TED talks, self-help books and online courses are available for improving skills for getting along with others. I used to teach educational psychology to college students planning on being a teacher. A picture or an initial plan for getting along with somebody else already involves two people. What about just one person? You can look up "intrapersonal skills", which I take to be about the same thing as self-development.
As soon as we focus on just one person, we immediately see that WHICH person matters very much. How old? One? Ten? 20? 40? 80? What sex? In lots of ways, sex is irrelevant but in lots of other ways, it is fundamental. Depending on age, we might delve into how the person spends time. What do they like? What do they avoid?
When we think of two people, a marriage, a sibling relationship, a parent and child, two friends, we double the complexity and the matters that matter. Teachers often have too many students and too many responsibilities to really get to know their students. Giving any single student too much attention can be counterproductive. But there may be basic approaches that help.
A rough picture of many teaching situations has three parts: the student, the teacher and the subject or skill being taught. In the old days, say, before a mature John Dewey and American progressive education, we expected the student to be eager and to apply effort. We expected the teacher to know, especially if the expected student was about 12 years or so old and we expected the subject to be valuable and somewhat fundamental. Mothers produced a child, nursed the child and depended on native intelligence to raise the child. Mothers were depended on to handle emotional insight and expression. Even today, much time and effort is spent on knowing a subject and far less on caring about the self, the subject or other people, especially in high school, college and beyond.
One simplified hope for educational psychology would be instructional activity that arranged for all teachers-to-be to be equipped with what to say and do so that all of their own students would learn the subject at high levels. What if something intrudes? What if a puppy dies? What if a divorce looms? The best book I found to give a foundation of interpersonal skills is Thomas Gordon's "Teacher Effectiveness Training". Roughly speaking, Dr. Gordon specifies "I-messages", active listening and careful mutual problem solving, in that order.
"I-messages" are about my feelings, my frustrations, my understanding. They are not about your flaws or your short-comings. Active listening is about listening to what another person says, their complaints, their frustrations and fears, and stating them back to show I am getting their message. Careful mutual problem-solving can begin later when we will figure out what needs to be done and how to accomplish that.
