Building Quality Relationships - Part 3
The last few weeks we have explored two of three important steps to foster trust and develop quality relationships. Let’s recap:
Integrity - following through on our commitments. Integrity is to make commitments to ourselves and others, and then seeing them through. This involves being reliable and clear of expectations from oneself and the other person. It’s about maintaining boundaries and respecting the boundaries of the other, not to misuse information learnt about the other in disingenuous ways.
Accountability - taking ownership for our behaviour, including making amends when we make mistakes. It also includes how we manage ourselves and allow for the other to also be accountable for themselves. This involves being non-judgmental, honest, open, and generous.
The third step is Communication. Communication ties the first two steps together nicely. It determines the type of connection we form with another person. It represents the moment to moment invitations we give to the other person for a particular level of trusting connection.
From very simple body language like eye contact and posture to the more intricate, such as learning your partner’s perceptive cues to speak to, the level of communication you offer and respond with will dictate the level of trust you form in your relationships.
“If there’s miscommunication, you’ll miss the opportunity to build trust and intimacy, and you’ll both feel frustrated.”
The biggest misconception about how to communicate with your partner is that communication is the same as talking or making conversation. Communication in relationships, at its core, is about connecting and using your verbal, written and physical skills to establish and reestablish your levels of trust.
Think about an important relationship in your life and reflect on how you communicate with that individual. Explore the level of integrity and accountability you communicate through your words, gestures, posture, eye contact and stories. Is it accurate? Is it honest? It’s one thing to know what your boundaries are, but useless if you don’t know how to communicate that to someone else. It’s one thing to be very apologetic for your mistakes towards another but ineffective if you communicate it in a way that appears unapologetic.
Don’t just take my word for it, try for your self! Reflect on the way that you communicate and test it out with your own relationships. Use the following questions to guide your reflections.
How do you communicate to yourself on integrity and accountability?
How do you communicate love?
What words make up your internal dialogue?
What word do you repeat to yourself when you succeed?
What words do you repeat to yourself when you fail?
How do you respond to a compliment?
How often do you gift someone else with a compliment?
How do you communicate your boundaries?
How do you respect someone else’s boundaries?
How do you behave when you are wrong??
How do you behave when you are right?
What kind of body language and posture do you sink into when you think no-one else is looking?
What are you not doing in your life because you cannot trust yourself in dealing with the consequences?