“How we treat and see others is a reflection of how
we see and treat our time and, more importantly,
ourselves.”
We may perceive these techniques and shortcuts to be working and giving us the immediate results we want. Yet in the long run, we realize that a lot of these relationships are shallow and begin to see the side effects of these techniques. Most of us think that having a great smile and being friendly is more than enough to be effective in relationships but this is very far from the truth. Sure, having the right set of social skills can open up relationships but it takes character to develop these relationships.
For instance, a lot of parents think that they can have fruitful relationships with their children by using a set of parental techniques. So they say positive words to them (even if they don’t want to or mean it), pretend to be listening to them only to get ready to talk back and give them gifts to get a desired behavior. Yet in reality, parents who use these parental techniques wound up having a distant and shallow relationship towards their children.
This is not only applicable to parents-children relationships but to all types of relationships. Whether we like it or not, in developing effective and meaningful relationships, techniques and shortcuts don’t work. There’s a difference between managing things and people. To manage your time efficiently, you can use techniques and shortcuts to manage things, machineries and tasks. But you can never be efficient when it comes to developing effective and long term relationships because people are obviously not things you can simply control and manipulate. When it comes to relationships, we focus on effectiveness and leadership.
I was involved in a feasibility business group where I was team leader and we had to come up with a business proposal paper to implement a business. In developing this business proposal paper, adversarial relationships were created because some members felts other members weren’t doing their jobs. Being team leader, I called for a group meeting to resolve the existing conflicts and issues. I had a lot of things to do during the appointed day of the group meeting so I decided to have the meeting for an hour to resolve everything. In the meeting proper, group members shared their feelings and concerns and I realized that it would take more than an hour to resolve everything. In fact, it took us 3 hours to do so! Definitely, my schedule and plans throughout the day were disrupted but it was worth it because group members were able to resolve their issues and concerns towards one another and were in a position to work effectively with the spirit of mutual confidence and trust.
In developing relationships, slow is fast. We cannot develop meaningful and effective key relationships in ourselves by using efficiency but only through giving in the time and the showing of our true character with the people we’re building relationships with. In transactional relationships, you treat people as things where they’re either resources to get things done or an obstacle for you to get the things you want. In transformational relationships, you see people not as things or tool buts as unique human beings like us with dignity who deserves to be treated the way we want to be treated. In developing relationships, people don’t need to pretend to one another but they become more open towards one another because parties involved in such relationships can trust to treasure each other’s strengths, values and vulnerabilities.
To be effective in relationships, we need to focus on key relationships, on those relationships that matter to us in the long run. Because 20% of these relationships we have gives us 80% of the satisfaction in life while 80% of these relationships only give us 20%. Unfortunately, a lot of us tend to associate effectiveness in human relationships with quantity not quality. Thus, we know a lot of people who might look socially successful but have shallow relationships with their spouse, children and parents. It’s not the number of friends you have in Facebook or the number acquaintances you know that matters but the depth of the relationship you have towards the people who truly matter to you.
As the old saying goes: “No man is an island.”
God created each and one of us not to simply live life alone and to die alone but He has created us for each other, to serve one another, to love each other. To be effective in living life, we are called to be effective in relationships. And to be effective in relationships, we treat people not as things or part of our to-do list we can manage efficiently but as human beings who deserve to know our genuine selves so they too can be their genuine selves. In doing so, we become effective in our time on Earth so when the appointed day comes where we’re in our deathbed, we don’t have any regrets because we’ve managed the meaningful relationships in our lives the way it should be managed.
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