You may come across inconsiderate people in your life who don’t take your feelings into account when they are dealing with you. You can also meet people who do not want to stop thinking about themselves or who try to take advantage of you by draining all your energy .

It is necessary that in your daily relationships you do not give power to other people over your emotions, doing so will only lead to toxic and unhealthy interpersonal relationships . The key to be able to overcome the resentments that people generate because of their criticism or negative verbal messages is your own reactivity. It is you who must change the behavior and not them. Nothing will change if you look elsewhere.

Improve your interpersonal interactions without empowering yourself

People often joke about new topics (content) but that real change involves fixing how we speak or act (process). Here’s a helpful checklist to improve your interactions so that you can really start having healthy relationships that give you rather than leave you.

• • Don’t expect others to change. Work on yourself instead of wanting others to change for you. When we set low or no expectations for others, we have a better chance of being satisfied. The less you expect from others, the less disappointment you will get.

• • Model the change you want to see. Mahatma Ghandi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” Yes, if we are faced with challenges, we may well push others along the way. Certainly, if we lean toward underperformance and pessimism, the outlook remains less bright.

• • Practice positivity.  Consider the ratio of positive to negative feelings created, whether at home, at school, at work, or among friends.

• • Be nice. It takes as much or even less energy to show a smile or an affectionate comment than to sigh, frown, or impart sarcasm. Fred Rogers perhaps conveyed this best: “There are three ways to achieve ultimate success. The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”

• • Don’t take things personally.  Observe this and other cognitive distortions, such as emotional reasoning, black-and-white thinking , excessive generalization, reading other people’s minds, predicting the future, and catastrophe.

• • Be direct.  Avoid forming triangles. The closest distance between two points is a straight line. Do you have something to say to someone else? Think of a line. When that line wobbles, it looks like two people who don’t get along on either end. If we discharge another person, forming a triangle, our temporary relief is just that. Temporary. You need to be direct but also courteous to start an important conversation with others.

• • Clean up your emotional disorders.  There are four stages to anger: build-up, spark and implosion, explosion (or both), and the cleansing stage. If you spilled soda on the floor, would you leave it there? No, because it would stain, it would attract bugs, it would create a fall hazard, in other words it would turn into a disaster. But very often people leave their sticky and emotional disorders wherever they occur without cleaning or resolving them. It is similar to the stone wall, which we know will also undo relationships, over time.

• • Cool down. Use “I’m sorry” messages and avoid making affirmations. Don’t take anything for granted because this will only make other people defensive.

• Do not get away from your loved ones.  Out of sight, out of mind , right? Incorrect. Family systems teach us that the limit, one of the eight principles of Bowen’s theory, generates more anxiety than it corrects.

The emotional cutoff is the extreme way to distance yourself, but it has long-term ramifications for future intimate relationships, even generations, because anxiety is less able to be absorbed. Chronic anxiety multiplies. Those who cut look to others to meet their connection needs . When those relationships become strained, especially if people don’t work to improve their identity, the same interpersonal issues arise.