Relationships: If I Knew Then What I Know Now

By L Dwain Boswell

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"If I Knew Then What I Know Now" is my surveys of the insights that can accelerate the success of different areas of life. This is a series of thing you wished you had known when you were younger, and would have made your life easier and better. In this post I'm talking about relationships.

1. START WITH YOU: When I was younger I didn't know what was important to me. Therefore, what I wanted was in response to what the current culture demanded rather than shaping my own distinctive relationship guidelines. I had no idea what a successful relationship meant to me. Unfortunately, "If I Knew Then What I Know Now" is a phrase that will continue to be spoken from one generation to the next because the average person's young logic just doesn't mature until later in life. With that said, this is what I have done now that I wish I would have known to do then:

• I have a set of principles that guide me through almost every challenge I face. These guiding principles have been taught to my wife and kids and we all agree that they help us achieve what we want instead of just responding to others' expectations and cultural demands.


• These principles help us to be ourselves and reveal to others the kind of family we are.


• These principles help our kids to know it's OK to be different and not to conform under pressure or compromise our standards.

2. KNOW WHO TO TRUST AND WHO TO AVOID: This is not something you typically find out just by looking at a person. You have to get to know a person's motivations, their priorities and the pressures they face. When you know yourself it makes it more important to understand people because your relationship building process becomes rooted in knowing yourself. For example, one of my guiding principles is "we value the truth", so it's critical for my relationships to have strong elements of openness and honesty. However, some individuals are best avoided because truth is nowhere in their nature.

• I'm more concerned with other people and their general interest, rather than just my own.


• I try to work more with people who have different complementary gifts, talents and skills than I do.


• Now I ask for what I want instead of leaving people to second guess what I want from a relationship. When I was younger, my intentions were not clear to others at all.

3. INVEST PERSONAL TIME INTO THOSE YOU CAN TRUST: You have to share the relationship and if you are not mutually willing to invest time the relationship will eventually dissolve. These are some key things I've learned now that I wish I had done years ago:

• I connect my goals to others' desires which impact the relationship for the long-term.


• I listen and ask questions to draw out others' suggestions, because I can't and don't want to do life by myself. This lets others know that they are valuable and worth something to me.


• I share the relationship with others because now I understand that sincerity increases your status in a relationship and denying others access runs people away.

4. PRESENT YOURSELF WELL: This is another one of my family principles which is, "We value a positive self-image". I tell my kids that they are always being observed. My daughter wants to be a dancer so I used that scenario to get my point across with her by saying, "the same way you perform your best on stage during recitals, you have to present your best self in life". In other words, it's always show time. I wish I would have known these things when I was her age:

• Nothing is "off the record". Be careful what you say and how you say it.


• Don't discount good manners, this may sound old-fashioned but it takes you as long way in relationships.


• Nice people don't finish last! Be gracious even when others are not, you want to be labeled as a nice person. When people think about building a relationship with someone, the nice people are at the top of their list.

Human nature being what it is, some lessons we can learn only after we have failed the test. My family and I have five guiding principles because no one thing has led us to success. We understand that it starts with self, but a relationship is a mutual agreement. We understand that we will miss the mark from time to time, but how we present ourselves is important. Life becomes better the faster we recognize the importance of "Good positive relationships", the third principle of my families 5-guiding principles.

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