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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