10 tips for developing better relationships

Twenty years ago I qualified as a teacher and my first position was in a residential school for boys who were labelled in those days as emotionally and behaviourally disturbed - an awful label I know and it certainly helped me to realise that labels are for jam jars not for people.

I entered the teaching profession with lots of values and a real vision to make an impact on developing young people. Although I'd had various holiday jobs over the years, this was my first experience of the real world of work. I think at the time I used to see the world through rose tinted specs, but over the next two years my worldview changed significantly and now I realise it wasn't necessarily for the better and has had a very negative effect on my professional life.

The term I started coincided with the appointment of a new headteacher, it was his first headship and even though I am sure he was a great teacher, he lacked a lot of skills in managing and motivating his staff team. I really learnt a lot about how not to manage and motivate people and some of the pitfalls in organisational development.

In the two years I worked at that school, I think I only went into the headteacher's office about three times, one of which was for the actual job interview. I never had any one-to-one support and the only feedback I ever got tended to be negative and involved a ticking off in front of the kids. I'm sure you can well imagine how that made me feel.

Although I enjoyed the teaching side of things I really hated the school environment and couldn't wait to get away from there at the end of the day. I'm sure I used to get on my housemates nerves moaning about my job and complaining or rather in line with my view of life at the time, I would be making excuses for my boss. After all it was his first management position, he was only developing his skills too!

One day things really hit home. I had gone home quite upset and started making excuses for the headteacher again when a friend really pulled me down to earth.

"Stop there!" she said "This man is your manager, he's doing the job because he demonstrated to someone he could do it , he is getting paid twice as much as you are, you deserve to be supported and developed in your role."

I thought right, I either stand up to him or get out of that environment as soon as I possibly can. I chose the latter and at the end of term I was gone, off to pastures new and out of the teaching profession completely. I was escaping or running away. What I resolved in my own mind however was that I would never again expect less than the best possible support from my line manager.

Now I have had several jobs since that first teaching job and have had some great managers and some downright awful ones. What I did however was set myself some very high expectations for the way I wanted to be managed and how I, in return, would manage my staff. When my manager or the people responsible for employing and supporting me didn't fulfil my expectations of them or if my staff didn't meet my standards and in my mind, refused to be motivated and led in the right direction, I would often get myself into a rut of depression and consequently the quality of my own work and impact would suffer. I would be on a downward spiral until I lifted myself out of the situation by moving on to employment elsewhere. Running away again.

Since starting the Enfys Acumen however, becoming my own boss and having no-one else to blame as it were, I have put a huge amount of effort into personal development and understand now that I had placed myself in a position that I was setting myself up failure. Nobody is perfect and managers and staff have a shared responsibility to the team-playing role.

I have written before about teams and how in a team you have some people you are completely comfortable with and others you don't necessarily want to have much to do with, but recognise they too have a crucial role to play. See my blog post on Teamwork and Bicycles.

The rest of this post gives 10 tips on developing better relationships. I wish I'd discovered them sooner. If you are in a role where other people aren't meeting your expectations, I'm sure you'll find them useful:

1. Remember that however unreasonable someone is acting, their behaviour is derived from a positive intention. When you act as if all behaviour has a positive intention behind it, through discovering it, your life will become more pleasant. An example: You meet an angry person and you think how childish and silly they are. But if you were to ask yourself, "what is the positive intention behind this persons angry behaviour?", you could come up with something useful that allows you to feel more comfortable. For instance people often act angry because behind this they believe it will protect them from harm.

2. When you find yourself feeling uncomfortable in an interaction get some perspective by disassociating. In your mind's eye see yourself and the other person interacting over there, rather like you would if you were to see a video film of the situation.

3. Step into their shoes. This is one of the most powerful methods for gaining wisdom about your relationships. To begin, you imagine communicating with the other person, noticing how they talk, observe their facial expressions and so on. You then step into their shoes and see through their eyes and hear through their ears. So of course you will be looking at yourself! Run through a conversation you've had before, that could have been better. Notice yourself and become aware of how seeing things from this other person's perspective gives you new insights into the relationship.

4. What assumptions are you making about the other person? Are you willing to challenge those assumptions? Pick one. What is the opposite of that? eg narrow minded/open minded.
Now imagine interacting with the person with this new attitude.

5. Step into the WE frame: Think about a person you want to get along with better. Disassociate: Picture both of you interacting in your minds eye. Now allow yourself to find a common purpose between the two of you. Of course if you can't come up with anything you can always fall back on the fact that you are just two human beings who are trying to experience more happiness.

6. Funify your boss (or that irritating colleague). Many people experience difficulties communicating with their boss. It's often due to being too serious. So here is a simple, quick way to inject the antidote: FUN! Okay, picture your boss or whoever. And then notice their facial features. What stands out? Is it their nose, their eyes, eye brows, chin? Now you simply exaggerate those features rather like a caricature cartoonist does. Exaggerate and funify it in such a way that it makes you laugh or at least feel better towards the relationship.

7. No Failure, only feedback (or learning experiences.) A really useful way to make beneficial changes is to view everything as a learning experience. So thinking about a relationship you find challenging, notice how you usually respond to the person and then ask yourself, "How else could I respond?" How many different ways could you respond in your interactions? Come up with at least 3 possibilities. This enables your mind to generate more flexibility of behaviour.

8. Often when we experience difficulties in our relationships it is due to focusing on faults. This distorts our perception of the overall relationship, which is really a mixture of good and bad qualities. To re-focus our attention on the bigger picture begin to remember qualities you admire in the other person. Come up with three, picture them, increase the size of the images and place them around an image of the faulty qualities of the person. And remember positive intention, take a look at Tip 1 again!

9. What would be the consequence of staying stuck in the same relationship dynamic with a particular person, say ten years from now?! The fact is if you want to experience better relationships YOU are going to have to change your viewpoints or attitude. It's okay, this can be fairly simple. Imagine stepping into the future ten years from now and look back at that relationship and notice that it has remained in the same stuck pattern year after year for ten years! Looking at it like this, acting as if it could really happen, allow your feelings to arise that make you say, "enough is enough I MUST change!"

10. Think of someone you would like to get along with better. Choose someone of medium level problematic-ness and then read the following questions slowly: Isn't it true that all of the problems that we experience when relating to others is due to OUR feelings? What if we were to change our feelings? This could make things easier couldn't it?

If you are stuck in a professional relationship that is giving you grief in some way, why not try some personal coaching or ask the Enfys Acumen to help with developing a strategy to help your team work together more effectively.