6. support: means connecting with others by initiating, building, maintaining, and strengthening relationships to be stronger, more capable, and happier. Principles: love, interdependence, influence, teamwork, synergistic work, creating win-win situations, seeking to understand, drawing on strengths, building teams, and finding your voice
Hi, my name is Ben Balden. My life’s mission is to help everyone live a happier, fuller life. My intention for creating this information here is to realize my vision of a world full of happy and successful people at peace with themselves and in harmony with others. I warmly invite you to join me in this passionate cause: to help all people everywhere live a happier, fuller life. Let’s start with ourselves.
The Main Idea
The main idea here is that you are better off connecting with others. We call this connecting relationships. Building and maintaining relationships is important in your life.
- Strength – Relationships support you when times are hard and cheer you up. Relationships also cheer you on when you are achieving, to raise you to higher levels and help you shine.
- Synergy – Synergy is about adding your talents to others to make something greater. When you work with others and do something that neither of you could do alone.
- It’s Your Nature – By nature, you will be more satisfied, grateful, and live a happier, fuller life if you live it with others.
EXPECTED TIME FOR COMPLETION: 1 hour 30 Minutes
What We Will Cover
You can be stronger with others, so you can live a happier, fuller life. But first, you need to understand what that means and why it’s so important. The next logical question is who do we connect with and build relationships with and how we initiate and maintain those relationships. The three sections here will include the following:
- What & Why? – What are connections and relationships and why they are important to help us live happier, fuller lives?
- Who? – As not all relationships and individuals are the same, who should we seek to build relationships with?
- How? – And how can we effectively build and maintain those relationships?
What & Why?
What do we mean by connecting with others?
Connection with others means establishing a common or shared understanding, bond, or agreement. You feel this when someone expresses something that resonates with you, and you understand them more and you know they can understand you.
re·la·tion·ship /rəˈlāSH(ə)nˌSHip/
noun: the way in which two or more … people are connected, or the state of being connected.
A relationship develops when you connect with that other person. The more connections you have with that person the greater a relationship you have. Relationships can be constructive or destructive.
You are not alone
Many people think that when we first come into the world, you are not aware that others even exist. In the first year of your life, you begin to comprehend you are a separate individual and other individuals exist.1 There are over 7.5 billion2 ‘individuals’ on this planet, and about 107 billion different individuals have lived here in total.3
It is this great diversity of people that make the world so wonderful. The quality of the people you interact with determines what is a good town to live in, company to work at, or school to attend.4 These interactions can add great significance, meaning, and value to your life. These interactions are part of our nature.
We are social creatures designed to interact with and interdepend on other people to improve our lives. That is, it’s our human nature. Aristotle noted that man is “by nature a social animal.”5 Interacting with others fills human needs entrenched in us in the moment of our creation. The act of filling these needs naturally improves our situation in life.
Happier together
Spending time with others is likely to lead to a better quality of life. Quality time with family and friends who love you will dissipate any stress gained from work and the pressures of life.6 Those of us who are consistently involved with others in a positive way are statistically happier. They also tend to be healthier, live longer, and enjoy life more.7
Benefits of Working with Others
There are several mathematical models that illustrate how working with others will leave your life better off. Here are just a few concepts from the professional world to illustrate how two or more together can be so much more powerful than many unconnected individuals.
- Specialization – The economic principle of specialization offers mathematical proof of the benefits of working together. Specialization occurs when each person or country concentrates in the area they are good at and trades with others for things they lack or are comparatively poor at. You benefit from the unique gifts and skills of others and they benefit from your own. In an amazing combination of numbers, the product you end up with a greater overall yield.
- Synergy – Similar to specialization, Synergy means two or more groups combining their efforts or resources to create something none of them could have done alone. The compound effect is greater than the sum of the separate parts.
- Portfolio management – In the world of finance, investors build portfolios as a way to manage risks associated with the unpredictable gains and losses of individual investments. By connecting and interacting with others, we are better able to navigate the ups and downs of life. When you are down, others buoy you up and you return the favor to them when they are down. The overall effect is a greater emotional and physical stability.
- Support systems – In the business world, managers and teams seek to set up personal support systems when working in foreign or new environments. Your personal support system provides psychological encouragement, personal assistance like secretarial support, the ability to divide up and delegate tasks to accomplish larger goals together, to share and test out ideas on a fresh mind as a sounding board, and to check your sanity and thinking and balance out rough edges in your methods. Personal support or mentors help push you on and clear up your path allowing you to go further with less effort.
