How to Improve Your Interpersonal Relationships
Interpersonal relationships refer to every relationship that fulfills a range of emotional and physical needs. These people are with the ones you're closest to.
While romantic relationships are interpersonal, intimate friends and family members are interpersonal too. There's also such a thing as secondary interpersonal relationships. These include neighbors, acquaintances, and others with whom you interact regularly.
Simply put, you have some type of interpersonal relationship with everyone you know.
Given the importance of relationships to our physical and emotional well-being, it's necessary to learn how to develop and maintain them. In fact, knowing how to improve your relationships helps you create a support system that offers strength as you deal with life challenges. Some things you can do in this regard include:
Share Your Life with Your Loved Ones
Maintain Healthy Boundaries
Listen to What Others Have to Say
Be Respectful
Practice Empathy
Understand Your Own Feelings
Stay Assertive
In this article, we take a deeper look at the steps you can take to improve your interpersonal relationships with colleagues, friends, loved ones, and others in your life. Here's everything you need to know.
The Premise: What Are Interpersonal Relationships?
An interpersonal relationship is an affiliation or social connection between two or more individuals. Interpersonal relationships can involve your loved ones, partners, co-workers, acquaintances, close friends, and other people who make up the social connections in your life.
Why Are Interpersonal Relationships Important?
Interpersonal relationships are imperative for your overall emotional and physical happiness. Relationships help fight loneliness while also making your life meaningful.
For example, the belongingness and closeness you experience with friends and family is a vital part of your social support. Relationships in other areas of your life outside of family and romance can also positively impact you, such as getting together with acquaintances for a hobby or a shared interest.
All interpersonal relationships are built on support, trust, and loyalty. Close relationships might also be built on love. Mutual love and reciprocation of these qualities are essential in maintaining all your relationships. Otherwise, the relationships can become one-sided.
How to Improve Your Interpersonal Relationships
Even though there isn't a single way through which you can have an ideal relationship, some critical traits are present in every healthy interaction. For instance, the key to improving interpersonal relationships is mostly about communicating healthily, trusting others, and practicing empathy.
Keep in mind that there's no such thing as a relationship that doesn't encounter hurdles at some point; however, there's always plenty of room for improvement. Here are 7 tips on how to improve your interpersonal relationships.
1. Share Your Life with Your Loved Ones
In order to develop and maintain strong bonds with your loved ones, there needs to be a mutual give-and-take when it comes to sharing information. People need to be open to you; however, you also have to let others in and share your emotions, opinions, and experiences.
After all, it's through this mutual sharing that you get to know one another. This process, called self-disclosure, strengthens bonds and forges intimacy between individuals.
Think about how you might feel if someone close to you didn't share important information with you about things going on in their life. You might feel that they don't trust you or that they don't think of you as a friend.
Allowing others inside your life isn't always easy. By sharing information, you show them that you care for them, trust them, and will enable them to show the same care in return.
To improve interpersonal relationships, you need to learn to be open with the people in your life. Let yourself be vulnerable. Identify opportunities where you can let your loved ones get to know the "real" you.
2. Maintain Healthy Boundaries
Sharing information and being open doesn't mean you should give other people limitless access to your feelings, time, or thoughts. Healthy boundaries are the foundation of any strong relationship. Thus, it's crucial not only to create these boundaries but also to reinforce them.
Boundaries can be defined as what you're willing to accept in a relationship. These boundaries represent your expectations, limitations, and values.
A boundary in your interpersonal relationships might look like having expectations for when you'll be there for each other or limits on when you spend time together. It can even encompass how much you're willing to share about yourself physically, emotionally, and even digitally.
Such boundaries are crucial in your relationships with others; however, they are also important for your relationship with yourself.
It is essential that other people respect your boundaries; however, it's equally vital for you to respect theirs. Respecting these boundaries indicates that you care about each other's goals, needs, values, and emotions.
3. Listen to What Others Have to Say
Naturally, we are all talkers. We feel good when we talk about ourselves. However, if all we do is talk about ourselves, we will soon run out of people willing to listen to us.
