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How to Improve Your Relationship

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We all want to have a healthy relationship. Sometimes we come across a scenario and are unsure if this is a “make it or break it” issue, or maybe there are other issues that need to be cleared up or improved. Whether married or in a new relationship there are some simple steps you can take to improve your relationship so that neither of you feels either “rushed” or “stuck” in your partnership.

Be the best you

The role of your partner is not to make you happy, but rather for the two of you to be mutual support for each other, to be the best you can be so you can become a better version of yourself. Yet we each like to be appreciated and speaking each other’s love language adds to the satisfaction felt in the relationship. This means showing your love and affection on significant dates.

Whether Valentine’s Day or a wedding anniversary, you can improve your relationship with a gift you know your beloved will appreciate. Even if you are not great with choosing gifts, there is a traditional anniversary gift list that can give you ideas from a framed photograph for your first anniversary represented by paper or a gold dipped rose for your 50th anniversary (or your 14th anniversary.) Your gift is a chance to celebrate the love and affection that you share each day.

Timescales

There is no rigid timescale for any relationship. You may meet, start dating immediately and be engaged in six months if you know yourself well enough to know what you want and don’t want; what works for you and what doesn’t. Simply put, the more you know yourself, the easier it will be to determine if a relationship is healthy and can be improved.

In contrast, waiting too long for relationship milestones can flag up a fear of commitment, which can be based on past hurts or other issues that need looking at. If the timing of relationship goals is different between the couple, there is a possibility now is not the right time for the couple to be together, since resolving past issues is critical so they don’t hurt the relationship in future.

Respect each other’s dignity

See your partner as an individual in their own right, and not simply with you to take care of your every wish. Honour each other’s history and unique story and ask questions of each other to find out something new. It can be easy for some people to see their partner as being in the relationship for their benefit, which kills a relationship over time.

Be considerate of your partner, honour their boundaries and be affectionate in a way you know they appreciate, from holding hands in public or going to bed together at the same time each night. This could as simple as deciding about your next monthly date night, whether you let her have her horror movie fix or instead share a new experience at a new local restaurant.

Keep your friendship

Within your romance, maintain your great friendship. It is your friendship that will weather all storms, being more important than physical attraction, personality matches, and shared values. Be grateful when they buy your favourite ice cream or clean your car and don’t see it as an expected duty.

Friendship is about being interdependent rather than independent or dependent and it is important to nurture that connection whilst maintaining our own unique identities within our coupledom. This means that you can tweak your schedule for dates that are important to them, leaving the gym earlier so you can see a movie premiere for example. Actively listen to what your partner is saying and if there is a challenging meeting coming up, make a note of the date and set a reminder for yourself so you can ask on the day how it went.

Have realistic expectations of each other. Accept that in relationships, mistakes will be made by both parties. Let go of old wounds and forgive mistakes that did not mean to cause hurt or harm. If you feel a bit stuck, talk with friends to resolve your feelings, they can also offer critical insights to help you on your way.

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This is the Career Kiss of Death, according to Lee Iacocca

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Auto industry icon Lee Iacocca wrote in Iacocca: An Autobiography (1986,)

There’s one phrase that I hate to see on any executive’s [performance] evaluation, no matter how talented he may be, and that’s the line: “He has trouble getting along with other people.”

To me, that’s the kiss of death. “You’ve [the evaluator] just destroyed the guy,” I always think. “He can’t get along with people? Then he’s got a real problem, because that’s all we’ve got around here. No dogs, no apes—only people. And if he can’t get along with his peers, what good is he to the company? As an executive, his whole function is to motivate other people. If he can’t do that, he’s in the wrong place.”

A significant predictor of success in most professions is being easy to get along with. People who’re well-liked, work well with others, and help them do their jobs well will advance in any organization. Those who don’t usually don’t get as far.

A significant predictor of success is being easy to get along with

Idea for Impact: Interpersonal relationships in the workplace are at the heart of the matter

Leadership is influence. Leadership isn’t about titles, positions, pedigree, distinction, or corner offices. A leader who can encourage, inspire, and direct others’ efforts will be effective in any endeavor.

If you’d like to exert more influence on your boss and inspire more cooperation from your peers and colleagues, work on being genuine, pleasant, sincere, easy to talk with, and friendly—without becoming desperate to please others.

Too, develop the antennae for what motivates people by respecting their ideas and values. That may sometimes necessitate holding back your own.

Read Dale Carnegie’s masterful manual on people skills, How to Win Friends & Influence People (1936.) Jeswald Salacuse’s Leading Leaders (2005; my summary) can help you expand your persuasive skills for situations where you may not have much influence over others.

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What Makes a Great Relationship

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'The Hard Thing About Hard Things' by Ben Horowitz (ISBN 0062273205) Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things (2014) is one of the best business books I’ve read in a long time. Here’s what he says about how he and Marc Andreessen have worked effectively in partnership across three companies over two decades:

Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

Close relationships—at work or home—are tough. Nothing in life prepares you for them. But the intellectual and emotional rewards of close relationships are stimuli enough for navigating these choppy waters.