- Mentoring – In the corporate world, new executives are often paired with an experienced mentor to guide them. Mentoring is one party providing training, guidance, or advice to another. Being able to learn from the experiences and avoid the mistakes of another saves a great deal of time and resources. Moreover, when someone has traveled the road before, they are in a better position to identify the best way to travel. And the new generation has the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants and go further than any have gone before.
The world is just empirically better off when people work together. These are just a few analogies that demonstrate the benefits of different people working together.
Can you go it alone?
I’m sure there are many people who think this is obvious. Yet, so many people try to tackle life alone. They are just mistaken that either they need to go at it alone or (2) they are better off without others.
The truth is that although (1) there are some things you are better off doing alone, (2) there are some things that are less enjoyable to do alone (3) there are some things that are far more difficult to do alone, (4) and there are some things you can’t do alone.
The trick is to know the difference.
There are just some things in life that need more than one person to do. The majority of the greatest inventions, discoveries, and remarkable feats in our modern world are accomplished by groups or teams working together. Sometimes you need two or more people because the nature of the task is impossible for one person.
Yet, despite all the benefits, there are some that are just more comfortable working through life alone.
Why some don’t want to connect?
There are only two reasons why you would want to forgo the benefits of working with others.
- Fear – Not all relationships are good. You may have experienced some trauma in your past with a non-supportive relationship.8 And now you want to avoid that trauma by avoiding relationships. Your erroneous belief is that you are better off alone. The truth is that although there are bad relationships, the world has many more good and supportive relationships, and you have more control over what relationships you have in your life than what you might think.
- Ego – We all like to feel important. Praise and adoration are dished out to the mighty hero who took down the beast alone. Nevermind it was 10-times harder and the path to victory could have been a lot smoother. But asking for or accepting help may feel like doing so diminishes this sense of inner pride. People sure give up a lot for the feeling of importance. Most of the time this unnecessary need for importance is a misguided lack of love for oneself. When this need for importance is dismissed, you can connect with others better, build relationships and go further in life.
Who?
The next logical question is WHO should we connect to? And trust me, not just anyone will do. There are good and bad relationships. There are people who are positive and supportive and people who are negative and will pull you down.
You may have heard this well-known quote by Jim Rohn:
“You’re the average of the five people you spend most of your time with.”
In fact, some people go as far as to say the five people around you are determining your success. I’ve heard this quoted by a great many teachers of personal development. When it comes to earning potential, people earn within 20% of the average income of their closest friends.9
The actual reality is that this influence goes far beyond your 5 closest friends. It’s the sum of all your relationships and acquaintances. This powerful influence extends well beyond your 5 top friends. And they influence more than your income. They make you fat, too.10 A recent study of obesity showed you are 45% more likely to gain weight if your friends are obese. So it’s important to choose friends and the people you hang out with because choosing them is choosing who you will become.
Which friends?
Choosing friends who are headed in the direction you want to go or are already there will help you move in that direction. Surrounding ourselves with positive and supportive people provides intellectual stimulation, improves our opinion of ourselves, fosters mentorship, develops good habits, and encourages us to move and improve.11 Make sure the people you select are people you like as well as love. It’s not enough to be impressed by them, but you also need to be able to spend a lot of time with them.
Surround yourself with people who want you to be your best.12 You can tell if these are the right people because people who want the best for you want you to be your best. When you shine, achieve, accomplish something great, they will cheer you on and support you. If you surround yourself with people who are not accustomed to your success they become fearful they become scared because you are reflecting back something they don’t recognize. Those would be people you don’t want to surround yourself with.
When to disconnect?
Pursuing good relationships is just as important as leaving bad relationships. I have heard this principle taught by many people, and I’m always troubled by the admonition to drop bad friends. I love the approach Darren Hardy gives in his book, The Compound Effect. He teaches us that those unsupportive, negative people just need to be demoted to 3-min friends. You just spend less time on them, don’t intentionally or proactively improve or maintain a relationship with them. Conduct business, dispense pleasantries, and move on to spend time with those who inspire you. If an unhealthy relationship of dependency begins to form, it’s your responsibility to reform it to be interdependent or begin to distance yourself from the relationship, so you can focus on building healthy relationships with those you wish to associate with.
