Relationship Building – Important Strategies for Home life & Work life Success

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.

Life is Busy Stop and take the time to think

In our daily work, consulting with many interesting individual clients over the twenty year history of our private practice, we are privileged to be able to learn from the wisdom & experience of the people we are working with.   A frequent insight that is expressed by many of our more senior age clients (55+ ) was that they regretted not having spent more time just thinking about life and where they were going.  Instead, they seemed to have been on a busy non-stop ride throughout their lives.

So often the demands and busyness of life can keep us from taking a step back to look at the bigger picture.

Why do people in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s & 50’s often find it hard to set aside time to think?

• Life is busy – as life gets busier and more demanding we can sometimes struggle just to stay on top of matters and cope with it all.
• We are on an entertainment ride – we live in a 24/7 consumer – entertainment culture.  It is not in the best interests of the media or entertainment industry for us to switch off and just spend time thinking. Instead, we are offered a never ending, seamless feed of exciting shows, series and sporting events.
• Ants in our pants – many people just can’t keep still long enough to think.
• Quiet contemplation is not really valued or promoted in our society.  The old Greek philosophers would be turning in their graves to see how little talk of deeper issues there is in the public arena today.

When we take time to think we can:

• Look at the big questions.  What is the meaning of life? What do I believe in? What happens to us after we die?
• Create life goals. What would I like to achieve? What things are really important to me? What do I need to be focusing on in 2015 to help me reach my goals?
• Evaluate our journey. What have I been learning? Am I on track to reach my goals? How have I been distracted? What do I need to be doing differently? Whom can I be building a stronger relationship with?
• Appreciate the present. What good things are happening in my life presently and how can I appreciate them more fully?  How can I put my problems into perspective?

As always we would be delighted to make the time to talk with you professionally – please choose to contact us and book an appointment in your own good time !