Listening to others is vital in creating and sustaining relationships as it shows mutual respect and care. We have all been in a conversation that makes us feel more like an audience than a friend. Bear in mind that if you invest in other people's lives and genuinely listen to them, they will do the same for you.
Active listening is where you are engaged with what someone else is saying. You don't stay quiet and let them say what they have to say. Instead, you reflect on their words, paraphrase what they've said to show you're listening, and ask questions you might have.
Listening is a sign that you care about people. It shows that you're involved in the other person's life and are genuinely interested in what they have to say.
Listening is an excellent way to learn more about the other person. It even allows you to offer emotional validation and support, which can go a long way in making the other person value you as a confidant and friend.
4. Be Respectful
To improve your interpersonal relationships, you need to show respect for other people. This doesn't mean you need to agree with everything they believe in or do what they want to do. Nevertheless, it means that you need to show that you value their opinions, feelings, interests, and time.
Some things you can do to show respect in interpersonal relationships include:
Show up for them when they need you.
Be mindful of their feelings and emotions.
Hear them out even when you disagree with them.
Honor the commitments you've made with them.
Avoid passing derogatory remarks about the things they like and enjoy.
5. Practice Empathy
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and feel what they're feeling. It means you look at things from their perspective and feel their pain as if it was your own.
Empathy can benefit interpersonal relationships in several ways. When you show that you're feeling someone else's emotions, it allows the other person to experience a feeling of belonging. It will enable others to feel understood, and that understanding works as a foundation for closeness and trust in a relationship.
The book, Altruism in Humans, published by Oxford University Press, suggested that along with fortifying relationships, empathy even fosters cooperation, kindness, and helping behaviors. It also improves a person's mental health.
6. Understand Your Own Feelings
To strengthen your interpersonal relationships, you also need to understand yourself better. When you have a solid understanding of your emotional triggers and responses, you are better able to control them when you are working closely with others.
Digging even deeper, you will find that understanding your own feelings might automatically enhance your ability to empathize with others and put yourself in their position. And when you are being assertive and communicating your own feelings, ideas, and thoughts, you can do it much more effectively and easily.
An article from Harvard Business Review titled 3 Ways to Better Understand Your Emotions talks about three ways you can use to understand your feelings. These include:
Increase Your Vocabulary of Emotions: Different emotions have different flavors. The more words you use, the better you will be able to navigate the minor differences.
Pay Attention to the Intensity of Every Emotion: Are you feeling disappointed or sad? You can rate your emotions on a scale of 1 – 10, depending on how intense they are.
Write About Your Feelings: Set a timer for 15 minutes and write about something you are feeling strongly about. Try to reflect and learn by using phrases such as "I have learned" and "I realize that…."
7. Stay Assertive
Assertiveness is when you confidently express your opinions and needs in a calm, honest, and fair way while paying attention to the views and needs of others.
People are more likely to respect and like you if you are assertive in your communication instead of aggressive or passive. They will also trust you more, and you will be able to communicate more freely with them.
Here are some ways through which you can be assertive:
Telling others how you feel.
Conversing at a normal volume.
Maintaining eye contact.
Avoid exaggerating words such as "never" and "always."
Using facts instead of judgments
Wrapping Up
Interpersonal relationships cover all areas of our lives, including work, home, and recreational activities. When we don't have strong relationships, it's possible to feel undervalued and lonely as an individual. You might also feel that you don't have adequate social support.
These days, it's quite easy to lose out on interpersonal relationships because of technology that encourages digital communication. People working from home don't experience in-person communication with their colleagues. Family members and friends might choose to text instead of getting together and having a conversation.
Make it a point to visit your friends and family members in person or keep an eye out on local meetups and other online tools for ways to engage with other people. Also, remember that you cannot build interpersonal relationships if you don't have a solid relationship with yourself.
Take some time to know yourself and invest in self-care. If some issues prevent you from spending time with others, talk to a therapist for guidance and support.
