How to Improve Interpersonal Relationships

Healthy relationships are the key to success these days, especially considering the fact that no man is in island and collaboration is more important today than maybe at any other point in human history. At the same time, because we lead such incredible digital lives these days and always seem to have our noses in our phone, tablets, and laptops, we don’t have quite as strong interpersonal relationships as we used to have in the past.

Most would agree that we know less about our coworkers, our neighbors, and even our friends and romantic partners then we would probably like to know – and worse than that, most of us have absolutely no idea how to improve interpersonal relationships going forward.

Thankfully though, there is no “dark art” to improving interpersonal relationships or leading the kind of happy and healthy lifestyle with friends, family, coworkers, and romantic partners that you have always dreamed of. It will take a little bit of work on your behalf (and a fair share of listening to others that you hope to get to know and work with better), but at the end of the day you will always end up much better for it!

Open Yourself Up To Others Before Asking The Same Of Them

One of the most effective ways to really improve your interpersonal relationships is to stop trying to figure out how to “get more” from other people and instead figure out how to “give more” to those that you want to be closer to.

Our society is admittedly very much rooted around getting as much as we can as quickly as we can and as efficiently as we can, but that’s just not how human relationships have been designed to work. We see those kinds of people as “takers” – even if we see the same kind of behavior in ourselves – and we all consciously or subconsciously put up armor against those kinds of people.

By taking a different approach, and giving freely of yourself and sharing with others as much as possible you’re going to be able to break down walls, destroy barriers, and build the kind of lasting relationships with people that you are looking to. This is really powerful stuff but when done correctly – and authentically – this is probably the best way to improve interpersonal relationships almost immediately.

Actively Practice Generosity

Our world today – or at least our perception of our world today – is pretty dark, pretty fast moving, and pretty cold. The daily news is flooded with horror story after horror story, our gossip talk around the water cooler is just as bad, and even though we don’t live in real life and death situations like our ancient ancestors did we are dealing with more stress and more pressure than cavemen running from sabertooth tigers ever had.

By actively practicing generosity and literally looking for things that you can be thankful for, be grateful for, and appreciate you are going to be able to transform the way that you look at the world and the way that people work and communicate with you.

You don’t necessarily have to start giving away all of your possessions or your hard-earned money, or even give anymore of your time to others than you already are. All you have to do is start giving more authentically, appreciating generosity when it comes your way, and looking for ways to reciprocate and actively spread more generosity to get the ball rolling in your interpersonal relationships. Really start to think about how you can positively impact people’s lives around you and you’ll be able to completely transform everything. Maybe not in the world, but definitely in your world.

Commit, Commit, Commit

Our modern and hyper connected world with instant feedback, instant communication, and instant gratification has really destroyed the ability for people to commit to what they set out to – mostly because they have so many choices that they can shift to or pivot to whenever things get a little bit difficult.

It’s incredibly important for you to really try to cultivate and attitude of commitment, of dedication, and of persistence. There are a lot of things that aren’t going to be successfully completed the first time that you try them, a lot of things that aren’t going to be mastered the first time out, and a lot of bumps in the road as you move through all the different seasons of life.

If you jump ship from one thing to the next just because the going got tough you’re never going to build the kind of resilience that you need to make it through life, but you’re also never going to build the kind of relationships that only the fires of crucibles and challenging situations can create. If everything is on “easy mode” there’s no real reward – and that’s where dissatisfaction and the downward spiral it causes comes into play.

Really try to embrace these elements above and you will be able to improve all of your interpersonal relationships by actively improving yourself first. This is game changing stuff!