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Gaining and Maintaining Healthy and Rewarding Relationships

Guest post by: Millard MacAdam

Article Overview: Gaining and maintaining high integrity, healthy relationships and lasting friendships is a key to achieving a more balanced, bountiful and beneficial life. You will always become like the people you hang out with! Read on to discover some of the things you can do to build stellar relationships and friendships.

Gaining and Maintaining Healthy and Rewarding Relationships

Gaining and maintaining healthy relationships is a key to achieving a more balanced, bountiful and beneficial life. High integrity relationships more often develop when individuals realize that differences in positive traits and values make for a more interesting, exciting and worthwhile life. Different types of relationships are friendships, romantic, marriage, work and family. Healthy relationships grow and are fruitful when people consider each other as partners in life and do not see one another through a lens of money, property or anything with which they are obsessed.

Healthy relationships are created and prosper only in an intentional manner. It takes time and energy for people to build stellar relationships together. Relationships grow and change over time. Therefore it is important that people acquire the skills that keep their relationships congenial and healthy. Relationships flourish into true and loving bonds when people choose to share themselves with one another rather than try to change each other.

In my Intentional Relationship Integrity workshop for groups of company employees and managers, there are a number of relationship-building principles participants address and practice. Building proactive relationships, preventing and resolving interpersonal conflicts, surfacing resistance, truth telling, peacemaking, reversing wrong thinking and enhancing one another's conscience are some of them. If you're interested in learning more about the relationship-building skills taught in this workshop and how it can be custom tailored to meet the specific relationship-development needs of your employees, please contact me.

Building healthy relationships is also something a person can learn to do by observing others who are relationally competent. Participants in the workshop share their stories and model what effective interpersonal relationships can look and sound like in action.

Quite a few factors are involved in building good relationships. An important thing in building a healthy relationship is to first be a good friend. Healthy relationships evolve into true friendships. If you have lots of solid friends, my bet is you are relationally very competent.

Friends are open and willing to talk through things and to honestly share positive and negative feelings with each other without blaming. In the process of building healthy relationships and friendships, it is important to avoid jealousy, possessiveness and competition and recognize that they are triggered by events from your past which trigger your fears and insecurities.

To build a healthy relationship and friendship, it is important that you show interest in the feelings and dreams of those with whom you are relating. You also need to take responsibility for your actions and feelings, and encourage that those you're relating to do the same.

Another important thing is "establishing trust". All relationships and friendships thrive on trust. It is essential to consistently express trust toward others with whom you desire a stellar relationship.

Lastly, excellent interpersonal communication is an essential element of a healthy relationship. With good communication, you can solve many issues which otherwise may blow up your relationship. Communication demands very good understanding of each other and understanding verbal and non-verbal messages.

If you develop the above qualities, there is every possibility that you will enjoy a very healthy relationships and lasting friendships. A high integrity, healthy relationship is worth more than gold. Yet, it can't be purchased with currency. Wise persons invest time and effort in developing healthy relationships and friendships on an on-going basis. They maintain a vigilant watch so that they do not let their efforts weaken over the course of time. If not now, when? If not you, who?

If you need help in mastering and implementing any of the skills and tactics mentioned, I'm here for you! Please visit the Call-A-Coach section of my web site for more information.

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Article Tags: Friendships, Healthy, Interpersoal Skills, Relationships, Work



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