Enhancing your relationships

Loneliness is the most terrible poverty - Mother Teresa

It is the quality of your relationships and interactions with other people that bring you joy or pain.  We get cooperation, receive support, recommendations, empathy, positive feedback or we are subjected to criticism, conflict, disagreements, scolding, insults or such  negative treatments by others based on the way we communicate and  interact with people.  We certainly get what we put in; and life mirrors and reflect back to us what we project towards others.

Scientific studies both theoretical studies and wide empirical evidence points strongly to profound causal impact of social relationships on personal success, happiness, health and general wellbeing. Also there are studies that consistently show increased risk of death among persons with a low quantity, and low quality, of social relationships. Experiments on humans and animals also suggest that social isolation is a major risk factor for pre-mature death and mortality from widely varying causes.

How and why lack of social interaction and isolation affect mortality is a long way from being fully understood, but there is no doubt that there is a close relationship between health and sociability.

Generally people acquire most of their interpersonal skills in one of the following two ways:

• Learning by experiences or
• Being influenced by people around them. 

Unfortunately unlike other skills, life skills are rarely taught in a structured, conscious and formal setting.  Learning and honing these very important skills are left to chance and luck.  Most people obtain these skills by default and foster them either by experimentation or trial and error or unconsciously let themselves be influenced by people around them. 

Letting ourselves entirely at the mercy of others narrows our options and limits us to skills, habits and characteristics of a closed circuit of people. We may run the risk of adopting methods, techniques and practices that are useful to others but may be unproductive, ineffective and useless to our circumstances, upbringing  and unsuitable to our personality.

Although there is a common view that learning by experience is the best method of learning, I take a slight issue with the notion of learning by experience.  I believe learning by experience is good but can be an in efficient, slow and a costly way to learn.  We may get into a situation that we try to frequently re-invent the wheel. 

  I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. – Maya Angelou

Here we will take the two methods i.e. learning by experience and learning by peers a step further.  We will explore highly effective and productive methods of developing your interpersonal skills and help you build lasting, productive relationships in all aspects of your life based on mutuality, respect, shared sense of values, ethics and moral principles.

I aim to introduce you to some of the methods and guiding principles that helped me and the people I was fortunate to work and support over the years.  Majority of what I will explain here are like open secrets to everyone.  I mean they are common sense approaches that almost everyone knows about them but a great deal of  people do not follow them or they take them for granted or simply do not know how to benefit from them.

We are increasingly becoming more and more aware of our own emotions, our ways of thinking, and our perceptions in dictating our actions and relationships with others.  We now know that it is not our rational intelligent IQ but rather our Emotional awareness and perceptions of people and the contexts and situations command our relationships with others.

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. Mother Teresa

The root cause of any problems and conflict be it family problem, social problems, business or organisational problems can only lead to what I call “relationship problems”.  Any obstacle, any challenge in business can be solved and can be dealt with effectively if you can gain the trust, support, cooperation, empathy and willingness of other people.  You can only be able to do so if you are:

• Thoroughly honest with them
• Genuinely interested and believe in helping people
• Capable of balancing self-interest with the interest of others
• Committed to mutuality of relationships
• Appreciative of other people’s points of view and circumstances
• Valuing integrity and self-respect above all else
• Respecting yourself and have respect for others