Want to improve your relationships? Focus on effectiveness.
Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash
Humans by nature want to be in relationship with others. And humans, by nature, will often find it challenging to be in relationships. It’s important to point out this basic tension: we want to connect with others, but often we find ourselves in conflict, resentful, hurt, or just feel like we can’t make meaningful connections happen.
Effectiveness in relationships
The concept of effectiveness can be really helpful. It’s a subjective term, what’s effective for you will be different than what’s effective for someone else.
Effectiveness can mean
asking for what you need
communicating your needs or feedback clearly without hurting the other person
building more intimacy with others
not letting your emotions drive a conversation
holding a boundary
repairing existing relationships when you hurt someone
cultivating new relationships
It can help to assess yourself and consider what is working and what is not working. Where do you feel stuck? What are patterns you find yourself in again and again that never feel good?
I could write a whole book on relationship effectiveness, and in fact, that’s most often what therapy is all about, how to create and sustain relationships that work for you. It can be helpful to start with this concept as a way to assess where you are and then focus on areas where you can move forward and make change happen.
Start with your values
Getting clear on what matters to you in relationships is a great place to start. What feels meaningful for you when you are in relationship with another person? How do you want to be treated and how do you want to treat others? What kinds of relationships would help you to feel like your life was going in the direction that you wanted?
You can have broad values about relationships that work for everyone in your life or you can focus in on specific relationships with family members, romantic partners, friends, coworkers, etc.
Your values aren’t goals. A relationship goal would be to cook dinner for someone you care about, say no when you mean no, or walk up and introduce yourself to an interesting stranger. Values are the direction you want for your life. It’s highly likely that the same things will matter to you in one year, five years, and even at the end of your life. You can read more about values and how to get clear on them here, here, and here.
External stuff - your behavior in relationships
It can be helpful to consider the external stuff that either moves you toward the relationships you want or moves you away from them. This external stuff is what we call behavior. It’s what you can see when you interact with others: your words, your body language, etc.
There are many ways that your behaviors can feel ineffective and impact your relationships in problematic ways. You probably already know this intuitively but consider behaviors that don’t feel effective for you, the ones that lead to you feeling disconnected, less close, or frustrated.
saying yes to something that you don’t want
raising your voice or using a sarcastic tone to communicate your anger
saying something to wound the other person and possibly damaging the relationship
constantly checking in with someone because you feel abandoned by them
continuing to engage in a relationship that you don’t want
avoiding engaging in a relationship that you do want (not engaging in behavior is still behavior)
You might have the skills to make change or perhaps you’re not really sure how to change behaviors to become more effective. A helpful place to start is to consider the behaviors that feel like they keep you dissatisfied with your relationships. What would you like to see different?
Internal stuff - your internal experience in relationships
Keep in mind that if it was easy to change behavior you would have done it by now. External behaviors are influenced (and often feel dictated) by internal experiences.
Internal experiences are the things that others cannot see but that you experience: your thoughts, feelings, body sensations, memories and urges. We are often at the mercy of painful internal experiences. We hurt someone we love, we don’t ask for what we need, we stay in problematic relationships, and we avoid healthy relationships because of what we experience inside.
Consider an area of your relationships where you don’t feel effective. It can be helpful to review what happened, almost like you’re watching a movie. When you get to the point where things seem to fall apart with the other person, “pause” the movie. What is going on for you in that moment? What feelings do you notice? What thoughts? Perhaps you notice certain body sensations or memories of past similar experiences? Often there are urges to act, often in ways that aren’t effective.
How do you become more effective?
Start by clarifying your values. What would look different in your relationships? What would you hope for? What direction would you like to see?
See if you can notice the connection between your internal experience and your external behavior. This is a powerful exercise because this is where change can happen. You will likely continue to feel, think and experience challenging things when you interact with others. Seeing the connection between these internal experiences and your external behaviors that feel ineffective can be very helpful.
While working on your internal experience is absolutely important I think it helps to start with exploring behaviors you would like to change. Start small. What behaviors could you change that wouldn’t bring up too much internal hard stuff for you? I’m a big fan of scaling behaviors - pick something small that feels doable and scaling up to something more challenging when you are ready.
Focusing on your internal experience can often seem more overwhelming. How could you change your thoughts and feelings and memories? Actually you can’t. However, you can learn how to relate to these differently.
Why does this matter? Because when you can relate to your internal experience differently, when you aren’t overwhelmed by emotions or hijacked by thoughts or automatically give in to urges then you can then find space to choose behaviors that feel more effective. Read more about how to relate to emotions differently and how to notice your thoughts without being hijacked by them.
Therapy can help as well. Therapy can be a place to examine what is going on and build skills around how to make change and build more effective relationships. It can be where you uncover blind spots or get help when changing your behavior feels overwhelming or the internal painful stuff feels too deep and overwhelming to manage (think trauma).
Ultimately, relationship effectiveness is a subjective concept. You get to decide what it means for you, but focusing on being more effective in relationships can help you move toward a life (and relationships) that feel more rich, vital, and meaningful.