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    Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time: A Guide for Work and Home
    Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time: A Guide for Work and Home
    Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time: A Guide for Work and Home
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time: A Guide for Work and Home

    By Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger

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    About this ebook

    The most important moments in life involve big decisions, big events, and big opportunitiesand those involve other people.

    Relationships make our lives work, and as it turns out, they improve our health and happiness as well. When we have good ones, they help pick us up when we stumble and fall, but they dont just happen.

    Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger, who has built a career helping people build personal and professional relationships that create success, shares steps and strategies so you can:

    start conversations that lead to meaningful relationships;
    take a positive approach to the people in your life;
    listen effectively and understand others and their ideas;
    adapt your conversation style to increase connections; and
    manage difficult conversations to achieve positive outcomes.

    Any conversation can be the one that changes everything, but you need to know how to navigate them. Take the first step to enjoying game-changing relationships and build the life you wantone conversation at a time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateJan 10, 2018
    ISBN9781532031922
    Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time: A Guide for Work and Home
    Author

    Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger

    Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger is a popular speaker, author, and mentor who helps people build the personal and professional relationships that create success. She speaks and leads professional communication seminars at corporations, associations, and nonprofit organizations. She holds graduate degrees in English and education. She lives in the Washington, D.C., area where she is a frequent keynote speaker at the Smithsonian Institution. Visit www.carolannlloydstanger.com to learn more.

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      Book preview

      Building Relationships One Conversation at a Time - Carol Ann Lloyd-Stanger

      Copyright © 2018 CAROL ANN LLOYD-STANGER.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-5320-3193-9 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-5320-3192-2 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2017913503

      iUniverse rev. date: 01/09/2018

      CONTENTS

      Preface

      Introduction:   Relationships and Conversations

      Chapter 1 Making Relationships a Top Priority

      The Impact of Relationships

      The Extended Reach of Relationships

      Stories and Storytelling

      Building Blocks of Personal and Professional Connections

      The Success That Matters Most

      Chapter 2 Choosing the Best Conversations to Have

      The Power of Choice

      To Have or Not to Have

      Perspective

      Direction and Alternate Routes

      Outcomes and Destinations

      Chapter 3 Listening and Understanding Your Way to Success

      Time to Learn

      What People Want

      To Build a Bridge

      Questions That Get Answers

      Listening Builds Relationships

      Chapter 4 Exploring Style and Making Connections

      Image and Expressions

      Why People Don’t Get You

      It’s Just the Way I Am

      Style, Substance, and Setbacks

      Ways Style Can Work for You

      Chapter 5 Solving Problems and Creating Solutions

      Hallmarks of Tough Conversations

      Out of the Frying Pan

      Tough Talk with Yourself

      The Path to a Better Outcome

      Conclusion:   Getting Started

      Notes

      For my mother, who taught me how to build wonderful relationships with meaningful conversations

      PREFACE

      No road is long with good company.

      —Turkish proverb

      Our lives are shaped by relationships. Friends and family members, colleagues and neighbors, even competitors—all these people and our relationships with them contribute to some of the most meaningful moments of our lives. Those relationships are started and nurtured through great conversations. In years of working in youth and adult education, years of developing and presenting workshops about professional communication, and years of working with individuals seeking to experience greater personal and professional success, I’ve learned three important things:

      1. People make the most progress when they seek the success that matters most to them.

      2. Most people associate success with the people and the important relationships in their lives.

      3. The greatest tool we have for building strong personal and professional relationships is conversation.

      A client shared the example of how a simple conversation started a long-lasting, important relationship. While in a high school physical education class, my client started running required laps around the gym. Someone ran up to her and asked, Can I run with you? Simple question. My client said yes, and a friendship began. They started with what people often call small talk: other classes, favorite teachers, interests, siblings, and parents. Small talk isn’t really small; it is foundational. Later conversations covered the same material in more important ways: favorite classes became career plans, interests became life plans, and family members created new relationships. Conversations built relationships that supported these women through the years.

      People sometimes ask me why I choose to focus on conversations. In all the work I’ve done over the years, the big decisions, big successes, and big ideas all happened because of conversations. Conversations are how we share our lives. When people define success for themselves, it includes other people. Personal and professional success depends on relationships. And relationships depend on conversations. Big conversations and small conversations and everything in between.

