Have you ever stopped to consider that people either feed you or drain you? We all know people who boost our spirits up, while others drag us into a ditch.
Most of us think of our relationships in these terms: We like to be around people who make us feel good. We hope, no one, in his right mind, would gravitate to people who dish out bad feelings.
In all relationships, we stand the best chance of improving things, if we feed other people positive, encouraging thoughts, and ideas.
A friend of ours recently told us: "My mother-in-law feeds me a lot of negative energy. Then, I come home and eat like crazy. I binge."
All of us have likely done this. Someone hurts our feelings, so we break out the chips and dip. Next, we find ourselves parked in front of the bread, cheese, and mayonnaise. A sandwich-or two-makes us feel comforted.
If you think in terms of planting healthy seeds in a relationship, you'll figure out a way to build people up. Bragging on others and pointing out what they're doing right is pretty simple to do. But, you might need to get very inventive as well.
We know a stepmom who is trying to build her family into a healthier unit. We'll call her Karen. "My two stepsons were failing in school," Karen told us. "So, I sat down and talked with them. One of the boys told me he believes his dad and I hate his mother. He told me he couldn't study because his world had fallen apart."
Karen says this stopped her in her tracks. She told her stepson she was going to change her way of speaking. She told him he was right about her hateful language.
"I called up his mother, my husband's ex-wife, and told her I wanted to do better," Karen told us. "I told her I needed to be more thoughtful toward her. I went so far as to ask her forgiveness for anything I'd done to hurt her," Karen continued.
From that moment on, Karen's stepsons and her husband heard only positive remarks about the ex-wife. Karen says she just bit her tongue if anything negative was going on. She had to work at it.
Today, Karen says she and the ex-wife have no harsh language between them. They aren't friends exactly, but they are definitely not enemies. Karen's stepsons are doing much better in school.
"I got into a quarrel with my boss, which was really stressful," says a friend of ours we'll call Rick. Rick says everything was going downhill until his boss did something marvelous. "My boss walked in one morning and asked if we could just hit the re-set button," says Rick. "He told me I was one of the best employees he'd ever had. The man asked me to forgive him. I nearly fainted."
Rick says that he is now trying much harder to keep things on track. He goes out of his way to compliment the boss to other employees and ask the boss if he needs anything.
"Any person can easily get into a quarrel with someone," says Rick. "Feeling in control is simply a matter of having the guts to change the conversation."