SESSION TWO: CREATING POSITIVE RELATIONSHIPS
Creating positive relationships takes work, but like any skill, we can learn how to build these relationships by considering useful techniques and then making a decision to apply them. While we often think of communication as a coding and decoding process, we can also consider how communication is also a process of constructing meaning out of messages.
In this session, we will look at ten quick things that you can do to help develop positive relationships. You will have an opportunity to evaluate what you are doing now and what you might want to work on. We’ll also talk about the power of words to build you up.
Ten Quick Wins
One winning communication strategy is to always develop positive relationships with people. Most of us want to do well in life and work, and we want to look forward to our day, not get out of bed feeling dreadful or apprehensive.
If you add these 10 tips to your toolkit, you will build stronger, positive relationships.
- Speak to people: There is nothing as nice as a cheerful word of greeting.
- Smile at people: It takes 72 muscles to frown, but only 14 to smile.
- Call people by name: The sweetest music to anyone’s ears is the sound of their own name used properly and positively.
- Be friendly and helpful: To make a friend, you must be a friend.
- Be cordial: Speak and act as if everything you do is a genuine pleasure.
- Be genuinely interested in people: You can find things to like in almost anybody if you try.
- Be generous with praise, cautious with criticism.
- Be considerate with the feelings of others. There are usually three sides to a controversy: yours, the other person’s, and the truth.
- Watch for opportunities to give service: What counts most in life is what we do for others.
- Practice your positive sense of humor: The kind that is about telling funny stories about yourself, not other people.
None of these techniques are rocket science, but our ability to apply them sometimes slips away from us
Words are the building blocks of good communication, but from them, we still must build meaning. Throughout our lives, we can challenge ourselves with learning new and better ways and words with which to enhance our communication with others.
Words are very important in our efforts to communicate with others.