It is amazing how many of the keys to success in life are common sense but not common practice.
For my part, what I know and what I do are still a struggle to keep aligned, and that’s mainly because of how painfully shy I am and how insecure I can be about what people think about me, the person. That remains the roughest part of my life right now: figuring out how to “fit in” in a place that has become so familiar yet remains so foreign.
I’m reading “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi. It’s a bit much for me at times because he is so my polar opposite in some regards; he’s the consummate networker, the King of Small Talk, the Great Connector of People…and I am totally not those things! However, in many other regards, his philosophy is very similar to my own. Again, common sense, but I’ll state it this way: people just want to come to work, do a good job, and feel like they belong. Anyone who appears to not fit that very broad description has issues, and even they want those same things.
I try to keep the following things in mind at all times:
1. All life is interconnected, ergo all human beings are interconnected.
2. All human beings experience the same range of emotion. How we experience them and what triggers those experiences may vary, but the range exists in all of us.
3. All psychological mechanisms at work in children are at work in adults. Adults just build all kinds of fancy facades to confuse things. Anything I learn as a parent, I can translate to the workplace. The flipside is also true: anything I learn at work I can translate to parenthood.
4. You can never say “thank you” enough. In fact, you probably don’t. I know I don’t.
5. Finally, the essential guiding principle: Love is the answer. The question doesn’t matter because, in the end, Love is always part of the answer. Patience helps, but I’ll always argue that Love is the key ingredient!
The tricky part is making sure that I’m actually behaving in a way that reflects my beliefs. These are my beliefs; yours are probably different. The thing we have in common, though, is that we are on the same lifelong quest to keep our behaviors and beliefs aligned.
Good luck on your journey!
Illuminate Possibilities 