Disagreement is inevitable, but it is at the heart of creative thinking and problem-solving. An unassuming disagreement—even a misunderstanding—can cause tensions to rise. Differences of opinion can turn into disputes and arguments can cascade into fights, putting a relationship at risk.

The healthiest relationships are built on a strong foundation of mutual respect. A reciprocally beneficial connection entails accepting the others, knowing their goals, supporting them to become the best version of themselves, and wanting to work through difficulties and disagreements.

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How to Reduce Thanksgiving Stress

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Getting everything organized in your kitchen for this week’s annual celebration—one that nonetheless marks the Anglo-Saxon incursion of someone else’s country—is challenging enough, but hosting Thanksgiving gets even more stressful as soon as guests start arriving. You’re obliged to talk to them, entertain them, and keep them busy and occupied, all the while prepping and oven-coordinating.

How to Reduce Thanksgiving Stress One way to reduce your festive stress is to assign each guest a simple responsibility. Get aunt Mary to set the table, uncle Roger to get all the wine and the champagne ready, and the children to prepare the place cards. Somebody else can organize simple Thanksgiving games for the restless kids.

Give them all specific goals; don’t dictate perfection. Make sure the jobs are easy enough, short, and, preferably centered away from the kitchen, allowing you to focus on getting the food ready.

Appoint one dependable person to operate as your right-hand person—this person can coordinate with everybody else.

Your guests will feel satisfied that they’ve helped, and you’ll get some valuable space to get everything ready and have a fun time with your family.

Reduce Thanksgiving stress further by not partaking in that ritualized consumer orgy called Black Friday. Join the Buy Nothing Day movement in protest against excessive consumerism.

Addendum: When multiple families assemble for large gatherings, there’s a tendency for entire families to sit together. That’s a shame; if people could scatter around the dining table, there’d be more interactions and a livelier event. Bear this in mind while you decide on seating arrangements.

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Etiquette: How to Tell Someone Their Fly is Down?

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Etiquette: How to Tell Someone Their Fly is Down? What do you do if you notice that your boss’s fly is down? Or a manager’s undergarment is showing?

Should you tell them?

Definitely. Because they’ll want to know.

Most people would rather be a little embarrassed now in the presence of someone familiar than later in the company of clients or someone important.

Keep it simple and say, “Jeff, your fly is down.” Or “Hey Rita, your slip is showing.”

Tell them quietly and discreetly. Don’t be vague.

If you’re uneasy with speaking about this to the opposite sex, request a person of that sex to deliver the message.

You may feel briefly awkward and uncomfortable, but the consequences of not informing them could be high—especially if it becomes apparent that you were aware of the problem and said nothing.

The other person will be appreciative. You’ll gain some respect not only for limiting their exposure but also for being candid and considerate.

If they get angry, declare, “I was just trying to be helpful.”

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You Hear What You Listen For

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Two men were walking along a crowded sidewalk in a downtown business area. Suddenly one exclaimed: “Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket.” But the other could not hear. He asked his companion how he could detect the sound of a cricket amid the din of people and traffic. The first man, who was a zoologist, had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature. But he didn’t explain. He simply took a coin out of his pocket and dropped it to the sidewalk, whereupon a dozen people began to look around them. “We hear,” he said, “what we listen for.”

Source: American evangelist author Kermit L. Long quoted by Karen Anderson in The Busy Manager’s Guide to Successful Meetings (1993)

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Could Limiting Social Media Reduce Your Anxiety About Work?

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Limit Social Media Participation, Reduce Envy and Anxiety In a recent article on “Facebook envy,” I wrote about how looking at the carefully curated lives of others on social media can provoke insecurities about one’s own accomplishments—or lack thereof.

In response, a blog reader directed me to journalist Keith Breene’s writeup about a study on why millennials aren’t happy at work. Here’s a précis:

Much of the stress and anxiety reported by twenty-somethings is caused by ruthless comparison with peers. Emerson Csorba, director of the consultancy Gen Y, reported one millennial describing the challenge like this: “If we are not doing something exceptional or don’t feel important and fulfilled for what we are doing, we have a hard time.”

Where is the pressure coming from? With millennials more connected than any previous generation, opportunities to compare levels of success are ubiquitous, creating anxiety and insecurity. The accomplishments of peers, shown on social media, are a constant prompt to examine millennials’ own successes or failures. The problem is made much worse by the fact that only positive achievements are posted—you only ever see the good stuff.

Even though everyone knows that social media is a kind of PR feed of people’s lives, when you spend so much time online, these messages can easily become overpowering.

Idea for Impact: Resist the Envious Consequence of Social Media

Everyone’s lives are far from perfect, notwithstanding the dreamy pictures they’re posting on social media.

Protect yourself and your own internal goodness from self-sabotage. Rejoice in your real accomplishments without needing to show off to anyone else or seek external validation. Care less for what other people think.

Life isn’t a competition. There isn’t a race to the finish lines.

Furthermore, making others envious should never be a motivation for curating your social media posts. Nothing good comes from trying to be the envy of others.