Making the transition
It will be difficult and awkward at first to spend time with that crowd you are developing yourself to be.13 Your subconscious mind might also fight against you to bring you back to crowds you are more comfortable with. Resist, use common sense, and seek to be more comfortable with more positive supportive people. There are only two kinds of relationships: (1) those that suck and (2) those that support. You choose where you spend your time. Chose to spend it with those that will support you.
Increasing your connections
Enlarge your circle of friends through networking intentionally, getting to know new people and thinking of creative ways to stay in contact with them. Make it a point to meet new people when you can. Sit with someone new. Strike up conversations with people and purposefully connect with others. Use a method of keeping track of your contacts like the contact manager on your phone.
How?
“Okay, I get it!” you say. “Is there anything I can specifically do to apply this in my life?”
If you want to create anything new in your life, it needs to be created in your mind first.
- Understand it – We are really going to understand connecting to and building relationships with others.
- Take Responsibility – Then we are going to make a decision to take control and make it happen by taking full responsibility for each relationship.
- Invest – With responsibility comes obligations to invest time, resources, and effort into building relationships.
- Communicate – And relationships are centrally about connecting which happens through communication.
- Team up – The culminating stage of gaining strength through connecting and building relationships is teaming up with others and working together to create or do something wonderful.
Understand it
Connecting, relating to, and building positive relationships with people all involve feelings of affection, appreciation, and a concern for the welfare of another. The highest manifestation of these feelings of connection is, “love.”
love /ləv/
noun: strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties
verb: feel a deep attachment to someone, and to act on those feelings through concern, care, and service
As a noun, love is a strong affection or association arising from that connection with another. There are just so many different forms love can take that we are not always sure what is being referred to or we are going to commit to. This can be an intense feeling of charity for a stranger in trouble or a deep matured love for a spouse developed over decades.
Although in English we usually think of love in terms of romantic love. Sometimes that definition is expanded to include:
- Romantic Love
- Brotherly Love
- Friendship Love
The Greeks, however, have up to 8 different kinds of, “love.”14 This expanded definition of the word helps us expand the understanding of these feelings of connections.
- 1. “Eros” or Erotic Love (sexual passion & desire)
- 2. “Philia” or Affectionate Love (friendship)
- 3. “Storge” or Familiar Love (kinship, familiarity, without physical attraction)
- 4. “Ludus” or Playful Love (young lovers, flirting, infatuation)
- 5. “Mania” or Obsessive Love (feeling of needing the partner)
- 6. “Pragma” or Enduring Love (matured & developed over time-decades)
- 7. “Philautia” or Self Love (healthy love for self first)
- 8. “Agape” or Selfless Love (unconditional love – highest form)
And, I’m sure there are other ways we can differentiate the different forms of love.
Looking at feelings of affection for others in this way helps you see there are so many different kinds of relationships and connections you can build. The colors of connections and bonds we can form with others are abundant and diverse. The lesson: let your love flow in many forms.
The Highest Form of Love
Many types of love are balanced with the principle of reciprocity: both parties give and take from the relationship. But the highest form of love has no conditions. It can exist and be maintained entirely from one side or one of the parties to the relationship.
This highest form of love is selfless love or God’s love.15 This is a charitable, unconditional, concern for the welfare, wellbeing, and happiness for others. In his book, The Four Loves16, C.S. Lewis explains that in this category there are two kinds of selfless love: need love or gift love. Initially some people look at this one-sided relationship as draining, harmful, or weakening; however, the opposite is true: this form of un
- Need love (child for parent)
- what – This is a love a child has for a parent. Another way of looking at this love is the love you feel for God. You need Him, love Him, and take without being able to give much in return.
- positive – feeding, gratitude, admiration, and allowing others the joy of giving
- negative – When this type of love does not exist and one party takes from another without reciprocating, the parties to the relationship experience a scarcity of love and affection. The relationship is selfish, taking, and draining.
- Gift love (parent for child)
- what – This love is when one party feels an intense bond, connection, desire, and concern for the wellbeing and happiness of another. The giving party freely gives without condition relying on the hope that somehow their gift will bring happiness to the other party. The happiness of the giver is not dependant on the other party appreciating or even receiving the gift. This the love of a parent toward an infant child. Or the love God feels toward you.
- positive – giver has abundant love and gives freely to those in need and pours out love unconditionally
- negative – When this kind of love doesn’t truly exist, the giver harms receiver by weakening and creating dependency. The true motive of the giver may be to feel important by providing in some way.
