High quality relationships that make you feel happy, safe and loved are a key resource in your life
High quality relationships that make you feel happy, safe and loved are a key resource in your life.
They offer you:
The potential for greater emotional resourcefulness.
Higher self confidence.
They can act as a 'secure base' from which you feel safe to take calibrated risks and achieve success at the highest levels in every area of life.
However, if you attract toxic relationships and toxic people, this will have the opposite effect on your life and your success.
Toxic people will:
Breadcrumb you and even try to control your life. This becomes an emotional tax you have to somehow pay back through grieving and processing after the fact.
Make you lose trust in yourself and your own decision making.
Instigate trauma bonds with you instead of healthy emotional attachments.
Strip value from you. If you stay long enough with toxic or narcissistic people who abuse you, you may no longer have the self confidence to take action and achieve great things.
Furthermore, because toxic people feed off your emotional resourcefulness and empathy, even if/when you leave them, you'll have to undo the effects of their abuse. This robs you of valuable time, and you still may come out of it with some level of anxiety that you'll have to manage.
So let's talk about the 5 Main reasons why having successful relationships make you more successful in life.
#1:Great Relationships Make Us More Emotionally Resourceful
What are emotional resources?
Emotional resources are feelings within us (such as empathy and love or even frustration and despair) that motivate us to take action in order to secure resources in life.
As Tony Robbins says: "We all would do more for the people we love than we would do for ourselves."
When we live only for ourselves, we don't have the same emotions that motivate us to gain deeper insights needed to serve our customers, raise our standards or do what it takes to get that promotion.
When we are in a healthy relationship, we feel more connected emotionally to something beyond ourselves.
Essentially, by being in relationships we become more vulnerable and we are forced to dig deeper in order to offer more of ourselves.
This is a risk we take with our finite energy and vulnerability that helps us feel deeper.
And when we feel deeper, we are able to:
Access more creativity
Add more value to other people such as our boss, our colleagues, the workplace, or our own business and customers.
"The quality of your life is the quality of your relationships." - Tony Robbins.
#2: Quality Relationships Give us Esteem and Skills to Connect to Others
If you are able to attract and keep quality relationships in your life, you will find that you have more confidence to connect with other people, no matter who they are.
This is because you feel safe in connection, instead of shying away from it.
There's nothing worse for any human's mental health and self esteem than to constantly be alone without connection and human company.
Of course, those with attachment trauma or an insecure attachment style may disagree, since it is hard for them to regulate the emotions that come with intimacy.
People who are insecurely attached tend to want to push people away in the name of maintaining their separateness, (or in their terms, "be independent").
Of course there's nothing wrong with this, we should all make the decisions we feel are best for us, but long-term isolation eats away at our happiness as well as our social skills.
As they often say, "if you don't use it, you lose it."
The same is absolutely true of the social skill muscles.
When you're constantly alone, you don't get to exercise that muscle and become more skillful at connecting with humans.
Being alone for a long time might be comfortable for some people who feel safer that way, but feeling safe is not the same as feeling happy.
If you struggle with social skills, one thing I recommend you try to practice is the art of playfulness, and you can do that through banter.
Banter helps you to break the ice, get comfortable in conversation with others, and even access deeper conversations with them over time.
#3: Great Relationships Help Make Us More Grounded & Long Term Decisions
Great relationships bring into our awareness other people's needs and wants and encourage anti-narcissist tendencies.
When we only focus on our own needs, we tend to get good at being self-serving.
But being self serving long term tends to make people alienate us and disconnect from us.
There are great lessons to be learned in great relationships that apply to the rest of our lives.
The people around us serve to help regulate our thoughts and feelings and thus they keep us grounded.
#4: You Have A Strong Support Network In The Event of Crisis
Often in life we go through stressful times, sometimes unexpectedly.
These stressful times can throw a previously happy person into a dark place where we lose hope.
It's easy to have hope when you're going through happy times. It's a lot harder to feel hopeful within you when your investment portfolio is taking a big hit, your business is losing revenue, or a beloved family member suddenly passes away.
Yet, having the warm feeling that someone has your back helps to manage the stress hormones and the worry.
Essentially, people become that safe place, that "home" you can go to when everything around you is a mess.
Be Willing To Invest In The Right Relationships
You can't always control what happens in the world around you, but one thing you can do is invest in your relationships with others.
Yes it's risky, yes you might get hurt. But if you have the awareness to weed out toxic people quickly, you will gradually build on the number of quality relationships in your life.
As you build on the number of quality relationships you have, you become more emotionally resourceful to overcome adversity in other areas of your life.
Also you may just realize that in the end, all that really mattered is how connected you felt to those who are closest to you.
Success is great. It adds to the quality of your life in wonderful ways. And yet, no amount of financial success can compare to the infinity that you experience through your relationships.
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