Let’s begin with a basic assessment of your current circumstances. What do your perceptions tell you? What’s the truth?
How do you feel about your current relationships? Are you happy or dissatisfied? Do you feel connected to the people around you, or are you disconnected and lonely? Are your relationships rooted in truth, or have they been infected by falsehood? Do the people in your life know you for who you are, or do you only reveal a shadow of your true self? Do your relationships empower or disempower you? Do you have what you want, or is something still missing?
Be honest in assessing your own role. What do you contribute to the people closest to you? What do you have to offer a partner? Do others benefit by having you in their lives, or do you take advantage of them without providing much in return?
Look beyond the external forms of your relationships, and seek the real truth about them. For example, a marriage can be a label to describe a legal partnership, or it can represent a deep interpersonal bond between two people. What do you see when you look behind the labels? What’s the true nature of your relationships?
Observe the breadth and depth of your current relationships. Do you have a constant influx of new people coming into your life? How many people would claim to know you if asked? How deep are your bonds? Which people would consider you a close friend or an intimate partner? Would you like to have more connections in your life? Would you like to deepen any of your existing connections?
As you assess your current situation, keep in mind that your relationships exist only in your mind. Your perceptions define them. In order to accurately assess your current status, you must look within. Accept your thoughts as they come, and don’t be surprised if your feelings about certain relationships are ambivalent or unclear.
Now turn your attention to your predictions. Where do you honestly see your current relationships heading? Which ones are growing closer, and which are drifting apart? Where is your momentum taking you? What does your present situation tell you about your future?
Obviously there’s too much uncertainty in human relationships to be perfectly accurate in making predictions, but all you need to do here is make reasonable guesses. Your honest expectations, even if they may turn out to be inaccurate, still contain a great deal of truth because they reveal your beliefs. Your beliefs will affect your actions, thereby causing future changes in the direction of your relationships. Therefore, it’s important to become aware of your honest predictions because such awareness gives you the power to consciously change what isn’t working.
Pay special attention to your feelings, since they contain their own predictive intelligence. Positive emotions represent positive predictions, and negative emotions reveal negative predictions. Sometimes you may feel like a relationship is declining even when everything seems great on the surface. Then you may have a discussion with your partner and discover that there are important overlooked problems you need to work through together.
Falsehood is clearly damaging, but so is inattention. If you stop deliberately injecting fresh truth into your relationships on a regular basis, distance is created by default. Truth isn’t merely the absence of lying; truth is an essential relationship activity.
Accept whatever truths you discover about your relationships, even if you feel trapped in your current situation. Don’t succumb to denial. If you feel depressed and lonely, accept those feelings. If you feel your marriage is headed for divorce, accept your honest predictions. If you feel completely stuck and powerless to change, accept that. Never close your eyes to the truth. If you want to grow beyond your current limitations, you must first learn to stop resisting where you are.
Finally, it’s important to accept the true nature of human relationships. All of them are guaranteed to be temporary. No matter how strong your bonds are, they’ll all eventually end in separation or loss. No relationship can possibly endure, at least not in physical form. Allow your awareness of this truth to give you a deeper appreciation of the people in your life. When you accept that your relationships are temporary, they’ll become more precious to you, and you’ll be less likely to take other people for granted.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina