Harry Browne once said: “Everything you want in life has a price connected to it. There is a price to pay if you want to make things better, a price to pay for leaving things as they are, a price for everything.”
Fully 85 per cent of your happiness will come from happy relationships with other people. Unfortunately, fully 85 per cent of your problems and unhappiness will be associated with other people as well. In addition to your family your friendships are also important to your well-being.
Aristotle wrote that man is a social animal. This means that we define ourselves in terms of our relationships with other people. Our destinies are determined by our interactions with others and theirs with us. We learn who we are and know about ourselves only through interacting with other people.
THE CORE OF
PERSONALITY
Psychologists tell us that everything we do is either to build our self-esteem or to protect it from being torn down by other people. Each person is hypersensitive about his or her own sense of personal value and importance.
Your self-esteem—how you feel about yourself, how much you like yourself—is largely determined by your self-image, or the way you see and think about yourself. Your self-image is made up of three parts: (1) your self-image is made up of the way you see yourself; (2) your self-image is the way you think others see you, (3) your self-image is the way people actually do see you and treat you.
THE KEY TO HAPPINESS
You are truly happy only when you feel that all three parts of your self-image coincide. You are happy only when you feel that the way you see yourself, the way you think others see you, and the way they actually see you all seem to be consistent in a particular situation.
In life, you seek out friendships and relationships with people who make you feel comfortable with the way you see yourself and think about yourself. When you are with people who treat you as if you are valuable and important, you enjoy higher levels of self-esteem. You like and respect yourself more. You feel happy in their presence.
THE LAW OF
INDIRECT EFFORT
The secret to building and maintaining wonderful friendships and relationships is simple. It is for you to practise the Law of Indirect Effort in every interaction with other people.
You must get out of yourself and your own preoccupations in order to get into other people and how they might be thinking and feeling. Therefore, if you want to have a friend, you must first BE a friend. If you want people to like you, you should first like them. If you want people to respect you, you should first respect them. If you want to impress others, you should first be impressed by them. In this way, by approaching people indirectly, you appeal to their deepest subconscious needs.
The deepest subconscious need that people have is the need to feel important. Since you have this need as well, whenever you practise the Law of Indirect Effort and focus on making other people feel important, you reinforce their self-image, increase their self-esteem, and make them feel happy about themselves—and by extension, about yourself.
Whenever you say or do anything to raise the self-esteem of another person, you trigger a “boomerang” effect that causes your own self-esteem to go up at the same time and in the same measure. You can never do or say anything to make another person feel better about himself without simultaneously feeling better about yourself.
It takes tremendous self-discipline and self-control for you to rise above yourself. Instead of trying to get other people to like you and be impressed by you, focus first on liking them and being impressed by them.
SEVEN WAYS TO MAKE PEOPLE FEEL IMPORTANT
The key to excellent relationships with others is quite simple: Make them feel important. To the degree to which you can make other people feel important—starting with the members of your family and then extending outward to your friends and coworkers—you will become one of the most popular people in your world. Tracy suggests seven ways to make other people feel important.
1. Accept people the way they are. One of the deepest cravings of human nature is to be accepted by other people without judgment, evaluation, or criticism. Psychologists call this behaviour “unconditional positive regard.” This is when you accept the other person completely, without reservation, for exactly the way he or she is.
2. Show your appreciation for others. Whenever you appreciate another person for anything that he or she has done or said, you raise that person’s self-esteem and make him or her feel more important. Expressions of appreciation— from small nods and smiles all the way through to cards, letters, and gifts—raise people’s self-esteem and cause them to like themselves more. As a result, by the Law of Indirect Effort, they will like you more as well.
3. Be agreeable. The most welcomed people in every situation are those who are generally agreeable and positive with others. On the other hand, argumentative people who question, complain, and disagree are seldom welcome anywhere.
4. Show your admiration. People usually invest a lot of personal emotion in their possessions, traits, and accomplishments. When you admire something belonging to another person, it makes him feel happy about himself. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Everybody likes a compliment.”
6. Never criticize, condemn, or complain about anything, whether it be directly or indirectly. Never do or say anything that lowers a person’s self-esteem or makes him feel less important or valuable. Refuse to gossip or discuss other people in a negative way. Never say anything about a person that you would not say to his face. The most harmful force in all of human relationships is destructive criticism. It lowers a person’s self-esteem, makes them feel angry and defensive, and causes them to dislike the source. So never complain about people or situations that you do not like.
7. Be courteous, concerned, and considerate of people you meet. When you treat people with courtesy and respect, they feel more valuable and important. As a result of making a person feel more valuable and respected, that person will in turn value and respect you even more as well.
When you express concern about things that are happening in people’s life, they warm up to you and like you more. When a person has a difficult situation and you express your concern or compassion, you touch their heart. You connect with their emotions. Through this, you make yourself a more likable person.
Consideration is the third of the three Cs. When you practice consideration, you discipline yourself to do and say things to people that make them feel more valuable and important.
BE CONCERNED ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE
When you meet people for the first time or again after a period of time, ask them how they are, and then listen closely to the answers. People will often share with you a concern or problem in their lives. When they do, practise consideration and sensitivity. Treat the problem or difficulty as though it were extremely important to you. Amazingly enough, when you act as if you are really interested and concerned with a problem or situation in another person’s life, you very soon start to feel genuinely affected emotionally by the other person.
The rule for building lifelong friendships and wonderful relationships is simple. Resolve that from now on, when people leave your presence, they will feel much better than they did when they entered your presence.
Practice all the ideas above to make people feel important. Look for ways to raise people’s self-esteem and reinforce their self-image. Make them feel as though they are valuable and worthwhile. Furthermore, everything that you do or say to make another person feel important makes you feel important as well.
BY CAPT. SAM ADDAIH (RTD)
