From prickly relationships to fruitful ones

 

 

A bad relationship can bring you down. Bad relationships at work disrupt the quality of your performance. It can lead to avoidance, misinterpretation and ultimately distrust within the family or organization. When the relationship is bad, nothing good comes from it. 

 

Personal level

A not so good relationship does not have to stay this way, you cannot change the other but you can begin with yourself. Over the years working with my individual coaching clients on rebalancing their relationship issues I broke this process down to three parts: 

 

• Reflect honestly on self, your values, principles, beliefs and boundaries,
• Align your beliefs, values, principles and boundaries into clarity and a way forward, 
• Act consciously on the new found insights.

 

Each of these steps take courage and time. And to finally put your thoughts into action is a courageous step. It means that you might need to speak up in such a way that your message is heard or perhaps start saying no in a way that is new to you. 

 

The result however can be transformational, for the relationship and for yourself!

 

As a bonus, you can apply this steps also for yourself, for the internal relationships you have with your inner critics. Think of all the voices we hear in our head. Aligning them is a life long process.

 

Organizational level

And a similar approach can be followed for systemic relationship issues within groups and organizations using the steps of Meet, Reveal, Align and Act.

 

The focus in a systemic relationship approach lies on "what is trying to emerge within the system?". In organizations there is always movement; supporting citizens, improving services, growing business, creating shows or educating people. When the proces is not flowing in the right direction and results are disappointing something within the system is stuck. 

 

The systemic approach is to meet, reveal, align and act.

• Meet the system where it is, assess what is going on, who are part of this system?
• Reveal to the members of the system what is trying to take place, what is the change wanted that causes the conflicts? Bringing clarity and understanding,
• Align the members of the system. This creates support and collaboration and leads to
• Action and a new way forward.  

 

 

More information?

Drop me an email on: gerdavanloon@mac.com

 

 

 

Improving relationships, one system at the time.