Relationship track – number one resource for extraordinary relationship management

Hi and welcome to the relationships track. If you don’t know what tracks are, please read more about them here. In short, tracks are the recommended order of blog posts you should read to really master the topic you selected. Following a track will help you acquire knowledge step by step in the fastest possible way. Now let’s get started.

If there is one single thing that has the biggest impact on your life, it is absolutely relationships. A single critique from your boss, a fight with your spouse or a friend not returning your calls can destroy your day or even weeks or months in a second. On the other hand, making love with the right person, going on a trip with close friends or creating something exciting with a team of people makes life priceless.

You become who you spend time with. You think like the people who are close to you. You overtake other people’s emotions and behaviors (identification). Your key relationships can stifle you or encourage you, people close to you can push you towards the stars or make your life a mess.

You have zero chances to thrive in life if you don’t have an encouraging environment, and people are right in the center of that. You can be on a dream island, but if you aren’t with the right people, it will be more like a horror island. Trust me, I’ve experienced that.

Even though relationships are super important, it’s really hard to properly manage them and keep their quality and health in check. Usually most relationships turn into relationsh*ts sooner or later. Two former lovers become the biggest of enemies, friends start to gossip about each other and families get into big fights that last for months.

You want to avoid that and all similar situations, because your life will turn to hell. Every second you have is too precious to waste on lousy relationships and unnecessary fights. You want to be extremely picky about the relationships in your life, you want to very carefully nurture the ones you choose, and on top of that, you want to become an extraordinary conflict solver.

This track will teach you all that – how to establish, build and grow awesome connections with many different people. The relationships track is divided into four sections:

• General relationship management advice
• What to do when things don’t go as expected in relationships
• Dealing with family and intimate relationships
• Dealing with business relationships

Enjoy reading the relationships track and becoming a master of personal and business relationships.

General relationship management advice

Healthy relationships are what matters most in life – Relationships are heaven or hell on Earth. Good relationships can make your life really worth living, but crappy people in your life can make you suffer, really suffer and drown in misery. So you must forge your relationships very carefully; and make sure you only have healthy relationships in your life.

In this article, you will learn why relationships are heaven or hell on Earth, about different types of relationships and why they matter, what you should expect from them, how to choose who to spend time with, and how to find people who will support you in life.

The best relationship advice ever – I’m sure that by now you’re convinced that relationships are one of the most important aspects of your life. So let’s continue with the nine best pieces of relationship advice ever.

Implementing these will completely change how you see relationships and how you manage them. And here’s the thing, relationships aren’t really real, they are only a figment of your imagination.

• Always have the center on yourself
• Become the best version of yourself
• There is no ice to break
• There is no middle path, find your fit
• No zombies and bozos
• Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships
• Build multiple dimensions with superior communication
• Relationships are like bank accounts
• No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken

Relationships are like glass – but the glass is already broken – There are many versions of the story that symbolizes how relationships are like glass. The stories claim that relationships are fragile and easily broken. That after the damage is done, you can pick up the pieces and put them back together, but you rarely find every piece and the glass never looks the same again.

Well, these quotes are badly misleading. Because in real life, the glass is already broken. No relationship is perfect and there are always issues and challenges in every single relationship. If you want to have quality relationships in your life, you must have realistic expectations.

The real secrets to outstanding communication – The only path to outstanding relationships in your personal and professional life is outstanding communication. Consequently, excelling in communicational skills is absolutely one of the most important skills you can possess, if not skill number one.

In this blog post, you will learn these few core concepts that will make you a great communicator. Not only great, an outstanding communicator. If you decide to implement them in everyday life, your professional and personal relationships will start to blossom.

A simple trick to express negative emotions in a mature way – Every single person on the planet has to deal with negative emotions. Your goal is neither to suppress them nor to completely wipe them out.

Your ultimate goal is to learn to properly manage your emotions and make sure they aren’t doing the damage – that means (1) becoming aware of the negative emotions before reacting, (2) controlling your reactions and then (3) expressing them in the healthiest way possible. In this blog post you will learn how to achieve that.

Why you criticize other people and how to stop doing it – It’s so easy to criticize other people, and so hard to give a single honest compliment. It’s so easy to see yourself in a good light and at the same time focus on imperfections of other people.

But criticizing people is a complete lose-lose situation that only creates distance, spreads negative energies and causes tensions. Criticism is one of the worst kinds of negative thinking, talking and acting. In this blog post you will learn why you criticize other people and how to stop it once and for all.

Do not judge: observe, notice and learn – One extremely important skill in dealing with people is learning not to judge, but rather to love, observe, notice and learn. In psychology, there is a concept known as “the outer critic”, whose job is to criticize others to create distance and protect you from being hurt. That’s why we love to judge others.

But it makes much more sense to enjoy diverse relationships than to get isolated in a homogenous group of people where everybody thinks alike. So you have to learn how to manage your outer critic, and you do that in four steps.

