Introduction to Interpersonal Effectiveness

Interpersonal Effectiveness Handouts 1, 2, and 2A

As a concept, interpersonal effectiveness is relatively easy to define. Essentially, learning these skills will help you to navigate your interpersonal relationships more effectively. Whether the relationship is platonic, romantic, professional, or any other variety of relationship, these skills will help you navigate them with more efficacy. Overall, interpersonal effectiveness skills will cover three main areas: 

1. Obtaining what you want and need from others with effectiveness

2. Build, maintain, and strengthen good relationships and learn how to walk away from destructive relationships. 

3. Walk the middle, or wise, path when it comes to navigating interpersonal relationships. 

As with mindfulness, there are certain factors that can interfere with one’s ability to be effective when it comes to relationships. Most of the time, people’s struggles with getting their goals met in interpersonal relationships fall into one or several of many categories, including: 

• You simply don’t have the skills needed to do so. Maybe no one ever modeled how to make and keep friends, or you only saw growth 

• You struggle to identify or validate what you want and need from your relationships. 

• Your emotions, or being in your Emotional Mind too intensely, get in the way of being Wise. 

• Sometimes people favor getting short-term needs met over working toward long-term goals, which makes sense if you’ve never had safe relationships. 

• Other people, often who are more powerful than you, get in the way of you getting what you want and need from them or others close to them. 

• Your beliefs about your own worthiness prevent you from believing you deserve to ask for what you need. 

Do any of those sound familiar to you?

I’d like to address the final bullet of the factors that interfere with interpersonal effectiveness; the idea that you don’t deserve to ask for what you want and need from relationships in your life. First of all, that’s not true in the slightest. No matter the state of your relationships, no matter the abundance or lack of them, every human being deserves to have good and supportive relationships. We simply cannot survive as solitary beings. That said, we do also have the responsibility to approach our relationships with skill and effectiveness. Fear not, this curriculum will arm you with the tools needed to be an effective participant in all of your relationships. 

If you struggle to believe in yourself, I want you to consider taking a look at Handout 2A in this section. This handout is a list of myths that people often believe that get in the way of being effective in relationships. I want to challenge you to examine these myths and see which ones are things you have said or sound like things you have said to yourself. Develop counter narratives to these, because they simply are just myths. 

The first skill we will discuss is how to obtain your goals effectively, specifically discussing the concept of DEAR MAN, a foundational skill in asking for what you need. Stay tuned for more information about this!