The chapter entitled Relationships in Time To Get Real! focuses on the key relationships in your life, their importance, and how they can help you to gain unvarnished feedback on your decisions and plans. The chapter also includes advice about relationships in general that can either help or hinder you in building a fulfilling life.

Key relationships occur with those people with whom you can share your innermost thoughts and plans about life and career. These are people you trust and whose advice and counsel you would want to seek. They are willing to tell you what you need to hear even if you do not want to hear it.

Key relationships require the capacity to build trust. Trust in a relationship creates a feeling of safety. Safety allows for personal sharing. The sharer understands that he or she can trust the relationship and therefore can be open and transparent in a dialogue. The receiver in the relationship understands that trust is the basis for the relationship and therefore knows that the sharer is vulnerable and he or she would never do anything to break confidence or to hurt the person who is sharing. Such a relationship should propel you, the sharer, toward your best life.

In the book Time To Get Real! you also consider negative or toxic relationships that need to be worked on or moved away from. It’s important to recognize that relationships can hinder an individual’s progress toward his or her best life. These are negative or toxic relationships; they poison the efforts of an individual from moving in a positive direction.

Brian was a good guy who found he was constantly dealing with criticism from his older brother, Michael. Brian would periodically approach Michael for advice on various issues impacting his life. Michael consistently found negative aspects of Brian’s decision-making or behavior. He did not reinforce or applaud Brian’s positive behavior or decisions. He dwelled on the negative. This really bothered Brian. What should he do? What would you do?

In this instance and many others that you can think of, we have an individual attempting to move forward in their life, but hitting a roadblock in the form of a negative or toxic relationship. Whether it’s a friend, family member, boss, or spouse doesn’t matter. What matters is that this frustration in the relationship makes you feel negative, non-trusting of the individual, and concerned that you cannot share your true feelings or innermost thoughts.

Just as a positive key relationship can help you move ahead to your best life, a negative or toxic relationship can prevent you from making progress. Refuse to live with a relationship that makes you feel bad, turns you off, creates negative energy for you and doesn’t help move you along to your best life. You can seek the advice and help of one of your positive key relationships. You can seek guidance from a mentor or coach. Living with a negative or toxic relationship should not be an option.

Our relationships are important and individuals with robust relationships maximize their chance for happiness. It’s not easy to be a workaholic if you know you have to play tennis twice a week with Laura. It’s harder to be alone watching television for hours when Paul expects you to have lunch with him at least once a week. A cure for feeling old occurs when you get out to watch your grandchildren play soccer, baseball, or football. Relationships push you outside of yourself. They require solid interaction between human beings. Relationships also vary in their intensity. The key is to have enough of them to bring variety and interest into your life.