Relationship advice often centers on what you should do about the other person. The advice here will focus mostly on how you can improve your relationships by taking responsibility for the way 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 what you’ve created in your life it is more likely that you will either allow people to abuse you or you’ll treat certain individuals badly. I say “certain individuals” because the people you chose will usually be those who have lower self-esteem than you or a person who is not in a position to strike back like a subordinate employee or a frail relative or 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 the way 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. Use this information only as an incentive to begin, however. After that, your focus should be 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 the way they treat you, then 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 summons the courage to take a stand and let people know who you are as a person, 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, your tastes, and your level of tolerance to whomever you have a relationship with. Behaving in this way isn’t being nice and cordial it is being cowardly and immature.
By taking a stand, your relationships will improve 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 that are common to all relationships. These rules include such things as 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.
I wrote an article that became one of my most popular at Solotopia entitled, “The Rules of Friendship.”Most of these rules are applicable to nearly all relationships. If you follow these rules, your relationships will thrive and people will admire and be attracted to you.
4. Personal Vibrations
Whenever we meet other people, we are sending out vibrations that indicate our present state of mind. These vibrations supersede any happy or self-confident masks we may put on our faces. These vibrations are impossible to contain or hide.
If we get ourselves into a state of truly feeling happy, grateful, friendly, loving, and self-confident we will get a matching response from those we interact with. The ability to get yourself 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 that you want from people. This will in turn 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 other people. Unfortunately, no one likes unsolicited advice. This is particularly true if it is given frequently.
Trying to change people is like trying to change the course of a river. It requires tremendous energy with little possibility of any significant change without causing serious damage. The best way you can 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 a variety of infractions. I do believe that there are situations where a relationship should be cut off completely, but these are rare.
Instead of cutting a person completely out of your life, you can simply temporarily or indefinitely limit or stop contact with them. I say this because 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 just 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.