4 Steps to Building Healthy Relationships

Neale Donald Walsch, American author of the series Conversations with God, wrote:

Relationships are the most important experience of our lives.

Yet, if that is true, why can we be so bad at them?

All too often, people find themselves stuck in relationships they aren’t happy with or don’t know how to make work.

This guide will tell you everything you need to know to create happy, healthy, and successful relationships.

Of all the information in this guide, here is the most important thing to know: 

Your relationships won’t change until you do. 

Let’s get started.

The Guide to Healthy Relationships

What is a healthy relationship?

A lot of people think that a relationship has to be perfect, whether it is a family relationship, a friendship, or a love relationship.

We are looking for someone else to complete us.

All relationships have conflict though, and no relationship is perfect.

A good healthy relationship definition comes from the University of Washington’s Health Center:

“A healthy relationship is when two people develop a connection based on: mutual respect, trust, honesty, support, fairness/equality, separate identities, good communication, a sense of playfulness/fondness.”

The healthiest and most successful relationships are the ones where:

the members in the relationship are accountable for who they are and how they feel.

A big cause of relationship issues comes from expecting the other person to be different than they are, and/or not being accountable for who you are.

The foundation for a healthy relationship is: Discovering who you are and becoming a more authentic person.

In other words, deepening into the goodness that you already are. 

To have healthy relationships:

you have to find the wholeness within, so you don’t have to rely on the other person to do that for you. 

An article from the Atlantic talks about a course being offered at Northwestern University on healthy relationships and marriage.

The article notes that:

The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person.

This fact is true for any relationship, not just marriage.

One of the movie scenes I love to rail against is in Jerry Maguire. Tom Cruise’s character tells Renee Zellweger’s character, “You complete me.”

I always see red! It is simply not true.

No one can complete you but you.

Steps To Healthier Relationships

If you want your relationships (be it romantic, business or friendship) to be healthy, successful and fulfilling, first and foremost you have to be the right person.

That starts with doing your own inner work, like knowing who you are at your core.

That being said, there are certain actions you can take or steps you can follow within relationships to make them more fulfilling and successful.

Below are 4 steps you can use to build healthy relationships.

Let’s get started:

Step 1: Own Your Emotions

One of the most important first steps you can take to build healthy relationships is to own your emotions.

Early in my marriage I was particularly bad at owning my emotions. 

My past is riddled with many “Angry Tomi” stories. I used to be very angry at the world, and my anger was never far from the surface.

My anger at the world had a tendency to spill over into my relationships with others - making my relationships not as fulfilling as they could be. Occasionally, my anger drove others away. 

It took me a long time to be able to own my emotions, including my anger, as my own.

That shift was created when I read about the concept of emotional maturity in Dr. Paul O.’s You Can’t Make Me Angry.

Avoiding owning your emotions can negatively impact your relationships.

In You Can’t Make Me Angry, Dr. Paul O. wrote that

Emotional maturity demands ongoing, total acceptance of people, places, things, and situations as they are, rather than as I might wish them to be.

Emotional maturity requires that you accept things as they are.

Emotional Maturity means going inward to take responsibility for the way your life looks and to take ownership of your emotions.

  • When you do not own your emotions, you want the other people in your life to be responsible for your happiness. 

  • It is always their fault that things went wrong for you, or their fault that you turned out the way that you did, or their fault that you are angry or sad.

  • In my case, it was life’s fault I was angry, and everyone else just had to deal with it.

  • When you abdicate responsibility for your emotions in the way that I did, you usually end up projecting them onto others.

Until you take responsibility for what has happened in your life and how you feel, you won’t be able to move past the emotional blocks and your relationships will suffer.

This isn’t to say that what has happened in your life has been your fault. 

Sometimes bad things just happen to good people.

But, in order to move forward, you have to own how you feel about the events in your life and the role you have played in them.

Owning your emotions and being emotionally mature requires that you say, “I am responsible for how I am, who I am, how I live, and what I feel.”

When you can do that, you can start to reclaim control of how you feel and make your relationships better and more fulfilling.

Three questions you can ask yourself to help you own your emotions:

  • What emotions do I feel the most frequently?

  • Why might I be feeling this way?

  • Is there something in my life that I am avoiding seeing and feeling that makes me feel this way?

Step 2: Understand Your Impact on Others

In my youth, and early in my professional career, I thought of myself as a real truth teller. 

