The Power of Empathy: 6 Keys to Building Strong Relationships
Did you know that your relationships help determine the quality of your life, your health, and even how long you’ll live? When a Harvard study tracked hundreds of people over nearly 80 years, researchers found that the quality of people’s relationships—more than any other factor—predicted long, satisfied, healthy lives.
Unfortunately, how to build and maintain strong relationships is one subject we weren’t taught in school. And, in the decades before concepts like couples therapy and emotional intelligence became buzzwords, many people weren’t exposed to healthy relationships in their household while growing up.
As a result, it’s up to us adults to learn how to keep our relationships strong and to model the principles of healthy relationships for our children. It’s never too late to learn.
6 Keys to Building Strong Relationships
Want to build a healthier relationship with your spouse, siblings, parents, and friends? Here are my top suggestions for making sure any type of bond stays strong, even through the inevitable ups and downs life throws our way.
1. Make a Commitment
You might have heard that love is an action word. That’s because it’s not something that flourishes on its own or automatically maintains its strength over time. On the contrary, it requires commitment and an ongoing effort by all parties to ensure that it grows and evolves.
In order to have healthy relationships, you need to commit to the work they require. This includes both emotional work, such as understanding your own reactions and motivations, and physical work, such as spending quality time together. For my husband, Daniel, I set aside “special time,” taking 30 or 60 minutes each day to do whatever he wants. It’s an investment in our “love account” that pays dividends for both of us.
Staying on autopilot in your relationship is the alternative to commitment and effort, and it’s a surefire pathway to distance, alienation, and even resentment. Ensure that you and your partner understand the commitment you both share, including what exactly that means in your relationship. Instead of taking your relationships for granted, constantly nurture them for maximum longevity.
2. Take Responsibility
When conflict strikes—and it will—I’m a big fan of taking personal responsibility and avoiding the “victim mentality” trap. As long as you’re busy pointing fingers or wallowing in self-pity, you’re not doing the work necessary to arrive at a positive and productive solution for both parties. And getting into the blame game usually escalates the situation rather than repairs it.
Keep in mind that taking responsibility has nothing to do with blame. Split the word into two, and you see response ability—meaning you have the ability to respond in whatever way you choose. Will you choose to respond in love or in anger?
If a disagreement arises, take time to calm down and ask yourself what role you’ve played in the conflict. Be honest about your own behavior. Then ask yourself what you can do to improve the situation. Remember to focus on the things you can control, not on the things you can’t (such as other people’s actions).
3. Kill the ANTs
Do you know people who seem to live their lives under a black cloud of anxiety, fear, and sadness? They’re probably falling prey to a lot of negative thinking patterns. Daniel refers to them as ANTs, which stands for Automatic Negative Thoughts. They create skewed perceptions and can lead to the victim mentality I mentioned above.
The 9 types of ANTs are:
- All-or-Nothing: Believing that something is all good or all bad
- Just-the-Bad: Seeing only the bad aspects of a situation
- Labeling: Attaching negative labels to oneself or others
- Guilt-Beating: Often using words like should, must, ought, or have to
- Fortune-Telling: Predicting a negative outcome, often without evidence
- Mind-Reading: Believing you know what others are thinking
- If-Only and I’ll-Be-Happy-When: Harping on the past and longing for the future
- Blaming: Blaming someone else for your problems
If you find yourself falling into any of these patterns, you can learn to step out of them. When a thought pops up, ask yourself this series of questions:
Is it true?
Can I be 100% certain it’s true?
How does the thought make me feel?
How would I feel without this thought?
Write your answers down if you find that helpful.
Keep practicing this technique to establish some distance between you and your thoughts. When you start to question your automatic internal responses to stressors, you’ll learn that many of your assumptions, suspicions, and fears are totally unfounded. And you’ll be able to approach your relationships with much more balance and rationality rather than catastrophizing.
4. Practice Healthy Communication
Without fair, open, and honest exchanges, no relationship can thrive. As human beings, we’re always evolving, changing, learning, and growing. So, when we avoid communication, we might imagine our partner is the same person we fell in love with 10 years ago—or even 10 months ago—and that’s simply impossible. Ongoing communication ensures that both people continue learning about each other and growing in the same direction. Daniel and I make time for regular check-ins about our goals and what’s working (or not) in our individual lives and our relationship.
Keep in mind that communication is a two-way street. You’ll want to express your own needs and feelings in a respectful manner, but you must also engage in active listening. That means really hearing what’s said (even repeating back what you’ve heard to make sure you understand correctly) and making an effort to understand the emotions behind it (practicing empathy).
On the other hand, you’ll want to avoid toxic communication tactics: talking over someone, constantly interrupting, engaging in shouting matches, making passive-aggressive comments, stonewalling, or just waiting to talk versus truly listening. In general, aim for responding rather than reacting to what’s been said.
And don’t forget to share plenty of positive feedback and appreciation—it makes a world of difference in the happiness of partnerships. Relationship expert John Gottman has found, over decades of studying couples, that the ratio of positive to negative experiences should be 5 to 1. Therefore, for every negative interaction, there should be 5 positives to counteract it.
5. Learn Lessons and Move On
When you experience conflict, look on the bright side: By taking the actions outlined here, you’re actually on your way to strengthening your relationship. Conflict is inevitable, but working through that conflict in a healthy way will solidify your bond and give you important information, should you choose to learn from it.
Approach a difference of opinions from a place of curiosity, not judgment. Are someone’s needs not being met in the relationship? Is there a compromise that will work best for everyone concerned? Note that “winning” or “losing” should never be a factor—the only “winner” should be the relationship as a whole.
Finally, learn to exercise grace, forgiveness, acceptance, and letting go. In times of conflict, ask yourself where your partner is coming from and put yourself in their shoes. Also ask yourself how important the problem is. Will you care about this in a few years, or even a few days? Or is there a deeper issue at the root of the problem that does need to be addressed? Seek an honest and fair assessment of the situation. Afterward, discuss what you’ve learned in the process, and be ready to move on, stronger than before.
Relationships Take Work—And They’re Worth It!
I’d be lying if I said all my relationships were smooth sailing 100% of the time. But what I’ve learned is that I don’t need to take a situation and make it worse through knee-jerk reactions and finger pointing. Instead, I feel empowered to carry the above strategies and lessons to every new relationship I build, now and in the future.
Learning and practicing the principles of building strong relationships is truly the gift that keeps on giving.
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