Have you ever toiled forever in silence crying for just a little love and affection? Yeah, me too. But love is strange. The more you give it away, the more you get in return. For example, …
I was getting a bowl of cereal this morning for my darling wife at a hotel breakfast buffet. I noticed that the young lady tending the breakfast bar was being both effective and efficient and quietly proficient at keeping all of the items and serving dishes full, need, and clean. But instead of a smile, she had a rather stoic loil.
After she talked herself back into the kitchen behind the door, I knocked and pushed it open and asked, “Can I ask you a question?”
She took the two steps between us toward me and bracing her face replied, “Sure.”
I asked, ” Don’t you wish people would recognize how nicely and neatly you maintain your breakfast bar? ”
She gulped and replied, “Yes.”
“Don’t you wish someone, anyone, would just take a second to say thank you?”
“Yes.”
So I splurged and smiled and said, “So thank you for a practically perfect breakfast.”
Tears welled just a touch in hers eyes as we briefly as she replied, “Thank you. You don’t know how much I needed that. I was having a bad day, but you’ve just made my day good.”
“You’re welcome,” I replied, “but don’t settle for just one good day. Go out there and be Great! All the time!”
People don’t need constant praise, though more is always better than less. But everyone needs and deserves just a little recognition for what they do in their jobs moment to moment for others.
Here’s challenge for you. Try to recognize someone positively just twice on the day you read this. It will make you feel so good you will want to do it twice an hour.
Have you ever been having a conversation with someone and their phone beeps, chirps, or plays a musical notification that tells them something is happening in their social media sphere? And they just have to stop, in mid-thought with you, and check it out. Has that ever happened with you?
Yeah, me too. People used to hate it when I did that. So I’ve tried not to do it as much. Almost never now. I solved the problem by setting alone time appointments during which I focus on my social media presence and activity. It’s part of my business work to pay attention to my social media relationships.
Whether we as parents, spouses, or friends like it or not, social media is everywhere. And almost all of us seem to hate it – whenever anyone else is doing it that is. But did you know, properly used, social media can actually help your relationships. With your spouse, your parents, your kids, your other family and close friends, your business relationships, and all the other folks you include in your life’s precious resource of people.
How? By communicating positive and affirming things with and about those with whom we have relationships and for whom and to whom our values make us responsible. The concept is called “public commitment theory.”
Sociology researchers posit people who post positive and affirming things together or about each other are more likely to have better relationships with those they post with or about.
Apparently, publicly testifying about each other as a couple or the other as an individual does several things:
It makes the couple’s relationship a larger part of their individual identities.
It reinforces the couple’s aspiration for how they want their relationship to be.
It drives the couple to become what they have publicly aspired to be.
Working on doing such public testimony together has an even greater effect on your mutual relationship. Investing the resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in taking and posting positive and affirming pictures of people shows your “other” is on your mind. Telling positive and affirming stories online about yourselves and each other all shows how much your relationship means to the both of you.
Showing your bond with another to the entire world of third parties “out there” shows you are proud of your relationship, you are making it a priority in your life, and you want the rest of the world to share your relationship. Saying nice things about the other person in your relationship to the other person is nice. Saying nice things about the other person and your relationship to the rest of the world is even nicer.
Properly used, social media can help your most personal relationships.
[reminder]When was the last time you posted something nice about someone else online?[/reminder]
Have you ever thought, when God mysteriously sends you the perfect opportunity to do something new and different, “Should I or shouldn’t I snap this up? It’s almost too good to be true.” Yeah, me, too. And the times I have passed on such things still haunt me to this day.
But not today, my friends, not today.
Meet Susan’s and my new best friend on Oahu and in our Marriott Vacation Club family, Alberto Maldonado, who quietly and magnificently serves a small tribe of less than 500 clients as a Senior Sales Executive for Marriott Vacation Club in Ko Olina, Hawaii. More important than having just sales education, training, experience, and success, however, Alberto has a winning personality, expert credentials as a surfer (he is the former Peruvian surfing champion pictured here to the right), and the Aloha spirit of being willing to serve people without expecting anything in return.
Which is how I came to be standing atop his soft top board in the picture below. Wait for it.
For the last week of every year since the 2000, Susan and I have gone to one of our Marriott vacation villas located around the world for our annual “Last Year – Next Year Think Week,” where we recap what all we did over the last year and set our course for our happily married adventures during the next year. During each of those visits, we schedule a meeting with a Marriott sales associate to stay up on what is new in the Marriott Vacation Club program so we can squeeze as much value as possible out of this key item of property we count among our life’s precious resources. Because we are experienced owners who aren’t necessarily looking to add to our portfolio, we usually get assigned to some of the newest, greenest associates in the ownership center. This year, however, we got picked up by a senior sales associate, to wit Alberto Maldonado.
