OFW guide: How to establish great and lasting relationships with co-workers

In your professional career, it is always good to have friends or a network of contacts who can help you move up and be successful. To do this, you must establish relationships that are not only great but also long lasting. Not everyone realizes the importance of good relationships. Usually, people treat relationships with customers or co-workers as something that is purely business or part of their daily work. However, establishing good relationships with co-workers and business associates is actually part of achieving success. According to an article on the Reader's Digest, we need the goodwill and cooperation of our co-workers to perform our own jobs well. The article cited studies showing that "disagreements with coworkers and bad interoffice relationships deflate morale and impair performance even more than rumors of layoffs." It also noted that people spend most of their waking hours at work more than anywhere else. "Reaching out to your colleagues — or extending an olive branch, if need be — can make your work environment a much nicer place in which to spend eight (or 10 or 12 or 14) hours a day even as it increases your job security. (In the event of a layoff, chances are the office loner or grouch is among the first to go.)," the Reader's Digest said. The business site Inc. has three tips for establishing good relationships with clients or co-workers: (1) Be self-aware Establishing a good emotional relationship with others actually starts with getting to know yourself. Before you can create bonds with others, you need to create one with yourself first. Know yourself -- your needs, wants, dislikes, and limits -- so that you can deal with others more effectively and harmoniously. If you do not have a good basic knowledge of who you really are or if you cannot control your emotions, chances are you will encounter many problems in your professional life. (2) Empathize Learning how to empathize – the ability to put one's self into the situation of others and feel their pain – is equally as important as self-awareness. Empathizing means that you are focusing your energy on the emotions of others, not just yourself. Understanding how others feel will help you create a stronger bond with people. People will appreciate that you are concerned about their personal well-being, not just their value to you at work. (3) Be realistically optimistic Going forward together is one of the most important factors of being in a relationship. However, to be successful in doing this, you must be a realist and an optimist at the same time. Being a realist entails that you don't turn a blind eye toward possible failures and problems that come along the way. Combined with optimism, which is taking hurdles as opprtunities to improve yourself, you will become realistically optimistic. This will allow you to identify problems and find the solutions as part of improving yourself. - Andrei Medina, VVP, GMA News