It is not uncommon for each of us to become complacent and sometimes take for granted the interactions we have with significant other people in our busy lives. Although we may intellectually understand the importance of seeing the world through another person’s eyes, often our clients identify that ( upon mindful reflection in the consultation room ) they have typically defaulted to responding to others as if on autopilot. As an encouraging reminder, listed below are some excellent areas to focus upon, when we are looking to improve the quality and depth of our interactions with significant people in our personal and professional lives.

Enjoy describing situations that you perceive differently from the other person without injecting blame or judgement or criticism of them into your conversation. This will result in the other person not needing to become defensive or feel threatened, meaning they are much more likely to process your perspective and give you an open response.

Relationship Building - Strategies

Feelings

Explain the feelings that have been generated for you by that particular situation, without expecting/assuming that the other person must feel the same way about this situation as you do.

Focus

Focus on solutions and positive steps that you and the other person can collaborate upon and create together into the future, rather than struggling to make the other person adapt/conform to your own perspective.

Explore

Explore the positive consequences and verbalise the benefits for you and the other people involved in implementing the solutions your open conversation with them has generated. You may also want to articulate the negative consequences in not adopting collaborative solutions and the risk of staying stuck in an old negative mindset or pattern together.

Encourage

Finally, go out of your way to choose words of affirmation, praise and encouragement for the other person in your communication. This could mean that rather than highlighting a handful of matters that did not go so well with each other, you instead put a joyful highlight under one particular aspect of the relationship that is going well and build upon this as the focus.