SKILL 7
Interpersonal Relationships
Interpersonal relationships are the proving ground of emotional intelligence; they are where the rubber meets the road. Our skill in interpersonal relationships governs whether other people in our lives will feel eager to see us again or dread it. Here is where our needs, desires, and expectations are anticipated, acknowledged, appreciated, and treated with respect or where they are thwarted and ignored. The quality of our interpersonal relationships establishes the social and emotional climate in our families, neighborhoods, and workplaces. When our relationships are working well, they provide the common ground where we get to enjoy our own experience of humanness through sharing it with others.
Stein and Book (2011, p. 125) define skill in interpersonal relationships as “the ability to establish and maintain mutually satisfying relationships that are characterized by the ability to both ‘give’ and ‘take’ in relationships, and where trust and compassion are openly expressed in words or by behavior.” The tricky part is the requirement of mutuality. Developing relationships that truly are mutually satisfying requires surrendering some of our control to another person, or to other people. But out of the natural correspondence between emotional competencies, we discover that kind of surrender is also exactly what it takes to be socially responsible! Nothing will bring our interest and attention to focus faster on the group’s needs than when we surrender some of our own self-interest and have, as they say, “some skin in the game.”
In order to have an authentically mutual relationship, we have to understand the other people well enough to anticipate their preferences and be able to satisfy them to some extent . . . and they get to be the final authority as to whether or not our attempts were successful! To make it even more complicated, there are times when almost everyone is somewhat deceptive about what he or she wants and what he or she is or is not willing to give. For a relationship with real depth, we ultimately need to know the other person well enough to detect when he or she is bluffing and to constructively elicit his or her true perspective when it does matter and recognize when to let it go when it doesn’t.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS?
No matter how much we might pretend otherwise, humans must care about interpersonal relationships because we are primates, who are by nature highly social creatures. We cannot survive long in isolation. Our ancient biology predisposes us to seek communication with others. Your brain and heart structures and the neurotransmitters that circulate throughout your body are all extensions of millions of years of behavior. You can’t escape needing to be touched and held and spoken to. You can’t not seek reflections of yourself from fellow human beings unless you suffer from some of the more extreme forms of mental dysfunction such as schizophrenia or autism.
As the planet becomes more crowded and more of our resources have to be shared, our ability to make friends and keep them is critical to our ability to progress socially—and perhaps even to survive. Trusting, committed relationships among neighbors and community members were key ingredients in the success of the American Revolution and the settling of the frontier. It has only been as we have grown more and more affluent that we could afford to indulge in the sort of separation and fragmentedness that has now become commonplace. There are serious costs to this alienation. We harbor a vague sense of competition with our neighbors, even suspicion, and the desire not to be bothered by them.
What is surprising to those of us who have been conditioned to believe success comes out of competition and winning is that it not only doesn’t cost us anything to reinvest more of our resources and concern in social responsibility, but it actually improves our stress tolerance and makes us happier. Taking a fresh, more honest look at ourselves, we rediscover that we are naturally social creatures.
HOW CAN WE BUILD INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS?
“Friendship should be more than biting Time can sever.”
T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Fortunately, the skills for building durable, mutually beneficial relationships are well-known and easily practiced by those who truly want to improve this skill. It should also be kept in mind that this, of all of the sixteen skills, is most subject to the hereditary constraints of a biological set point. Each of us has a general zone of comfort that governs how reserved and how outgoing we are. We can learn to operate outside of that, but will need to recharge our batteries in order to do so.
The first step is to examine honestly the level of satisfaction you currently experience. Consider the relationships that are central to your life and think about the most and least satisfying aspects. The second step is to recognize that, if you want to make new friends or improve the quality of an existing relationship, it will be you who does the changing. . . . It is never a useful goal to set about changing or improving the other person; rather, it is a recipe for certain frustration and failure. The third step is to start working on specific behaviors, such as improving your listening, introducing yourself to others, finding areas of common interest, reading nonverbal cues, and ending conversations in a way that encourages more contact in the future.
Certainly, there are relationships that should be abandoned rather than improved—abusive ones fall in this category. Knowing which relationships to nurture and which to let go is a separate skill, and you can find many resources on that topic. Here we are concerned with ways to start and improve healthy relationships.
Improving your skills in interpersonal relationships can bring a host of benefits from stress reduction to increased productivity and creativity, as well as an expanded enjoyment of life. Celebrating your accomplishments is a key ingredient in developing happiness. To the extent you can increase the quantity and quality of your interpersonal relationships, you will have more people with whom to enjoy celebrating those achievements! As you assist your clients in building this skill, they are likely to notice more ease and success in achieving the goals that they desire.
STAR PERFORMERThe Dalai Lama is a Buddhist monk as well as the spiritual and political leader of all Tibetan people. His life’s work is to enable his people, a large number of whom are living in exile, to maintain the high spiritual, ethical, and artistic values of their ancient culture. He is an excellent model of interpersonal relationships because he is able to humbly reach out and create relationships without judgment across the world. He is able to assert his intelligence and authority effectively in the world without the self-importance that sometimes makes others come off as arrogant and egotistical and through these skills he has brought many more people into relationships.
REEL PERFORMERIn Something’s Got to Give, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson meet when she’s in her fifties and he’s in his sixties, having his first heart attack. Both are deeply identified with and committed to their singleness, and they defend it with strong protective shields that also “protect” them from the stability of a relationship with a life partner. However, at a deeper level it is as if their souls somehow connect and lead their personalities through a long list of lessons that produce a new and deeply rewarding relationship for both of them. It’s not easy, but—wow!—is it worth it!