The Point
The point is that there are many different types of “connecting” and many types of relationships that we can build with each other. Be unrestrained in connecting with others in any positive way they will let you. At the risk of sounding cliché-ish, one of the biggest lessons I learned in MBA school was that “love” not only has a place in business, but it is also the essence of good, lasting business relations. Forming and maintaining healthy relationships is the foundation of any good company. The second most important lesson I learned was that I was responsible for forming and maintaining any relationships I was a part of.
Take Responsibility
Most relationships require two parties to maintain the relationship.
Many people in these relationships assume that if you are 50% of the population of a two-person relationship, you are only 50% responsible for that relationship working out. A 50%-50% deal. Not only is this false, but also this is not supportive of your goals, and it is essentially taking the ability to have awesome-relationships out of your power. You need to take 100% responsibility for your relationships. Here are a few ideas to help you understand that anything less than taking 100% responsibility for your relationships with others will not get you the results you want.
- Not 100%, not responsible – If you fail to take 100% responsibility for your relationships and something goes wrong, the human default is that the error lays in the domain of the responsibility of the other party. Therefore they are responsible for the breakdown. The only problem is that they have the same human default.
- Entirety – “Tenancy by the entirety” is a legal term that states that both parties own a piece of real estate in its entirety, whole, and undivided. This creates the right of survivorship. So that if one party dies, the other party still owns the whole property, so nothing passes from the dead party to their estate. Husbands and wives usually own the family home in this way. Likewise, they should own the responsibility for their relationship in the same way: whole and in its entirety.
- Jointly & Severally – When it comes to accepting responsibility for a liability, the law allows a successful plaintiff to hold all defendants individually responsible to make restitution. That winning party can be made whole from any defendant. Likewise, you must be jointly and severally responsible for a successful relationship. You must pay when the other party does not. Remember, if this is not a healthy relationship, you can pay your share and walk away.
- 50% vs. 100% – Humans are committed when there is no question. Every time you have to stop and ask whether doing something is your responsibility, it wastes time and resources. When both parties are putting their “all” into making a relationship work, it works. When the parties put in 50%, it never adds up to 100%.
You got to ask yourself what you expect from this relationship. Is this a relationship where both need to give and take? If so, both parties need to be 100% invested in making the relationship happen.
Invest
Relationships don’t grow without effort. You must invest effort, time, and resources to enjoy the strength, stability, and synergy that comes from healthy relationships. It’s like planting a garden. Those seeds you put in the ground are negligent in worth compared to the many fruits you harvest at the end of the season. Moreover, that new fruit is full of hundreds of new seeds. Investing in good relationships pays off.
love /ləv/
noun: strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties
verb: feel a deep attachment to someone, and to act on those feelings through concern, care, and service
In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey points out that love is a verb and that proactive people make it a verb.17 That means that you listen to, serve, sacrifice for, appreciate, affirm, and help the person you love.
Isn’t it about time
Relationships take time. There used to be these great ads running on TV promoting stronger family relationships. The catchphrase of each scene was, “Family. Isn’t it about… time.” Time is required for building any kind of relationship. When it comes to relationships and time, “…you simply can’t think efficiency with people.”18 Relationships happen and maintaining them sometimes cannot be scheduled. You have got to put people above problems and programs. So, you will need to invest time whenever it is required.
Love on them
So, how to do you do, “love?” There are many positive, selfless people who have begun to use the phrase, “love on them.” This phrase provides great imagery for both the emotions you feel and the actions you do. Loving on people can take several forms.
- Service
- Seeking to understand
- Reciprocating
- Expressing gratitude and appreciation
- Making sacrifices when necessary and appropriate
- Supporting
Communicate
Here’s a philosophical question for you:
If one person loves another but never expresses it or does anything about it, is it really love?
That is to say, for love to exist, does it need to be expressed?
- Noun: no – The answer is that if love is a verb, something you feel, then just feeling it brings it into being.
- Verb: yes – But if love is a verb, something you do, it doesn’t exist unless expressed or acted upon.
com·mu·ni·ca·tion/kəˌmyo͞onəˈkāSH(ə)n/
noun: the imparting or exchanging a message with another
Communicating is simply the act of transmitting a message from the mind of one party to the mind of another.
When we communicate to someone one of the feelings of connection, we strengthen that connection. So, part of cultivating the feelings of connection is expressing the feelings. Sharing our feelings with others affects the bond between us.
