My wonderful friend, sharing my thoughts with you once again is such a joy and blessing. If this is your first time reading, I feel so honoured to have your attention for the next few minutes. In today’s episode, I will share something that has been on my mind and part of my most recent discoveries, “Building and Managing Relationships”.
A relationship is formed based on the quality of the inner person that is expressed outwardly to people. The real you is comprised of your expressions, mannerisms, and emotions that are not rehearsed. I have observed that the bedrock of true relationships that would last long is ORIGINALITY. I have grown up to love and enjoy people that are original and not those that are doing or saying certain things to please me.
In building a relationship, you must be willing to first understand each other. This involves tolerating the differences of other people and finding areas that suit your way of life best. The uniqueness of everyone is the extra spice God gave to the world. It is your responsibility to combine the spices that suits your taste buds while making any dish of your choice. Interestingly, we sometimes enjoy the company of others that are opposite of us.
Take for example the sun and the moon, someone will say they are best friends while another will say they just tolerate themselves. Regardless of your point of view, they seem to understand themselves and work together seamlessly. The sun gives the moon relief during the day while the moon benefits from the glory of the sun at night. All the moon does is to look for the best place to position itself for it to give light and show its beauty. The moon works closely and continuously with the sun that is why the night and day is constant.
Maintaining relationships involves abiding by the principles that have been established to govern the union. I have heard severally that any friend that is not adding to you is definitely subtracting from you. Within the next few days, I urge you to spend some time assessing the quality of your relationships with people. Sacrifice and integrity must be a common denominator. Sacrifice talks about loving your neighbours as yourself and also very importantly, doing to others the way you will like them to do to you. Integrity on the other hand means saying something and doing it.
I have enjoyed several benefits of my parent’s investment in relationships with people. Doing to others what you will like them to do to you is more like a seed that will always reproduce in many folds. Your investment in the nurturing of the seed will show in the quality and quantity of the fruits that show forth. Nurturing a plant involves taking care of the plant by cutting the weeds and pruning it. Likewise, pay attention to areas of your relationship that needs to be cut off and others that needs to be nourished.
Every relationship that is built will be managed by certain laws, rules, or principles which must be obeyed for the relationship to last long. Obedience to the rules of your association will develop trust and commitment to that relationship. Building a relationship takes time, intentional efforts and it’s quite costly. Maintaining a relationship costs a fortune, your emotions, time, energy, and presence. While destroying a relationship is actually cheap and doesn’t take time. The more you violate established principles, the weaker the foundation of trust becomes. If that continues, in no time the relationship will not be worth anything.
Therefore, my lovely friend, I urge you to be intentional about building and maintaining your relationships. Furthermore, be careful how you relate with people and even when you end a relationship, ensure that it doesn’t bring strife, anger, and unforgiveness.
An afterthought of this is that, relationship takes a lot of investment and reflection time to know who to adequately give the investment to is paramount. Overtime people fall short after building a relationship by not maintaining it, that effort to be should always be present to preserve the relationship and make it worthwhile.
So true Bolu, maintaining a relationship can be tasking. Thank you Daniel for calling us to action and advocating that we do better in our relationships.
Thank you so much for this piece, its got me thinking, am a work in progress in managing relationships. But with I will be intentional about it.
I was particularly eager to read this article.
I don’t even know where to start to build a relationship from.
Thank you so much
Every relationship has rules and regulations….
We don’t say it enough.
Thank you Sir.
Interesting read! Building relationships is easy… it’s constantly putting in the work to maintain good ones that is sometimes challenging
Wow! What a great read , This further expands my view on the importance of maintaining great relationships and the efforts required . Thank you Abundantly Daniel.