Often times people will come in with dysfunctional relationships – struggles with their sibling, spouse, co-workers, etc. One of the first things I’ll look at is how they frame up that interaction. Let’s say I’m struggling with one of my co-workers and I view that person like this person comes in and I’m working on my computer and they’re talking to me non-stop. I view this person as being annoying: “Why won’t this person leave me alone?” and when I view it that way I’m going to have less than favorable views of that person. That can get in the way of how I interact with that person.  That can put a chip on my shoulder or mess with me in a way that will affect me the rest of the day. So instead of viewing that person as someone who is trying to annoy me, you look at it with a different perspective: what skill is this person lacking?

Maybe this person doesn’t read verbal cues. 

Maybe when they were younger, and they were the youngest brother, and whenever they wanted attention from someone they had to talk non-stop. 

You look for different ways of understanding instead of judgement of this person. Why does this person show up like this? Why did they adopt this behavior? And when we view this co-worker like this I’m going to be impatient with them and trying to get out of conversations with them as quick as I can, or avoid them. On the other side of that, I can view this person as a human being and think what led them to take this kind of approach? When I see people adopt this kind of mindset, I see them have more patience with others as well as their relationships usually improve across the board. 

When you work on being more patient with a co-worker, usually that translates to having more patience at home, more patience everywhere you go. When you start this concept of viewing people in a healthy way and a non-judgmental way (“what is this person lacking”) – then we look at the other side of the coin. “What skill do I lack that this person is annoying me so much?” Once we look at that then we can look at our own accountability and those are things we can change! We can’t change our co-worker but we can change ourselves and see what skills we are lacking. 

When we start looking inwards, that’s where growth really picks up because you’re focusing on things you can change.