Quality Relationships = Quality Life

This is episode 223 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now, your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Hello. Hello, empowered people. Today we're talking about relationships, Specifically, how to create relationship quality. Yes, relationship quality. I'm going to give you three steps for how to create relationship quality. However, just want to tap into this for a second. I imagine that you feel like you're on top of the world when you're really, really connected with another human and feel like you're at the depths of despair. Perhaps when things are really going poorly with someone you really care about, maybe they're ill or maybe you've had an argument. Either way, the point is, is that it's really our relationships in life that matter. So many things that matter in life. However, however sweet a business accomplishment or a sport accolade is, it really becomes the relationships along the journey that we remember. In the long run, it really becomes the relationships and the people that we're with that create the fiber of our life. So you can imagine that if you've had an argument with a family member, you might walk around bummed the rest of the day in work or with other interactions. Or you can imagine that maybe you've experienced this, that when you make a brand new friend that you really connect with, that life seems that much brighter, more intriguing, a little more fun. Or if we've had an argument with that same person, we may get snappy with other people that we're around. Our relationships with people that we care about really permeate the rest of our lives. In fact, when they're great, life is great. When they're suffering, we tend to suffer, too. And there's a quote by an amazing person who's a researcher in this area, Esther Perel. I can't say that Esther Perel. And her quote is, the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life. Think about that for a second. The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our life. And that's why today's podcast is about how to create relationship quality. You already have the relationships. I'm sure there's lots of relationships that you want to keep going, but how do you create greater relationship quality? That's what we're going to go into. Even a Gallup survey. I want to share this first. Even a Gallup survey finds that people who have a best friend at work, that really deep, connected relationship at work, are seven times More engaged in their work. So it really permeates who we are, what we do, how we show up in the world and the quality of our life. So here we go. Years ago, I went to Turkey and I had left behind my business, left behind my home, brought my daughter and Paul and I went to live there. And he was already there. He had some connections, some relationships, but when I went there, I knew no one. I absolutely didn't have any connections there. But there was this group of women who were wives or girlfriends of other people that Paul worked with on his team. And so I got to know them a little bit, but I felt this emptiness, like I really didn't have a deep quality connection. Part of the reason was that I didn't have a lot of similar interests than they did. I was interested in my research, I was interested in my business, I was interested in very intense training and they were interested in more domestic things that didn't intrigue me as much. And they were amazing people, but I just didn't feel that deep quality relationship with them. But the reason it didn't bother me was because I had a profound, stellar relationship with Paul. And that relationship was such high quality, so connected, so deep, that it didn't matter to me if other areas were. Weren't as. As connected or weren't as high quality. Now, as time went by, I made. I got closer with a couple of those women. However, it still wasn't a. Wasn't a big source of fulfillment for me with those relationships. My source of fulfillment in relationship was with my husband Paul. And that's likely going to be true for most of us where we're seeking the majority of our fulfillment from one or two relationships. And then when they aren't going well, then everything else feels like it's not going well. Versus I wish at the time I had the wisdom, because this is about 15 years ago. I wish I had the wisdom to really explore and gain more understanding of their interests that were a little more domestic in nature that I really wasn't interested in. I could have created some deeper connections and had more of a diverse quality of life while I was there with more relationships. So as we go forward, how to create relationship quality, there's three ways that I see this being very, very necessary. These three steps I see as being very necessary for the quality of a relationship. For the long term, I think that the quality of the relationship short term is easy to have. But most of our relationships, I'm going to suggest that your relationships are ones that you'd like to have long term. So the first one is structure. This became apparent to me recently. Although I've been very aware that it's easy to lose touch with friends. I'm sure that all of us have experienced, I'm sure you've experienced where you've had a long term, very good, close, connected relationship with someone, but you've lost touch over the years. Maybe you're very close in high school or university, and then as distance geography, different careers, maybe family and family focus. A number of things can separate the two people, you and your friend. And then ultimately you meet up again for some reason. You make an appointment, you're visiting their city, you reconnect and you feel like everything is picked up right where it left off. It feels amazing. It feels like you have known each other forever. And it's so easy to reconnect. Now that's