Fitting People In
How we manage our relationships can enhance our lives. Healthy relationships protect against depression, loneliness, and even aging. On the flip side, mismanaging relationships can hurt our emotional and physical health.
Relationships are often the biggest challenge in people’s lives. The absence of close relationships, frequent uncoupling, or high conflict can cause emotional distress. Finding lasting love, whether in friendship, intimate partner, or parenting, is more complicated. Most people mismanage their relationships and blame other people for the outcome.
Building relationships is awkward because most people get hung up on who to trust. But trust needs to be more balanced in building a healthy support system. Having healthy relationship boundaries protects you, not withholding trust or avoiding people.
The better your support system, the easier it is to find people you can trust when trust matters. You need a different level of trust for childcare than buying a car. Most relationships are casual enough to require nothing beyond mutual respect.
The weaker your support system, the more independent decisions you must make. It takes you longer to find answers, and the solutions are likely more costly.
Relationship Investment
Mastering relationship bliss is possible when you become an intentional investor in relationships. You leave little to chance by living lovingly but guarding your heart. That statement is not a contradiction. You are the keeper of your heart.
You are responsible for knowing when you are giving too much, too soon, to the wrong person or for the wrong reason. You must constantly check your intentions with others, so you do not put them in charge of your heart.
A heart is to be shared, not given away. When you give away your heart, you no longer have say-so over its care. You have left it unguarded. You have abandoned yourself, hoping someone will take good care of you. However, once you abandon yourself, others are less likely to take care of you because your expectations become overwhelming.
Guarding your heart is an act of responsibility, not defensiveness or shutting people out. It requires the opposite, sharing your life with more people. Protecting your heart requires you to diversify and strategize relationships.
Support Systems
The key to building healthy relationships is having a system to put them in. You want a support system, not just relationships. Your support system is a group of independent people you allow to enhance your overall well-being. As needs arise, you have at least one person to help you address that need.
If you have 20 close family members but no friends outside your family, your system could be more optimal. If you are madly in love with your dream partner who treats you like royalty, but you have no one else to rely on, your system could be more optimal. Many parents smother their children instead of helping them build an independent support system. Neither the parent nor the child will have an optimal system.
One person cannot be your whole support system, no matter how much they love you, how much influence they have, or how many secrets you share. If anyone promises to be your everything, that should terrify you. If anyone makes you their everything, that should scare you, and you should get some distance and work on building your system. You cannot create a support system within an emotional cage.
Diversify Relationships
Cultivating relationships with people who do not share all your ideologies or life experiences is critical. Life is increasingly complex, and our support system should reflect its complexity. Diversifying our relationships gives us access to information, resources, and opportunities.
If all the people in your circle of influence have the same information and resources as you, they will be of little help. If you have a million followers online but no in-person friendships, your access to information will be limited. If everyone in your circle shares the same losses, you will drown under challenging times. Everyone in your circle must not be in the same boat.
Make friends outside your organization, marriage, race, age group, and career field. The more diverse relationships you have, the greater your sphere of influence and the more depth you add to your support system.
Restricting your relationships puts pressure on the few people you let in to meet your many needs. The fewer people who have access to you, the less your needs get met. Either you ignore your needs or have unreasonable expectations of the people you want to meet them.
Strategize Relationships
Meeting people is easy. All it takes is a hello. But, nurturing a relationship as part of your support system requires strategy. You must know your relationship needs, and you must know yourself. You have a work life, a home life, hobbies and interests, and organizations with overlapping and independent needs.
You enhance relationship satisfaction when you place expectations and roles on the right people who agree to fulfill your needs in the area you expect. It’s unlikely that any one person shows up in all areas of your life. Conflict arises when you assign others roles based on your needs, not theirs.
A life partner doesn’t mean you spend a lot of time together. Often, best friends spend more time together than life partners. Being best friends doesn’t mean a person will help advance your career. Being a parent doesn’t mean your child will live in the same city to be close to you. Roles are constantly negotiated in healthy relationships, not assigned.
Know your needs and express them instead of relying on your perception of traditional roles. Verbalize your expectations and be willing to reasonably negotiate needs with others instead of demanding from someone trying to take care of their competing needs. Allow relationships to flow into one another instead of pulling at each other. Don’t make anyone a hostage of your expectations.
Try to make new friends every year. Invite people into your circle and keep growing your support system. The person who makes you laugh may not be the best at holding space for you to cry. The person who acts as your protector may not want you to outgrow them. So, they never tell you how to become better.
Stop looking for a best friend, a partner, or a mentor in everyone you meet. Don’t look for anyone. Just allow your circle of influence to grow strategically. Then, when you need someone, they will likely exist in your circle.
Strategize your relationships to grow and thrive. You should not invest all your energy into the same relationships you’ve had for decades. Your closest friends will remain tight, but they should not stagnate you. When you strategize for growth, you allow people to enter and exit your life without regret.
