Improving Any Relationship: Bad Relationships, Great Relationships, Any Relationships
The inspiration for this post I guess is…….I feel like I just can’t reach certain people in my life. Whether personal, professional, family, there are relationships where it feels like it’s difficult to be understood. It’s difficult to comfortably interact, difficult to influence, and difficult to emotionally connect. There is this feeling that, however hard you try to get on with things, to make the relationship better, to cover the bad memories with more recent good ones, you can’t get through. There is a resistance between you, and the other person.
History of the relationship is big. Prior events play a big role. The most difficult ones are those with elements of disloyalty, lying and deceitfulness, public shaming, vengefulness…..OUCH. Hard to come back from that. Not impossible, but hard. Emotional memory is powerful. It’s always there during every interaction, however hard you try to ignore it.
But, there is still something more powerful. Being. Being a Human Being, the center of which is love and compassion. We just need to see it, to feel it, and thus realize its presence. We just need to step back into it. Back to the beginning, our ever present source, which is the Always with no end. Your pristine, awakened awareness, prior to all notions, all feelings and emotion. It’s the CREATOR. It is God. From THAT place, all is possible. Infinite possibilities. And from THAT place, you have the power to create whatever you want, including a better relationship. It won’t happen over night, but as long as you truly want, and believe that you have a great relationship with great intentions, then over time the relationship will improve, and the sky is the limit.
Look. Listen. You have nothing to lose here, except your self inflicted negativity, stress, frustration, and anger. You have everything to gain. Happiness, fulfillment, a sense of knowing and feeling that you are doing the right thing in the moment. It’s the right thing to do, to bring your best to the relationship. To bring happiness, good intention, help, and service to others.
So I offer you some practical steps towards improving relationships. The goal of these steps is to first center you around your Being. From here, you can objectively see what is causing challenges, which is your thinking and feeling. Then, from that BEINGNESS, to create and embody a new mindset to bring into the relationship. It’s a sort of “becoming”, and it is significantly beneficial to any relationship whether in good standing, or bad.
So relax, think about a relationship you want to improve, and try the following:
Center Yourself: First, you have to step back from your mind and body/emotions, and just realize the quiet awareness that is the foundation of your being. It’s a realization. It’s a realization that “I can see my mind, and I can notice my thoughts, I can notice my feelings and body.” “I can put attention on them and also just witness them go by”. The goal here is to establish your self in a new perspective (pure awareness) from which you can witness and identify bad thinking and feeling. It’s to help you connect to your essential Being, that space before any arising of notions or feelings.
Observe and Take Note: From that pure awareness or Being: Watch for any negativity throughout the day. Just notice it, witness it, let It go by. Drop it. Particularly when you are interacting with someone where the relationship needs to improve, where you need to rebuild partnership, compassion, trust, and loyalty. Make note of these thinking and feeling habits. Write them down. These bad thoughts and feelings must be recognized and understood so they can eventually removed. Things you may notice may be resent, a feeling of mistrust, a thought about vengefulness or scheming, a feeling of not being liked by the person. For now just write them down.
Reflect and Plan: During a quiet time alone, maybe in the evening, read through what you have written. What are the bad things you were thinking and feeling? Think about how you felt during your interactions with this person during the day. Were you afraid? Were you suspicious? Did you feel the person was not being truthful? Were you feeling angry because of these thoughts and feelings?
Also, reflect and ponder what you really desire for this relationship. Think about what you desire to feel while interacting with this person. Do. you want to feel free to interact? To be yourself? To express the truth about what you are thinking and feeling? Do you want to feel helpful? Do you want to feel loving and compassionate? Write these down. These are the things you want to feel in your relationship.
What do you want this person to feel about you? Do you want them to trust you? To confide in you? To feel free to share their thoughts and feelings with you? To come to you for advice? To come to you when they need support? Write these down. These are the things you want the other person to feel in their relationship with you.
