CBP S1E8: 5 Tips to Build Stronger Relationships

Relationships – not necessarily the ones you have with your significant other – are hard! They have a huge influence on our success at work and in life. I try to learn everything I can about how to build stronger, more meaningful relationships from everyone I can, and here are five of the best tips I’ve collected. Here’s to building stronger relationships!

Referenced in this episode:

• Fierce Conversations | Susan Scott [affiliate link]
• 8 Ways to Stop Overapologizing (article)
• E4: The Effects of Overapologizing (podcast)

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Transcript

Hello and welcome. This is Dianne Whitford, from Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration, and this is the weekly Coffee Break podcast. Welcome to the show! Hey everybody, this week I’m talking about relationships. This last week has been a tough in a number of ways, but in one respect, it’s been difficult due to relationship problems. And I’m, and I’m not talking about relationships with your significant other or partner necessarily, although these same concepts will apply, but relationships you might have at work or with your friends or with the Starbucks barista down the street. All of those types of relationships are important because they keep us grounded. They, they keep us on or take us away from the path that we want to be on. Not only is it important to choose the people that you build relationships with, but to put in the effort to maintain those relationships as you go forward.

One thing I like to do as I talk to people at work or in real life where, that I notice are very good about building relationships is I like to ask them a lot of questions and get their advice on “how can I better build relationships with people? How can I strengthen the relationships that I’m working on? How can I improve relationships that are kind of a problem?” And so, what I’ve done is collected five things that I use when trying to build relationships or maintain relationships. Advice people have given me, things that I’ve seen other people implement effectively. And hopefully it helps you too. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that people who are good at building relationships are learners. They are observers. They notice the details, they have tricks to remember things like people’s names and their kids’ names and what they’re up to and what their hobbies are and all of those kinds of things.

And they pay attention to those kinds of details as they’re talking to somebody or as they’re interacting with them. So what are these people that are really good at building relationships? What are they doing? Here’s what I’ve noticed.

Some of the best advice that I ever got on how to bond with somebody is to ask them questions that they can answer easily and happily. Not just yes or no, but more open ended questions like, “tell me about why you like that or tell me about how exciting that was for you”. Something more than just how was your weekend or how are you doing? But something that investigates that person, as a person. That they can talk a little bit about themselves and their motivations and what interests them. And when you learn that, and take notes if you have to, it helps them feel like you’re interested in them because you’re asking them questions and it gives them a chance to talk about something that they know really well and about something that they are excited about.

And so that opens them up. And before you know it, they’re going to be chattering along at you about something and you’re just going to be learning all this stuff about them. And then they’ll remember that you asked them those questions and you were interested in their lives and they’ll, and that will just have them look more favorably at you. People really appreciate the effort that someone takes to get to know them. When you remember something about somebody like someone’s kid’s name or you remember that so-and-so’s son is going to graduate from high school, or you remember that some – one of your teammates daughters is going to be in a recital this weekend or something along those lines. People appreciate, they know that that kind of stuff isn’t easy, and they appreciate that effort. Think about somebody that you might’ve interacted with that remembered something about you and the next time you talked to them, they asked you how that went or asked you how that thing was and you felt good, right?

Because you felt important. You felt like you were important to that person. And all you have to do as the, as the person trying to build that relationship is just to ask them questions. Another thing I’ve noticed is that people who build great relationships give trust. Even if the, the person they’re talking to or the person they’re interacting with hasn’t necessarily yet done anything to deserve it. And that’s really hard for a lot of people, I think, because a lot of us tend to think, I’ll give trust when it’s earned or I’ll give trust when I feel like I’m getting trust. And great relationships are built on trust and you can’t always wait for that person to earn it or to show that they’re trustworthy before you just give them the benefit of the doubt. So try, try to get yourself into the mindset and try practicing giving trust even, I mean, I’m not saying you have to like give them the keys to your house or your car or something like that where you have to like, you know, exercise some great level of trust in that person.

But try giving them the benefit of the doubt, at least, when you’re talking with them, believe what they’re saying. Until someone proves you wrong, give them the benefit of the doubt. When someone feels trusted, it’s easier for them to trust in return. And it also makes them strive to be worthy of that trust. So when I tell somebody, I believe you, I believe that you’ll do what you say. They don’t want to let me down. Especially if I’ve built that relationship with them. They don’t want to let me down. They don’t want to disappoint me. And so by giving that trust, I kind of help that person become worthy of it.

To that end, the third thing is to be trustworthy. Be the kind of person that other people can trust. Keep confidences when they’re given to you. I know that life gets in the way sometimes.

You can’t always do everything that you say you will, but try to be careful about the commitments that you make to where it’s not difficult for you to meet that commitment or you’re not working until one o’clock in the morning to turn in that assignment on time. Be careful about the commitments that you make so that you can meet those commitments and you can be trustworthy. This also includes keeping confidences. So, as you become a trustworthy person with a lot of relationships out there and a lot of connections and things like that, people will tell you things and it’s important to keep those confidence – confidences, close to you. Other people don’t need to know all the things that, you know, you don’t need to share everything that you heard. Gossiping is not attractive. It’s not something that will get you very far in work or in life.

