The holiday season is a time for celebration — and it’s also a prime opportunity to nurture your professional relationships. People are typically more open, reflective, and in a positive mindset during this time of year. Leveraging that mood to reestablish ties and rekindle connections can create a foundation for lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.

Whether you’re looking to advance your career, grow your business, or develop more meaningful connections with others for your mental and emotional well-being, strengthening your relationships can be a powerful way to achieve those goals. It’s often through our networks that unexpected job offers, partnerships, or collaborations arise, making it crucial — and worthwhile — to invest in these relationships.

Here [is the first of] three easy steps to take advantage of the momentum of the holidays to foster deeper connections that carry into the new year.

1. Review your relationships.

Taking stock of your relationships and professional connections will help you determine who you want to reconnect or strengthen your bond with, as well as which relationships no longer serve you.

First, create a list of colleagues, connections, and professional acquaintances from your phone contact list, LinkedIn, and other social media sites. Then, build a three-column table with the headers: Active Relationship, Infrequent Relationship, Lost/No Relationship. Distribute your contacts into those three columns.

Just like a stop light with red for stop, green for go, and yellow for caution, in each column, highlight the relationships you want to maintain or strengthen in green and the ones you’re no longer interested in maintaining in red. Red doesn’t mean you need to cut people off right away; it just means you won’t be putting in effort. Highlight the contacts you are unsure about in yellow.

When looking at reestablishing or deepening a relationship, it’s never all about your needs or desires. Relationships are mutual investments in each other’s lives, successes, and failures. Therefore, it’s important to look at not only what the relationship brings to your life, but what value you can bring the relationship. For the people you’re unsure how to categorize (your yellow highlights), ask yourself these three questions:

1. Can this relationship help me take steps toward achieving my personal and professional goals, or will it only help them achieve their goals?
2. Do I have a positive feeling when I think about my relationship with this person?
3. Can I be authentic around this person? Do they understand me and I understand them?

If you answer no to any of those questions, consider what specifically stops you from wanting to maintain or strengthen the relationship. For example, even though you can answer yes to the second and third questions for a particular person, perhaps your analysis reveals that you’re putting in all the effort into your relationship with them, so it doesn’t feel mutual. That imbalance makes you feel self-conscious that you’re bugging the person or they don’t see the value in the relationship.

Letting go of certain connections, even if they seem meaningful and valuable to you, can create room for new, more meaningful relationships. The goal is to focus your energy on the connections that matter most when it comes to enhancing your overall well-being, fulfillment, and growth.

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