Strengthening Our Relationships-Part Two

To make your relationships stronger, start with you.  Give more than you get.  Don’t keep score.

Accept responsibility for oneself.

• Take responsibility for your own happiness.  Don’t expect someone else to make you happy.
• Do what you say you will do.
• Admit your mistakes, then apologize.
• Be realistic with your expectations.

Respect the other person.

• Listen to his/her ideas.
• Be honest in your communication.  Don’t sugarcoat, but don’t be mean.
• Know what the other person likes and doesn't like.  Act with this knowledge.
• Accept him/her for who they really are.
• Trust him/her.  Act in a manner that is trustworthy yourself.

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Strengthening Our Relationships-Part One

How strong are your relationships?  Do you have someone you can count on….no matter what?   Are you a person that another can count on….no matter what?  Strong relationships share some common elements:  accepting responsibility for oneself, respecting the other person, sharing common interests, and a promise to create cooperative communication.

To accept responsibility for yourself means you recognize you have choices.  When something goes wrong or is misinterpreted, you can accept the part you played and correct the issue.  To respect another person means you accept them for who they are…..not what you’d like them to become.  Sharing common interests may bring people together at first, but if not nurtured, it can become just a laundry list of activities or beliefs.   There is no meat in it.  A promise to create cooperative communication can slip off our tongues easily, but can be hard to maintain.  This requires us to attempt to understand the other’s point of view, before we express our own…..even before we think about our own.  It is a willingness to be open to another person’s ideas, even though starkly different from ours.

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Embrace Reality-Part Two

Remember the old movie Reality Bites?  I’m not sure I ever saw it, but I was always intrigued by the title.  Yes, reality does bite at times.  But to admit that means we have embraced it.  We have acknowledged reality for what it is…..not for what we’d like it to be.

We have many options for viewing reality.  We can think of it as an enemy, something from which to escape.  We can view it as a requirement, something we have to endure.  Reality can be a challenge for us, something to defeat.  Or we can look at it as an opportunity to learn, and then embrace it.  To embrace reality means we are living with integrity.  Instead of banging our head against the wall, we step back and ask what we can learn from our situation….our reality.

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Embrace Reality-Part One

To embrace reality, we have to acknowledge its existence.  Very simply, reality is “what is”.  This doesn't take into account our feelings about the reality we are experiencing.  That is another story!  But in order to embrace reality, we first must accept it for what it is.

“What is” defines the context of our lives.  Reality shoves limits and boundaries at us…..even though we may try to sidestep them.  “What is” is just that…..what exists.  There are no judgments to it, no meaning to it.  We add those things ourselves.  We may color our reality with negative connotations, which leads us to certain behaviors.  We may paint our reality positively, which can help us handle something (or so we think).  Reality “is” whether or not we acknowledge it accurately.

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