Really try to stay away from that gossip mentality. And that’s not to say you can’t vent. It’s not to say that you can’t share your frustrations, but, just really try hard to be the kind of person that someone can tell something to and they know it won’t go any further.

A little in that line, number four is be careful who you vent to. I have a, a couple of people at, at work that I feel comfortable venting to and they’re not people that are in, you know, not my manager and not the people that report to me because I don’t feel like it’s fair to lay that on those people. Find some people that are trustworthy that you can talk to and, and be careful that you really kind of keep it in that area. And the other thing, when you’re thinking about venting, all of us need to vent.

We all need to get stuff off our chest. But what you don’t want to do is come across like a, somebody who has a constantly negative attitude. Try to listen to other people, especially the people that you spend a lot of time venting to listen to them when they need to vent. Make sure that it’s not all a one way street. Ask them, is there anything I can help you with? Do you need to talk? Do you, you know, whatever. And then again, keep those confidences that they tell you close.

Also be careful about what you vent about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said something that I was frustrated about and I didn’t realize that there was a connection between the person I was talking to and the person that I was frustrated at. That’s awkward. Also it is true that venting with somebody who shares your frustrations can also kind of build a relationship with them.

You just don’t want it to be where your relationship with them is, is based solely on the fact that you guys can be negative Nellies together. You don’t want to have all your interactions with somebody be of the negative kind even if you’re both being negative about the same person or same thing or same frustration.

The last one is communicate with clarity and this one can be super difficult because we’re in an age of technology and it’s – people communicate a lot of times via text or email more often than they actually communicate face to face. And somebody that is texting or emailing, it’s very difficult for that person to get across their tone or their intent. And so emails and text messages are frequently misconstrued. I’ve gotten text messages from my boss before where I agonized over it for days. What did she mean? What did she mean?

What does that mean? Oh my gosh. Because I read too much into it, you know, and that’s what people are, are, have the potential to do with everything that you text and everything that you email. So what I would, what I would say for that is evaluate what you’re saying and look at it with from the context of what might somebody misconstrue here or be hyper alert for the responses that you’re getting back from what you communicated to make sure that people are hearing the message that you intended. You can tell by the way people respond to what you say if they heard what you meant or if they took some other meaning out of it. So just not only be careful in what you’re saying, but be a careful listener and make sure that you’re evaluating the response to what you’re saying to what people are saying back to you and make sure to clear up any misconceptions.

Part of that is something that I learned about in a book called Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott [affiliate link]. And it’s called cleaning up your emotional wake. And when you think about emotional wake and what that means, if you think about a boat and it goes along the lake or the ocean or whatever, and there’s a big set of waves behind it and those waves can spread out across the lake and set boats rocking for people that are parked on the shore and and all of that stuff. And so even though you’re just kind of trolling along through the lake, your wake that you’re leaving behind you, can be disruptive to other people. And that’s the idea of an emotional wake. It’s the feeling you leave behind when you exit a room. It’s also the feeling that people get after an interaction with you. And so you want to be aware of the effect that your words are having on somebody.

Really take care of cleaning that up before you end that interaction. And it’s super easy for someone to say, well, I’m not responsible for how somebody else took my words or I’m not responsible for other people’s feelings. And that’s true. But you can also be very intentional about what you say to where you don’t cause somebody to have a negative reaction. And that doesn’t mean don’t rock the boat and don’t say inflammatory things. It means, think about what you’re saying and say it in a very intentional and deliberate way, and be ready to pick up and clean up some of that fall-out from whatever it is that you’re intending to say. One of the things I struggle with a lot is in meetings or at work, I get super passionate about a topic, whatever that is, and I can get angry and I say things that, in a tone of voice that is maybe derogatory or I get frustrated and, and someone will say to me later, you sound mad.

You sound irritated. And, and that is not the perception that I want people to have of me. I have to be super careful about what I’m saying so that people hear the message I’m trying to say, that this wasn’t appropriate or this was not right, but in a way where it doesn’t sound like a personal attack. It doesn’t sound like I’m pissed off because that leaves an emotional wake behind me that I don’t want to leave. It’s okay to get mad. It’s okay to get frustrated. You’re not, you’re not – you don’t have to apologize to somebody for how you feel. As we talked about in the previous podcast, but you, you are responsible for the actions you take or the things that you say as a result of how you feel. So don’t apologize for how you feel. Don’t act in a way, as a result of those feelings that you feel you need to apologize after. So those are my five things. I’ll, I’ll create a infographic or something to go along with it. But if there’s any additional relationships idea or relationship building tips that you have, I would love to hear them. Please visit the blog which I will link in the description where you can add a comment or go to our Facebook and add a comment there. If you’d like to sign up for our mailing list, you can do so at www.coffeegritandinspiration.com/subscription. Hope you enjoyed today’s podcast and I’ll talk to you next week. Bye now!

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