I spent a big portion of my life with a frustrating realization that my friends and family had their own limits. What was even more angering was my own limited viewpoint that others had to change my life, and that somehow, they were responsible for both my happiness and failures. After years of soul searching and a trip overseas, it finally dawned on me that each friend was intended to enhance a small portion of my life by being simply themselves.
As long as we focus on great qualities each one of our companions embodies, we are able to have more friends and our lives can become richer. Below, I am including five reasons how identifying great qualities in our friends can help us secure better relationships. To read more about my work, please visit my website (A&E, PR agency NYC).
- Focusing on friends’ qualities improves your receiving position: you would not ask your accountant to fix your plumbing, so why do we expect our friends to be advisors for every walk of life? By allowing our friends to excel in those activities where they have natural inclinations, we provide them with an opportunity to put their best foot forward. They are able to utilize their talents to help guide us on appropriate decisions or simply share their knowledge and inspire us chase our dreams.
- Focusing on friends’ qualities improves their relationship with you: who wants a friend that constantly pressures you to discuss topics in great detail that you know nothing about? We often engage exactly in those conversations that are unrelatable to our friends, and then become surprised or frustrated when we don’t receive the answer we expected. By focusing on our friend’s skills rather than flaws, we help improve the experience others share with us as well.
- Focusing on friends’ qualities helps you take more responsibility for your life: by pinpointing our friends’ pitfalls, we subconsciously take the blame away from ourselves. We expect them to make up for our uncertainty, lack of experience, or even poor judgment. By acknowledging ownership of our own decisions and accepting responsibility for our actions, we help empower ourselves to push through problems on our own rather than subconsciously waiting for our acquittances to rescue us.
- Focusing on friends’ qualities helps you become a better listener: by focusing on others talents and offering advice instead of requesting it, we allow for an opportunity to discover new perspectives. Many times, we receive great advice by not asking but simply by being open to a dialect.
Focusing on our friends and family qualities over flaws helps us receive more from our relationships. We are able to engage in better conversations, improve our listening abilities, receive different perspective on life, and ultimately improve our ability to have more friends to enjoy.