Even with your most positive relationships, some of your old habits, your old automatic ways of being and interacting that make the relationship less energizing, can resurface. So it may be a good time to try some new things. Here are four strategies that can be effective in enlivening your relationships.
Feel the power of generosity
- Relationships are reciprocal systems – support goes both ways
- The support we receive is rarely an exact mirror image of the support we provide
- We may not be receiving a certain kind of support, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give it
- Being generous is a way to prime your brain for good feelings, and those good feelings in turn make us more likely to help others in the future
Do regular relationship check-ins
- Take a minute to reflect on how your relationships are faring and what you wish could be different about them.
- If we accept the wisdom – and, more recently, the scientific evidence – that our relationships really are among our most valuable tools for sustaining health and happiness, then choosing to invest time and energy in them becomes vitally important. Investing in our social fitness isn’t only an investment in our lives as they are now. It is an investment that will affect everything about how we live in the future.
Practice radical curiosity
- Curiosity – real, deep curiosity about what others are experiencing – goes a long way in important relationships. It opens up avenues of conversation and knowledge that we never knew were there.
- Genuine curiosity invites people to share more of themselves with us, and this in turn helps us understand them.
Communicating understanding back to others
- Listen to others’ experiences and then communicate that understanding in a way that feels true to them
- It’s life-affirming to suddenly find oneself in sync with the experience of someone else
- Hearing an accurate rendition of our own experience coming from another person can be thrilling
