Strengthening Your Relationships

What are you doing to strengthen your relationships? Are you missing out on opportunities to show commitment, generosity and passion? Like everyone else, those you have relationships with may falter or slip because no one is perfect. When this occurs it is both your responsibilities to take the necessary steps to ensure that your relationship grows stronger and more fulfilling and sustaining as a result. If you are a business person, are you networking with an intention to reciprocate business for your colleagues? If you are a co-worker, what are you doing to help your co-workers do well and accelerate their career? Are you sharing valuable information with them that will enrich their knowledge on how to get the new promotion or improve their success?

If you are a spouse, do you do things to promote your spouse or do you look for opportunities to make him or her look stupid? Do you point out their weaknesses or do you highlight their strengths? Are you taking the kind of actions in a manner that will make your spouse feel proud of you, or do you do whatever you want without considering the other person’s feelings?

If you are a business person, do you speak to your clients in a dignified manner when things go wrong or do you dismiss them and make light of their concerns? Do you assure them that you will do whatever you can to help them solve their problems to help make your service invaluable?

If you want to strengthen your relationships you should ask yourself, what is one thing that I can do in the next week to strengthen this relationship?

Write down five things you can do to help strengthen your relationship and do one each week for the next five weeks. Don’t keep it a secret, tell the other person that you want to improve the relationship and maybe you may just inspire some positive competition - another great way to boost relationship growth.

If you are a business person you know that your customers/clients are valuable to the survival of your business so you make allowances for them and treat them in a manner that reflects your value. If you are a manager, then you know that your employees are valuable to the success of your team or department and as such you will treat them in a manner that shows value. You speak to them respectfully, you encourage their growth and development and share your goals and vision with them so that they can be fully engaged in making this a reality. If you are a spouse, then you know the value your spouse plays in this relationship and in helping you build the life of your dreams. It is very important that you treat your spouse with dignity and respect, acts of caring, love, understanding, and forgiveness for mistakes and hurts.

When working with groups, I often ask them how valuable they feel at work or in their intimate relationships. I think this is an important question because assessing value in the relationship is something both parties should do. If you feel that you are not being valued in a relationship then it is your responsibility to have what I call - the value conversation. This is where you ask the other person in the relationship to identify ten things of value they believe you bring to the relationship, and you should offer to do the same. On completion, you should both prioritize your top five values and then ask the other person how he or she would like to have you show respect for that value over the next three months, and of course you should be prepared to do the same.