John Spiegel: Hi I am John Spiegel. I am a family mediator and we are going to talk now about how to build good relationship with your in-laws.
Host: What helps build enjoyable, strong relationships with in-laws?
John Spiegel: What I encourage people to do is to think long term and to think strategically about these relationships. These can be precious relationships and they are worth investing time in. Well, how do you think strategically, what does that mean? Okay, so the key thing that people can do, is to be good listeners. I think everyone on the planet is just eager to have someone else take real interest in them and to listen with full attention.
So, one of the ways to think strategically is to try to picture in your mind how you can create a situation where you get listen to that person and it has to be done one on one. And then when you have got that opportunity, then you are going to want to ask them open ended questions about their lives and about their thinking and about the things that are of interest to them. Get interested in what they have to say and let it be visible that you are interested, if people can do that one thing to listen with interest, to ask open ended questions, to resist the temptation too quickly, to break in with their own stories that they reminded of and just keep the focus on the person that you are building a relationship with. You are just going to just from the get go; you will be way out ahead of what you expect.