What is Relationship Intelligence?

Do you do any of the following? If so you might want to learn more about relaltionshp intelligence. This blog will help you do that.

--Said yes to going out to dinner when you really didn’t have the money, so you charged it and maxxed out your credit card again
--Told your kids no but then when they contiued to badger you, gave in
--Allowed yourself to be interrupted at work for a chat and then had to stay late to finish a report
--Left your cell phone on all day and took every call that came in regardless of what you were doing or how you were feeling
--Allowed an older child to come back home to live without any definite rules or end plan
--Accepted a date with someone you really had no interest in dating
--Agreed to sex when not wanting it or not ready to have sex with this particular person
--Continued to date someone you knew was not right, but didn’t want to hurt their feelings
--Continued to bail out an ex spouse or friend even though you knew they would not be available to help you in a similar way since their life was too chaotic
--Loaned money to a friend, child or sibling even though this person still owned you from the last time
--Took late night phone calls from a self involved friend and felt tired and grumpy the next day
--Stayed with a spouse who drank, had affairs or was abusive
--Said yes to extra work, was unable to get regular work done - then got a poor performance review
--Hired a friend or relative with a poor work history and then had to do his/her work so you would not look bad to others
--Waited for your "always late" friend and fumed about it, but said nothing
--Agreed to do all the grunt work on a project and then felt taken advantage of and used

These are examples of people who need to improve their relationship intelligence by developing better psycholigical boundaries. So what is Relationship Intelligemce?

Relationship intelligence is about how smart we are in our interactions with others. It could be a romantic partner, a child, parent, sibling, friend, teacher, co-worker, boss, business associate or the checker at the grocery store. The higher our RQ, the better and more productive and rewarding our relationships will be and consequently our lives in general. Happy, successful people are people who have satisfying relationships with others.

People with high RQ get along well with their fellow man. They exhibit poise and tact when dealing with others and have many friends and a happy and gratifying personal life. Some are married and some are single but all know that relationships are the key component to an authentically healthy and happy life.

So how does one develop high RQ? Is it inborn? Do some people just show up that way? Are some people simply born with high RQ? What if you struggle in this area? What if your relationships are fraught with conflict and chaos? Are you doomed to low RQ or can you raise it up to higher and higher levels?

First I think it is true that some people simply come into this world with a genetic predisposition to knowing how to interact with people in a way that is highly intelligent. They have good social skills right off the bat. They are warm and charming. They understand people intuitively and seem to have a natural tendency toward making people feel at ease in their presence. But like other high intelligences, this person is over on the right side of that bell shaped curve of the population. They are out on the edges and probably won’t be reading this blog or doing Google searches about relationships. They have other fish to fry and won’t be needing any RQ tips.

But the rest of us, well we’re all clustered at the top of that old curve with some skill in this area but a lot more we could learn to improve our RQ. That’s what this blog is about. I will be blogging here about relationships and how to improve them. I will give you tips each week that you can use. They won’t be too complicated or difficult in theory, although some things turn out to look simple but in fact, are more difficult than you might imagine. But just like any learning curve, some things will come easy and others will be more challenging. My advice is to take baby steps and go slow. Pick something small and doable first. By the way, my tips will be ones that occur to me as I go along in my week. Many of the tips I discuss here will be issues brought up in therapy by my clients. I won’t, of course, be revealing any identifying information about them, but I have found that a real life example is often easier to understand and hopefully will allow you to see your own self in these examples rather than me simply telling you about it.

Tip # One - Say No to a Smiling Face

One of the things I see more than anything else in my therapy practice is people with boundary issues and all boundary issues are related to relationships. This is one of those concepts that seems logical and obvious at first and many folks will acknowledge this is the right and correct thing to do but really have no a clear understanding of what having strong personal boundaries really means. Someone smiles and asks you for something - you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach or you say no, but then later they ask you again, eventually you give in and do what they want. This is a boundary issue.

One of the most telling statements a person can make to me that shows they don’t really "get" this idea is “I told him/her that I was not going to do that, again." or I told him or her that she could not ask me out at the last minute." But then both these people allow the person to get away with this boundary invasion. In most cases, I find that people want to tell the other person no and often do so with a detailed explanation and then the person with the boundary issue expects the other person to respect them and not cross the boundary. But that is not how it works.

Telling someone you have a boundary and enforcing your own boundaries are two different things. You can long for the other person to respect you, you can ask them to and you can yell and scream and rant and rave about how you are being taken advantage of or treated in a way that you don't like, but the only way a boundary is enforced is to not allow someone to cross it. It has nothing to do with what the other person does or does not do. Because other people want what they want and if they can talk you into it, charm you into it or badger you into it, many, if not most will do so. The very fact that you gave in to them, in their mind means it wasn't really a boundary in the first place. The number one rule about boundaries is, it is the responsibility of the person with the boundary to enforce it, not the other way around.

As Oprah has said “We teach people how to treat us.” What I know about a person like this is the people in his or her life know that if they keep at them, if they keep asking or giving reasons why the person should agree to their request, they will give in - they will cave. What this means of course, is the person did not really have a boundary – what they had was a desire to have a boundary, but no real boundary. A real boundary does not move, adjust or be plowed down by someone else’s desires, needs or demands. People with strong personal boundaries, do not cave!

Now of course this does not mean that on occasion you don’t agree to something that is normally a boundary for you but this should be rare and in very special circumstances. It should also be for your benefit and not someone else’s. Let me give you an example, I don’t take phone calls after eight at night. I have a boundary about this because I get wired up from talking on the phone and have found over the years that I sleep better and do better in general if I have at least a two hour down time before I go to bed. Plus, to be perfectly honest, I like my quiet time in the evenings and have plenty of other time for phone calls and socializing. I have let my friends and family know this and I simply don’t answer the phone after eight at night, I let voice mail pick up and then I check the message afterward to make sure it is not an emergency. But let’s say, someone from Georgia or New York – a two-hour time difference - wants to talk to me and this is the only time they can do it – it’s a reporter who wants to interview me for a national magazine or a family member who needs to talk to me about something important and can’t do it any other time. In that case, it’s in my best interest to take this call and it’s a one-time deal, so I make an exception to this boundary.

This seems simple doesn’t it, so why would people have problems with setting boundaries? It’s all about the desire to be liked, popular and to be seen by others as a special person. It’s also about the fear of what it will cost to say no to someone. Many people with boundary problems are like someone juggling ten fresh eggs in the air – these eggs represent their own wants and needs and everyone else’s in their life as well. It’s an exhausting job and every now and then one of the eggs, sometimes three or four of them will drop out of the air and fall, splat on the floor. Now they have a mess to clean up and part of that mess is repairing the damage to the relationships these eggs represent. Now they are on double duty trying to make up for this and their boundaries, if they ever had any to begin with, go totally out the window.

So, tip number one is say no to something or to someone who wants you to do something. Start small. Review the last two or three weeks – what did you do or allow in your life that inside your head you did not want to do or didn't not want to agree to, but did anyway?

If you find yourself in any of the examples at the top of this article then setting a boundary by saying no is your assignment for this week.

Take care, Lorraine