      Also, I’m a big Shakespeare fan. After all, Shakespeare is still a best-selling author, and his plays are still produced all over the world—four hundred years after his death. We all know the stories and characters he created more than four hundred years ago. We use words and phrases he taught us more than four hundred years ago. Shakespeare created characters and stories and language patterns that have lasted for more than four hundred years. And he did all that through conversations. Shakespeare used conversations to create the worlds he wanted.

      We can do the same thing. We can have conversations that create our worlds. We can have conversations that build the personal and professional relationships that create success. The possibilities are endless.

      You can live the life you want to live—one conversation at a time.

      INTRODUCTION

      Relationships and Conversations

      Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

      —C. S. Lewis

      This book is a guide to focusing on the relationships that make our lives meaningful. To keep relationships strong and growing—and start new relationships that contribute to our growth and the growth of others—we need to have nurturing, healing, encouraging, and fun conversations. We build relationships one conversation at a time.

      We live our lives through our relationships. As children, we learn to navigate the world through relationships with parents and caregivers. Then we gain a sense of self as we establish relationships with other children. We go to school and have opportunities there to establish relationships with teachers, other adults, and more children. As life goes on, we exercise more choice in our relationships. We meet new people, get to know them, and determine whether they are a good fit for us in our lives.

      Our relationships matter because they have almost unlimited potential to bring us joy and sorrow. When we are in positive, meaningful relationships, we are happy and healthy; when we are in destructive relationships or are isolated, we are less happy and less healthy.

      In addition to gaining benefits from relationships, we can provide benefits to others. We support friends and family members, sharing their worries and their successes. We strengthen communities as we volunteer our time and talents, share our resources, and spend time listening to others. We become part of something larger than ourselves through our relationships.

      To a significant degree, relationships make us who we are. The quality of our relationships has an impact on our physical and emotional health, our academic and professional success, and the growth and strength of the organizations we work for and the communities where we live.

      Relationships shape our personal and professional experiences. Our relationships can bring us happiness, increase our effectiveness at work, improve our health, and extend our influence through our communities. Building positive relationships can help us define success and allow us to create the lives we want.

      We create and strengthen relationships through conversations. Conversations are the way we learn about other people, share ideas, and solve problems. Any conversation with a stranger might turn into a great friendship. Any conversation with a colleague might uncover a great new idea that will turn a business around. Any conversation with a neighbor might inspire you to make positive changes for your neighborhood. Any conversation has the potential to be a game changer. And any conversation can be the one that makes all the difference in your relationship. The right conversation can change everything.

      My mom never missed a chance to meet someone new, get to know someone better, encourage someone to grow, or reassure someone that everything would work out for the best. She never missed a chance to have a conversation.

      Choose to say hello, to ask interesting questions, to listen more than you speak, to believe in what’s possible, and to make meaningful connections.

      You can build better, stronger, happier, more wonderful relationships in every area of your life—one conversation at a time!

      People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.

      —Joseph F. Newton

      CHAPTER 1

      Making Relationships a Top Priority

      Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

      —Oprah Winfrey

      The Impact of Relationships

      Meaningful Relationships Make a Difference to Physical Health

      Studies show that relationships have a direct, lasting impact on our physical health. Although doctors and researchers don’t know exactly why, there is consistent evidence that people who are in meaningful relationships are physically healthier than people who are not.¹

      People who feel isolated report much lower satisfaction with personal health than those who have positive relationships. Individuals who feel isolated report struggles with depression and high blood pressure. Doctors have noted a correlation between loneliness and the dysregulation of immune systems. In other words, the lack of social connections is related to an increased chance of illness. In addition, without the support of friends, people who are isolated suffer from more stress and associated health problems.

      Developing and maintaining meaningful relationships might be thought of as a matter of the heart—and that turns out to be physically true. People who have positive relationships have fewer heart problems and lower instances of heart-related deaths than people who don’t have these relationships. Relationships also have an impact on less serious health problems—for example, people with healthy relationships have fewer colds.²

      The benefits of positive relationships include improved physical health from childhood and teen years through old age. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that the quality of social ties affects various health factors. The researchers found that in addition to healthy diet and exercise, an active social life and connections with other people are essential for good physical health. Developing a strong social network, then, is an inexpensive way to develop better health over a lifetime.³

      Meaningful Relationships Have a Positive

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