Part 2: Manage Relationships Effectively

Establish Your Purpose

You cannot impress a sense of purpose onto a person that does not believe in themself or that their effort will pay off. When you give up having beliefs, your motivation will then be limited to the pursuit of pleasure or in the absence of that, a fear of consequences for failure to comply with the demands of authorities. If this is your situation, your state of mind is operating at the lowest intensity. This is not an optimal state which leads to growth or the fulfillment of your potential. The only person who can change this condition for you is you. The opposite situation can also be problematic. To have a mind that accepts ideas without using any intelligence or sense is foolish.

 

Having absolute certainty and a willingness to put your life and resources on the line without reasonable proof of truth is delusional and can also mean you lack self-worth. Neither extremes of beliefs are ideal. If you lack the motivation to pursue a great purpose, start with a simple breath meditation to establish your presence of mind. When you practice this discipline, you will realize how your thoughts affect your state of mind. Freeing your mind by learning to observe your thoughts is a matter of practice. This is how you identify the real you.

 

What is Real?

I had an interesting conversation with a self-proclaimed atheist, and he felt comfortable sharing his beliefs. He argued that there is no way to know anything for sure. The brilliant philosopher Socrates also made the same point. Conceptually, we can never know anything for certain as a result of a thought process. So I asked him if he had kids, and he acknowledged that he did. I asked him if he loved them, and he said yes. I asked him how he knew. He was stumped. The realization of how he feels about his children bypass his need to think.

We know something by heart when we memorize things such as a multiplication table. Learning yourself well enough that you can trust being yourself without a thought gives you the freedom to be yourself by heart. To get there, you need to practice a fact-based system of self-awareness and know yourself by heart. At the height of self-awareness you will come to know that  you are not your thoughts, but just the awareness that observes thoughts. Breath meditation is the universal practice across practically all spiritual faiths that teach the authentic mind/body connection. The reality is that without this awareness, we are no more than animals that think only about survival.

Practice SELF-CARE to understand your motivations, attitudes, beliefs, and values to know yourself by heart. When you become a real person, you can have a genuine connection with your purpose and have real relationships. You can mature your ego to a higher purpose.

Maturing the Ego

Suspending your judgment until you know the reality of a situation and withholding a mindless opinion is being a mature person that lives by the rules of discretion and self-control. Exercising your powers of observation and best judgement to organize the efforts, set goals, and evaluate the state of your relationships makes your ego serve your purpose rather than the other way around. This is an intellectually honest and fact-based approach to keep your ego in check. Most people lack this capacity because they don’t dare to live and learn from experience. Instead, they mimic what they believe is the mindset and behavior of those they idolize. Infantile individuals do not enjoy the success they achieve. History is littered with examples of people that despite achieving fame and fortune died in misery.

It took the practice of SELF-CARE for me to accept the realization that my past relationships with people were motivated by a desire to further my ambitions. I had a bias to look at things from a self-serving standpoint and ignore anything else to the contrary. The problem with that approach, emotionally speaking is volatility leading to an eventual loss of control and despair. If this sounds childlike and immature, that is because children have an underdeveloped ego. Parenting ourselves with a compassionate concern addresses this.

 

Invest in Yourself

 

It isn’t necessary to face painful losses to mature your ego. Some people spend an entire lifetime ruminating on a painful past. This is not only unproductive, it is also ungrateful and immature. Life provides indications that tell you that change is required. Pain, anxiety, frustration, and an overall sense of disappointment with yourself signals there is an alternate reality possible for you if you so choose.

 

Productivity

When you waste valuable time replaying bad episodes in your life, the experience further scars and embeds itself into you as a pattern.  You can spend time trying to suppress the suffering, or you can face the fear that comes with the recollection. Speaking from experience, if your situation does not require professional help because you are still functional, ask yourself why the situation comes up again and, if anything you can do about it. Needless to say, you are not alone in having been a victim of circumstances. Find someone else that has similarly suffered and lend them your time to help them. Do something productive to heal and overcome your situation by getting better.

