-define fabulousness.

Make a commitment, now, to discover the uniqueness of all the people you know – Find it, celebrate it, cherish it. In doing so, you affirm to that person their worth and value to you and to others – a precious gift beyond measure, which honors the giver.

10. Look above and beyond

The true depth of many relationships becomes most apparent when there is a sense of connection between the people involved. This could be through intimacy with a partner, through your family or through a sense of teamwork or camaraderie with colleagues or the people you play sports with.

A lot of the time, that sense of connection is fairly obvious – you love your partner or your family, and you enjoy playing for your team. When you start to become more conscious of your relationships, it becomes possible to look beyond the obvious, and start seeing further connections with the people around you.

You might see that you and your colleagues outside your immediate department share a common mission of making the company a great place to work, and a successful business.

You might see that your neighbours are united with you in wanting a safe, clean environment for your street.

When next you are interacting with someone, be it a store clerk, a colleague or an old friend – Try to look above and beyond to see what connections there are between you. When you start to see how deeply interconnected we all are, you will start relating to people in a different, more considerate and more honourable way.

***

Since writing the original Upgrade your Relationships post, I have really been making an effort to apply these techniques to my life, and cannot recommend this practise more highly.

Consciously changing the way you interact with other people is one of the most transformational activities you can undertake – the benefits are far-reaching, profound and deeply humbling.

This isn’t a change anyone can force you to implement – your relationships are your responsibility alone. The only person who can make these things happen is you.

Do you want mediocre relationships, which are fundamentally limited in depth and joy they can offer? Or do you want vibrant, fulfilling relationships which challenge, nurture and inspire you?

It’s your choice…

How do you see yourself? How do you see other people? If you were to try to describe a person, either yourself or someone else – How would you do so? What words would you choose to use?

Do you see people, yourself included, as individuals? As members of society? As family or friends, strangers or lovers? How do you relate to other people?

We all have variety of different ways in which we see and define our relationships with other people, and with ourselves. Some common ways of how we identify with other people are:

• Seeing people as better or worse than us
• Defining people by the roles they carry out – Lover, daughter, friend, enemy
• Judging people by their beliefs (and how they agree or disagree with our own)
• Comparisons of worth through status symbols and social standing

All relationships, including those we have with ourselves, are strongly influenced by our own unique viewpoint – the opinions and beliefs we hold about each other. One of the most important factors in ensuring successful, open communication is understanding the way we see people, and how our opinions and ideas about them can affect what we’re trying to say and how it is received.

Aspects of a Person

As we build a relationship with someone, we gradually cultivate and come to believe in a broad range of interpretations about that person. Except in extreme cases, none of the ways mentioned above are particularly exclusive – our identification with others is most often down to a combination of factors – ideas, beliefs and opinions we hold, which I tend to refer to as aspects of a person.

Typical aspects of a person, which help or hinder how we relate to them:

• How we feel about them – Do we love or hate this person? (Or ourself?)
• Our opinions of the roles they carry out – We might be proud of them for being a good father, annoyed at someone for being a lousy employee or happy someone is our friend.
• Religious Beliefs or Political Alignment – Let’s not go there!
• Perceived Social Status – Do they have greater or lesser standing than our own?
• Wealth (or lack thereof) – Who has the most?
• Qualities we admire – Courage, discipline, a caring nature…
• Flaws we dislike – Hogging the remote, atrocious driving, personal hygiene issues…

In learning to understand how relationships are built, I started to use the term aspects because it is neither positive or negative – Even with people we are very physically or emotionally close to, the concepts we hold about them are rarely exclusively positive – there are often negative opinions which colour how we see them, if only on occasion.

Most perception is projection – we often like or dislike in others what we most like or dislike in ourselves. Commonly, the deciding factor in whether a relationship between ourself and another, and how positive or negative it is, is how well the aspects of the other person match the self-held beliefs and aspects of ourselves.

Dwelling on the Flaws

Without conscious awareness, it’s all to easy to dwell on the negative aspects of a relationship

In most person-to-person relationships, the aspects and ideas we each hold about the other are going to be a selection of positive and negative. We may love our sibling, but dislike the way they borrow our stuff. We may struggle to relate to our boss, but admire the way they handle problems.

Unfortunately, unless there is some measure of conscious awareness in how we identify with other people, it is all too easy for us to dwell on the negative aspects of a relationship. The partner we adore becomes an ogre when they don’t let us get our own way… The boss we respect becomes a tyrant when they give you more work than you want… The pleasant waiter becomes an incompetent when the food is wrong, or delivered cold.

In times like this, a single aspect about someone overshadows the rest – which may all be predominantly positive – that one decision or action, no matter how short-term, can temporarily drown out all the happy, loving, positive parts of that relationship. When we see others only as a collection of aspects, then it is easy for us to allow just one of those aspects to become dominant.

This tendency is especially prevalent when we know very little about someone – We’re much more geared up to focus upon the negative aspects of strangers than we are the positive. How often do your criticize the driving of other people on the road? How often have you ever thought “Wow, that person is an excellent, courteous driver?” Yeah, me neither…

For some of us, entire relationships can become centered around a particular flaw, or negative aspect. This is what happens when we hate people – we have selected one aspect of who they are and turned that single fact into our entire definition of them. In some cases, perhaps involving violence or abuse, the nature of that negative aspect means that intense dislike or even hate is morally justified, but more often than not it is some small perception about another that has grown out of all proportion.

Persecution of others, because of religion, nationality or class, is at the extreme end of this spectrum. Over and over in our history, those in power have singled out one aspect of a group of people – their religious beliefs, where they were born or the color of their skin – and because they see it as a negative, they have used it as excuse to dispossess, torture and execute those people – committing atrocities in the name of one single aspect of that group.

The Whole-Person Paradigm

In order to transcend this limiting way of seeing and relating to others, we need to learn see other people as more than just a collection of aspects – we need to see above and beyond our facts and opinions of them and see them as whole and complete human beings.

This is not about changing things about other people, it’s about changing things about ourselves. We have to learn to monitor how we think about other people, and to correct ourselves when we realize we are thinking about aspects, not about people.

The best way to begin is by paying closer attention to how you talk about and think about others – start to notice the words you use, and what you’re focusing on. When you become more familiar with paying attention to what you’re thinking, you can start to look beyond it and see what judgments and beliefs are affecting what you’re thinking. You will begin to understand at a very personal level how your relationships are affected by the way you identify with others, and you will be able to look deeper and see people as who they really are.

This simple change is difficult for a lot of people because it involves having to let-go of deeply entrenched judgments and beginning to accept others, and ourselves for who we truly are. For those of us who are strongly attached to our opinions of others, this can be quite painful or shameful – If those beliefs we had about someone caused us to treat them poorly or unfairly, it can be a tough process to release those opinions and accept that person as more than just what we thought.

The value of this making change cannot be easily explained – At a low level it is simply about noticing how you think, and trying to be a bit more relaxed and open-minded. At a higher level, this change can achieve a quantum leap forward in your relationships with others, bringing greater strength, depth and clarity to your ability to relate to other people.