One day, after a particularly harsh truth-telling session, a colleague from a respectful business culture said to me:

“You don’t need to poke a bear in the eye with a sharp stick to get its attention.” 

This was a wake-up call to me. 

My truth-telling was not only not having the intended effect, but it was often getting others mad and damaging relationships in the process!

I didn’t understand the impact my actions were having on others.

In fact, I was clueless to the negative impact my unprocessed emotions were having on my relationships.

To improve your relationships and make them healthier, you have to understand the underlying emotional messages behind the actual physical messages that you are delivering.

We’ve all been in a situation where you ask someone how they are doing, and their response is, “I’m fine.”

Their body language and the way that they say what they are saying clearly shows that they are not fine.

My son likes to call this underlying emotional message the Stink-wave, because the emotion those words are riding on has some stink behind it. (Apparently, I was an experienced practitioner in the art of the Stink-Wave).

When you hit others with your Stink-Wave, it is not conducive to having successful, healthy relationships.

It is just another way of not owning your emotions, and it can have a significant impact on the success of your relationships.

Eliminating the Stink-Wave goes back to understanding how you are feeling, owning it, and not emotionally thrusting how you feel onto others.

Step 3: Engage with the right person

Part of owning your emotions and creating healthy relationships is making sure you engage with the right person.

Humans invest a great deal of time complaining to the wrong people. 

Oftentimes, when people complain, it isn’t really with any intention to solve any problems. 

This might be because they don’t think they have the power to solve the problems, or because they have no say in the matter, or for whatever reason.

Engaging with the right person creates a more trusting, fulfilling relationship.

If you really want to have healthy relationships, you have to address issues with the people that you have issues with.

Complaining about people or saying things behind their backs is a good way to violate trust and ruin relationships.

If you are not sure how to engage with someone about a boundary they have violated, then see my blog on setting boundaries to see ways you can set and hold your boundaries.

Engaging with the right person means having a meaningful conversation with the person or people you are having the issue with.

Oftentimes, the reason people complain is because one of their values has been violated, and they don’t want to hold someone else accountable for the behavior. 

This just creates more drama though, and to truly have fulfilling relationships, you have to face the issue head on.

Sometimes the issues can simmer below the surface and you aren’t aware of it. Two good questions you can use to address this with someone are:

 

  • What is the most important thing you and I should be talking about?

  • What topic are you hoping I won’t bring up?

 

Engaging with the right person can be hard, especially if you don’t want to upset them, but doing so can take your relationship to the next level.

Step 4: Know when to let go of a relationship

One of the best things you can do to have healthy relationships is to know when to let go of a relationship.

You are enough as you are on your own. The purpose of a relationship is to enrich your life, and you have to be able to recognize when a relationship is not doing that.

This becomes even more true as you own more and more of who you are and how you feel.

As you continue to grow into the person you are meant to be, others may not be willing or able to make that journey with you.

For the people walking with you in relationship right now, you have to ask yourself, “Is this someone who is willing and able to make the journey to my best self with me?”

Or this: “Does this person lift me up and support my dreams?”

If the answer is no, that’s okay. 

Everyone is worthy and deserving of love, whether you move forward together in life or not. 

It is a simple truth of the world: not everyone can make the journey with you.

Experience has shown me that taking new actions in your life and moving in the direction of the authentic you and who you want to be can result in acceleration of relationship deconstruction (a nice way of saying it all falls apart). 

This doesn’t mean excommunicating people from your life entirely. In the case of family members especially, that usually isn’t possible!

It might just be minimizing your interactions with people who can no longer, for whatever reasons, support this emerging version of you.

Whatever you choose to do though, you have to be okay stepping away from old relationships that aren’t fulfilling or do not help you be who you are meant to be.

Allowing these non-supportive relationships to rest where they are, as they are, makes room for stronger, healthier, and more amazing relationships.

Tools & Worksheets

Want to continue your journey?

Building healthy relationships is a discovery process, but our steps make the process simple!

Sign up for Step 6 of our Ten Steps to Happily Ever After: Your Love Fit.

In this $30 step, you’ll find the full guide, The Love Fit Worksheet, and accompanying video with Tomi as your guide to help complete the process to creating happy, healthy love in your live.

Sign up today to continue your journey and discover how to bring healthy love into your life!


10 Steps to Happily Ever After

STEP SIX: YOUR LOVE FIT