Even if we grow tired of listening to others say that communication is the most important aspect of any relationship in your adult life, I’ve come to learned that, in some cases, life lessons and certain truths are hidden in plain sight. And communication, specifically, is one of those obvious skills that we, way too often, forget to foster and cultivate.
In all of my professional career and personal life, communication has been the #1 skill responsible for my success (whatever that success amounts to). In the noise of the day-today, our mechanical behaviors reign over our lives and it’s easy to forget that we are humans, and humans work best as a collective rather than as individuals.
We cannot work well within society if our connection, our relationship to that collective, is lost. Thankfully, the only thing that we need is essentially effective verbal and non-verbal communication, and meaningful connections to those closer to us.
Recently, I made a workshop in gbh.tech were we discussed the topics of fostering meaningful relationships with the ultimate goal of enhancing our inter-personal communication skills. Let me share a bit of what we discussed and learned!
Chapter 1: “Relate”
to make a connection
I named this chapter relate because I loved the meaning behind the word’s
etymology, which indicates relate is “to make a connection”. I loved it
because it made me realize that a relationship is more than just knowing
someone exists in your life (work, a friend of a friend, someone you greet on
the supermarket, etc.), in this case, the real meaning of a relationship goes
beyond that of acknowledging names or their beings, it’s about creating a
connection!
But, what does “creating a connection” mean? Well, in my opinion, when you create a connection it’s because you are interested in that person, for a intimate reason (respect, admiration, love) or something you both share (hobby, ideology, partisanship). And the connection is made when both entities demonstrate that interest in one another actively.
Why should you care?
Making a real connection with someone takes effort. It demands high amounts of social energy, and not everyone deserves that energy (truthfully speaking). So, why should you care?
As with everything in life, we invest time where we gain something that’s useful to us. That usefulness is not necessarily a material one, it can also be purely altruistic (something that makes you happy is worth investing time in).
So, you should care because it:
- Increases your influence: when others trust you, it’s easier for them to follow you, and be open to support you when needed.
- Cultivates your leadership and mentorship abilities: you learn what those close to you care about, and you look after their interests in a affable approach, while giving them the tools the need to grow.
- Improves your communication: you gain confidence in your way of talking to others, and you use your words meaningful, choosing the right time and the right way to express your thoughts and feelings.
- Helps you learn from others, and grow with them: you start to look in others for ways to support you in the skills that you lack. You can trust them, as they surely will trust you.
To relate, you need others. It’s always about them, not about you.
How to relate
This is arguably the hardest part. How do I even begin relating to others, or a the very least, improve the way I do it? There’s no magic formula to understand and predict human behavior, but the most common ways to get you started are:
- Find common interests: to make long-lasting and meaningful connections, we need to have something in common, something we believe in.
- Develop your empathy: shut up and listen to others, care for the wellbeing of others, ask about others’ interests, and be genuine about it.
- Be authentic: You are not meant to relate to everyone, that’s ok! Be yourself and naturally those who are worth your time will come along. Don’t try to fit in where you don’t belong.
You are probably going to forget about all this once you stop reading this post, because that’s what we do - we read things, find them helpful in some way, and then forget about it (we have bigger things to worry about). But, I strongly recommend you to take these three points in a note and practice them little by little every day; it’s incredible how much we can grow as individuals and as members of a group when we are self-aware of our behavior when it comes to relationships.
I read this, somewhere:
We are not in the coffee business to serve it to people. We are in the people business, and we serve them coffee. Nabi Saleh
I understood that everything we do is about people, and the things we think we do for us mean nothing if we can’t share them with those we care about.
The golden three
With every new person that I meet, I have come to ask one (if not all) of these question at a certain stage in our work-in-progress meaningful connection. These are the three questions that I unconsciously ask about others, as they too have asked about me:
1. Are you interested in me? Are you paying attention?
2. Can you help me? Can you add value to my life?
3. Can I trust you? Can I be vulnerable with you?
The lesson I’ve learned with these is that I’m not really the protagonist of someone else’s movie; if I want to relate to someone they should want to relate with me; taking steps to make sure we both care about our connection is essential to relationships as it is water to rice.
Learn to value others
I have tried to summarize much of what we talk about in our workshop session here, and to keep this post reasonably small to caught your interest up to the end, however, if you manage to get this far, I’ll lend you my secret to fostering meaningful relationships:
You have to forget about what you want to say, and instead listen to what others want you to know. Shut up, and listen. Learn to value others, and in return they will give you something invaluable: their care, their trust, and their time.
Thank you for reading this far! The next post will be Chapter 2, where I discuss another important aspect of any relationship: communication. I’ll keep you posted ;)