Relating...

I attended this session on relationships this Friday at the Agilent "Life is Beautiful" initiative. It’s not that I have come back as a transformed person, for most of the things discussed were the cliché gyana we all have. Its rather a question of intent to implement than to know. And the session surely sprouted a keen intent in me to summarize the experience. Follows:

Imbalance in life comes from stress and low (and sometimes no) emphasis on interpersonal relationships. When we think of relationships, a plenty of them come to mind: parents, brother, sister, cousins, friends, wife’s parents, second cousins, friends, colleagues, customers and so forth. What about our relationship with self?

Emphasis! of all the relationships we are born with or we make, the most important is the relationship with self. All of us carry our universe around ourselves. I, me, myself, my - perhaps these are the most used words. When self is the most important person in our lives, then how is it that we can choose to not-to-be-in-harmony with self? The next question I ask is how do I relate better with self? To help myself understand myself better, I ask myself some questions:
What is my ultimate goal in life? What is and who is important to me? What is it that gives me maximum contentment? What is it that is my strength? What is it that I fear?
What is it that I need to develop to move closer to my goals? Am I spreading happiness around? What am I doing for the people I care about? Am I making a positive difference to somebody’s life?

It seems easy on the surface, but these are the most difficult questions to answer. People spend their life times and they realize in the end that they were never related to themselves as much as they were related to their jobs and their responsibilities. The importance of this emphasis on relating with self can be very easily summarized by quoting Oscar Wilde when he said “I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly”.

The other important relationships are the ones we have with the significant others. Who are these significant others? These are the people who have maximum impact upon the way we are and our life is. These are spouse, parents (extended parents), siblings and children. Besides them, the significant other can be any person who affects us heavily.

So what do we do to establish harmonious relations with all these important people? To be honest it is no herculean task. There are some important ingredients to successful relationships and most of us are aware of them. For the sake of summarization, these are:

Communicating it right: two important powers are to be understood for communicating successfully viz. power of listening without judgement and power of active expression.
Expression: its important to have and to give the right to express freely (which also includes constructive criticism)
Problem Solving: to solve one problem at a time and solving it without being biased by past problems is one way to fighting fair.
Compromise: our culture teaches us a lot about compromise and we do a lot. Compromise is a necessary evil. But I must say that it should come from within and not be forced on self. As a halfhearted or unwilling compromise can strike back like a boomrang.
Sense of Humour: nothing is as impactful as well-timed humour. Who doesn't like the company of a humorous person?
Forgiving and Acknowledging Mistakes: although its difficult but we must forgive without being boastful. Acknowledging our mistakes cures half of the problems.
Self awareness and Self Enhancement: its important to know self. And it is more important to act for enhancing self. It is no hidden mystery that diagnosis of the disease is not cure, but curing is.
Appreciation: appreciating others (and self too) for a deed done good is far better than rebuking for a mistake. Like begets like.
Acknowledgement: it is important to acknowledge other’s efforts even if they are not that successful.
However, the most important is the genuine intent to do all this. We must not forget that the intent reflects in the body language. It is quite evident that all the above mentioned factors are impossible if there is no Honesty and no Faith. Also, these are impossible to acheive if we don't give regular time to them (time to self to sleep properly, time to self to think about, time to self to pursue interests, time to significant others to build and enhance relationships).

Organizations spend millions in CRM and SRM to reap the benefits of good relationships. Can’t we spend some genuine intention and hours to establish better relationships with self and surroundings?

After all, Life is beautiful…and only I make it so!!!

(the speaker of the session was Dr. Bhawna Barmi, a very respected clinical psychologist http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=83807312)