Visualize: Close you eyes. Relax. Take a few deep breaths. Enter into a quiet, sleep, meditative state. Visualize a pleasant interaction with the person. Visualize it how you want it to be. Feel it the way you want to feel it, using what you wrote down during step 3 above. Take your time with this. 10-20 minutes is more than enough. What is important is to really fall into this dream. If it’s a significant other, be on a date at their favorite place. If it’s a parent, have a free flowing conversation over dinner. Its its a co-worker, have a meeting about a key initiative at work. Make it a great experience and feel ecstatic about it. Feel happy, caring, compassionate, helpful, and loved. Also see the person feeling great, happy, thankful, loved, carefree, and trustful (what you noted from step 3). The goal of this exercise is to mentally and emotionally experience the relationship the way you want to experience it in your life. The more emotion you feel during this exercise, the more it will be impressed into your subconscious, and thus the more likely you will bring this energy into your actual interactions with this person.
Get out there an interact. Relate. Bring your new experience, your new thinking and feeling (from your Visualization exercise) into the relationship. It’s not magic. And the relationship won’t become what you want overnight. However, you will find that what you visualized becomes carried over into your waking experience. You will find yourself thinking and feeling in the new ways you experienced during your visualization. You will find yourself doing things differently. Different acts, even acts of kindness. Why? Because the bad thinking / feelings are not as strong, and instead you are acting from the good thinking and feeling you experienced during your visualization. It will begin to improve the relationship.
Rinse and Repeat: Adjust as needed. The more often you do this exercise, the more it will be ingrained into your subconscious. So cut out some time in your life to practice this exercise. You can do it again to continue improving on an important relationship in your life, or a very tough relationship with bad history, on your relationships with your parents, your significant other, your children. You a practice it to improve your relationship with strangers. You can practice it to improve ALL your relations.
Mindset Tips for Improving Any Relationship, Particularly Bad Ones
I don’t think Human relationships are a difficult thing, what makes them difficult is we are blocked in our Mindset. We have bad thinking and feeling habits that need to be changed. As noted above, these blockers stem from our conditioning, our past experiences.
Instead of bad thinking and feeling, we need to establish a new Mindset: thinking and feeling habits that enable us to thing, feel, and say the most important things to comfort others and improve relationships. With respect to the above 6 steps, you can apply these particularly in steps 3 and 4 as you think about and visualize how you want certain relationships to be.
Here is a handful of things you can think, feel, and say that are likely applicable to most, if not all of your relationships, especially the bad ones:
I decided to no longer live from our bad history. Whatever you feel, I respect it and I understand. At this point, all I care about is how best we can relate, collaborate, and how best I can serve your needs and happiness in this relationship going forward.
One thing that is of utmost importance to me is that we never have another bad experience. However, at the same time I want you to feel more than welcome to share any challenges your are feeling about our relationship. I will seek to understand it and adjust as to further improve our relationship and collaboration. I understand that sharing challenges can be hard for both of us, but I am committed to listening and understanding.
Every time we interact, I want you to realize that my mindset is to have a great and memorable experience. Part of that is to first seek to understand. I want to know what is on your mind. I want you to know that you have my ears, you have my overall attention. I am here to help do whatever is needed. What may be needed is a smile, a laugh, a cry, a solution, support, advice, congratulations, motivation. I am here to serve the interaction and to improve your happiness. I am here to serve the situation. I am here to improve the experience.
I enjoy sharing a laugh with you. It’s a great feeling, and a good memory. Its memorable. Its powerful. So feel free to make me laugh. I will make you laugh too.
Irrespective of where our relationship goes, including separation, I wish you nothing but joy, happiness, and success. I have had many conflicts with people, and never once did I not come away with regrets and self learnings. I am better for it, and I am appreciative of what I learned from this relationship. I am appreciative of you. So, while we are still here together, however long is left to go, I want you to be joyous, happy, healthy, and successful, and am happy to play my part towards you having all those things. Even if our relationship is expected to end tomorrow, you will have my best today.
It can be hard to think, feel, and share these things with people, particularly where the relationship is rocky, but what do you have to lose really? Nothing.
You have EVERYTHING TO GAIN from adopting this mindset. You gain love and care from others. You gain improved relationships. You gain your own ability to love. You gain the knowing and feeling that you’ve given everything you can. You gain happiness, love, and peace.