February 12, 2010
How to become better in our personal relationships…
This is a process where we want to enter into some calm, thoughtful reflection about what we are like in personal relationships… This mechanism of self-searching is a really, really healthy practice. Be objective… Look at how we are in personal relationships by an observation process of going through our last relationship… Start with the last one we were in and recognize, “What are my characteristics? What are the things that I have a tendency to do? Do I share a lot, am I bitey, am I moody, am I nurturing? Am I attentive? Do I have a tendency to be gung-ho at first and then all-of-a-sudden flatten out, where the novelty wears off my relationships?” What am I like in personal relationships?
“What would it be like to be in a personal relationship with me?”
This is the kind of question that allows us to look inside and see how we are with neither fear nor favor. We must look inside in order to prove our ability to have personal relationships… There has to be a way to look at our older relationships and learn from them… The way this is done is with objectivity. We must remain objective. So, it’s very easy to do when there is nobody else around, we can think about our relationships and spend a few days reflecting on personal relationships… What went wrong with our prior relationships, and what were some of the good things? Moreover, we’re trying to learn what are our characteristics… What are the consistent characteristics that we’ve heard of about us in personal relationships? “Do I say I’m going to do things that I don’t end up doing? Do I promise and vow to make changes that I really don’t know how to make? That I’m not going to make but I say I will anyway to cool down the situation? Am I a consistently nurturing person? Do I call the people I’m with and stay in touch with them?” These questions give us such great insight on the things that we can work on.
Go through each relationship, year by year… Getting all the way the back to relationships of when we were teenagers… What were you like when you were a teenager and you were in relationships? What kind of characteristics did you have? What happened to you after you got hurt in some of your relationships? What kind of characteristics did you adopt that maybe you didn’t even want, but you adopted them because you got hurt? Did you have a tendency to ‘let things go’ in your relationships?
One of the greatest attributes in a personal relationship is when our partner makes a mistake and we ‘let it go’! We get over it… We don’t remember it and relive it anymore. And when someone says they are sorry we recognize that is the best we can get; and that they are going to make a change, and we support that change. Most importantly, are we able to forgive our selves for the way we are in personal relationships? Thus, we are then able to forgive the people in relationships that have wronged us. Have we settled with our past, or do we still hang onto animosity about how we were treated or we think we were mistreated? Are we able to look back at our relationships and take the assets from them and note our strengths and weaknesses?
This is what this calm, thoughtful reflection is about… So, spend a few days thinking about your personal relationships and try to find out areas you might need to work on… If you find those areas, go to the person you are in the relationship with – or maybe even go back to some people in prior relationships – and ask them what were some of the things that you could work on in order to have better relationships.
It’s a great discovery… It’s a fascinating and exciting adventure because life is about personal relationships…
How do we better our personal relationships? By just looking inside and being self-honest to self about what we were like; and, what things could we work on our selves that would improve the quality of our relationships. This is about self-discovery and making our selves better people in personal relationships… Because what we have in life is personal relationships and the people we love… So, learning to have better loving relationships is a very important quality that we all need to embrace. The way we can do this is to have some calm, thoughtful reflection about what we are like in relationships, and what things we can learn about our selves so that we can have better personal relationships.
Have fun.
Much love,
K.C.
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