In this post, we will build upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and learn why we need to prioritize our relationships with all the people, places, and things to which and for which our values make us responsible. If you have not read the post entitled Part 1 – Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs, then it will greatly benefit you to do so now.
Each of us is somehow connected to all three of the categories of the “stuff” of our lives — the people, places, and things that surround us. The major relationships upon which we should initially focus, however, are our relationships with other people.
Our relationships with people can be viewed as a sibling pyramid organized somewhat like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The central and predominant portion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs deals with love, belonging, and esteem. These needs also drive our relationships with the people around us.
On some level, we love the people with whom we have relationships and we want them to love us. We feel we belong with them. We want them to feel they belong with us. We esteem them and want them to esteem us.
If you begin to categorize your relationships, you will soon come to realize they comprise one or more of the following types: your God, your self, your spouse (if you have one), your children (if you have any), your parents (if you still have any, including in-laws), your extended family, your true friends, your business associates (owners, investors, employees, vendors, and customers), your acquaintances, and your community.
This large number of people and the extensive relationships you enjoy with them over the years sustain and support you. The people around you, through acts and deeds both small and large, help you hold your life together in ways you don’t usually stop to appreciate. They give you significant amounts of their own precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people, which is simply wonderful and more valuable than anything you could ever repay.
Reflect for a moment on what has happened in your life up to now, how the people in your life have responded, and how you could ever repay them. Great! people realize, if we ever want to find peace and satisfaction in life, we have to change our thinking and not work to have more things, but rather to work for the sake of being satisfied with our life itself, which means being satisfied and at peace with, and enjoying even, all of our relationships with everyone, every place, and every thing around us.
For most who are owned by their lives instead of owning their lives (we will discuss life ownership in a later post) people, almost all of their labor and skillful enterprise spring from their rivalry with their neighbors – to have more than their neighbors do. This violation of the tenth Biblical Commandment against coveting is, as is written in Koheles (Ecclesiastes), futile. It’s not having more than the Joneses that counts. As Solomon explains, it’s having enjoyable work in life to do (which is not merely limited to economic work) and having someone enjoyable with whom to do it.
This point is the most important one you will ever learn, so it bears rewording and repeating to drill it in. The meaning of life is to seize full and complete ownership of your life and enjoy maximally the very essence of living it, which is exactly what being Great! All the time! is all about.
Just so you are really paying attention to this core principle of being Great! All the time!, we are going to put it in a box for you so you can take it with you wherever you go.
The meaning of life is
to seize full and complete ownership
of your life and enjoy maximally
the very essence of living it.
Relationships are the most important things in our lives. Two people working together get a greater return for their labor if they are both trying to make the world a better place instead of trying to get a leg up on each other. Building relationships is what you should want to do with your life. Having good relationships should be what you want to accomplish.
Nonetheless, while you should want to have awesome relationships with everyone in the world, you still have to work (in economic terms) in order to eat, drink, and enjoy those relationships. And in order to wisely develop, use, and recreate your life’s precious resources, which we will discuss a little later, you have to prioritize those relationships. If you do not, then whatever overachieving desire you may have to be one with the entire world simultaneously will eat you alive.
Aside from your relationship with whatever Supreme Being you may believe in, your relationships with people probably comprise the highest priority and numerical majority of your relationships. That is to say, people come first, while places and things are still important.
Having a diversity of relationships with varying numbers and types of people puts them in competition with your self and each other for your life’s precious resources. Unless you develop a hierarchy for organizing and prioritizing your relationships (putting your self first, right after God), you will drive your self crazy trying to be all things to all people at all times.
Take some time to think about all the people, places, and things with whom and which you have relationships. Make a long list of them. Then, in Part 3 of this series on Prioritizing Your Relationships, we will show you the Great! Hierarchy of Relationships that will allow you to figure out how to apply your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, emotion, intellect, property, and people to satisfying those relationships.