Hello,
One of the biggest questions I am asked is how to improve a relationship, whether it be with a spouse, sibling, parent, child, friend, or colleague.
Here are 3 principles neglected in relationships:
- Have urgency - When my parents were in their 70s, I only got to see them twice a year due to the long distance. I calculated that if they lived until their mid-eighties, I would only get to see them at most 20 more times. Now that is urgent. When you have a ticking clock, there comes a sense of urgency that you better get it right. You realize you will not have as many opportunities as you imagine to spend with your loved ones.
- Give precise, meaningful praise - Watch the people you care about carefully. Extremely carefully. And when they do something that you would like them to do more of, tell them that it was good and mean it. You have to be precise. "Here is what you just did that I think was great." Rewards are intensely valuable for modifying behavior.
- Remove resentment - People struggle to give praise in relationships because of underlying resentment. If you resent someone and they do something good, you opt out of praising them because you do not want to reward them in any shape or form. In the process, you have just punished them for doing what you want.
It is not enough to make time for your relationships; you must also be investing your attention in them too.
If you are looking to build rewarding relationships, my Discovering Personality Course gives tools and mental models to aid with this. Within this course, I have condensed the decades of my life studying personality. You will find more information than you would get in the typical semester-long personality course at a university during my 5-hour lecture series.
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