• Let go of your ego
• Practice empathy and tolerance
• Have positive attitude towards people and operate on positive energies
• Put data before rhetoric and stay flexible in your convictions

When asking people for advice – Sharing advice is an important part of every relationship and communication. There’s one really important thing you should know when asking people for advice. In most cases, people will give you advice that justifies their past decisions or reflects their personal experience. It definitely makes sense to listen to what people have to say, but know that your experience will be different and you’ll have to find your own path.

The second important thing regarding advice-giving is that people usually ask for advice just to get outside confirmation or comfort, not because they really want a piece of advice. Take these rules into consideration when you are giving or receiving advice.

Personas – Know what you want – One thing in life is sure. The more exactly, accurately and the sooner you know what you want from life, the easier you will get it. Usually the most successful people in the world are the ones who know what they want to do from a very young age on, and have the talent to really do it.

The best programmers, athletes, businessmen and so on, they all know that they were born to excel at exactly one thing. Knowing what you want in life allows you to focus on that thing only. The same rule applies to relationships. Know what you want, and then you can get it.

Making personas is a technique where you make a prototype of different ideal relationships. You clarify what’s important to you and what isn’t, so you can more easily choose, select and go after the relationship you deserve.

Relationship circles – If you’re proactive in relationships, you consciously decide who new you want to meet, with whom you want to spend more time, into which relationships you will put more effort and so on. A very good start to relationship proactivity is to map all the people who are present in your life.

List all the 150 or so people that interact with on a regular basis and then arrange them in four categories; actually, in four different types of circles, based on how close they are to you: Circle of intimacy, friendship, participation or exchange.

When things in relationships don’t go as expected

How to successfully resolve conflicts – Every single relationship is a bit of a power struggle. Most often the struggle is very subtle and goes unnoticed. These are all the times when you are making small compromises, looking for common ground, gently testing the boundaries and exchanging superficial thoughts and opinions – selecting a place to eat, a movie to watch or gossiping about a third person. But from time to time the power struggle escalates.

At the end of the day, you can’t agree with everyone on everything and you can’t always find common ground. The bigger the differences in goals, opinions, beliefs, interests, values, ideas, motivations or desires, especially the ones that are very important to you, the fiercer the conflict usually is. That’s when you need extremely good conflict resolution skills.

Extremely good or bad times are real relationship tests – In normal, or even slightly good or bad times, anyone can be a good friend, a good business partner or a good spouse. Normal times never show the darkest part of a person’s character, unless the person is an asshole by default. Extremes do. Extremes show whose personality really is larger than life and whose character is lower than a snake’s belly.

Well, everyone makes a mistake or breaks from time to time, but if you consistently see atypical behavior in extreme times when interacting with someone, you can see deep into their soul. Extremely good or bad times are real relationship tests that show what kind of people really surround you.

How much relationship drama is just too much? – Every relationship is a dynamic mixture of two energies – positive and negative. Positive energies are the energies of connecting, sharing and loving. They bring people closer together. Negative energies (as the second dynamic) are thoughts, words and actions that bring distance and tension into relationships. Negative energies are the energies of disconnecting, excluding, hating and alienating.

They’re present in every single relationship. Nevertheless, there is a limit to how much negative energy is too much. There is a point when too many negative energies make the relationship a toxic one. Then the relationship becomes abusive, destructive and life destroying. In this article, you will learn where to draw the limit when it comes to relationship drama.

Emotional flashbacks: when your emotional response is out of proportion – Emotional flashbacks are one of the most frequent reasons why relationships get damaged. You experience an emotional flashback when a trigger in the environment (it can be talking to a person) reminds you of your childhood pain, suffering and traumatic situations. A subject, object, item, place, expression or any other kind of trigger reminds you of all the past events that caused you constant pain.

From a psychological point of view, an emotional flashback happens as a delayed response to childhood abuse. They are direct messages from your painful past, alerting you to how unfairly you were treated and how much pain you had to suffer. Learn how to manage emotional flashbacks to enjoy deeper and healthier relationships.

How social pressure really looks like – I am extremely picky about the people I spend my time with. I value time the most. I want to spend my time with smart enthusiastic people, people who constantly improve, develop their talents and want to contribute to the world. I police my every decision very carefully so that I don’t spend time with zombies or people who drag me down.

Because zombies and energy vampires have a devastating negative influence on your life. They can suck every single drop of optimism from you. Even with only carefully chosen relationships in my life, I interestingly still have to deal with social pressure a lot. And I also put a lot of social pressure on others. This article explains how social pressure really looks like and how to deal with it; and how not to do this stifling thing to others.

Haters gonna hate – We all have to deal with haters at some point in our life. Whether you like it or not, haters are the consequence of you standing up for something and even more so of you being successful. The more successful and firm you are, the more haters you’ll have to face in your life.

Crying about it won’t help, so let’s see why haters are gonna hate and what to do when you face irrational haters in your life. Because in the end, there will be haters, there will be doubters, there will be nonbelievers, and then there will be you, proving them wrong.

Proven ways to stop taking things personally – Sooner or later, somebody in your life will say something to you that you will take personally and you’ll have to deal with it somehow. Taking things personally is about emotions, not logic. When you take things personally, you’re emotionally hurt and offended.

