Strategic Discipline Blog

Have you ever been around a person in love?  Women especially can intuitively feel when someone is in love.  People in love seem to get along with everyone. They’re happy, cheerful, even charming.

What does that have to do with business and relationships? 

Our ability to get along with other people is in direct relationship to the height or depth of our self-esteem.  People in love have a naturally higher self-esteem. 

How much we like ourselves is the direct measure of how much we like other people.  How much we like ourselves is the key determinant to the quality of our human relationships. 

Therefore every single thing we can do to raise our self-esteem, to like ourselves even more, to value ourselves, and to see ourselves as worthwhile, important people causes us to like and accept other people more. We see them as valuable and worthwhile.  A person with very genuine levels of self-acceptance and self-esteem naturally has and without effort, the greatest ability to get along with people.

This information comes from Brian Tracy’s Superior Human Relationships.

The most important thing we can do as human beings to increase the quality of our relationships is to learn to like and accept others.

Prior to this segment on Superior Human Relationships in Brian Tracy’s Psychology of Achievement Brian Tracy spoke repeatedly on the value of saying, “I Like Myself” over and over and over.  Psychologically it builds up our spirit!  We spend so much time tearing ourselves down by our negative self-talk.  What can we do to build ourselves up should be a critical component on everyone’s personal development list.   It sounds arrogant at first blush, but I dare you to face the mirror and repeat, “I Like Myself” several times.  In my experience it only takes three to five “I Like Myself” to get anyone to smile. 

When my children were still young I can recall there being times when they would pout and get angry.  They’d be upset about something they couldn’t do or simply were being stubborn.  I couldn’t get through to them.  It was as if they were simply going to be sad, angry, mad or depressed. There was nothing I could do to change them. 

My tactic for changing their mood was to carry them into the bathroom, and force them to repeat, “I Like Myself” several times.  It didn’t even take 3 to get them to smile, grin from ear to ear, then turn and give me the biggest hug you could imagine.  Seeing how this powerfully transformed and uncommunicative and stubborn child so quickly, told me this had immediate, compelling, and energetic capabilities to improve anyone’s spirit.  I don’t use it myself as much as I probably should, but at the times I remind myself too, it dramatically transforms my disposition. 

In fact another version of this is to simply change "I Like Myself" to "I Love Myself!"  See which works best for you! 

Tracy notes that another powerful tool to use to raise our self-esteem is to set goals and work toward attaining them.  Every time we set a goal and begin moving step by step toward it, we feel terrific about ourselves.  We feel more and more like winners, like valuable people. 

It’s perhaps the most valuable reason for a business to create themes, quarterly priorities, and individual and company dashboards.  The entire business is transformed as it feels better about itself by progressing toward a goal! 

The happiest most enthusiastic are also the most goal oriented.  The more goals and progress they see, the happier they are when they meet people. 

Conversely the people, who are most unhappy, have no goals, are going nowhere, and are negative and down on themselves.  Consequently they have the worst human relationships. 

Aside from working on ourselves what can we do to and for other people to improve the quality of our interactions with them?

We’ll look at this briefly here because there 4 Steps you can do to “Make Others Feel Important” which requires another full blog.

Realize first that everyone we meet has a self-concept and level of self-esteem lower than it needs to be.  Everyone, and I do mean everyone, has a burning desire for more self-esteem, for a higher sense of self-liking and self-worth.  Even the greatest on this planet need reinforced levels of self-esteem. 

Knowing this it’s easier to understand why everything we do to raise the self-esteem of others will improve the quality of our relationships.    Here’s probably the biggest key to this whole relationship puzzle. 

In the miracle of creating us the Creator made us in such a way that we cannot do anything to raise another’s self-esteem without simultaneously raising our own to the same degree. 

Every single kind, warm, heartfelt, sincere and genuine thing that we do to make another person feel good about themselves causes us to feel good about ourselves. 

It’s the law of reciprocal or indirect action.  And it works 100% of the time. 

If we go through life trying to make others feel good about themselves automatically we make ourselves feel good! 

We’ll cover the Four Steps to “Make Others Feel Important” in a future blog.  We’ll also look at the reverse of the Law of Indirect Action which will explain why criticizing is so unhealthy.

I just returned from a trip to the West Coast to work with one of my clients.  We achieved a number of breakthroughs and it’s provided me with several ideas to share here in upcoming blogs.  One of these includes why having “Where are you Stuck?” in your daily huddles is so helpful.  We look at this next blog.