You build and expand your relationships by deciding to connect with other people and allowing them to connect with you. The most basic way this happens is through direct communication. The more you communicate with your fellow human beings, the more connected you become. These links allow you to enjoy the emotional side of love as you develop feelings of closeness and caring.
Communication is only the beginning, however, since human relationships have the potential to move from connection to communication. Even with frequent interpersonal communication, there’s a risk of falling into a rut and hitting a plateau. Exchanges that are lacking in truth, love, or power eventually grow stale, but when all there elements are present, the blocks to deeper levels of connection and closeness are removed.
If you consider your default manner of communication, you’ll probably find that it’s unbalanced. Most likely you favor one or two channels instead of using all three.
Think about some of the people in your life and see if you can identify their dominant communication channels. Which people favor truth, wanting to talk about facts and exchange information? Who reaches out mostly with love, wanting to discuss anything and everything just for the sake of connecting? Who communicates with power, trying to drive people to action and make changes? You’ll see some aspects of truth, love, and power in all communication, but most people tend to lean heavily on one or two channels.
What mix of truth, love, and power do you use to connect with others? Realize that your weakest channel will be the source of many of your communication problems. You can actually achieve significant growth in your relationships by learning to use your weakest channel when communicating in addition to your strengths.
If you’re in a relationship right now, can you identify your primary area of compatibility? Do you connect on truth, sharing information and learning from each other? Do you connect on love, expressing affection and enjoying each other’s company? Or do you connect on power, encouraging and supporting each other to achieve your dreams? While all three may be present to some degree, which strategy is the most dominant?
The practical application here is that when you know your dominant connect strategy, you can use it deliberately to regain your closeness whenever you start feeling a little distant from each other. Similarly, you can use your differences to intentionally help each other grow. Through our relationships we can consciously increase our alignment with truth, love, and power.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina