relationship advice

The best tools for successful conflict resolution in personal relationships
Every single relationship is also a bit of a power struggle. Most often the struggle is very subtle and goes unnoticed. These are all the times when you’re 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. Conflicts become especially strong when you take something personally or when relationship boundaries are seriously breached.

If that happens to you often, don’t assume you are the unlucky exception. Conflicts, big or small, are a normal part of every healthy relationship. If there are no (properly managed) conflicts in a relationship, the relationship is definitely a superficial or toxic one.

So thinking about how to avoid or run away from every single conflict isn’t the right strategy. It not only prevents a relationship from developing more dimensions, it also hinders your relationship assertiveness and proactivity. It makes you a coward.

The right direction is to develop superior conflict resolution skills instead. It’s one of the best skills to have to enjoy healthy relationships. If you have no such skills, a conflict can quickly be mismanaged, and a relationship can get seriously damaged.

On the other hand, if you develop good conflict resolutions skills, every conflict becomes an opportunity for strengthening the bond between two people and making the relationship even deeper; because you open up. Think about how unique and deep make-up sex can be.

My whole life has been spinning around conflicts and power struggle. In my family home, when I was managing a VC fund, dealing with politicians and in numerous cases when I decided to kick things out of the status quo a little bit (I love to do that a lot).

So I’ve learned a lot about conflict resolution and in this blog post, I want to share with you my thoughts and experiences that may help you improve your conflict resolution skills as well and consequently develop deeper bonds with the key people in your life. Because I may deal with conflicts a lot, but I also always enjoyed really deep relationships in my life.

Your options after a fight are quite limited

After a big fight, you don’t have many options. Actually, there are only five options to choose from:
1. You can decide to terminate the relationship or at least put it on hold (termination)
2. You can pretend that there is no conflict and become more and more passive-aggressive (lying to yourself and others)
3. You can openly punish the person and pour gasoline on fire (competition, fight, avoidance, ignorance)
4. You can fawn and yield to the other person and betray yourself
5. You can try to fix the relationship as soon as possible (collaboration, compromise, negotiation)
If the fight was too big, if someone violated the relationship boundaries really bad, you have every right to terminate the relationship. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do, especially in cases of toxic relationships where the same damaging patterns are repeating themselves.

You have every right to terminate a relationship that isn’t working. If you do that, there is no need for conflict resolution. Just don’t confuse avoidance and ignorance with terminating a relationship and letting things go.

The second thing you can do is to fight. You can decide to compete, to overpower and go for a win-lose situation. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes going for a fight is what you have to do.

I saw that numerous times when the second or third employee in a business left the company and started a competing business. Again in such cases, there is no need for conflict resolution, you just have to make sure that you win. It’s kind of a similar situation if you decide to yield and kneel, you just don’t fight but submit and so there is no need for conflict resolution.

But cases where terminations, submissions and fights are the only options are quite rare. They do happen, people can do all kinds of unbelievably damaging things, like cheating, stealing, being abusive etc. (actually, we all behave stupid from time to time), but they aren’t a part of everyday life; as long as you aren’t living in a war-zone, prison, toxic family or any other kind of hostile environment and if your relationships are healthy at least to a certain extent.

The most often scenario in interpersonal conflicts is the one, where you should successfully solve the conflict as soon as possible, but you rather play power struggle games. Punishment games.

That’s when conflict resolution skills are really needed, because any kind of punishment destroys trust in relationships. It’s the opposite of successful conflict resolution. It’s a big waste of time, energy and it destroys the relationship’s “wealth” or value. So the best option you have, when there is no need to fight or terminate a relationship, is to try to resolve the conflict as soon as possible.

Any kind of punishment destroys everything you’ve built in a relationship

Every relationship is like a mutual bank account. By doing something good for a relationship, you put money into the bank account. By doing something bad for a relationship, you withdraw money from the relationship bank account.

Every relationship bank account can be full of money, barely above water, in negative numbers or even bankrupt. A lot of “money” or “wealth” means relationship happiness, low numbers lead to low quality of the relationship.

Examples of investments in the relationship bank account are spending time with somebody, going on a nice trip together, doing somebody a favor etc. Examples of withdrawals from the relationship bank account are all the things like cheating, lying, not keeping your promises etc.

Even if it might seem so on the first glance, conflicts aren’t withdrawals yet. Mismanaged conflicts turn into withdrawals from the relationship bank account. Properly managed conflicts can be an investment, assuming that relationship boundaries weren’t seriously breached.

That’s because properly managed conflicts can deepen the relationship bond. They present an opportunity to open up and forge a deeper bond. And conflicts that get out of hand (aka when severe punishment is happening) always cause destruction in relationships.
Here are examples of the most frequent punishments that lead to mishandled conflicts:

Aggressive reactions – physical or verbal abuse, explosiveness, loss of temper

Passive-aggressive reactions – silence, creating distance, becoming unreliable, rejection, isolation

Devaluing relationship – sarcasm, cynicism, criticizing, shaming, focusing only on the negative

Revenge, eye-for-an-eye thinking and similar destructive behaviors
Here is the thing. In the relationship bank account, the same rule applies as it does to the money one – it’s so easy to spend money and it’s so hard to save it. It’s so easy to punish someone or lose temper and so hard to invest energy into successful conflict resolution. But at the end of the day, that’s what makes the difference between wealthy and poor people in whichever context, the money or the relationship one. Wealthy people do the hard things.

So when you want to do additional damage in a relationship with punishment after a fight, ask yourself, why would you further destroy something you’ve been building (for months or years), why would you destroy the key wealth and value you have in your life? Relationships are one important part of the wealth you have, so chose the hard path, the asap resolution path.

You don’t just throw the computer out of the window when an error occurs; because you know it has value. The most important relationships in your life are even more valuable. So do the opposite from any kind of punishment. Decide to resolve a conflict as quickly as possible.

Well, fast doesn’t necessary means too fast. Resolving a conflict as quickly as possible has certain limitations, because you don’t want to do it superficially. Here are the exact steps to follow, which will absolutely lead you to successfully resolving a conflict:
1. Avoid all-or-nothing thinking
2. Wait for the emotional charge to neutralize
3. Really understand what’s happening behind the scenes
4. Forget mind reading, honest communication is the key
5. Decide to show respect to the other person
6. Don’t preach and make sure that the conversation is balanced
7. Focus on a specific behavior that bothers you and your feelings
8. Take a timeout if things get heated again
9. Sometimes you have to agree to disagree
10. Some conflicts simply can’t be resolved
Avoid all-or-nothing thinking at all costs

My personal biggest obstacle in successful conflict resolution in close relationships was always all‑or‑nothing thinking. For me, relationships were either perfect or nothing.

I was so happy and thankful for having someone in my life when things were perfect, and then after a small quarrel, the value of the relationship went straight to zero. Then things went back to perfect again after the conflict passed and soon back to zero, and so I was oscillating on an emotionally heavy roller coaster.

It took me quite a while to understand that life is never black and white. That all-or-nothing thinking is a very toxic cognitive distortion. There is no perfect relationship. If you want to have a healthy relationship with anyone, you have to accept turbulent times as well as happy times.

There is, of course, a line to draw where there is no going back or when there is just too much drama, but you still have to make sure that your emotional reaction in a quarrel is not out of proportion and that it doesn’t lead you to damaging the relationship even further.

Therefore, before we even go to successful conflict resolution, have realistic expectations regarding relationships. You can’t properly manage conflicts if every disagreement you have in life takes a relationship from everything to nothing.

Neutralize the emotional charge

If you want to successfully resolve a conflict, you have to first neutralize the emotional charge – on your side. Actually, it has to be neutralized on both sides. Take your time to calm down. Go for a walk. Take a few deep breaths. But that doesn’t mean you can’t immediately mitigate potential damage.

Agree with the other person to take time for emotions to calm down, but also agree to meet and resolve the conflict as soon as possible. Show your good intentions that you want to keep the relationship alive and that everything will be okay, things just need to calm down and then you’ll talk about it.

Humor is a good way to neutralize the emotional charge. Try to squeeze a small smile out of yourself, even though you are drowning in negative feelings, and explain the plan – let’s take a day or two for things to calm down and then we’ll have an honest talk. If you don’t do that, mind reading will come into play on both sides, and mind reading usually makes things much worse.

Forget about any mind reading

If you don’t immediately agree that you will both put the energy into resolving a conflict, mind reading games will take place. And trust me, your mind can take you to some very dark places – from fantasies about worst case scenarios and exaggerating about how the other person is feeling, to dreaming about potential revenge options and magnifying all the negatives and minimizing the positive aspects of the relationship.

You don’t know how the other person feels and what the other person thinks. Don’t try to be a fortuneteller and read minds. It doesn’t work. You are only assuming and you can be assuming wrong.

So you want to open honest communication as soon as possible, not base your actions purely on your assumptions. Wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups and if you act based on them, you can only make everything worse.

When you immediately agree to resolve the conflict somewhere in the nearby future, there is nothing to fantasize about, because you already know what the next step will be – finding a solution and getting back on good terms. If you manage to do that (and it does take some guts) the conflict already hit the bottom and things can only go upwards after that.

Really understand what’s happening behind the scenes

There are two types of conflicts –intellectual and emotional. Intellectual conflicts almost always have an obvious root cause. One person thinks A and the other person thinks the opposite or sees things differently in some way. Then you have to make compromises, find out-of-the-box win-win scenarios and new solutions, or at least develop empathy towards different opinions.

Emotional conflicts almost always have a deeper meaning. Usually you are fighting about one thing, but the root cause of the problem is something completely else. For example, in an intimate relationship you are fighting over whether the toilet seat should be up or down, but that is rarely the true reason for the conflict. Usually the real reason is that somebody feels neglected or some other deeper needs aren’t being met.

You can analyze with 5 Whys what really upset you or the other person so much, and make sure that you really understand what’s happening behind the curtains of the conflict. Look for changes in relationship patterns, like:
- What could be the person afraid of or angry about?
- Is there any big change that is causing stress (moving to a new place or offices, changing a job, illnesses, changes in market trends etc.)?
- Which things are different in a relationship than they were a week or month ago and how (how much quality time you spend together, are there new people present in social circles, are there new interests and desires that you are aware of etc.)?
- Are there changes in how much you or the other person is investing into the relationship?
- Were there any wrong assumptions present in the relationship from one side or the other or was something not communicated clearly?
- Is there a transference, projection or emotional flashback happening?
The first step is to take the time for an emotional charge to lose its power. Then you analyze what could be the real issue and what the fight is all about, while you avoid any mind reading. Please be careful about the difference. Mind reading is your mind going crazy and acting purely out of your ego assumptions.

A thorough analysis is something completely different. It’s a reflection about potential issues that are causing the conflict, while being aware of which parts of the analysis are only your assumptions and what are the facts. And even more, an analysis is about finding the right starting points for an honest talk. Following up on the honest talk should be your next step. But there are a few rules of how to have an honest talk.

Always show respect to the other person

The emotional charge should be gone by now, but you still might be a little bit angry, sorrowful, upset or hostile. Thus you have to consciously agree with yourself that you will show respect to the other person no matter what.

You must have an active constructive approach to the honest talk. That means no name‑calling, sarcasm, cynicism or labeling. You have to follow the basic rules of good communication. There is no quality relationship without mutual respect. That’s your start.

Always respect basic human rights. Everybody has the right to be treated with respect, to make autonomous decisions and to not listen to your advice or overtake your values. Everyone has the right to their own beliefs, values, opinions, preferences and feelings. As do you. Be tolerant and respect that.

Challenge yourself to find the good and beautiful thing inside of everyone. It’s there. It’s your job to find it. Not their job to show you. Mark Manson

Don’t preach, let the conversation be balanced

I love to preach. I love to judge, aggressively explain my convictions for hours and argue how I am right (fortunately, I’m doing that less and less). But here’s the thing. Nobody likes to be preached to. Even if people pretend that they are listening and agreeing with you, they are usually not. That was a big epiphany for me one day, and you won’t believe where – in a church.

I was raised as a catholic. And I always loved reading and listening to different views and opinions. So I always listened to priests preaching and then thought about what they were saying, why they were saying it and if it made any sense.

After the mass, I always wanted to debate with people what was the sermon all about. And I figured out that nobody really listened. Nobody had a clue or they had at most a vague idea of what the priest was talking about. I provoked dozens of people, young and old. Same response. Huh?

People don’t like to be preached to. So explain your view, emphasize especially how you feel and why you feel like you do (explain your values), make sure you are understood and then listen. The conversation must always be balanced. Don’t preach and don’t interrupt the other person.

When solving a conflict, focus on behaviors, feelings, values and solutions

During the honest recovery talk, don’t criticize the person and avoid “you” statements. Successful conflict resolution is not about playing the blame game, but about directing energy towards potential solutions. So focus on a specific behavior that bothers you and explain your feelings and experience connected to it.

Show your vulnerability. That’s how you create a safe zone for an honest talk. Explain your view through values and have radical candor. Suggest a few solutions and keep your mind open. That is the recipe for having a successful and honest talk that leads to conflict resolution.

It’s hard to achieve that. You have to open up and constantly keep your feelings in check. Your mind will try to slip back into the blame game, protecting your ego and minimize the value of the relationship. But you are stronger, you are smarter.
- You can turn anytime again against the other person (expressing your feelings in an unhealthy way)
- You can turn anytime against yourself (stifling your negative feelings)
- You can express your feelings in a healthy way and find a solution. Which one will it be?
The timeout

Since it’s not easy to always keep your feelings in check, there is one more tool you need. The timeout. In case a discussion gets too heated, agree that anyone can call a timeout. When someone calls the timeout, you just have to agree when to continue with the conversation.

My girlfriend and I always use the timeout strategy when the negative emotional charge gets too strong. When one of us calls a timeout, we immediately stop with any kind of action, words or unproductive non-verbal communication. We wait for things to calm down and then we continue with conflict resolution.

If every sports game has a timeout to cool down the heat, you deserve to have a timeout in your relationships when communication isn’t going in the right direction.

Sometimes it’s okay to agree to disagree

Much like you shouldn’t have unrealistic expectations that relationships are only a bed of roses, so you shouldn’t have wrong expectations that after a conflict, you always have to find a position where you both completely agree with the new common perspective.

Sometimes you just have to agree to disagree. If that’s emotionally okay with both parties, it can be a “win-win” situation.

It’s not like one person is always right and the other person is wrong. You can both be right, or you can even both be wrong. Thus it’s sometimes completely okay to agree to disagree. The main point of conflict resolution is that the trust doesn’t get damaged and that there are no heavy emotional knots in the relationship, growing into big emotional balloons that burst sooner or later.

Some conflicts simply can’t be resolved

Last but not least, some relationship conflicts can’t be resolved; or it doesn’t make sense to resolve them. It takes around 90 – 120 days for a relationship culture to get established; assuming that two individuals spend enough time together in person. After that, every relationship unfolds more or less by specific patterns.

The longer a certain pattern lasts, the harder it is to change it. And in every relationship, there are healthy and unhealthy patterns. We can further divide unhealthy patterns into tolerable and intolerable ones. The main idea of a pattern is its repetition. So if an intolerable pattern starts to occur and can’t be stopped, any further investment in a relationship is probably futile or leads to even more damage.

Cheating, physical violence, verbal abuse, threats, drugs and many similar extreme toxic behaviors have a tendency to repeat themselves (much like good relationship patterns do). So you must be extremely careful to set very straight and strict boundaries in relationships.

Once they are crossed, or the second time they happen at most, think twice before resolving the conflict and repeating the same scenario again from the beginning. You aren’t here to save people in relationships, you are here to enjoy relationships.

Your toolbox for successful conflict resolution

Now you have the toolbox to successfully resolve conflicts. I’m completely sure that you already intuitively knew 90 % of the things discussed in this article; or even more. But it’s not about knowing it, it’s about practicing it.

If you are currently in the middle of a conflict with anyone, you know what to do. Send a message, drop an e-mail or call the person to set a date to have an honest resolution talk. Assuming that deep down, you hope to resolve the conflict.

And if you aren’t currently in any conflict, you know what to do the next time you encounter one. Commit yourself to handle a conflict at least a bit differently, slightly more constructive than how you usually handle it.

Homework

There are many options how you can do that. To repeat them:
- Do the opposite from the aggressive, passive-aggressive or any other type of toxic action after a conflict occurs.
- Immediately agree to solve the conflict somewhere in the nearby future (it takes guts to do that, but it feels good) and take time for the negative emotional charge to pass.
- Don’t let your mind take you into dark places with all-or-nothing thinking or fortunetelling.
- Practice empathy and try to analyze what’s happening behind the scenes. Use the 5 Whys technique, self-reflection, and analyze if you or the other person might be in an emotional flashback.
- Always show respect. That is your starting point. In intimate relationships, love is lust and respect.
- Let the conversation be balanced, don’t preach, and focus on behaviors, values and solutions.
- If the conversation gets too heated, call a timeout. Also use the same tool the first time a conflict occurs, if things are going completely in the wrong direction.
- Look for win-win solutions, find new creative standpoints. If you don’t find any of that, agree to disagree and continue to enjoy the relationship. The key thing is not to damage the trust, to open yourself, show your vulnerability and see a conflict as an opportunity to deepen any relationship.
How much relationship drama is just too much?
Every relationship is a dynamic mixture of two energies – positive and negative ones.

Positive energies are the energies of connecting, sharing and loving. They bring people closer. Examples of positive energies are touching, making love, having deep talks, exchanging useful information, working on team projects, having fun together, sharing resources, offering mutual support, and so on.

Negative energies as the second dynamic are thoughts, words and actions that bring distance and tension in relationships. Negative energies are the energies of disconnecting, excluding, hating and alienating. Below are examples of negative energies in relationships.

I call them drama in one word.
- Gossiping
- Lying
- Hiding the truth
- Verbal fighting
- Physical fighting
- Passive aggressiveness
- Ignorance
- Controlling
- Humiliating
- Manipulating
- Cheating
- Stealing
- Betraying
- Hypocrisy
- And so on
Negative energies are present in every single relationship. It’s a matter of the yin–yang principle and the duality of life. Positive can’t exist without negative. There is no good without bad. And in everything good there is just a little bit of bad, and in everything bad there is just a little bit of good.

Here are a few examples. If you eat too much chocolate, you get sick. In the same way, if you spend too much time with someone, like 24/7, a relationship starts to get stifling. And there must be a little bit of friction and conflict in a relationship. It brings passion, creativity and growth to both parties.

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.

It brings nothing but the negative and drama into the lives of everyone involved. That’s why it makes sense to constantly pay attention to how much drama there is in every personal relationship in your life, especially the key ones, and to manage drama properly.

The DNA of a relationship is set in the first 90 days

In the startup world, there is a saying that the team’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. A-level people attract A-level people. Smart people attract other smart people from different domains and industries.

Every startup has its own DNA, which is considered a combination of culture, processes, competencies, vision and other elements. The DNA is nothing but a mixture of its leaders’ DNAs. You can find the same phenomenon in personal relationships, especially in two ways.

Birds of a feather flock together. People who like drama attract people who like drama. If somebody doesn’t like drama, they cut people who cause drama out of their lives. Ambitious people attract other ambitious people. People who like to whine and complain spend a lot of time with other people who whine and complain.

Analyze people in your life and they always reflect a part of your personality. Much like parts of your personality are reflected in other people’s lives. So change yourself and you can change others. Change yourself and new people will come into your life. Find a new group of people and you will become a new person. It’s that simple.

Men/women are like kitchen tile. If you lay them right the first time, they stay there for the rest of your life. It’s a stupid example, but it shows very well how the DNA in an intimate relationship or any other relationship is formed. The beginnings of every relationship are extremely important and they set the tone of the relationship for the rest of its existence.

In the first 90 days, the culture of a relationship gets shaped. Boundaries, general attitude, communication style, common interests and the things you do together, locations where you spend time together, relationship vision, and so on. Once the relationship DNA is set, it’s extremely hard to change it. It can be done, but it’s extremely hard.

If you observe a little bit, you will see that with the same person things usually evolve and operate on the same pattern. You do the same things together. You talk about quite similar topics all the time. You go to more or less the same restaurants or types of restaurants. You have the same types of fights, and so on. That’s the relationship’s DNA. It’s a collection of the relationship’s core patterns.

If a lot of drama develops in the first 90 days, because both parties encourage or allow it in one way or another, there is a great probability that drama will be a dominating force for the rest of the relationship.

The first 90 days are crucial for the direction into which a relationship will go. So make sure that you set the right boundaries and the right culture from the beginning. Making changes later in a relationship takes incomparably more effort and hard work.

Every relationship is a dynamic thing, for sure. It can be changed later. People change their preferences and values. A relationship’s DNA is no guarantee for anything to be as it is forever and it’s not completely predictable. But it definitely sets the general tone of a relationship. Now let’s get back to drama.

How much relationship drama is just too much?

As we said, there is some level of drama in every relationship. In every relationship’s DNA, there are chromosomes that cause tensions, destructive interpersonal patterns and misunderstandings. But the question is: how much drama is simply too much?

If we want to find the answer, we need a few metrics that can help us determine how toxic a relationship is. Since relationships are not math, it’s a completely subjective assessment, but we can still get a good sense of quality of every relationship.

The metrics that measure the level of drama are at least the following (I read that somewhere on the internet and found it a brilliant idea, so I developed it further):
Type of drama and level of destructiveness (intensity)

Frequency of drama

Average duration of drama
Type of relationship drama

There are different levels of destructive patterns in relationships. In other words, there are things that can be forgiven and things that shouldn’t be acceptable at all. Some things hurt more than others.

It definitely depends on you what is acceptable to you and what hurts you the most, but we can try to set a general scale from the most destructive type of drama to the most forgivable one.

Ground zero is having a normal human discussion with someone. Then we can continue with heated discussions and small fights that are quickly under control. But already in the next step, we have different types of drama that at some point get out of control and can even escalate all the way to physical abuse.

Here are different types of drama:
- Physical abuse: Hitting a person, strangling, scratching, kicking, smacking, throwing objects etc.
- Verbal abuse: Humiliating, scolding, making fun, insulting, passive aggressiveness, criticizing, sarcasm, mockery, threatening etc.
- Betrayal: Cheating, lying, having double standards, manipulating, stealing etc.
- Behavioral abuse: Ignoring, evoking jealousy on purpose, rudeness, controlling etc.
You can find 50+ types of drama in the template you can download at the end of the article.

I suggest you make your own scale of what is tolerable to you, what you can deal with and where is the limit when a behavior becomes completely unacceptable to you. A deal breaker. If you don’t want toxic patterns to repeat themselves, you have to draw the line the first time it happens.

When it happens the second time, you just leave.

Frequency of relationship drama

The second important metric is the frequency of drama or, to be more exact, the frequency of different types of dramas. Frequency is extremely important and here is why.

Causing drama is a bad life decision. What leads to a general poor quality of life is making a series of bad decisions, stupid decisions. You can make a big stupid decision, like driving drunk and getting into an accident, or you can make small daily stupid decisions, like smoking a pack of cigarettes.

Even if small stupid decisions don’t seem as hurtful as the big ones, they accumulate over time and can have an even greater negative impact than big stupid decisions. The best thing is obviously to avoid both, big and small stupid decisions, but frequency matters because it accumulates. It’s the same with the frequency of drama.

Everyday cynicism, criticism and small fights can be as hurtful as big abusive fights that happen from time to time.

You want to avoid every toxic combination: frequent big drama and frequent small drama. Drama should be the exception in a relationship, not a rule. It’s completely up to you to decide where is the limit when an exception turns into a rule. Nevertheless, we again need some metrics to get a better perspective.

You can simply measure how often drama happens in every one of your relationships. It can be:
- Constant never-ending drama
- Daily
- Weekly
- A couple times per month
- A couple times per year
- Never – which is usually also not a good sign
What you’re looking for are exceptions that cause drama. Somebody had a bad day or got thrown out of their emotional center. Being extremely tired lowers tolerance levels, and so on.

At the end of the day, tough times are real relationship tests. They aren’t toxic drama, they’re real-life tests. But what you want to avoid at all costs is a repeating pattern of constant drama in a relationship.

Average duration of a relationship drama

A monster grows with time. Drama grows with time. You want drama in your relationship to be short and to turn sweet as quickly as possible – into a smile, hug, deep conversation or make-up sex. The longer the drama lasts, the more your precious life is being wasted.

Simply measure how long a drama lasts in different relationships you have in your life:
- A few minutes
- An hour
- A few hours
- Maybe even a few days
- Seems like forever
Together with the other person in a relationship, you have to find a way to make every drama last as short as possible. There are many tools you can use to achieve that, but that’s a topic for the next article.

What is acceptable to you?

As we discussed, every relationship has a certain DNA. The DNA as a blueprint of a relationship consists of patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, unless a person is really prepared to change things when the relationship gets toxic; or both of them, to be more exact, since there must be two people to create drama.

It rarely happens that people are willing to change, but sometimes it does. In my past, I tolerated and created a lot more drama than is acceptable to me today.

In very healthy relationships, drama occurs a few times per year, it’s always a controlled one that doesn’t do serious emotional damage and it lasts for an hour or so at most. Under rare circumstances, spikes can happen, but they must be a big exception not a rule.

The type of drama, frequency and duration – you have to decide what is acceptable to you. You have to decide how much drama you will create in relationships and how much you will tolerate. Try to get the drama creation from your side to be as low as possible and then show the other person how to do that.

There are many mechanisms for achieving that:
- Compliment people and tell them you love them (5 – 7 compliments to 1 critique is a healthy ratio)
- Express your expectations and boundaries with values
- Be straight with other people, apply the radical candor philosophy
- Develop superior communication skills
- Don’t let debates escalate in a negative direction
- Treat others as you want to be treated
- Try to solve problems immediately
- Apologize when you make a mistake
- Learn to accept yourself and others as they are
Although we know many drama management tools, from time to time you meet a drama queen or drama king, and then it’s usually time to let go and move on.

Sadly, people create drama in relationships because that’s the only way they know, they had dramatic relationships at home with their parents. But only when people are willing to change, only when people are willing to find a new better way, can you really help them and show them how to improve and how to grow.

Homework

Relationship drama assessment template

Below you can download a template that will help you evaluate how much drama there is in your relationships in life. It will help you get a clearer picture of how healthy a specific relationship is. It won’t give you an exact answer, but you’ll get the general idea. The template includes 50+ abusive behavioral patterns.

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- Relationship drama assessment – Template (xls)
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So many people prefer to live in drama because it’s comfortable. It’s like someone staying in a bad marriage or relationship – it’s actually easier to stay because they know what to expect every day, versus leaving and not knowing what to expect. – Ellen DeGeneres
The real secrets to outstanding communication
Let’s go straight to the bottom line. 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 the skill number one.

You can find hundreds of books and online articles explaining thousands of different rules for how to be a good communicator. In fact, there is so much different advice out there that you can get easily lost and in the end implement none. That’s not the strategy we’re looking for.

I’ll share the right strategy, the best recommendations and the real secret to outstanding communication. The real secret to outstanding communication is that it’s not really hard to achieve it. It’s actually extremely easy. You don’t need to follow 100+ rules. All you need to know are a few core concepts that make the difference between poor, mediocre and deep, multidimensional human connections.

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.

And remember, healthy relationships are what matters most in life. If you excel in communication and have many deep relationships in life, your happiness level will definitely increase.

Here are the core communication concepts you need to know:
1. Be curious about the other person
2. Know how to really listen (there is a simple trick how to do that)
3. Create a psychologically safe environment
4. Employ radical candor (honesty builds trust)
5. Always have an active constructive response
6. Explain relationship rules with values
7. Sometimes words aren’t enough and so you must communicate things with your behavior
That’s it. If you follow these rules, people will see you as an outstanding communicator. Now let’s go into detail.

Be extremely curious about the other person

If we forget about abusive and toxic relationships, there are only two types of communication: meh & wow. The first one is the average type of communication, the okay one, the “meh” one, and the second one is the outstanding, extraordinary, “wow” I-want-more type of communication. There is no middle ground when we communicate.

The main difference between “meh” and “wow” is the extent to which you show genuine interest in someone. Curiosity is your best ally when it comes to extraordinary communication. I think you shouldn’t even start a conversation if you aren’t honestly, deeply, vigorously, expectantly interested in someone.

It’s extremely obvious when you’re really interested in forging a connection with someone. You want to know everything about them. I mean really everything. Their life story, how they achieved what they achieved, how they think, their values, what they love the most in life, and numerous other things.

You know in a single second if there is a spark of genuine interest in a conversation or not. When there is no spark at all, there is no right vibe in the air, no shine in the eyes, it’s hard to come up with questions, and awkward silence often takes place (not the good type of silence).

In such a case, it’s better to say goodbye rather than torture both parties; or even better, make yourself interested. Committing yourself to go from “meh” to “wow” in any case.

It’s easy to become interested in someone with the same values, the same hobbies or any other common ground. That’s what you’re usually naturally looking for when you start a conversation (common friends, places etc.) and then you build up the communication and relationship from there. What’s much harder is to show curiosity in people who are completely different from you.

Showing interest in somebody even when it’s hard to make a connection is what makes you the real master of communication. If you learn to communicate with people you share no common ground with, you become that much better in communication with other people where a connection exists. And your intellectual horizon significantly expands. I’m still learning this mastery level.

Here are a few tips that can help you achieve such a level I am also learning to follow:
- Be extremely tolerant. The most advanced societies in the world are tolerant societies. Tolerance is what leads to diverse, heterogenic and integrative environment. Only two completely different views hold the potential to create something new. That’s why we say that opposites attract. That’s why tolerance is important. The only thing you shouldn’t tolerate is intolerance.
- What’s your story? Every human has their own completely personal story that absolutely has interesting parts, you just have to dig deep enough to find them.
- You can learn something from everybody you meet on your life path. You just have to avoid being cocky or feeling superior. Never put your ego before learning something new.
- Treat other people as you want to be treated. That means showing respect to other people. Instead of being judgmental, try to understand why somebody is as they are.
Following these values – showing tolerance, curiosity, the desire to learn and understand and respect, is the first step that will make you an extraordinary communicator.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Dale Carnegie

Listening skills

If you’re really curious about someone’s life, you really listen. You follow the rule that God (or whoever) gave you two ears and only one mouth. What being a good listener really means is not very complicated. In fact, there is only one subtle difference between being an active listener and a bad one.

An outstanding communicator doesn’t listen to respond, but listens to understand the other person. That’s it. Active listening means being an empathic listener. You imagine being in the shoes of the other person, reliving their experience and trying to understand it – from what happened to the person you’re talking to, to how they reacted and why they reacted as they did.

An outstanding communicator doesn’t listen to respond, but listens to understand the other person.

If you are a good listener, you deeply understand the other person and you know how to show it. On the other hand, if you are a bad listener you always miss the point, especially because you are eager to respond and tell your opinion. You see, in communication people most often aren’t looking for your opinion but want to be understood, feel connected to someone.

The next time you’re communicating with someone, have a goal of learning about them and understanding them, not telling your opinion. Shut up, open your heart, pay attention to every word, ask questions, and try to relive the situation of the person you’re communicating with.

Creating a psychologically safe environment

Google did big research on the best performing teams and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else. In the best teams, members listen to one another and showed sensitivity to each other’s feelings and needs. Read that again: members showed sensitivity to team members’ feelings and needs. They listened verbally and non-verbally to understand.

There were two indicators of psychological safety:
- Firstly, team members spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking.
- Secondly, all the good teams had high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.
Psychological safety is what makes teams function best and in the same way, creating a psychologically safe environment with someone you are talking with is what makes you have outstanding communication skills.

As we’ve already mentioned, if you want to be a good communicator, you can’t be dominant in talking – you have to actively listen and be curious. It’s part of creating that kind of a safe environment.

Equally important, if you want to be an outstanding communicator, you must not pay attention to only what people say, but also to what their body language tells you and how they behave. That helps you understand the whole picture and the hidden hints a person is trying to tell you, but doesn’t tell them directly. I call these things reading between the lines.

On a practical level, when communicating with anyone, observe their body language – is it open, defensive, positive, negative …? It’s not hard to notice posture, facial expressions and other basic body language signs. Try to sense feelings inside a person you’re communicating with, and connect and resonate with the same feelings. Synchronizing the vibes will create the safe environment.

Psychological safety means that people know, on the emotional level, that they will be accepted in communication with you with all their flaws. That you understand their imperfection, their struggle and battles with themselves. A psychologically safe zone means that you understand them, if necessary encourage them, mentor them and love them even if sometimes they can’t follow the path they have set for themselves.

When you communicate with people, you must show that you do care.

There are many things that destroy psychological safety, and here are the most frequent ones:
- Should statements – you should do this or that (people usually already know it).
- Non-constructively criticizing and preaching – Constantly criticizing, judging and preaching means that people will start talking with you only about the weather, traffic jams and the daily news.
- Being dominant in communication – Interrupting, talking 50%+ of the time, using an aggressive tone.
- Gossiping – If you are gossiping about somebody else it’s a clear sign that you will be gossiping about the person you are talking with.
- Lying to people and being a hypocrite – If somebody catches you lying or they know you lie frequently, it’s hard to build a psychologically safe environment.
- Politics and diplomacy – You sense somebody isn’t saying something only so they wouldn’t offend you, but deep down you know they think differently than they say … which leads us to the next point.
Being radically candid

Source: First Round

You definitely have to establish a psychologically safe environment, but that doesn’t mean you put being nice and kind before the honest truth. That’s hypocrisy and manipulation. Introducing diplomacy and politics into communication is what immediately kills psychological safety and outstanding communication.

I would never trust a politician with my secrets. Duh!

With curiosity, active listening, understanding and creating a psychologically safe environment you show that you deeply care about a person, that they can trust you and that you will put the integrity of the conversation above everything. Offering a shoulder to lean on is a good first step, but it’s not enough for outstanding communication.

After establishing a safe environment and showing that you care, you also have to counter-balance conversation by being radically candid. Otherwise communication is nothing else but bitching, whining, complaining and spreading negative energy. If you really care, you sometimes have to show tough love. But it’s more art than science to figure out when to do that and when to just offer a shoulder to lean on.

Anyway, having radical candor means creating a bullshit-free communication zone. The concept is taken from the business world, explaining how a constructive relationship between a boss and an employee should be like, but I think it applies to every single relationship.

Honesty builds trust. Nevertheless, there is a very subtle difference between preaching with “should” statements and criticizing and showing that you care while employing constructive radical candor. To do the latter, here are a few basic rules:
- Show that you care, not only with words but also with actions (buy people books that can help them solve a problem, introduce them to new people who can help them, send them interesting articles, recommend conferences to them etc.)
- Don’t tell people what they should do, show them how they can do better
- Contribute out-of-the box creative ideas that aren’t so obvious
- Use the ratio of 5 praises for 1 critique, and make sure that the critique is constructive
- And especially: don’t tell people to do things that you aren’t doing yourself
Active constructive response

Source: Go Strenghts

When somebody initiates a conversation with you, there are four ways of how you can respond. Your initial response usually sets the tone for the rest of the conversation. Therefore, always beginning with the right kind of response and then continuing to use it is what leads to outstanding communication.

Here are the four types of responses in communication:
- Active constructive: Authentic, enthusiastic, supportive
- Passive constructive: Showing silent support
- Active destructive: Pointing out the negative and problems
- Passive destructive: Failing to acknowledge, ignoring
An active response means that you get fully engaged in conversation. You very carefully follow everything we’ve mentioned so far. An active response means that you put down your phone or whatever else you’re doing, and start paying full attention to the person in the present moment.

You actively listen and show curiosity in what a person has to say. A passive response means that you aren’t fully present – you know, you’re talking to a person while browsing your phone, multitasking etc.

“Want to prolong the battery life on your iPhone? Put it the fuck away when you’re talking to me.”

Your response can also be either constructive or destructive. The destructive type of communication is when you focus on the negative, problems or blame, or when you reject a person in a brutal way.

As we have seen, there are two ways of being destructive. You can be destructive very passively – for example, you show the “meh” response only with your body language or you are passive aggressive. But you can also be destructive in a very active manner, by being openly aggressive, insulting etc. You don’t want either of that.

You want to follow the rule to respond 80%+ in the active constructive way and 20%- in the passive constructive way. And you must unlearn any kind of destructive response.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t say no, if necessary. I’m sure that you know there’s a way to say no in a very active constructive way (more about that in one of the next blog posts).

Explaining rules with values

This one is a little bit complicated, but please bear with me, it’s a very critical core communication concept. In every relationship, there are always at least some rules and boundaries.

Well, to be more exact, for each relationship type you have specific expectations and internal representations of what healthy boundaries are and why they are important to you – in a relationship with a friend, a spouse, a boss or whoever. These internal representations are closely connected to your values.

A very important part of a quality and deep relationship is not only liking the other person for their personality characteristics, they also have to more or less meet your expectations of how a specific relationship should look like, including respecting rules and boundaries important to you. These rules and boundaries usually come from your primary family culture.

Not to sound too abstract, here are a few examples:
- For someone, it’s normal to greet a person with a hug, for somebody else only with a handshake.
- One friend may not care at all if you are 5 minutes late, but the other one will go crazy.
- Your ex-spouse didn’t care at all whether you sent her a message while she was at work, but to your current girlfriend getting a message from you really means a lot; or remembering your anniversary.
There are many different kinds of expectations, boundaries and rules – from frequency of communication, type of communication, level of intimacy, the ways of showing love and respect, what gifts mean to a person, you name it (these are all types of non-verbal communication). Poor verbal communication always leads to a lack of understanding and respecting these rules and values, and consequently to a shitty relationship in general.

A very frequent cause of shitty relationships is poor verbal communication about values, expectations and rules.

The mistake you can make in every single relationship, besides not respecting other people’s boundaries, is trying to only enforce specific rules from your side without explaining why they are important to you. The key to extraordinary relationships is that you don’t just set boundaries and rules, but explain with values why something is important to you. The sooner you do that the better, because you open yourself up. This leads to a whole new level of understanding, trust and quality of communication on every other topic.

This is one very good way of developing deep communication with somebody and being perceived as an outstanding communicator. You must open yourself up and explain your values as soon as possible and then listen hard enough to understand the values of other people and, of course, respect them. Forging a connection on the level of mutual understating of core values is what opens the doors to hearts, no matter how different you are from each other.

For that, you have to be able to express your feelings in a healthy manner, clearly explain your values and why certain things in a relationship are important to you, and that you expect the same thing from the other person – to communicate with you what is important to them.

If you aren’t talking about your feelings, values and the kind of a unique relationship you want, communication is rarely deep and quality, especially with the closest people in your life. Feelings are what builds a real connection.
- There is a difference between forbidding your kid from watching the TV while eating because you say so, and explaining that in your family, it’s important to talk and communicate (explaining values) and a meal is a great opportunity to feel grateful for each other, talk and share thoughts, and how the TV is preventing that.
- There is a big difference between sulking all day because your friend was 10 minutes late and explaining that being late equals being disrespectful and ignorant to you and that it makes you feel like you don’t matter to them.
The more a relationship develops with time, the higher is the need for communication about values, expectations and internal representations. Only honest talk about these things can lead to taking the communication to a whole new level and deepening a relationship with someone.

When verbal communication isn’t enough

There is one more level of communication that’s really important for outstanding relationships. You rarely need, but it’s a tool at your disposal when words and all the constructive use of language isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to show people with actions, not with words, the directions into which you want to move a relationship for it to stay a quality one and not turn into a “relationshit”.

In specific radical situations, behavior is a much better type of communication than words are. Here is the theory behind this. You let others know how to treat you and what kind of a relationship you want by tolerating different kinds of behaviors.

The more you tolerate a behavior you don’t like, the faster the quality of a relationship declines. At the end of the day, the quality of a relationship and communication with the people you care about depends on how they behave towards you, not what they say to you.

“A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.” Henrik Ibsen

From time to time, after explaining something that you don’t like over and over again and not getting anywhere, you’re left with no choice but to show what you mean with actions. It’s a way of you communicating with the other person to take the issue seriously.

As you probably figured out, I’m especially talking about toxic and abusive behavioral patterns in relationships. Sooner or later, they happen in every single relationship – from one person investing much more than the other into the relationship, to passive aggressiveness, open verbal fights, envy and jealousy to many other kind of power struggles.

Some form of damaging behavior shows up in every relationship (because relationships are already a broken glass) from both parties and sometimes actions are the best way of communicating things. Here are a few examples:
- If you are annoyed that you always have to pay, don’t pay next time.
- If someone is insulting you, explain to them that the relationship will end the next time they do it, and then do it.
- If you don’t like to wait and you have to wait for someone after explaining your values to them, leave and make sure they turn up on time next time.
- If a waiter is not respectful to you, ask for the manager and negotiate that you will not pay the bill.
Although, keep in mind that outstanding communication is more art than science. There is a thin subtle line between being rude, wanting to change the other person instead of specific toxic behavior and enforcing important rules to you by acting in a respective manner.

Now you know the path to outstanding communication

Encourage people in their goals, mentor them and show them how to do things in a different, better way, help them grow, push them to new levels of competence, be a good friend and show that you care a lot while also being honest and not permitting any bullshit or toxic behavior.

You can only achieve that with outstanding communication and giving your best in every single conversation. To summarize:
- Show genuine interest and curiosity, have a high level of tolerance and ask many questions.
- Be an empathic listener, not with the goal of responding, but to understand and learn about the other person. Learning about the other person is the key to active listening.
- Create a psychologically safe environment by connecting with other’s people feelings and by paying attention to body language and not being a critical, cold, dominant and/or lying person. And make sure you don’t gossip ever.
- Don’t be a politician or a diplomat, practice honest communication, but when you have radical candor show that you care, and at the same time inspire people or teach them how to do things better. Never only preach with should statements.
- Respond in an active constructive manner 80% of time. Communicate with people actively and being completely present, or don’t communicate at all. And always be constructive in a conversation.
- The deeper a relationship goes, the more you must talk about your values, why something is important to you, and your feelings, and you must encourage the other person to do the same.
- Sometimes the best communication is communication with actions, especially when people start behaving toxically or abusively.
Healthy relationships are what matters most in life
Do you have big plans and big goals for your life? Do you want to live the good life, the dream life and are prepared to fight for it? Excellent. If you really want to reach the stars, there is one very important fact you must know.

The culture of the environment you function in eats your visions, goals and strategy for breakfast. How you act and consequently also the potential you can achieve in life is always the result of your personality and your environment. So you must constantly improve yourself, but you must also make sure you choose the right environment for you to thrive.

Your success = the best version of you + the right environment (markets, relationships)

To prosper in life, you need to be a part of something that feels like home and natural to you, and enables you to flourish, develop and grow. You need an environment with ideal conditions for you go after the big goals you have in life.

You need an environment that supports you in achieving your goals, an environment where you fit in perfectly and that shoots you right among the stars.

There are many parts of your environment that have an influence on you, like your country, political stability, demographic trends, dominating religion, access to healthcare etc. (here are all of them listed) but there are two environmental factors with the strongest influence:
- the markets you choose and
- the relationships you form.
Markets always win. Markets can make you or break you. And people you let close in your life can make you or break you. Who knows what happens after death, but people can make your life heaven or hell on Earth for sure.

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

Good relationships can make your life really worth living, and crappy people in your life can make you suffer and drown in misery.

In this article you will learn:
- Why relationships are heaven or hell on Earth
- Different types of relationships and why they matter
- What you should expect from different relationships
- How to choose who to spend time with
- How to find people who will support you in life
What are healthy relationships

Let’s start with defining what a healthy relationship is. First of all, mistakes happen in every relationship, there is no such thing as a perfect relationship.

Nevertheless, a relationship can be deep and strong, or shallow and superficial. And even more importantly, a relationship can be a healthy or a toxic one.

Here are the signs of a healthy relationship:
1. Both people have the center on themselves and only then is a relationship formed
2. You share similar values and interests and you create, have fun and experience things together
3. There is a high level of tolerance, transparency, trust and respect
4. You listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs
5. There are always more dimensions present in a relationship
6. You encourage each other to constantly improve and achieve personal goals
7. The investment into the relationship is close to 1:1 from both sides
8. You communicate with active constructive responses 80 % of the time and you communicate a lot about the important things
9. You hold each other up when tough times come
10. In intimate relationships, there must be love and sexual attraction
Don’t just read the statements and agree with them. Ask yourself the right questions for every relationship you have in your life.

What kind of activities are you doing together? Are you treated as an equal and with dignity? Are you asked for your opinion about important life decisions that influence both parties? Are you being constantly criticized? Is there a high level of trust?

As mentioned, there are always errors in relationships. No relationship is perfect. But there is a limit when too many repeating errors make a relationship toxic.

If there are patterns like severe criticism, contempt, rudeness, meanness, jealousy, insulting, degrading, blaming, guilt-tripping, criticizing, physically acting out, the person constantly repeating themselves, a relationship is definitely toxic.

Now, a toxic or abusive relationship has many negative consequences. It can literately suck the soul out of you. It can make you a zombie. Misery loves company!

First of all, it takes a lot of energy, then it hinders your self-confidence, in abusive relationships there is always an absence of strong foundations of love and support to go after your goals, you become depressed, bitter, you start doubting yourself and sooner or later you start drowning in the victim mindset.

On the other hand, healthy relationships provide you with strong foundations and roots to go after your goals. With a healthy relationship, you know you have a place to go when things go wrong, you are always encouraged and supported.

With many healthy relationships, you feel strong, grateful and alive. It’s definitely the best thing you can have in life.

Different types of relationships

Now that we know what a healthy relationship is, let’s look at the most important relationships you will forge in your life. Love and work, that’s all there is. Consequently, we have personal and professional relationships.

There are, of course, also different levels of intimacy in every relationship, from professional, to being only acquaintances, to being friends, friends with benefits all the way to real intimate relationships. You can experience different types and levels of a relationship with the same person.

But you probably already know that from your own experience. All in all, what’s more important is that there are six relationships that shape your life the most:

Personal relationships
- Spouse
- Family (primary/secondary)
- Friends
Professional relationships
- Boss
- Coworkers / Co-founders
- Mentor / Mastermind group
The more ambitious you are, the more you need the right environment that supports your ambitions – professional and personal one; besides market trends supporting you (financial, job markets etc.), you especially need a lot of healthy relationships.

A person in a healthy environment and with healthy relationships flourishes, a person in a bad environment withers like an unwatered flower.

When it comes to personal relationships, you must always be aware of your personal power. You can choose most of these relationships in your life. You choose who you’ll spend time with and who doesn’t deserve a spot in your life. Only if you are proactive enough. Actually, you must be superproactive.

But at the end of the day, relationships are your choice. It’s not love’s fault or the HR department’s to reply to your job application or whoever. You should never blame anyone else for having crappy people in your life (authority figures in your youth are an exception, but more about that later).

You want to be in a position to know exactly what kind of relationships you want in life and then going after them. Making a persona of ideal relationships might help you with that. Now let’s do a deep dive into the six most important relationships in your life.

Personal relationships

In your personal life, there are three pillars of love and nurture that you need: love from your spouse, your family (primary, secondary) and your friends (community). To be happy, especially in the mature ages of life, you need all three pillars, building them as strong as possible, at least in some form.

Spouse

You may be single at the moment (and fool around), but you will end up in a serious relationship sooner or later. If not, you’re probably quite emotionally damaged and need to develop a deeper capacity for love and commitment.

It’s hard to get real value out of intimate relationships if you are unable to commit. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Now, the intimate partner you choose (they’re not brought to you by love or a greater force, you choose them) for the long-term relationship, will have one of the biggest influences on your life. Right after your parents. And I mean a really big influence on your life.

Your spouse can make you or break you. There is no third option. If you constantly fight, if you feel insecure and share no similar hobbies or values, your relationship will drain the energy out of you day by day before you eat breakfast.

Being in an abusive, boring or toxic intimate relationship is one of the most frequent ways to become a zombie (next to having an abusive boss).

So choose your spouse very carefully. Make sure you have similar values, but that there is also an opportunity to grow together. Make sure you have common hobbies and activities you both like, but also different perspectives that enrich you both.

Remember that couples who do things together, stay together. Make sure there is a physical fit, intellectual fit, emotional fit and spiritual fit. It must feel right. Make sure you encourage each other and provide emotional security when things go tough. And know that you have to constantly put effort into a relationship to develop a deeper and deeper bond.

We are all people; we all make mistakes in relationships. That’s normal. It’s not about the mistakes, it’s about a relationship being toxic or not; and whether you’re becoming a better version of yourself because of the intimate relationship you have.

It’s not easy to end a long-term relationship, but it’s often necessary for further personal development and happiness in life.

First of all, make sure your intimate relationship isn’t toxic and that you’re growing together all the time. If you have a hard time deciding whether you should stay together or not, there is a great book called Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay, written by Mira Kirshenbaum.

You may not choose who you fall in love with, but you can definitely choose with whom you will stay.

There are 36 questions in the book that should help you decide if you should end a relationship or not. Here are the top questions from the mentioned book that I find important and may help you decide on the quality of your relationship:
1. Do you currently share goals and dreams for your life together?
2. Have you made a commitment to pursue a course of action or lifestyle that definitely excludes your partner?
3. Do you and your partner have even one positively pleasurable activity or interest (besides children) that you currently share and look forward to sharing in the future?
4. Does your relationship support your having fun together?
5. Would you say that to you, your partner is basically nice, reasonable intelligent, not too neurotic, okay to look at, and most of the time smells alright?
6. Do both you and your partner want to touch each other and look forward to touching each other and make efforts to touch each other?
7. Do you feel a unique sexual attraction to your partner?
8. Does your partner bombard you with difficulties when you try to get even the littlest thing you want; and is it your experience that almost any need you have gets obliterated?
9. Do you have a basic, recurring, never-completely-going-away feeling of humiliation or invisibility in your relationship?
10. Have you got to the point, when your partner says something, that you usually feel it’s more likely that he’s lying than that he’s telling the truth?
11. Do you genuinely like your partner, and does your partner seem to like you?
12. Is there something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in and that they acknowledge but they’re unwilling to do anything about?
13. In spite of all the ways you’re different, would you say that deep down your partner is someone just like you in a way you feel good about?
14. Do you feel that your partner, overall and more often than not, shows concrete support for and genuine interest in the things you’re trying to do that are important to you?
15. Would you lose anything important in your life if your partner were no longer your partner?
16. Is there a demonstrated capacity and mechanism for forgiveness in your relationship?
17. Has your partner violated what for you is a bottom line?
18. If God or some omniscient being said it was okay to leave, would you feel tremendously relieved and have a strong sense that finally you could end your relationship?
These are definitely tough and to-the-point questions that should help you to make the right decision. If you decide to break a long term-relationship or if you are single and want to really find the partner of your life, start building up your sexual market value (after taking time for recovery).

Go to the gym, eat healthy, develop social skills, read a lot and become an interesting person, improve your bed skills, learn how to approach, and so on. Don’t expect “love at first sight” to do it instead of you.

Family

This is a very easy one, if you were raised in a healthy family environment, and a very tricky one if you were raised in a toxic family and you don’t have a deep connection and shared values with your family members.

In any case, family is important and no matter how difficult the situation is, you have to maximize the love you can get from your family ties.

Family is important for many reasons. The early relationships with your mother, father and other authority figures in your youth become blueprints for all your relationships later in life.

Family also gives you the framework for your values; how well you were nurtured influences whether you developed hope, strong will, purpose and industry in life or you’ll be hindered by negative emotions as an emotional midget. Your upbringing also greatly influences your happiness levels.

You can never truly understand yourself without understanding your family roots.

Family should be the one that’s there for you in tragic situations, family should be the one helping you the most financially (inheritance) and it should be the greatest support you have in life.

Healthy relationships with the family

Healthy family presents foundations and roots in your life, so that you can fly high. Family is legacy handed over to you, and you are the one handing legacy down to your offspring, enriched or impoverished.

Now, errors are made in every family, there are always disagreements and differences in values. But there is a limit, where errors are normal and when the environment becomes toxic.

If you have a healthy family, it’s your duty make this pillar of love even stronger, by nurturing good relations with family members and enriching the legacy you will pass on. You have to be grateful, because being born in a healthy family is the greatest security and given advantage in life.

Toxic family

One of the hardest questions in life is what you should do if your family was (or is) toxic. Many of the following blog posts will be dedicated to this topic, but in summary it makes sense to put at least some effort into making things better.

Nevertheless, you have to accept that many things are out of your control and may hurt while giving you no positive outcome. It all depends on whether family members are prepared to see the damage they’ve done at least to some extent or not.

If you had a painful childhood, you first have to work hard on becoming more self-centered, assertive, letting go of the responsibility for painful events from your youth, and you have to work hard on your own life vision and goals and take full responsibility for your life. You must work hard on your autonomy and make sure you aren’t an extension of your parents.

Then, if you want to make your family relationships a little less toxic, setting some strict boundaries and a gentle confrontation are usually necessary. The purpose of the confrontation is not to punish family members and dump negative feelings on them, but to tell them the truth, face them and set relationship rules that are acceptable to you.

Many parents don’t even realize what they’ve done, because they were raised in a pretty similar way. Being honest with them may be a fresh start of the relationship. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. If it doesn’t, you don’t have to forgive. You have to work hard on making sure that your past stops controlling you and that you can focus on the positive things from your upbringing. In many cases, it even makes sense to go to therapy.

I suggest you read the book Toxic parents for more insights what you can do.

And usually there are at least some family members you have good relations with. Maybe you can enrich your relationship with them. If not, you can focus your positive efforts into making a much greater legacy for your secondary family, your kids and your grandkids.

If you manage to change negative behaviors that were transferred from generation to generation in your family, you’ll do a very important and noble job, and you will definitely positively influence the future.

I encourage you to find a way to build strong family foundations. Family is different than friends. It’s a circle where people really deeply care for one another, especially in tough situations, no matter the differences and misunderstandings.

And if you had a toxic family, work hard on improving yourself, read a lot about how to deal with your past and how you can maybe make things better. At the end of the day, you aren’t doing it for them, you’re doing it for yourself.

Friends (community)

The third pillar of love in your personal life are your friends. When we’re talking about friends, we must have quality and quantity in mind. Quality always comes first when we talk about relationships.

If you want to be happy in life, you need a few close friends you share interests with, the ones you can really trust and help each other go through life.

Isolation leads to depression and bitterness, so enough socialization with people you care about must be an important priority in your life.

Now, a very important fact is that your friends are a source of great joy in life, but they can also be the source of social pressure. You tend to spend time with people who have similar values and interests as you. When you grow and change, your friends may get scared of losing you and thus put pressure on you.

I’ve seen it many times. For example, you start to eat a healthy diet and they mock you because you don’t want to eat pizza with them. The same can happen if you decide to become a vegetarian or stop drinking alcohol. They may not believe in you if you want to start your own business, because they even don’t know how, being only employees all their life.

So make sure you surround yourself with friends who support you, encourage you, with whom you do productive activities and not just kill time and have fun together.

Fun is an important part of every relationship, but you should also have the privilege of growing when spending time with your friends. And if they are blocking you when you’re making changes in life, make sure you calm down their fears and negative feelings. If they still block you after that, it’s maybe time to find new friends.

Besides quality, quantity also somehow matters. I especially mean always meeting new people, spending time with completely different groups and types of individuals, so your relationships can really be varied and rich.

Remember you can learn from anyone, and more different types of people in your life only mean that they’ll enrich your personality. To achieve that, the number one relationship value you must have is tolerance.

Business relationships

We’ve covered love, so let’s now move to work. You spend almost 1/3 of your time at the job. There is a zero chance of you being successful and happy in life if you work a job you hate with people you despise.

In business relationships, you have even more room to choose than in personal ones, the only thing you really need is a high enough level of competences.

The three pillars of healthy business relationships that lead to success are an outstanding relationship with your boss, great relationship with your coworkers, and finding yourself a mentor or a mastermind group that helps you achieve your career goals faster.

You should consider which business environments would allow you to deliver the most value, develop your competences to the full in the long run, achieve the position and the renown you want and, of course, achieve your financial goals.

If your business environment doesn’t enable you that, you’ll have to either change it or lower your ambitions. And you don’t want to do the latter in the most cases.

Boss

Your boss can either skyrocket your career or make your life miserable. Thus there is an important rule that you should never work for a boss you don’t respect. With an abundance mindset, you must be aware that there are many jobs and many good bosses. You don’t want to work for an asshole or a bozo.

Never work for a boss you don’t respect.

If you’re constantly scared of your boss, if you’re being abused, stressed out and treated unfairly, you will never be happy in life; even more, your life will be a living hell.

If something like that is happening to you, analyze very clearly if you don’t choose to be abused because it’s something familiar to you (one of your parents was abusive towards you).

If the answer is yes, start working on yourself, develop your competences, set some boundaries and start looking for a new job if necessary.

Never assume and hope that things will get better by themselves. If you were in an abusive relationship with your parents, you will almost always attract bosses and partners who will somehow be abusive to you, until you set some boundaries and put the center on yourself.

On the other hand, a great boss can give you so much. They make sure your potential is being developed, they mentor you and coach you, they make sure you get promoted frequently for your hard work, you get paid fairly, they help you to develop your social network, and so on.

A great boss can really help you to thrive and develop your career potential to the maximum. So make sure you find someone you’ll be proud to work for and with.

The boss should sometimes be tough on you to get the best out of you, but make sure it’s tough love, not abuse. As mentioned many times before, deep down you know very well if a relationship is abusive or not and why you cling to it.

If you are self-employed or a business owner, your customers are your boss; and sometimes other stakeholders. Again, relationships are extremely important, only in a little bit different way – you have to make sure you provide enough value to the markets, you work for customers you really understand and respect, and that you constantly improve and develop together with markets. Everyone has their own boss.

Coworkers or cofounders

Much like your friends are important in your personal life, so are your coworkers in your professional life. Again, there is a simple rule. Work in a dream team.

Work with people you respect, admire, can learn from, and about whom you can really say “we are a f*cking dream team, we can achieve anything.” A dream team will elevate you to the stars, a bad team will make you into a zombie.

There are probably fewer than 20 % good teams, and fewer than 4 % of dream teams. It’s hard to find or build the dream team. But if you aren’t in one, bitching, whining or complaining won’t help. There are only two options you have. Either find the dream team and join it, or help build one where you currently are and work.

It’s often a tough decision whether you should help build a dream team or join a new one. It depends on your visions, mission, life goals and how much you are willing to invest into a company you work for.

Changing team culture is a tough and demanding process, it usually lasts years, but it’s also a rewarding one, and it definitely enables you to develop superior people skills. I think in most cases, it makes sense to give it a shot, but if there is no progress after a while, it’s probably better to move on.

Become an A-player

Anyway, the first rule of being a member of a dream team is that you are an A-player. Only A-players (or people who work like hell to become A-players) work with other A-players. If you aren’t one yet, start working on it.

Become a role model for others, mentor others and start fueling your team with positive emotions and constructive thoughts together with your boss. If you want to work in a dream team, your competence level must be high and you must know how to be a good team player and, if necessary, show that to others.

Psychological safety is the key factor in healthy relationships

Now, this is the most important part of what makes a team a dream team (even in personal life) – Google did big research on the best performing teams, and their data indicated that psychological safety was critical to making a team work, more than anything else.

In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

There were two indicators of that. Firstly, members of the team spoke in roughly the same proportion, in other words there was equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking.

Secondly, all the good teams have high social sensitivity, meaning team members were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, facial expressions and other nonverbal cues. Now ask yourself if you are that kind of a team member and if you work in such a team.

I worked in an outstanding team and in a bad team. I know that working in a bad team made me depressed, people were doing everything but work, they were gossiping, blocking each other, feeling nothing but anger, envy, disrespect and other negative feelings. After eight to ten hours of that kind of bullshit, you can’t come home with positive energies.

You’re always also a product of your environment, so make sure you choose people you work with very carefully. And make sure you’re a productive and constructive team player. It’s easy to criticize others, but we are usually very forgiving towards ourselves.

Start changing your work environment by changing yourself.

Mentor and mastermind group

The last really important type of a business relationship is having a mentor; or even more of them, a whole mastermind group. Having a mentor often makes all the difference between making it in life or not.

The best athletes and businessmen in the world have mentors. Why wouldn’t you?

Good mentors can help you develop different competences quickly, like business skills, life skills, understanding market insights, they can help you with their social networks, wisdom, by believing in you, showing you the way and bringing out the best in you.

You should know that doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will, and that mentors are by far the best doubt killers. You can find a mentor at your job, hire professional coaches, write directly to people you admire and ask if they are prepared to mentor you, or you can even hire specialists who help you advance in certain areas of life (therapists, personal trainers, etc.).

If there is one way to accelerate you career success, it’s by finding a mentor. So make sure you do that. Some people even take a step further and build themselves a group of people who challenge them, push them and support them in every way.

The concept is called a mastermind group. If you’re really ambitious, build yourself a group like that, and I guarantee you that your career will start to flourish at a much faster pace.

Homework

Start building healthy relationships today

Now it’s time to do your homework. It’s time that you change your life strategy from relationships “just happening” to you tactically forging relationships that will help you flourish and prosper in life. And ending those that only make your life miserable.

Make personas of your ideal relationship

The first step is to clarify what kind of relationships you really want in life. So make a persona of your ideal spouse, a few different friends, your boss, your mentor and coworkers.

While doing this fun exercise, also make a persona of your ideal self. For your primary family relationships, brainstorm 5 – 10 things you can realistically do to make them better, instead of outlining a persona.

Assess your current relationships

Now you know what kind of relationships you want in your life. In the next step, it’s time to make an assessment of how close your current relationships really are to what you want in life. Take a big piece of paper and:
- Horizontally, write numbers from 1 to 10.
- Vertically, list 5 – 10 important relationships in your life.
- Rate every relationship from 1 to 10.
- If you rated some relationships between 4 and 7, it means that you can’t decide if they work or not, and that tells you nothing.
- Rate them again, now only with 1, 2, 3 and 8, 9, 10 marks. This will show you whether a relationship really works or not.
- All the relationships marked with 1 – 3 clearly don’t work.
Decide what to do with current relationships

For the relationships that work (got 8,9, or 10), great. Enrich them even more, nurture them and be grateful for them. On the other hand, when it comes to the relationships that don’t work, there are only three options why.
1. A relationship isn’t your fit. Irreconcilable differences or whatever.
2. It may be that it’s time to let go, it’s time for the relationship to end.
3. Your partner, you or both aren’t investing enough into a relationship and you should start doing that.
Based on the analysis, you’ll have to decide which relationships do work and which ones don’t. There’s nothing wrong about ending a relationship in a decent and human way.

Only a few relationships are lifelong relationships. All things come to an end, and there is always the point where you have to move on. So don’t be burdened with guilt and shame when it’s time to move on.

Now you should know which relationships in your life work, which don’t, which to terminate and which to try to improve. Start working actively on that. And simultaneously start forging new relationships.

Start forging new relationships

Prepare a list of your potential mentors. Prepare a list of companies you want to work for. Join different clubs, hobby gatherings, meetups, and so on. Look at your personas and go where people you want in your life are going.

Brush up on your social skills, meet new people, open yourself up to opportunities. You can find people and form relationships that will make your life heaven on Earth. Constantly add new people in your life and always stay open to healthy relationships that can bring so much into your life.

And never forget that at the end of the day, you deserve to have only healthy relationships in your life. Even one toxic relationship is definitely too much. But if you have it in your life, it’s probably your choice. If that’s the case, try to figure out why.
The best relationship advice ever
Here’s some shocking news to start with. Relationships don’t even really exist. They simply don’t. If you don’t believe me, try to hold a relationship in your hand or move it from one place to another. You can’t. Because relationships only exist in your head.

Every relationship you have in your life is nothing but a collection of thoughts, including memories and different convictions about a person. Why is this such an important fact?

Well, because if relationships are only thoughts in your head and they don’t really exist, it can be easily manipulated how you see a specific relationship.

You know the feeling of being in love and seeing the other person with rose-tinted glasses and after two to three months, reality check comes? Or when you’re shocked if someone does something you never expected they could do? Or how because of the halo effect, you think famous actors have much better personalities than they actually do? (The latter is also why you should never meet your heroes.)

These kinds of errors happen exactly because of the fact that relationships don’t exist, but are only a construction in your head. There are so many such cognitive errors you can make, from projections, transference, stereotyping, the halo effect, perceptual set, Pollyanna principle, self-serving bias, selective perception, contrast effects, expectancy effect etc. The list of cognitive biases in relationships is endless.

That leads to a few important facts:
- Your image, including assumptions about any other person, are wrong, at least to a certain extent; and wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups. That’s why the glass in relationships is already broken (more about this analogy later). Becoming aware of errors is painful, and that’s a part of life.
- The wrong assumptions you have also lead to unrealistic expectations about how a relationship will unfold, which only really leaves you one rational option – enjoy relationships while they last, in the present moment, now. Relax. Relationships are to be enjoyed, not controlled. That doesn’t mean you don’t plan your future with other people, but you should do it only in the agile and lean way.
- Since relationships are only thoughts in your head, you can avoid pain in a relationship by taking care of your own thoughts. You don’t even need the other person in a relationship to participate to solve any relationship issues (especially with troublesome parents or exes). Change yourself (your perspective) and you will change others.
- Relationships as individual constructions in your head are one of the best ways to better understand yourself and get to know yourself to the core. Because you will try to simulate your early relationship experiences with every relationship later on (abusive parent, abusive partner).
The bottom line is that relationships are easy or hard only because you make them as such in your head; and in every relationship, you try to seek and experience what is familiar to you. And what’s familiar to you are your early relationships with the authority figures from your youth. That’s how your image will be distorted.

Based on these facts, many people then conclude that no matter who you’re in a relationship with, you will always have pretty similar experiences. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if you make many cognitive errors in relationships, people are different and every relationship is a unique experience.

The false image you have about a person always exists, but there’s still also always an actual exchange of energies and actions (thoughts, touches, expressions, intentions etc.) that’s happening in a relationship. Despite the cognitive biases, the energy exchange with every single person is always a unique experience.

Your image of a person is always wrong, but your experience of a relationship is not. That’s why people remember the most how you make them feel.

In these terms, people bring out the best or the worst in you. In these terms, who you spend time with and what kind of a person they are matters a lot. Even if relationships don’t exist, we can say that there are positive experiences of a relationship and negative ones.

You can see relationship with the most rose-tinted glasses possible, but abusive, ignorant, passive‑aggressive or any other similar behavior in a relationship is still toxic. And deep down, you always know if a relationship is toxic or not (making an error is human, but there’s a limit to when a relationship becomes toxic). A passionate love-hate relationship is a toxic one, for example.

It’s extremely important whether a relationship is a healthy or a toxic one. I’ve seen it over and over again. A very damaged person in a healthy environment and with many healthy relationships starts to blossom. A promising, emotionally healthy and good person in damaging and abusive relationships gets broken and rots away.

I’ve been in both kind of situations, so I know the difference very well. This is why you have to choose very carefully who you spend time with. It’s one of the most important decisions in your life. There is no middle path; a relationship is either a toxic or a healthy one (as we will see later).

Before we go to relationship advice, there’s one more important angle to consider. People are animals. Social animals, to be more exact. That means that we compete, collaborate, conquer, make allies, have appetites, trade, pay attention to reputation, have sex, and so on.

So whether you want it or not, every relationship is a trade. There is no such thing as a free lunch and there are no exceptions. A few decades ago, people had children primary as an economical investment. You get something out of a relationship (or expect to get when you form it) and you have to give.

No matter how much in love you are, no matter how good of a person you met, it’s a trade. There must be value seen in you and you have to see value in others. The value can be sexual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, material, social or any other type. No value equals no relationship, at least in the long term.

The best and most honest relationship advice

Now considering all three facts below, let’s look at the best relationship advice ever.
1. A relationship doesn’t exist, it’s only a combination of thoughts in your head, which is why you see every relationship with many errors and wrong judgments. So the only win-win situation is to enjoy relationships. Next to that, you always see a person as something familiar to your past experiences.
2. The tone of a relationship can only be a toxic or a healthy one, and this provides a very real experience of a relationship. No matter your internal image, this is the part of a relationship where you meet the objective truth. Everyone makes mistakes, but there is a limit when a relationship becomes toxic.
3. Every relationship is nothing but a trade. If you don’t provide value, it’s hard to form deep, lasting and interesting relationships. There are many different types of value you can provide, and by far the best one is your own uniqueness, together with the effort.
And now here it is, the best and most honest relationship advice:
1. Always have the center on yourself
2. Become the best version of yourself
3. There is no ice to break
4. There is no middle path, find your fit
5. No zombies and bozos
6. Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships
7. Build multiple dimensions with superior communication
8. Relationships are like bank accounts
9. No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken
Always have the center on yourself

No matter how much in love you are or how awesome of a relationship started in your life, personal or professional, always keep your center on yourself. The moment the center is on another person or the relationship itself, instead of you, the quality of a relationship starts to decline. Always.

First, you have to be an independent, emotionally healthy individual, with your own life, visions, missions, goals, hobbies and interests. Only then can you form healthy and deep relationships. There is no other way. Without having the center on yourself, relationships will always be toxic in some way.

Now, having the center on yourself doesn’t mean that you don’t care, don’t make any compromises and don’t invest in a relationship at all. If you don’t have center on yourself, it only means that you’re clinging to a relationship too much and stifling it without letting any freedom in it.

Signs of not having the center on yourself:
- Too fast commitment escalation (you think about marriage on the first date)
- You get mad if your message isn’t replied in a second
- You don’t like your partner’s hobbies and friends
- Everything you do, you want to do together with your partner
- Extreme jealousy
- If you need more ideas, go through overly attached girlfriend or boyfriend memes
It’s no different in business relationships or friendships, you may want to do everything together, you’re jelly of other people, and so on. In any case, the fact is that the more you pull someone towards yourself, the more they’ll try to back off.

If you want to improve the relationships in your life, start by having the center on yourself. Start building your own dream life, share your visions with other people, and they will love to join you on your journey. There are a few steps you can take to have the center on yourself:
- Set your own life vision, mission, goals and know that nobody can make you happy
- Build up your self-esteem and self-confidence
- Tackle negative thinking and cognitive distortions
- Develop an abundance mindset
- Don’t have only one intense relationship in your life
- Make sure your needs are met (in and out of a relationship)
- Become the best version of yourself (here is how)
Become the best version of yourself

You definitely are worthy and important as an individual, no matter what you do and what your position in life currently is. There is a very simple and crucial rule of healthy self-worth which goes: never place anyone’s head above your own. Your personal strength must come from this kind of a belief.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned before, every relationship is a trade. The better version of yourself that you are, the more you have to offer. A valuable consequence of constantly improving yourself is that your relationships get much better in general and you open yourself to completely new relationship opportunities.

There are many ways of how you can improve your value in a relationship. Here are a few examples:
- Fit and groomed body, good style, strength and endurance can bring more physical value
- Higher education, hobbies, interests, visions, etc. bring more intellectual value
- Many social connections, status, people skills, etc. bring more social value
- Common values, fighting for a good cause, being a good person can bring spiritual value
- Money and assets bring material value, and so on.
People spend time with people with common interests and subjects. People spend time with people they’re attracted to because of charisma (charisma comes from having a powerful why in your life). People spend time with people with whom they can exchange value. I know it sounds completely unromantic, but every relationship is a trade.

There is no ice to break

There are 7 billion people living on this planet. Many of them have the potential to really change your life forever with how they see life, with many of them you could experience completely unique adventures, and many of them could help you grow faster or create even more awesome things than you’re currently creating.

The only thing that’s preventing such a thing from happening is the absence of a fat penguin. What? Well the absence of someone who would break the ice for you. You have no idea how many opportunities you miss just because you’re afraid to say hello to a stranger.

There’s an eye-opening perspective about that. Assume there is no ice to break and that you’re already connected to all the people. We all share the same planet, we’re all made from the same material, we all face our own struggles and fights. Just show genuine interest in people and know that you’re already connected with everybody.

Just show genuine interest in someone and the relationship will start unfolding.

Always connect with new people and don’t be afraid to talk to strangers. There is no ice to break. The ice exists only in your head. That doesn’t mean that every opening will be a pleasant experience (especially in dating), but that has nothing to do with breaking the ice, it has to do with finding your fit.

Rejection is something that you can move on from. Regret will never leave you.

There is no middle path, find your fit

In every relationship, there is common ground (values, interests, etc.) and there are differences. If there is no common ground and only differences exist, relationships don’t form. On the other hand, the wider the common ground, the better your foundations for a relationship.

It’s called finding your fit. Now, the mistake people make is that they jump into a relationship too quickly, before they even know their preferences, and even less a person. Like in Hollywood movies, where you see someone fall in love at first sight and then live happily ever after.

Life doesn’t work that way. Irrational thinking and actions like that are based on the scarcity mentality – better safe than sorry and alone for the rest of your life. And then you commit to the first person who shows interest in spending time with you. I’ve seen so many people who settled too soon and then they’re too afraid to break up the relationship, staying unhappy forever.

In reality, it’s much better to take time and search before you commit. Meet people, talk to them, get to know what you like in other people, etc. You can even help yourself by making a persona of an ideal relationship. Put in the effort to find your true fit, someone with whom things really work well.

And when you find your fit, know that it only means that you’ve found something that holds true potential. You’ve found something you can build upon and look forward to. It is then that you pass on from searching to hard work in a relationship, and growing and learning together from the differences.

Now, here’s the main catch in the whole story. You either find a fit or you don’t. A relationship either works or it doesn’t (in a certain moment). There is no other way.

Homework

Here’s a very easy task you can do to find out where you stand in your relationships. Take a piece of paper and follow the next steps:
- Horizontally, write numbers from 1 to 10.
- Vertically, list 5 – 10 important relationships in your life.
- Rate every relationship from 1 to 10.
- For the relationships that you rated between 4 and 7, it means you can’t decide if they work or not, and that tells you nothing.
- Rate them again, now only with 1, 2, 3 and 8, 9, 10 marks. This will show you if a relationship really works or not.
All the relationships marked with 1 – 3 clearly don’t work. There are only three options why.

The first one is that they aren’t your fit. Irreconcilable differences or whatever. The second reason may be that it’s time to let go, it’s time for the relationship to end. The third reason may be that too much was withdrawn from the relationship bank account and it’s time to heavily invest back (more about that soon).

Know that there’s nothing wrong about ending a relationship in a decent and human way, if the relationship doesn’t work anymore. All things come to an end, and there is always the point when you have to move on. Only a few relationships are lifelong relationships. So don’t be burdened with guilt and shame when it’s time to move on.

No zombies and bozos

People will make you or break you. Healthy and deep relationships will make your life on Earth heaven, and toxic people will make it living hell. So you must choose every relationship extremely carefully.

Here are the rules:
- Don’t spend any time with energy vampires and zombies
- Don’t work with bozos
- Don’t deal with crappy people at all
- Ignore the haters
There are many reasons why people will try to make your life miserable, from clashes of interest, different values and the desire to preserve the status quo, to envy and simply having shitty personalities. Don’t even bother, just understand and then move on.

When you get in the mud with a pig, you get dirty and the pig likes it. So completely ignore the evil people. Don’t think about them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t write to them. Don’t give them advice. Never gossip about them. It’s you who’s looking for the drama.

Diversity and the 1/3 rule of relationships

Let me emphasize again: who you spend time with matters a lot. You have to find people who fit into your life, and you have to find people who love you, support you, mentor you, believe in you, push you, help you to focus, encourage you, and so on. And you must do the same for other people.

To achieve the universal relationship balance, there is an important formula to follow:
- Spend 33 % of your time with people who are less competent than you (and mentor them)
- 33 % of time with people who are on the same level as you
- 33 % of time with people who are much more successful than you
- Still, try to learn from everyone you spend time with.
Next to that, although you have to find your fit to enjoy relationships, don’t spend time only with one type of people who think and act like you. Spend time with as many different people as possible, that’s the only way your relationship experience will be the richest. Never let your ego block you from learning or meeting someone new. I spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, scientists, writers, athletes, many different people.

This rule goes for personal and professional life. Science shows that half of the difference in career success (promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to one variable: being in an open network instead of a closed one. So network with many different people.

Build multiple dimensions with superior communication

Relationships are always multidimensional, and the more dimensions are present, the richer and the more varied they are. So when you spend time with people, try to engage as many dimensions as possible.

Examples of relationship dimensions are touch, intellectual stimulation, emotional encouragement, sharing economic resources, working towards common goals, having fun together etc. When you’re spending time with someone, you should try to activate as many dimensions as possible. The best way to engage more dimensions in a relationship is to “put down your mobile phone” and listen.

Want to prolong the battery life on your iPhone? Put it the fuck away when you’re talking to me.

Yes, the key to outstanding relationships is outstanding communication. In order for every relationship to work, you have to really communicate (in person) and you want to communicate a lot. Put down your phone, look people in the eye and start listening with full attention. Something magical will happen in every one of your relationships.

And outstanding communication isn’t that hard. You have four types of communication:
- Active constructive response (80 %)
- Passive constructive response (10 %)
- Active destructive response
- Passive destructive response
Just make sure you apply the active constructive response 80 % of times in communication with other people, next to really listening to them and showing genuine interest. Oh, and one more important rule I almost forgot. Make the compliment to critique ratio at least 5 to 1. Yes, for every critique, five compliments must follow.

Relationships are like bank accounts

Every relationship is like a mutual bank account. By doing something good for the relationship – like offering a massage, listening presently, spending quality time together, sending a loving message, doing hobbies together, etc. you put money in the bank account.

By doing something bad for the relationship, like being ignorant, passive-aggressive, abusive or disconnected in any other way, you withdraw money from the relationship bank account. The more damaging acts you do, the more money gets withdrawn.

Every relationship bank account can be full of money, barely above water, in negative numbers or even bankrupt. A lot of “money” means relationship happiness, low numbers mean nothing but low quality of the relationship.

If everyone is only withdrawing, a relationship will sooner or later go bankrupt. That means a relationship gets terminated. If you do extremely damaging acts like cheating or beating, the bank account will probably go bankrupt immediately, even if it was full before.

On the other hand, if you’re regularly depositing money, the bank account will be full and your relationship will blossom. The moment you start withdrawing, the relationship starts withering away.

In the relationship bank account, the same rule applies as it does to the money one – it’s so easy to spend money and it’s so hard to save it. But at the end of the day, that’s what makes the difference between rich and poor people in whichever context, the money or the relationship one.

Talking about mutual bank accounts, there is one more important rule. Make sure you invest into relationships as much as you get out of them. The investment ratio in every relationship should be as close to 1:1 as possible from both parties. If there is no balance, people get frustrated and even the most beautiful relationship can get in trouble.

No relationship is perfect, the glass is already broken

Last but not least, don’t look at any relationship with rose-tinted glasses. Nothing special is going on in your life. You aren’t experiencing anything so unique that other people would be deprived of.

Remember, you definitely are unique, just like everybody else is. Just like everybody else is. Don’t look at relationships like a fragile glass that can be broken, but like a glass that’s already broken.

We are all only people with flaws and sins. People will lie to you, disappoint you and sometimes betray you. Rarely intentionally, but sometimes even that can happen. But this is part of relationships and life. Accept it, enjoy relationships while they last.

Why such a tough reality? Well, it takes a lot of hard work and wisdom to find the right balance between id (animal instincts) and superego (doing the right thing). Even when you do find the balance, periods of life come when you’re thrown off-kilter.

Before you find this magical balance with enough wisdom and even once you do but are forcibly thrown out of it, id may do a stupid thing. That’s what makes us human. That’s what you do to other people and what other people do to you from time to time.

When that happens, it may hurt, but if you have the center on yourself (like the first rule dictates), you survive and move on if necessary. Remember, when it comes to life and relationships, the glass is already broken. There is nothing to break, because there is no perfection in life.

Much like there is no ice to break, there is no glass to break. And at the end of the day, forgive, but never forget. We function based on patterns and so does every relationship.

And for the end, do you want to know what real relationship tests are? Extremely good and extremely bad life situations. Now knowing the best relationship advice ever, good luck with them in your life. And please share this article with people you love.
Relationships are like glass – but the glass is already broken
There are many versions of the story symbolizing how relationships are like glass. Relationships are fragile and easily broken. After the damage, 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.

Then the advice continues that the real question is deciding whether it’s worth piecing the broken glass back together or whether you should throw it away and move on; and that many times, it’s better to leave the pieces broken on the floor rather than to cut yourself trying to put them back together.

Well, these quotes are badly misleading.

They assume relationships should be perfect and that there’s no room for human error; that even the slightest human mistake can crush the glass into pieces.

But all people make errors, with zero exceptions. We’ve all unintentionally broken a glass in the past; and we’ve all (un)intentionally hurt people in our relationships before and other people hurt you. Because there are two apes within us, fighting, and one ape is always eager to break the glass.

The story of the two apes

Two apes reside in all of us. One ape is selfish, egocentric, brutally competitive, constantly wants to have sex and fulfill other biological, materialistic and status desires, wishes and needs, no matter who gets hurt and what is the price.

Such an ape exists in all of us, and this ape doesn’t care about the glass. This ape only cares about instinctive impulses, primal appetites and instant gratification. In some people, this ape is very strong, in others not so much. In psychology, this is called id.

The other ape is the complete opposite. The other ape cares about others, doesn’t want to hurt people, has empathy and knows when to draw the line and curb instant gratification for the greater good. This ape takes care of other people, especially loved ones, and always takes them in consideration when making decisions.

The second ape cares about the glass; it wants to protect the glass, nurture it, polish it and take care of it. This ape knows how bad it feels when the glass is broken.

Therefore, it puts breaks on all the behaviors that are toxic to relationships and pays careful attention to not break any relationship agreements and rules. This ape is something we would describe as superego.

But it’s not the only ape living in every individual. In some, the second ape may be strong and knows how to tame the first ape with guilt and shame, but it’s never strong enough to always overpower the first ape. Nor should it.

Because a life without the first ape wouldn’t be passionate, competitive and satisfactory at all. Without the primal ape, you would never strive to fulfill your needs and you would never strive for progress in life.

You’d just agree with everyone and exist, without living. And every once in a while, you would snap and go crazy because you were repressing all your needs. The key lies, of course, in a healthy balance. Fulfilling all the needs you have in a healthy assertive way without hurting others.

You can fulfill your needs either by going after your goals in a healthy manner or with the sublimation of needs you can’t fulfill, and in that way you transform the raw impulses into higher levels of energy, be it humor, art or any other value creation.

Following that kind of recipe, keeping the highest possible integrity on the one hand and not hurting yourself with guilt and shame on the other hand, is the middle path everyone should find in life.

But not many people can easily achieve this kind of a balance. It’s not easy to consider both apes equally and manage them properly when they go wild.

Usually, one ape is just too strong compared to the others and it takes many life experiences and high levels of wisdom to tame one of the beast, or sometime even both of them if they’re brutally fighting (internal conflicts).

One of the apes will break the glass sooner or later

It takes a lot of hard work and wisdom to find the right balance between id and superego. Even when you find it, periods of life come when you’re thrown out of balance.

After you develop enough life wisdom to deal with both apes, there are still two types of life situations when you’re most often thrown out of balance and apes go crazy – when things go really shitty and when things go really well in your life.

Extremely good times and extremely bad times are actually real relationship tests; in extremely good and bad times, apes start playing with the glass. And most people fail to keep it in one piece.

When one person in the relationship is thrown out of balance, the other party is usually also automatically thrown out of balance – no matter if it’s friendship, an intimate relationship or a business relationship.

When an extreme is met, all apes just go crazy. It’s hard to keep a rational frame of mind when the people dearest to you threaten the relationship you have with them.

Here are a few examples of tough life situations that throw people (both individuals in a relationship) out of balance and cause the apes to go crazy:
- Death of a loved one
- Job loss
- Accidents
- Bankruptcy
- Addictions
- Being completely unsatisfied with life
- Depression etc.
And examples of flourishing life situations that throw people (both individuals in a relationship) out of balance and the apes, again, can’t keep their cool:
- Large sums of money on the table
- Fame
- Entering new influential social circles
- Other types of winning
When extremes happen and apes start to go crazy, there are only two options. Either you manage to tame the beasts with calm self-awareness and that usually straightens the relationship even more, or the relationship goes south. If apes aren’t tamed in extremes, then cheating, stealing, fighting, manipulating, hurting, etc. come into play.

This kind of craziness can either happen as one big crazy act to let the primal ape blow off steam (you get too aggressive, you cheat, etc.), or it can be a painful and long-lasting decay of a relationship (you are constantly too critical or passive aggressive, etc.). In any case, this is when the glass gets broken.

Yes, there are two options:
- An ape can just throw the glass to the floor with all its force and completely break it
- An ape can be slowly breaking down the glass piece by piece
Interestingly, sometimes you don’t even need an extreme for the apes to go crazy. Because some people are just crappy people or really have no idea how to deal with apes.

Your wrong expectations about relationships

We people love to wear rose-tinted glasses when it comes to relationships, looking at them from a very naïve perspective.

Those rose-tinted glasses are the main reason why we see relationships as so fragile. Like a beautiful piece of glass that should never be broken; and once it gets broken, all is lost and we suffer in pain.

In an exaggerated example, if you’re a perfectionist with naïve rose-tinted relationship glasses, you may want to find a partner who’s good looking, smart, faithful, meets every one of your expectations and never makes a mistake.

As a perfectionist with rose-tinted glasses and many cognitive distortions, you build completely unrealistic expectations in your head and leave no room for any error. A fart is inexcusable and anything else is just unimaginable in this perfect picture.

But then when a mistake happens, relationship suddenly goes from everything to nothing.

Then you wonder how unlucky you are and why this always happens to you; but all there is to it are completely wrong expectations. You expect other people to deliver something that even you can’t. Because you’re also mortal, you aren’t perfect and you are no exception to the fight of the two apes within you.

Therefore, you must take off your rose-tinted glasses and have a more realistic perspective on relationships and realize that they aren’t a piece of glass. In reality, relationships are a piece of glass that’s already broken. The apes already broke it.

“The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.” ~Ernest Hemingway

Relationships are like glass, but the glass is already broken

People are hell or heaven on Earth. Relationships are hell or heaven on Earth. That’s why we like to see them as fragile as glass. But guess what, the glass is already broken. The apes fighting inside us broke the glass a long time ago.

Becoming aware of this is the only way you can really detach yourself from perfection and enjoy relationships to the full.

I know it can be a little confusing, so here’s the broken glass story from Buddhism, to better understand this piece of wisdom:

Two monks are talking: “Do you see this glass? I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully.

But when the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground I say of course. But when I know that the glass is already broken every minute with it is precious.”

Or maybe you heard for Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

When the traditional Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with precious metal. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.

This kind of act is about embracing of the flawed or imperfect and shows fully existence within the moment, in a state of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions.

“Why be broken when you can be gold?”

The lesson of the both storise is very simple:
- There is no perfect form
- There is no flawless human
- There is no ideal piece of art
- There is no flawless body
- There is no absolute good
- There is no unmarred glass
- There is no bulletproof relationship
- Especially with time passing by, life challenges and all extreme life situations
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

Don’t expect any relationship to be perfect. Don’t expect from yourself to be perfection personified in any relationship and don’t have that kind of expectations toward others. There are apes battling in every one of us. When we are thrown out of balance, apes go mad and the relationship gets put to the test. That’s just how it is, that’s reality.

Ironically, people often hurt other people only because they’re hurting themselves. And even more ironically, they usually hurt the people they love the most. When apes go crazy, there isn’t any logic anymore, only madness. But again, that’s part of reality.

People often hurt other people only because they’re hurting themselves.

So in any kind of relationship, you will sooner or later encounter one of the behaviors listed below indicating that the apes are going crazy. Sometimes they go only a little crazy, sometimes they go completely mad. It’s a very unpredictable thing.
- Lying
- Hiding the truth
- Stealing
- Cheating
- Controlling
- Verbally abusing
- Physically abusing
- Humiliating
- Manipulating
- Betraying
- Gossiping
- Being passive-aggressive
- Ignoring
These are all the things that happen in a relationship. They aren’t an exception; they are rather a rule. And strangers aren’t the ones doing them.

It’s the people closest to you who can hurt you the most. If you assume a relationship is like unbroken glass, you bet against human nature. You bet against the wild apes. Never bet against human nature.

Never bet against the markets and never bet against human nature.

There are, as always, exceptions, but your odds are similar to playing the lottery. If an exception happens to you, excellent, I’m extremely happy for you. But don’t have the expectation that relationships in your life will be an exception.

Superior relationship strategy

There are three important rules you must always follow in life.
- Never go against the markets. Markets always win.
- Never go against the human nature. You never know when the apes will go wild. They’re just too unpredictable.
- Never go to war, especially not with yourself.
These are the foundations on which you should build your superior relationship. Based on that, below are the general elements of a superior relationship strategy that make much more sense than feeling sorry for yourself after a disappointment, only because you were wearing rose-tinted glasses and you can’t put the glass back together as it was in the beginning.
1. Your greatest power is that you always have the option to walk away from a relationship, if you want to. When a person becomes a zombie, if they stop investing in the relationship as much as you do, if they cross the boundaries, you can always walk away. It’s not a thing to be misused, or threatened with in a relationship. If you do that, you are obviously out of the center.
2. Always have a center on yourself and never on any other person or a relationship.
3. Become the best version of yourself. With higher awareness, more knowledge, health, and other resources, you can provide more value to relationships. Constantly improve yourself and constantly strive to improve relationships. The more value you provide in your relationships, the more stable they will be.
4. Bring out the best in people in your life, empower them, encourage them, mentor them and help them become the best versions of themselves. Expect a similar approach in return.
5. Have an abundance mindset, there are so many relationships you can form in life. Never assume there’s only one person you can have a really good relationship with.
6. Set strict rules and boundaries in a relationship and take them seriously.
7. Legally protect yourself if necessary (prenup, shareholders’ agreement etc.), especially when it comes to business relationships. Contracts are nothing bad. They are written for bad, not good times. And as you know now, bad times will come.
8. Know and expect that things will go wrong, especially in long-term relationships that last for years. So know which things are deal-breakers and which things can be forgiven. When the lines and boundaries are crossed, take action.
9. Don’t do things to a partner in a relationship you don’t want to experience. Don’t have double standards. Be fair.
10. Forgive, but never forget; behavioral patterns always repeat themselves. What you have experienced once, you will probably experience again soon.
11. The investment and reward from a relationship should be approximately 1:1 from both people involved in the relationship. If you invest 10 units of energy into a relationship, you should also expect the same from the other party. The interest to form a new relationship should be approximately 1:1 as well. If you chase people, they will never respect you enough to keep a healthy long-term relationship.
12. Never stop investing in a relationship and make sure it’s always growing but, as mentioned, both parties should be committed and invest into growth. When a relationship stops growing, apes start to go crazy.
13. Communicate and communicate a lot, especially when you find yourself in extremely good times or extremely bad times.
14. Know when it’s time to try harder and when it’s time to let go. All good things come to an end. It’s one of the hardest things to accept in life.
15. Enjoy life and enjoy relationships in the present moment. It’s the only moment you’ve got. When you love, love with all your heart, knowing that there’s nothing to be really broken.
When you follow these rules, you can enjoy relationships much more. You can be committed, show integrity, have serious and best intentions at heart, but you know that things will probably go wrong at some point.

And when things go wrong, then you’ll be hurt, then you’ll have to work harder to fix relationships as well as to find and build new ones from time to time. But that’s how reality works.

The fact that the glass is already broken is primal human nature, something nobody can run away from. It’s something you have to accept if you want to live life to the full. When it happens remember:

When the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground I say of course. Accept it and let go.

See the beauty of life and relationships in all its imperfections. When you know the glass is broken, every minute of every relationship is that more precious and meaningful. Because you feel much safer and you know that nothing can go wrong. Because the glass is already broken.

Broken glass doesn’t give you the right to be mean

You can easily misinterpret the whole story. If the glass is already broken, then I can abuse relationships and hurt other people without any moral constraints. If other people hurt me, why wouldn’t I hurt other people. If the glass is already broken, why not break it even more. Who cares.

Well, that’s an entirely wrong perspective. The idea of the story is not to become angrier, more frustrated and bitter, but to let go and free yourself from unrealistic expectations. The lesson of the story is to have a stronger center on yourself. The idea is to enjoy relationships to the full without being scared about what will happen in the next moment.

You absolutely must give your best in relationships and demand the same in return. It’s the only way to have deep, healthy and meaningful relationships.

Without mutual investments, there is no depth and there is no quality. Without quality relationships, there is no happiness in life. People are the ones making your life on Earth heaven or hell. You don’t want to intentionally make it hell.

So you absolutely mustn’t hurt people on purpose. There is zero benefit in that. First of all, if you’re intentionally hurting others, it only means that you are either hurting a lot or you are a psychopath (literally), which I hope not.

Then it brings drama, fights and severe negative consequences into your life. Not to mention all the karma points you lose.

Your action should be the opposite. You should invest a lot into being a happy person with a center on yourself, managing both apes properly and not having unrealistic expectations towards the people in your life.

Only on rare occasions it may happen that you get to lose control, because at the end of the day, you’re only human like the rest of us. And when it happens, you do everything possible to fix the damage and forgive yourself.

Even though your apes may go crazy from time to time, always make sure that the apes don’t go too wild and really do something stupid that would permanently damage your life.

Making one big stupid decision (stealing, cheating, using violence …) or several small ones (constantly hiding the truth, flirting with others, being passive-aggressive etc.) in relationships is one of the most common ways of how people mess up their lives; sometimes for years.

So no matter how wild the apes go, make sure you know where to draw the line. You must always keep a long-term perspective and no matter how strong the temptation is, make sure that instant gratification doesn’t bring you just a moment of delight and then long period of suffering and bitterness.

Man is still good. We break things, tear them down, but we can rebuild. We can be better, we have to be.