Not more communication – better communication
It’s not about communicating more. We must communicate the right things. Yelling, shouting, demeaning, and mocking the other person is also communicating. That’s communicating in a negative and destructive way. You must communicate in constructive ways. Before you say something heated, ask yourself if what you are about to say will build that person up or somehow benefit you at their expense.
Choose what you say. There is no magic rule that says that you must put words to everything you feel or everything that pops into your head. You must intelligently be selective. There are things that you think or feel that should never be communicated. Why? Because there is no good that can come from re-emphasizing thoughts and feelings that you, yourself, don’t want to focus on. There is much to be said about personal diplomacy – building good relations by focusing on the good in others. You’ve got to accentuate the positive.19
Not just words
Words are not the only form of communication, either. A simple smile, nod, or silence can communicate volumes of information under the right circumstances. Nonverbal communication must never be overlooked. It would be too complicated to record, research, and recite all the correct messages we should send and the various ways we need to be careful we might unintentionally be communicating something wrong. That’s not what’s important.
What you feel when you send a message is much more important than the words you say. We all know that you can say the same words with different inflections or intonation, and the feeling we can communicate with the same words could be polar opposites. For instance, you can very lovingly say, “Come here,” with outstretched arms to a loved one who is hurting. You could also shout, “Come here,” with anger to a sworn enemy you are about to hurt.
How you communicate it
Everyone is different and each person expresses and expects messages of appreciation and connection in different ways. When you are communicating with someone, it’s your job to choose, prepare, and deliver your communication in such a way that when it is unwrapped in the mind of the person you are communicating to they will understand the message exactly as you saw it before you communicated it. So, it’s best to know what language your audience speaks. An example of this is how marital couples communicate.
In his book, The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman tells us five different ways that people receive the message of affection.20
- l. Words of affirmation – using words to build up the other person. “Thanks for taking out the garbage.” Not – “It’s about time you took the garbage out. The flies were going to carry it out for you.”
- 2. Gifts – a gift says, “He was thinking about me. Look what he got for me.”
- 3. Acts of Service – Doing something for your spouse that you know they would like. Cooking a meal, washing dishes, vacuuming floors, are all acts of service.
- 4. Quality time – by which I mean, giving your spouse your undivided attention. Taking a walk together or sitting on the couch with the TV off – talking and listening.
- 5. Physical touch – holding hands, hugging, kissing, sexual intercourse, are all expressions of love.
Out of these five, we all have a primary love language which speaks more deeply to each one of us than all the others. Discovering each other’s language and speaking it regularly is the best way to keep the love alive.
Team up
Finally, some of the relationships you build will blossom into partnerships when you join forces and work together on an idea, project, or mission. By combining talents, skills, resources, and knowledge, two people working together can produce something greater than the parts. So, how to team up effectively?
- Strengths – You can use models like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (REVIEWED HERE) to discover and leverage the unique and natural strengths of the people you work with.
- Synergy – Achieving synergy is using your intellect to find win-win situations where both parties to an agreement are left better of by participating in the agreement. It’s about creating mutually beneficial solutions.
- Specialization – As noted before, you can partner with one or more individual and work in your various areas of skill and then trade the products of your labor with others.
- Delegation – If you either don’t like or are not good at doing something, consider delegating or outsourcing the task to others. There are many who are not only skilled at those things, but also would love doing them for you.
- Recruiting – By recruiting or gathering like-minded individuals to a common cause, and surrounding yourself with capable people, you can accomplish bigger-than-life projects. Not only can you find your voice and reach your vision, but also by empowering others, you help them find their voice and reach their vision.
Conclusion / Recap
In conclusion, you are a social animal and will get much further in life by connecting with, working with, and building healthy relationships with other people. Part of doing so is skill, and part is just overcoming some fears an inhibition. Connecting with others will strengthen you and enable you to benefit from the synergy of working with others.
Application in Your Life
Now, how can we progress in this area of your life? By definition, developing yourself in this area will require the involvement of others. But don’t worry; they need it, too.
Your challenge is to build yourself by improving your relationships. This application may take a day or two to accomplish. It might take a few moments. Here is your assignment for change:
- Step 1) List the names of about 3 people that represent the most important positive relationships in your life.
- Step 2) Pick one of these. Identify the nature of this relationship.
- Which of the 8 Greek love relationships describe it?
- If it was a contract, what are your obligations and what do you expect to receive?
- How long do you expect the relationship to last?
- If the relationship was perfect, how would you describe it?