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How to Make Others Feel They Owe You One: Reciprocity and Social Influence

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How to Make Others Feel They Owe You One: Reciprocity and Social Influence Reciprocity, as described below, is a manipulative technique. My aim for this article is twofold: firstly, it sensitizes you to one of the many things people can do to get you to do their bidding. Secondly, reciprocity is a handy technique for those circumstances where certain ends can justify certain means.

Reciprocity is treating other people as they treat you, or for the purpose of this article, as you wish to be treated—specifically with the expectation that they will reciprocate your favor in the future.

In other words, reciprocity is a sneaky trick that permits deliberate interpersonal influence. Do something for other people and they will be willing to do something for you, partly because they’ll be uncomfortable feeling indebted to you.

The concept of reciprocity is ingrained in human nature. As part of our upbringing, we are taught to give something back to people who give us something. Reciprocity and cooperation are the underpinnings of a civilized society—they allow us to help people who need it and to hope that they will help us when we need it. Research suggests that the desire to repay goodwill is hard-wired in the human brain.

Jack Schafer’s The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over (2015) offers a clever technique to put reciprocity into action:

The next time someone thanks you for something, don’t say, “You’re welcome.” Instead, say, “I know you’d do the same thing for me.” This response invokes reciprocity. The other person is now predisposed to help you when you ask them for a favor.

The effects of goodwill are short-lived. A long-forgotten reputation for helpfulness gets you nothing. You have to renew your reputation by helping others regularly.

To learn more about reciprocity, read social psychologist Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984.) He identified reciprocity as one of six principles that can help get others’ compliance to your requests.

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Why a Friend Can’t Keep a Secret

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Why a Friend Can't Keep a Secret A caring, faithful relationship with a family member or a friend is a sacrosanct space where you can shed your guard, reveal your secrets, and disclose your worries. Such relationships are life’s principal social support systems.

Your ability to form close relationships with others hinges on the trust you feel with your nearest and dearest.

Once You Share Something Confidential, You Lose Control of it

Sharing your secrets with others and keeping others’ secrets are essential to establishing and nurturing bonds between people.

Secrets are kept or revealed for a variety of complex reasons—utter carelessness, actual malice, self-serving manipulation, or altruistic protection of others.

  • Forgetfulness and negligence often initiate letting a secret slip; some people may not understand the potential consequences of not keeping somebody’s secret to themselves.
  • As the World War II idiom cautions, loose lips sink ships. Some blabbermouths just can’t be the soul of discretion—they have no filters and don’t concern themselves with betraying others’ trust.
  • Some folks justify spreading others’ secrets by convincing themselves that the secret is common knowledge—if a source shared a secret with them, the source may have shared it with others too.
  • Some nefarious people use secrets they’re supposed to keep as currency to curry favor with someone else. An egregious recent example is that of McKinsey’s Managing Director Rajat Gupta revealing confidential information about Goldman Sachs, on whose board of directors he sat, to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam.
  • Some people may assume an altruistic—or self-righteous—mind-set and reveal a secret assuming that divulging the secret could be more beneficial to those concerned than keeping the secret.
  • Some people reveal secrets because they can’t bear the mental distress of keeping the secret. Often, the bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep it.

If you’ve been told a secret or have some information in hand that may put somebody in immediate emotional or physical risk, be careful in how you act. Telling secrets in the wrong way, to the wrong people, or at the wrong time can be surprisingly destructive. If required, seek help from a relationship counselor.

If a friend shared something about you that you told them in private, try to forgive his/her lack of discretion. Hold back your trust until you can feel comfortable trusting them again.

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Here’s How to Improve Your Conversational Skills

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How to Start a Good Conversation

A year and a half ago, I wrote a popular article titled, “Stop asking, ‘What do you do for a living?'” The crux of my argument was,

Chatting with somebody in socializing situations should be less about discerning the details of the other’s life to size up the other’s socioeconomic status, and more about building a bit of familiarity to initiate stimulating conversations about topics of mutual interest.

A recent Harvard Business Review blog article on networking argues that the ‘what do you do?’ question may not be the best way to build rapport with someone else.

Research findings from the world of network science and psychology suggests that we tend to prefer and seek out relationships where there is more than one context for connecting with the other person. Sociologists refer to these as multiplex ties, connections where there is an overlap of roles or affiliations from a different social context. … We may prefer relationships with multiplex ties because research suggests that relationships built on multiplex ties tend to be richer, more trusting, and longer lasting.

The article gives examples of open-ended questions that could elicit non-work-related answers.

  • What excites you right now?
  • What are you looking forward to?
  • What’s the best thing that happened to you this year?
  • Where did you grow up?
  • What do you do for fun?
  • Who is your favorite superhero?
  • Is there a charitable cause you support?
  • What’s the most important thing I should know about you?

These inquiries could be helpful once you have a conversation going—they don’t make good initial questions. I’ve found it helpful to start with simple questions (“how do you know the hosts” or “is this your first time in this city”) and wait for personal details to flow into the conversation naturally.

Another practice I’ve found helpful is to ask to be introduced. Request your host to mention common interests when you are introduced to a new person in the gathering.

Susan RoAne’s How to Work a Room and Do I Say Next? provide great guidelines on how to make your business and personal conversations more effective.

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