Guest Blogger Jane Lovas' weekly series called “What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Life and Career” runs each Thursday

Two weeks ago I wrote about your relationship with yourself and last week I wrote about your relationship with your success team. Now it’s time to write about your personal relationships. This week I’m going to share some tips with you that will help you have great personal relationships.

1. Know yourself: You can’t expect someone else to know you if you don’t know yourself. Spend some time getting clear about who you are and what you enjoy doing.

2. Schedule time: Every relationship takes some work and you can’t do that without spending time together. Schedule time together and don’t cancel unless there is an overriding reason.

3. Honest Communication: Talk about what is going on inside of you, not just what’s going on with you. Also don’t let that elephant in the room get too big. You’ll be surprised how much smaller it becomes when it’s addressed. For the person not speaking: listen with both ears and your heart (thinking about what you’re going to say next is not listening, neither is texting or checking email).

4. Celebrate: Celebrate events such as birthdays, and accomplishments such a goal achieved. Sharing events and accomplishments also creates common bonds that help keep relationships together.

5. Be a friend: If you’re someplace new and you haven’t begun to make friends yet, be a friend to someone that looks like they might also be lonely. Start off with something easy such as coffee or lunch. Ask them some questions to get them talking about themselves.

No one should ever be lonely unless they choose to be lonely. If you are lonely – reach out and support someone else. I can assure you that if you are reaching out to others; there will be others that will reach out to you.

Have a great day!

"- Good Friends" courtesy Juliana Coutinho via Flickr Creative Commons

Jane Lovas is a career specialist who is the creator of the life changing 12 week tele-seminar “Creating the Life of Your Dreams”. She is also our guest blogger, whose column will run every Thursday. If you would like to contact Jane, you can reach her here, here or here.

This is certainly interesting. A new survey by the Institute for Corporate Productivity found that what employers are really looking for are the "soft skills." (Via Heather Huhman)

The study found that, overall, 76 percent of study respondents have identified soft skills such as listening skills, persuasion and teamwork that lead to successful organizational performance. Among large and high market performing companies, the numbers climb. Eighty-three percent of companies with 10,000 or more employees said they identify soft skills, compared to 72 percent of firms with 100-999 workers and 65 percent of those with fewer than 100 employees. Also, 85 percent of high-performing organizations ID soft skills, whereas 70 percent of lower performers reported doing so.

Clearly communication skills are important and definitely fall into the "soft skills" category. One way to brush up on your communication skills is through blogging. Now, I'm not one who advocates that every tom, Dick and Susie blog just for the sake of blogging. There are enough voices out there, so don't write just to write. It's important to have a message or theme and stick to it. And certainly don't go getting so personal that you could harm your career options in the long run.

But, like I said, it can help mold some of your of soft skills. And, according to Miriam Salpeter at Keppie Careers it can help your hard skills, too. Miriam talks about a client who was transitioning careers. The hiring manager hired the candidate and informed the new employee that the organization was largely convinced by the impressive writing on her blog.

So, if you do it well, and for the right reasons, you can use a blog as a showcase for some of your talents. And in the process it can help increase your skills and your ability to land a job.

"I'm blogging this" courtesy Foxtongue via Flickr Creative Commons