Are You Focusing on the Most Important Relationships in Your Life?
OR Are You Finding Your Business Is Hijacking Your Attention AND Short-Changing Your Relationships?
Today I want to share some thoughts about the importance of relationships, and living a life of purpose in sync with those we love.
It is now the start of a new year and I was reassessing last year’s achievements, what my focus had been, and how well I did. In all honesty, last year for me was a good year and a success as I met my major goals for the year.
2017, for me, is going to be a very different year to last year, as I plan to focus more intensely on my business goals this year and put in the work I need to do to achieve the goals I have set for myself. My path forward is an exciting one; and I am really looking forward to this journey. So, yayyy!
Thinking along these lines got me thinking about what business actually meant to me … specifically my relationship with my business (and YES! I have one). As well as thinking about the various other aspects of my life and the respective relationships in each, how well everything fits together, as well as any synergies between them. This led me to considering just how important it is to do a year by year review of the direction you have set for yourself (or the route you have planned – if you prefer to use that analogy) and to ensure that you are still on track and that your WHY has not changed in the meantime.
For me every aspect of my life IS about Relationships, and is an expression of and hinges on some sort of relationship. Whether that relationship is with myself, with my best other half, with my family and friends, with my business, staff, clients, colleagues, work mates, employers, acquaintances, or anyone else I come into contact with. Everything is about relationships … some deeper, some more shallow … but they all impact me in some way AND in return I too impact others in various ways.
So it is really important to review which of these relationships are the most important to me/you, which ones I/you should be VERY actively and systematically nurturing to ensure they continue to grow and flourish. That is, which ones I/you should FOCUS on. Like a living thing, a relationship that is not nurtured will eventually shrivel up, dry out and die. I am sure you would have heard the saying that “in business you don’t stay put … you are either growing or you are dying”. The same is true for relationships … if you don’t look after them, if you don’t nurture them, if you don’t take care of them, they WILL shrivel up and die.
Hence, for me, when considering relationships, the order of importance is: my relationship with myself, next my partner, then my family and friends, and lastly my business. The reason I put myself first is that I strongly believe that you need to have a good, healthy, caring relationship with yourself first before you can have a GREAT relationship with anyone else. I do not mean a narcissistic relationship, but I do mean the type that knows your weaknesses and accepts those; then in turn allows you to see and accept the weakness of those around you. The type of relationship that calls for balance in every aspect of your life.
That is why I put business last. For me business is a tool to achieve my goals of freedom in both time and money; but it does not take precedence over my relationship with my partner, friends or other people ranked higher in importance. I am sharing these thoughts with you (a lesson hard learnt) so that it may hopefully be of value to someone reading this and may help them bring more balance into their lives.
Hence, I would suggest that you have a look at your life and see what you are FOCUSING your ATTENTION most on. Have you allowed your business to take precedence over all your other relationships?
When you are doing something that you love and are single-mindedly working to build a strong business, it has a habit of taking over ALL aspects of you life. Particularly for passion-based businesses. Hence, you need to be vigilant to monitor each aspect of your life, to ensure those aspects that are the MOST IMPORTANT ARE actually getting the focus of your attention that they deserve. And that you are not spending most of your ATTENTION on just your business to the detriment of your family, or other important relationships. Because if that happens … (and to use an analogy) … if you have pushed your relationship with your family further and further away from you and into some dark, cold corner of the home while you focus solely on your business, and even slammed a door on it (possibly as a result of feeling guilty), you may find that when you open that door again one day wanting to start building it up again, it may be too late. It has shrivelled up, dried out and died on you, as it hasn’t been fed in a long, long time … may be even years. So work out WHAT is important to you and nurture it … don’t let your desire for success, money, etc blind you to what is truly important to you.
So the take away from this today is: to make sure that you are focusing most of your attention on that which is MOST IMPORTANT and RELEVANT to your life. And not to allow anything else to hijack that attention which belongs to something else that is more precious!
Anyway, that’s my rave for today. I hope it has been of value to anyone reading this, and if you have connected with any of this please drop me a Comment below. Also, if my writing is a little off par(?) or I don’t make too much sense, please forgive me; I will try better next time.
Till next time,
Stef