In Part 3 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, we left off listing the average person’s responsibilities and priorities as follows: God, self, spouse, children, parents, family, true friends, community, investors, employers, employees, customers, and a mission driven by a vision and values.

In Part 4 of this series, we will begin looking at the essences of those things, so we can start to understand how to prioritize and balance between them.

God

Starting at the top with God (and let’s try as hard as possible to not get bogged down in dogmatic preaching here), most of us feel a need to believe in something bigger than ourselves. From studying and attempting to know more about God, we are able to draw our sense of self and self worth, our sense of right and wrong, and our sense of peace with the order of life that goes on around us. As we come to understand more about what it is that God expects of us, in return for His precious gift of our part in this world and the world to come, we must realize that our values make us responsible to God, to maximize ourselves, to do what we perceive to be the right thing, based upon that knowledge.

Let’s leave the God concept alone for a while and move down the relationship pyramid to consider our concept of self.

Self

Satisfaction with your life can only be achieved by your self for your self. That is why practicing personal primacy is so important. And in order to achieve satisfaction for your self, you must put responsibility to your self immediately below your responsibility to God, and ahead of all others.

Some may say this seems to be quite selfish, but you can rightfully defend the need for practicing personal primacy. This does not mean you should always put your self first and ignore your responsibilities to others, but it does mean you have to plan on taking care of your self first, so you can then take care of others. It also means, if something you are asked to do for others may permanently hurt you, you should be absolutely sure why you are doing it and the benefits from doing it are worth the costs and risks of doing it.

We will talk about putting yourself ahead of all other people, what we call practicing personal primacy in Part 6 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships. Prior to that, however, click over to Part 5 and let’s move on to the parent(s), spouse, child(ren) trilogy.