标题：The Purr Principle: How We Can Build Great Relationships
source：forbes丨by Brett Steenbarger
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Dr. Judy Krings has written on an interesting topic: relationship resilience. We normally think of resilience as an individual function, reflecting a person’s ability to weather adversity and even benefit from it. Great relationships are resilient, as well. They not only survive life’s ups and downs, but actually thrive, maintaining loyalty and love throughout.
Whether it’s in the business world or the realm of romance, sustaining positive relationships is essential to success. Tamara Greenberg notes that relationship quality is closely tied to physical health; Seligman’s work suggests that relationships are one of five dimensions connected to emotional well-being. But how can we build better relationships, making friendship and romance truly resilient?
Resilience Starts With Solutions
A core tenet of the solution-focused approach to psychology is that we can make surprisingly rapid and meaningful changes simply by doing more of what is already working in our lives. People come to psychologists in a problem-focused mindset; they define the goal of the helping relationship as removing a negative state of affairs. The solution-focused therapist looks for occasions when the problem is not occurring. Very often, those exception occasions are times when, unwittingly, we are doing something very right.
So if the question is building better relationships, we could approach the issue from a problem mindset and ask about the behaviors that derail relationships and simply avoid engaging in those. A moment’s thought, however, suggests that strong, resilient relationships are not merely ones that avoid petty arguments and poor communication. It’s the presence of positive elements, not merely the absence of negative ones, that defines a great business or life partnership. As Marcus Buckingham explains, shoring up weaknesses cannot, in itself, align ourselves with our strengths and actually strengthen them.
From a solution-focused perspective, we learn about successful relationships by reverse-engineering our most successful moments of relating. What are we doing when we feel most connected, most in love, most in sync with another? When we do more of what works, we don’t eliminate all our weaknesses–we simply ensure a level of resilience that allows us to weather those shortcomings.