A lean, well-tanned Peruvian, Alberto chatted us up with his romantic South American accent in the reception area over our complimentary hot tea and then invited us back to his office. As he slid up to his side of the desk across from us on the other side, he asked the perfect salesman’s question, one I have tried to teach sales training clients to put first and foremost in their minds, one I have planted on the top of my branding for decades. Alberto asked, “How can I help you today.”
“Well, I’m glad you asked that just the way you did,” I replied. “Because it makes us feel so much more cared for than you just trying to sell us additional weeks.” He nodded with gratitude, as I continued. “In fact, we are trying to decide whether to sell our weeks, convert to hybrid weeks to access the newer resorts, or just sit still.”
Alberto did next what I have taught salespeople to do for years. He turned over his information sheet on me, picked up a pen, and put the pen to the blank side of the paper, and said, “Okay, tell me what you want to do and let me see if I can help you do it.”
Long story short, he fashioned a solution for us that was better than we had imagined. The GRRRRReat! part of the story, however, was Alberto’s interest in deepening our collective connection after we had closed the deal.
“Have you ever been surfing, Ken and Susan. Because I like taking my customers out surfing. I’m a great instructor and I know a great place, where only the locals go. If you want, I can take you out there tomorrow and teach you how to surf.”
It just so happens, I have always wanted to learn how to surf, and the warm weather of Hawaii made the prospect even more promising than my experience of learning how to snow ski in Breckenridge in 1982 (but that’s a different story). The next afternoon, Alberto took us to a beach with a great view of Diamond Head, sat us down for the pre-ride class, went over the basics, strapped his board to my left ankle and off we went into the water.
Cowabunga!!!!!
Here’s the result of my second attempt.
I’m the guy riding on the front of the wave. The real victor, however, is Alberto Maldonado, the guy in middle right side of the shot with his hands in the air holding me up from yards away, having helped me, in his own Aloha way, serving me and expecting nothing from me in return.
My new lifelong friend. Not lifelong because we’ve been friends for long, but rather because, we will be friends forever.
[reminder]What’s your most recent example of someone else living the Aloha way, only doing something for the service of others? Tell us about it in a comment below. [/reminder]
In the meantime, you GOTTABGATT!, so go out there today and be Great! All the time!
We are all gems of one type or another. Well-polished gems get their highest value when their polishers pay close attention to the facets surrounding them. Which is exactly what we do when applying the P10 Principle to find Greatness!
What are your four major life facets?
Four major facets upon which you should focus to reach Greatness! are:
In Part 8 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, we discussed Bentham’s utilitarianism. In this post we will talk about hot to practice some personal primacy to take back ownership and control of your life.
Your life is just like anything else you build, borrow, buy, or steal. As soon as you get it, you must constantly maintain it in order to protect its value. Because maintenance is such a big part of ownership, the problem most “owned” people have can be summed up as follows: the life they have created is too big and too difficult to comfortably maintain in a practically perfect state.
In Part 7 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, I left you hanging on my every word, waiting for the discussion of applying prioritizing your relationships and using your life’s precious resources in those relationships. Based on Bentham’s utilitarian approach, modified for a little Greatness!, I discussed how to plan the application of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to big, important things.
In Part 6 of this series of posts on prioritizing your relationships, I described Bentham’s take on utilitarianism and advocated using his seven factors as part of a method for deciding what is the globally optimal developmental choice in each moment. Doing this requires considering as many as possible of the Bentham’s utilitarian relevant factors of intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent.
“In case of emergency,” the flight attendant tells us, “oxygen masks will appear from the overhead bins. Put on your own oxygen mask first and then assist those around you in putting on theirs.” “In case of emergency,” the cruise ship’s purser tells us, “put on your own life jacket and then help others put on theirs and proceed to your designated emergency area.”
“Don’t wait for an emergency!” I say. “Practice persistently taking care of your self first, so you can best take care of those to whom and for your values make you responsible.” Why? Continue reading “Prioritizing Your Relationships – Part 6”
Have you ever thought, when God mysteriously sends you the perfect opportunity to do something new and different, “Should I or shouldn’t I snap this up? It’s almost too good to be true.” Yeah, me, too. And the times I have passed on such things still haunt me to this day.