an ideal scenario if, if you can recreate that right right away with that meeting. However, a lot of us have grown in different directions. Somebody might have expanded and become very interested in one thing that has little to no meaning to you. And it might be hard to maintain the kind of connection that you used to have. When you had more similar interests, you might have grown in a different way that just causes you not to have as many as many connections on other humans in your life. So that's an easy thing to. It's easy for that to occur within our lives when we've grown and life has thrown a lot of changes at us. However, if you want to have a long term connection with that person, the structure is key. I had a group of friends recently who I really adore. They're amazing people, but we don't have a plan as to how we're going to reconnect. So it's left to chance. And when that's left to chance, the likelihood of everybody being able to get together at the same time is very, very slim. So even when someone suggests something because there's not a pre planned, regular, structured event, then it's pretty challenging for the group to actually reconnect and be caught up with what's going on in each other's lives. Now consider this in a parallel situation, another group of women. But it's a paid group, this is a peer group. This is a group where all of us meet on a weekly basis. And after, in between those weekly meetings, we also have different assignments or connections that we do in order to reconnect with each other. And not everybody participates every week, not everybody shows up. But because that structure is there. It allows us to stay close enough and connected enough for the relationship to continue to flourish. When that structure isn't there, there's a natural distance that's created over time simply because we're all pulled in different directions. And unless we have that structure to lean on. I've recorded a previous podcast called Lean on Structure. Unless we have that structure to lean on with relationships, not just structure for our businesses or structure for our health, but structure for our relationships that creates the ability to know that there's something gonna continue to allow us to reconnect. It could be a meeting, it could be a get together, it could be something that a date for a couple. It could be something that is consistent over the long term that allows us to continue to reconnect. So structure is number one. Number two is communication. And specifically in communication, it's communication with trust and vulnerability. When one person communicating with another can be vulnerable and open, they're actually sharing something that might be a little bit, a little bit scary or a little bit personal. That vulnerability tells the other person that they are trusting them with that information. They're trusting them with that precarious share that they've just dealt. And so the other person is in a situation where they're going to feel more trust for that person because they've shared something maybe personal or scary or difficult for them to share, and then vice versa. The other person has the opportunity to also be vulnerable and share with the other person. This type of communication, this returning that vulnerability deepens the connection. There's a CEO group. They're a peer group of CEOs that I'm going to present to in a few months. And this group is very specific. It's only CEOs. They all meet regularly. And if they don't meet, they are subjected to potential removal from the group because if they miss a certain amount of time, there's a very high level of commitment. But the beautiful thing about a group like this and the structure that surrounds it is that they're in a situation where they can communicate with each other about the same types of problems that CEOs have and founders have. Whereas that same CEO or founder may have a very hard time being vulnerable or sharing the scary things within the context of their business, but with a whole bunch of other CEOs, then they can be vulnerable, share the problems, share their fears about their business with each other, and be able to support each other in that scenario. And that's another example of this communication, this trust and vulnerable communication that that can happen in any setting. It can happen with a business group, it can happen with a women's group, it can happen with a men's group. But this communication with trust and vulnerability is critical. The, the third thing is growth. And what I mean by growth is growth together via problem solving together. So an example of this would be years ago, an employee of mine had done a tough mudder at one point and I decided that I was going to organize a group of clients of employees and friends to do a tough mudder together. And we were going to train for months to, to do this tough mudder. And he had already done one, but he was excited to do one with us. But in this scenario, I had decided that we were going to be very, very prepared. I wanted us to be competitive in it. And so we trained for months. We trained. I made the program for all of us. We trained together, we sometimes weren't training together, but we knew what the other people were doing. So it created camaraderie whether we were together or not. And we worked our butts off. We did the cardio conditioning, the lifting, the sports specific work, just prepping for all these obstacles and the insanity of what a tough mudder entails. And we did this and prepared so well in order to make the result of having a very competitive environment be inevitable. And myself and this employee were in the midst of the race, just the two of us, because there was another group who were less competitive and they were sticking together. So the two of us were sticking together throughout this race. And he kept saying to