What you have to do when such a situation happens is to dig a little bit deeper into your emotions and personality to uncover the source of why you’re really taking that specific situation personally. Only then can you detach yourself from the negative situation. Usually there are five main reasons why you take things personally. When you become aware of what’s really happening behind the scenes, you can stop taking things personally. Here are the five main reasons:

• Deep down, you agree with the critique
• You experience an emotional flashback
• You perceive being treated unfairly in the situation
• You may feel excluded
• You have unrealistic expectations

More than 100 signs of power – The more power you have in life, the bigger capacity you have for acting or doing something in a particular way that you want. You have greater control over your destiny and the people who surround you. With more power also comes greater ability to influence crowds as well as key relationships in your life., but with greater power also comes greater responsibility.

In this blog post you will find a list of more than 100 signs of power that might help you maximize your status. It’s okay to show how powerful you are, just make sure you’re using your power to do good – in relationships and in general to make the world a better place to live for all of us.

Family and intimate relationships

You need to love yourself first before you can truly love others – There’s a cliché saying that you have to love yourself first before you can deeply love other people, be it your spouse, family or friends. It’s a lovely saying for sure, but let’s try to analyze it and find the answer to why it’s so important to love yourself first, from a very practical point of view. Because no matter how cliché the saying is, loving yourself matters a lot in building quality relationships.

Multidimensional relationships – Relationships are always multidimensional and the more dimensions are present, the richer and more varied they are. You often experience or build relationships only on a few of the easiest and most obvious dimensions. But why stop at a certain point if life is offering so much more.

Only a greater awareness and a bigger investment into relationships can help you build newer and newer dimensions and thus an even stronger bond with someone over time. Learn how to build multidimensional relationships.

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty – The four most important life areas for the majority of people are love, health, wealth and general happiness. If any of these life pillars collapse, the quality of life dramatically decreases. Out of these four, love is probably the trickiest one, since many factors are beyond your influence.

But here’s the thing. You can’t force somebody to fall in love with you, but you can definitely improve your odds. The book to go to if you want to improve your odds as a man dating women is Models: Attract Women Through Honesty written by Mark Manson. This article is the books summary.

No More Mr. Nice Guy – Why women don’t like nice guys (Book Summary) – There is a healthy form of being nice (something we should all do) and a very toxic one (fawning). And the toxic form is the one that backfires almost every time, because it’s nothing but a manipulation strategy.

Being a nice guy (the toxic form we’ll talk about from now on) is more or less only about seeking approval. What happens in the end is that a nice guy tries to please everyone, but he pleases nobody, not even himself.

All the possible theories why people fall in love with you – There are more than 7 billion people in the world, and then you insanely fall in love with one single person. It seems like a miracle. Several theories exist why that happens, and knowing them might give you a good idea of what are all the factors that have an influence on the attraction spark.

All the theories can definitely help you a lot in forming better and deeper relationships, become more attractive on the dating floor and to better understand yourself and your feelings.

The best sex of your life – Sex is, at the end of the day, one of the most important areas of life, for men as well as women. In this article, you will learn how to have the best sex of your life by applying lean and agile methodologies to your bed skills. I know it sounds crazy, but it works. The article might be a bit biased towards the male perspective, but overall I promise that there will be many new ideas and useful insights for both genders.

How not to raise a child – I have no idea how to raise children the right way. I don’t have them yet and I never write or preach about things I haven’t experienced on my own skin or somehow succeeded at. But I definitely know how not to raise a child. It always surprises me how parents most often don’t read even a single book about raising children. I don’t have a child and I read a few books on how to raise a child, just out of curiosity.

At the end, it’s not about being a perfect parent. It’s about not repeating mistakes and knowing how to say sorry. In this blog post, you will find 30+ toxic behaviors that can cause big damage to a child. One big thing or a repeating small toxic behavior, they can both have very devastating effects.

Relationships in business

How to find a mentor who will accelerate your success – I’ve seen it over and over again in professional and personal life – finding an outstanding mentor can save you years of hard work, of trying to figure out how things work, what to focus on and how you can achieve your goals as quickly as possible, hoping to enjoy success in younger years.

Many times, having a mentor makes all the difference between making it in life or not. Learn how to find yourself an outstanding mentor who will accelerate your success.

Kaizen rules for teams – Today, teams are the ones winning the most important battles in life, not individuals. Members of outstanding families have an outstanding emotional life, outstanding teams in the workplace achieve the best results in business, and so on.

You simply can’t succeed alone today, you need a team of people around you, supplementing your weaknesses and supporting you through tough times. But in order to have an outstanding team in an outstanding organization, be it company or family, you need to nurture outstanding culture. By following these Kaizen rules, you will definitely build yourself a dream team at work and home.

The next steps

This is the end of the relationship track. I’m sure you’ve acquired many ideas and insights into how to manage relationships better. But learning is never enough, you also have to apply the knowledge. Really apply it. It’s better to know one single concept and apply it than to know ten of them and apply none.

So I encourage you, take action. When you improve relationships, there are many other life areas where you can grow and shine. Check out the other tracks on this site and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter, so you’ll be the first to receive new quality blog posts; including new epiphanies and eye‑opening content on how to successfully manage relationships.