Dwelling on bad situations not only consumes your time and energy, but it also prevents you from moving further along in life. No doubt, bad people or poor judgment are the culprits. Giving either of these more power to make you suffer further is not in your interest.

 

Gratitude

The vibrational state of a person is very different between the extremes of resentful bitterness and gratitude. It is nearly impossible to be unhappy while being truly grateful for the good things you have. As a thought experiment, I took an entire day to think about what I could have in life if allowed to have anything that is possible.

Here is what I honestly came up with to feel genuinely grateful:

1. Abundant Health to enjoy feeling great

2. Trustworthy people for meaningful relationships

3. Financial Independence so as not to think about money

4. Doing what I love as a profession

5. Peace of Mind so that I can be at my best

All of these objectives are achievable with a plan. To pursue them requires a daily practice by taking the time and effort to improve as a regular practice. Daily habits include time management,  goal setting, and relationship practices to improve yourself. To force a belief that you are grateful when you do nothing toward that is delusional. Here is an example of how I transformed with SELF-CARE.

Investing in yourself means to accept the belief and exercise the faith that with the effort you are worth it. 

 

Stress and negative emotions affect everything from blood pressure, diet, rest, and your overall quality of life. 

 

The values that you choose to live by determine how you empower emotions to affect you. Maturity is an important factor because it governs the way that you allow your emotions to affect you.

On a daily basis, being aware of the objectives that best fit your values as suggested above helps to guide the structure of your activities and making time to improve your life accordingly. Lacking these guiding principles and formulating efforts, your quality of life is ignored.

 

Mission Focus

Your purpose in life is the overall choice of service that you provide to a market given your talent, passion, profession, and motivations. A mission is your choice of how you translate that purpose into a specific set of activities, at the current time, in your current situation. It takes situational awareness to understand how you best use your skills and knowledge to create value. Managing yourself is not a mission per se, but it is a qualifier that reflects high self-esteem as a desirable team member. If not as a participant, you need to be a desirable Leader to recruit and keep a high-performance team. Strong people expect strong, knowledgable Leaders like you to follow.

When you find yourself in a situation where you are a Leader and there is competition or high visibility, it is essential to have a mission. 

When there are various skills of your team, you need to assess the capabilities of the various participants and understand how they can contribute. Based on their skills and ideas, it is up to you to determine the Mission for your team. 

This mission is an aspirational target that when achieved, raises the profile. The value of each of the participants on the project should have an opportunity to participate. Each team member should have a complementary role to play. At every stage of your career, the level of challenge to your projects and its mission should demonstrate your long-term growth and your potential as a Leader. As your team recalls the projects, it should inspire.

Compete

From a SELF-CARE standpoint, your most important and formidable competitor is you. To challenge yourself to be better every day, you should have a realistic sense of how you currently perform. It helps to have a journal and track your effort against all of the important factors that affect your well being. The secret to the success of the most competitive and successful contenders for any competitive endeavor is daily routines with a plan and tracking performance against each step or activity. Making adjustments, changing the plan, and putting forth the right effort is how growth and technical excellence are achieved. Doing this for yourself, the benefits are the same.

The components of the Journal include your time management, goals, and the SELF-CARE relationship management tools you follow.

When it comes to competing against others, the adjustments are to going to be on the training plan and the ways to adjust to handle the strengths and advantages of the contender or challenger. Discipline, either way, should be the same. Competition helps to make us better as in the case of the most competitive spheres of human performance. 

Inspirational Leaders that have transcended the world where they compete and have become an inspirational guide for the rest of our species did so based on how invested they were in their beliefs, following a life-long commitment to their purpose. When you think about the Inspirational Leaders that come to your mind, it’s nearly impossible to accept the idea that they accidentally discovered their purpose and that they had little to no belief in their ideas.

The intention to make your life mean something, each of the sections above add up to the character and personality that you develop with effort. Your intention follows a realistic understanding of your character and commitment to a life well lived and this means to accept that until you discover who you really are, what you are capable of, and put forth the effort to succeed, you will not exist to see your full potential reached. The relationship you have with yourself is a non-negotiable one that you have to manage with SELF-CARE.

Continue to the next section, Part 3: Managing Relationships through Specialization