- Step 3) Physically accept 100% responsibility for the relationship (no matter the relationship)
- Speak out loud the words, “I accept 100% responsibility for (my marital relationship, my relationship with my daughter, my relationship with my boss…).”
- Write the declaratory statement down
- Extra challenge: share this with someone else, or better yet, the person (if applicable)
- Step 4) Choose one thing to do to physically invest in the relationship (more than what you are doing now).
- Perform an act of service, words of appreciation, spending time with, show interest in, help alleviate some burden, make some sacrifice for.
- Step 5) Communicate something positive
- Think about how this person “hears” messages of appreciation
- Express affection, appreciation, or admiration to this person (using words or otherwise) making sure that when you are in the act of communicating, your are feeling love and affection in your heart
- Step 6) Create or identify some synergy in your life (optional step)
- Find something that you can do to work with someone and create something that neither of you could do alone
The Oil Advantage
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About The TOGETHER Blend
This blend will help tap into your ability to connect with others in a spirit of love and mutually beneficial respect and support. Its intention is to foster building and maintaining supportive relationships with others.
Learn How To Make The TOGETHER Blend Here
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Thank You
Thank you for joining me in this Personal Development journey.
Books Mentioned in This Post
Stress Free for Good by Frederic Luskin and Dr. Ken Pelletier
Buy “Stress Free for Good” HereStrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (REVIEWED HERE)
Buy “Strengths Finder 2.0” HereSecrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
Buy “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” HereThe Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
Buy “The 5 Love Languages” HereThe Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
Buy “The Compound Effect” Here
Footnotes and References
- “Developmental milestone: Separation and independence” Baby Center https://www.babycenter.com/0_developmental-milestone-separation-and-independence_6577.bc
- World Population, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
- “How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?” article by Population Reference Bureau https://www.prb.org/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth/
- You have a lot of say on the quality of your interactions with the world anywhere you live or work.
- “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”― Aristotle, Politics
- “Being positively involved with your family, children, spouse, friends, and colleagues is the single best stress buffer there is.” Excerpt from Stress Free for Good by Frederic Luskin and Dr. Ken Pelletier; Ch7 (get this book on Amazon http://amzn.to/2oNa6rb)
- “People who are involved with other people are not only happier, they tend to be healthier and live longer. ” Excerpt from Stress Free for Good by Frederic Luskin and Dr. Ken Pelletier; Ch7 (get this book on Amazon http://amzn.to/2oNa6rb)
- “Others, burned by problems with friends and relatives in the past, don’t feel they have the energy to try again.”Excerpt from Stress Free for Good by Frederic Luskin and Dr. Ken Pelletier; Ch7 (get this book on Amazon http://amzn.to/2oNa6rb)
- “I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “Birds of a feather flock together.” Did you know that most people earn within 20 percent of the average income of their closest friends? That’s why you’d better watch whom you associate with and choose whom you spend your time with carefully.” Excerpt from Wealth Files chapter of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
- “You’re NOT The Average Of The Five People You Surround Yourself With” The Mission Podcasts https://medium.com/the-mission/youre-not-the-average-of-the-five-people-you-surround-yourself-with-f21b817f6e69
- “You Are The Sum Of The 5 People Closest To You, Make It Count” Elite Daily https://www.elitedaily.com/life/sum-of-5-closest-friends/1723824
- Oprah Winfrey’s Life Advice at 2012 Spellman’s Graduation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLTgnOuYb6o 13 min in
- “From my experience, rich people don’t just join the country club to play golf; they join to connect with other rich and successful people. There’s another saying that goes “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” As far as I’m concerned, you can take that to the bank. In short, “If you want to fly with the eagles, don’t swim with the ducks!” I make it a point to only associate with successful, positive people, and just as importantly, I disassociate from negative ones.” Excerpt From Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
- 8 Different Types of Love According to Ancient Greeks https://lonerwolf.com/different-types-of-love/
- The scriptures tell us, “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
- you can buy this book here https://amzn.to/2qZ9hMF and read a summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Loves)
- “My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that? … Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured.” Excerpt from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey page 92; Habit 1: Be Proactive
- Excerp from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey page 92; Habit 3: Put First Things First
- You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between“Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” was a popular song in 1944 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate_the_Positive
- Do you know the 5 Love Languages? Here they are: The 5 Love Languages Defined https://www.5lovelanguages.com/2018/06/the-five-love-languages-defined/
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