me, this is amazing, I love this, this is incredible. Because he had trained specifically and so much better for this particular race versus the first experience he went through. He basically went in it with some people, but they had just done the event together. They hadn't gone through the journey of working really hard together throughout to prepare for the. So when he experienced that other, that first tough mutter, he was miserable and suffering the entire time. So not only was his experience with the other people there not fantastic because he was so miserable the whole time, because it was so challenging for him that they also didn't get that experience of working together leading up into it. So the thing about this event for us wasn't necessarily just the event, it was that we had worked so hard for so many months together for the same objective, going for the same outcome, and that problem solving, working hard together, that experience of growth that we experienced together was what really developed and solidified the relationship in order for us to have this long term memory and long Term connection from going through that experience together. Now this happens naturally when say a family has a loss and they have to overcome it together. But it can be intentional as well. Where a business does a retreat and does challenges together, or a family or business does an escape room together. There are things that people can do together and problem solve together that solidify that relationship for the long term. They never forget the journey they went on together. And that's what we experienced with my friend and employee. And we'll never forget that experience. We can always refer back to it and it creates a deep connection. So I'm going to go over these again really quickly so that you can implement these structures, these concepts into your relationships to generate greater quality. So, number one, again, structure. The structure is the thing that you literally book a consistent time for you to see or call or zoom or connect with the person that you want to deepen the relationship with. It is not a random thing that you hope will happen in the spring. It is not a unplanned scenario where you'll reach out randomly to this person. It's something that is there in your calendar, scheduled so that you can increase that quality with that human. Now, chances are this is going to be with a long term relationship. So it's likely going to be something that's either weekly or monthly or some regular interval of time that you don't have to think about. It's always going to be known between the two of you that you both agree upon so that it is structured, it's something you can lean on because you know it's there. Number two, remember the communication. When you want to deepen that quality with someone else, deepen your level of vulnerability. Expand yourself by being a little bit Vulnerable is the word. But there's another word I'm looking for and it's just a little more open, a little more transparent, a little more willing to show someone else the real you. Even the parts that you want to hide, because you may not like within yourself. When you show that to someone else, they appreciate seeing the real you that generates that greater level of trust. So start sharing in that way and notice what happens with the connection and the quality with other people. And then the growth, problem solving, doing something challenging together that you really can grow together. Now this isn't going to happen in every single relationship if it's the quality relationship with your grandmother and they are not into doing a tough mudder, but they may be into doing a puzzle together, they may be into doing a crossword together. So decide what relationship is it that you would like to deepen the quality and what can you do to develop structure? What can you share or how can you generate that communication that can be more connected? And what activities or things that you can do that will challenge you and the other person to grow together in that problem solving realm? So this may be an uncomfortable podcast to listen to because a lot of us like to go through our relationships and keep them exactly the way they are. And what I'm proposing is that the relationship can grow, the relationship can be a higher quality than it currently is by putting a little more structure, communication and growth within that relationship. And not everybody wants to change the relationship. So consider that these three structures, these three differences to create quality are something that can be discussed with the person that you want to have a deeper relationship with. And that can be the step one of communication that's vulnerable. Just to say, hey, I really value this relationship with you and I would really like to deepen it with you. What do you think about having a date once a week? What do you think about talking about some of the things that might be a little uncomfortable? What do you think about doing this fun challenge together? Those are just examples of what can be possible. This month we have been going deep into relationships, and we have our first coaching call coming up on the first week of February. So this is with our group coaching, our Empowered Team. And this is our monthly program. And if you want to go deep into relationships and keep going into all of those things that really make a huge difference in your life so that you can perform your best, then join us in the Empowered team. It's a really incredible group of humans. It's a great community, and we endeavor to make the quality of our lives the best that they can be so we can keep giving our best to other people. So I hope you keep showing up in everything you're doing and make those relationships the best that they can be, so your quality of life is exactly what you want.