Nice to Meet You
You have opportunities to build relationships every day. You already know people who you have never approached. Colleagues, organization members, parents of your children’s friends, store owners, and neighbors are fair game. Take a closer look at their lifestyle to see what you have in common.
You start by being curious about people and give them a reason to be curious about you. You can ask your neighbor how they like driving their SUV because you’re in the market for one. Ask your colleagues if they’ve read the latest book in your industry because you were thinking about reading it.
Make up a reasonable excuse to have a meaningless conversation that could turn into a more meaningful one. Practice having casual relationships that you can deepen over time. Remember, you are not looking for a BFF, only to expand your social capital.
When I published “The Healing Journey: Relationships and Wellness Guide,” my publicist insisted that I contact everyone in my phone contacts and ask them to buy a copy. To say I was hesitant is an understatement. I had no idea I had 200 people in my contacts, and I hadn’t spoken to most of them in over five years.
To my surprise, 198 people were happy to hear from me. I am still trying to figure out what I did to the other two, but their tone suggested they were not pleased to hear from me. Surprisingly, most of the contacts purchased my book just because I asked. Many of them told me how much I meant to them, and a few shared that I had done something to change their lives forever.
I moved from Colorado to New York during COVID quarantines. In Colorado, most people were still out and about. But, in NY the quarantines were strict. People were not having events and meetings like they continued to do in Colorado. Meeting people was difficult.
Fortunately, I still had contacts of people I had met 30 years ago that helped me make connections. I make friends everywhere I go. Relationships matter. Leave a smile on someone’s heart today, and they will offer you a hand someday.
Relationship Triggers
When you have a lot of relationships, you owe it to yourself to be a good relationship manager. A meaningful way to manage relationships is to know what triggered the relationship. Know what attracted you to this person to determine the safe depth of the relationship. This is how you guard your heart, wallet, and reputation.
The relationship trigger is the reason for your interest in a person. The trigger should influence how much time, money, and trust you invest in the relationship. You must invest your resources wisely to build strategically.
For example, if you are triggered by fear, you should acknowledge your position and not make a heavy emotional investment. A fear-triggered relationship might be having weekly lunch dates with your boss to avoid being fired. But, the fear of being alone can be just as unsafe. You don’t see clearly when your trigger is fear.
Many relationships are triggered by past trauma, including systemic oppression. Trauma bonds are fragile and should be avoided. While being understood feels good, the relationship thrives off a victim mentality, not growth. Associations triggered by common lifestyles and interests, career support, and shared community goals have greater potential for long-term relationships and enhancing your support system.
Often, people experience emotional turmoil because they have made too much room for the wrong people to roam around their lives. Good looks don’t make someone a good person. Wealth does not guarantee compatibility. Respect your needs and govern relationships responsibly.
Every Relationship Is a Relationship with Self
Relationships reflect how you care for your needs, not just how others take care of you.
To master relationships, you must master oneself. Self-awareness, self-discipline, self-confidence, self-love, self-compassion, and self-definition — the more you master those, the better you will manage your relationships.
Monitor your expectations of yourself and others. You must align who you are with what you seek in relationships. Having higher expectations of others than you express toward yourself is a formula for relationship failure.
Many people don’t look in the mirror because they don’t like seeing themselves. Yet, they want someone to tell them they are beautiful.
If you want someone to spend significant time with you, you should know how to spend time alone. Others may not want extended time with you if you are uncomfortable alone.
When people observe you breaking commitments to yourself, they feel less obligated to keep their commitment to you.
The best way to meet kind and caring people is to be one. If you want to attract wealthy people, work your way into the wealthy category.
Relationships reveal what is ready to be healed in you. If you feel lonely, don’t assume it’s because you are single. Your partner is not responsible for your happiness. Your children are not responsible for making you look like a good parent. Your friends are not the reason your business is failing. Whatever is showing up in your life through your relationships is an opportunity to explore your inner workings.
Relationships Mastered
When you’ve done your work, relationships are easy. They are low-conflict and high satisfaction. You don’t feel like a victim, and you don’t take people emotionally hostage. You have a sense of balance. The balance isn’t 50/50, though. Sometimes it’s 80/20 or 40/60, then it reverses. You give what you have to offer at the time and make do with what you get.
A bad day is a little brighter when you have someone to cheer you up. Scary goals feel achievable when colleagues collaborate. Raising children is less taxing when you have support from other parents you have befriended. Staying healthy is easier when you share strategies.
Relationships are an asset when you master them, not a liability. Social capital is our portal to the world. The more sophisticated our network, the more accessible are our dreams and desires. We laugh to ease your burdens, love to expand your hope, receive compassion to explore your pain, encouragement to grow, and trust to become our most authentic selves. So, guard your heart, but don’t isolate it.
