The Relationship Killer

We all want successful relationships. We want to have successful relationships with our family, spouses, friend,and co-workers just to name a few. Just like anything else in life it takes constant work to ensure something remains working and doesn't deteriorate.

Communication is key to sustaining relationships. With communication comes understanding. Understanding leads to compassion and sympathy. Understanding and compassion maintains attractions and allows for positive feelings such as love.

Unfortunately many of us do not communicate. We talk to and talk at people. We do not listen to them with our full attention. We listen with the intent to respond with our next thought and opinion. We rarely listen just to understand. Keep in mind that you can understand someone without agreeing with them. When we do not understand a person it leads to assumptions, confusion, misunderstandings, anger and frustration. We open the door to these negative feelings when we lack good communication skills.

We often develop anger and frustration because we want our opinion to be heard more than we want to understand someone else. Seek to understand then to be understood. Frustration grows when we struggle to get people to adopt or understand our opinions, feelings and perspectives. Unbeknownst to us we fail at receiving the transmissions that contain the concerns of others, because we were too concerned with transmitting our message throughout numerous verbal conversations, emails and texts.

Finally when our frustration level hits a certain point we often resort to using criticism to highlight and pinpoint the issues we have with the other person in our relationships. We label their performance, personality, and actions. We pinpoint events of disapointment. We blame them for the issues that are not to our satisfaction. We repeat our negative feelings like we are the authoritative source because:

-We want others to co-sign on our feelings and take our side.
-We want to beleive what we say, and bring question to those we criticize, because questioning ourselves open up the possibility that we could be wrong.
-We want hope that our criticisms will make the person change and conform to our beliefs, so that we feel better about them and ourselves.

Criticism cannot accomplish what LOVE is supposed to do. Negative criticism cannot accomplish the tasks that are made for understanding. One way talking can never replace what communication is the definition of.

When we continuously fail to truly communicate by listening we open the door to anger, frustration, fear and slowly close the door on love, compassion and understanding. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Let's empower our relationships, bring back the love and improve the happiness with those we spend the most time with by communicating more and criticizing less.