Relationship advice often centers on what you should do about the other person. The advice here will focus mainly on improving your relationships by taking responsibility for how people treat you. Here are six (6) areas that are important for having positive relationships.
1. Self-Esteem
If you are unhappy with yourself and your life, it is more likely that you will either allow people to abuse you or mistreat certain individuals. I say “certain individuals” because the people you choose will usually have lower self-esteem than you or not be in a position to strike back, like a subordinate employee, a frail relative, or a weak friend.
Taking responsibility in this area requires that you take a hard and honest look at your behavior and then decide what actions are needed to change how you feel about yourself. This can be difficult, but the outcome can be very rewarding. You can use the pain of these realizations as an incentive to begin making important changes in your life. However, this information should only be used as an incentive to start. Afterward, you should focus on the person and life you want to create. Once you are firmly on this path, your relationships will improve.
2. Take a Stand
If you don’t take a stand with people on your beliefs, desires, and how they treat you, you will continue to be like a puppet with a brain. You’ll be frustratingly aware of what’s happening but unable to do anything about it.
You must summon the courage to take a stand and let people know who you are, what you like and don’t like, and how you expect to be treated. If you don’t, you’ll constantly have to mold your beliefs, tastes, and tolerance to whomever you have a relationship with. Behaving this way isn’t being nice and cordial, but cowardly and immature.
By taking a stand, you will improve your relationships because you will no longer be dealing with these internal frustrations, and people will know how to treat you.
3. Rules of Relationship
There are rules common to all relationships. These rules include honesty, loyalty, and reliability. If a person violates one of these rules, the relationship is injured. If left unattended by the violating party, the injury can fester into a serious wound and a lasting scar.
If you want to have and attract quality relationships, it is important that you clearly understand the rules of relationship. It is not enough to expect others to know and follow them. You must know and follow them yourself BEFORE you can expect others to do the same for you.
One of my most popular articles is Rules of Friendship. Most of these rules apply to nearly all relationships. If you follow them, your relationships will thrive, and people will admire and be attracted to you.
4. Personal Vibrations
Whenever we meet other people, we send out vibrations that indicate our present state of mind. These vibrations supersede any happy or self-confident masks we may put on our faces. They are impossible to contain or hide.
If we feel truly happy, grateful, friendly, loving, and self-confident, we will get a matching response from those we interact with. The ability to get to this place can happen regardless of the conditions in your life. The secret is to be the person that you want to become now! In doing so, you will get the responses you want from people. This will support and motivate you to become the person you envision.
5. Acceptance of Others
This is a tough one. This is especially true if you are a person who is always striving for self-improvement. If you are such a person, you know how easy it is to see opportunities for personal growth in others. Unfortunately, no one likes unsolicited advice. This is particularly true if it is given frequently.
Trying to change people is like changing the course of a river. It requires tremendous energy with little possibility of significant change without causing serious damage. The best way to help those you care about is to be an example and encourage, support, and love them. Change, if it ever does happen, will occur based on their timing, not yours.
The best relationship advice I can give you is to accept people as they are. This means nonjudgmental and unconditional acceptance. This does not mean that you should accept abusive treatment or offensive behavior, however. It means that you accept others as they are, warts and all, up to the point of your boundaries.
6. Ending Relationships
I’ve read a lot of relationship advice that encourages people to end a relationship for various infractions. I believe there are situations where a relationship should be cut off completely, but these are rare.
Instead of completely cutting a person out of your life, you can temporarily or indefinitely limit or stop contact with them. You never know when a person may change and become what you hoped.
If you cut a person out of your life permanently, you may miss the chance to have a great relationship in the future. This is especially true of family members and old friends. You could also cause a lot of unnecessary pain and psychological damage. Take the compassionate approach and quietly distance yourself from them. You never know what difficulties they may have been dealing with that caused them to behave in a way that provoked you to want to end the relationship.
When serious violations of physical or emotional abuse have occurred, like what sometimes happens in toxic relationships, cutting the abuser completely out of your life would be best. Staying in such a relationship would be self-abuse.
Relationship advice is like opinions. Everyone has some. So, how do you identify which advice is worth your consideration? I’d say that any advice that contains elements of vindictiveness, resentment, or hate should be ignored. Relationship advice based on fair-mindedness, compassion, and love is worth careful consideration.