One day i read this very interesting article that compared human relationships to a Tennis Game, and i thought i would summarize some of its contents related to setting goals in order for us all to start our mission on building successful relationships with a defined Goal.
"Human relations is like a game of tennis. The ball you serve comes back. I serve a negative ball; I get a negative ball in return. If I serve a positive ball, I will get a positive ball in return."Quote from the article.
What is our Goal now? this is the first question that needs to be asked by each one of us.
Do you want to have plenty of friends? do you want to be liked by most people? do you want to improve your realtionships with your daughter/son? do you want to improve and advance your love relationship with your man-woman, do you want to get along in a better way with your collegues?.....
Knowing your goal will make it easier for you to achieve it, why simply because " When people set goals, they will not choose to do anything which is not conducive to the achievement of the goal. Life is all about achieving desirable goals. Goals are thoughts. Good thoughts achieve good results. Bad thoughts achieve bad results." quoted from the article ( see link below)
So the rule of this : " In human relations – if you want to take something from somebody, first give him its equivalent. That is why the maxim goes like `Give and Take’. Have you heard of a law, which says, `Take and Give’. No. If you want love, give love first. If you want appreciation from your boss, work as if it were your own company and so on..."
So what do i mean by all this, before we start drafting our resolutions for a " New Life " full of human interactions, we first need to set our goals. What do we really want to achieve!!
In the same article they came about this technique: " Recall the names of all those people with whom you have some kind of tension. Now, do this self-talk, `` Mr. X and Mr.Y, I want to have a positive relationship with you. I am forgiving you here and now for all the harm you have done to me. I have decided to love you unconditionally. I am requesting you to forgive me for my mistakes.’’ Now, slowly your own mental states will change. You will notice that the old hatred and anger has disappeared!"
This is a example of a situation where a misunderstaing resulted in a hatred between two people and therefore caused some sort of tension and a loss of human interaction between these people. However, we can start on our demarch from the same ideology, and then i will be writing the names of all the people with whom i would like to build stronger ties and relationships and i would go like this:
" My son... I would love to get closer to you and i want for us to spend more time together at the house, GYM, the library, the ice cream place, the mall,...." or i would go like this " My collegue, i would love for us to spend some time together out of office time along with the other collegues in order for us to establish more human ties that are out of the professional atmopshere" and so on.
I once was asked by my Professor at my capstone seminar at Montana State university, Bozeman to read this book called " The seven habits of highly effective people". I always hated reading and i never thought i would ever go on reading even 10 pages of that book. However, it turned out that i read that same book over and over and over. Why??
The book did not only teaches you about how to be effective as a person , but it teaches you many rules that applies to our daily life and that need to be part of it. In this book, written by Stephen R.Covey’s there is a chapter entitled ``Seek first to understand and then be understood’, which is very enriching and talks about the same principle of giving and taking.
So what we need to put in mind is this: "In everything including human relationships,You cannot take back what you have not given!" Try to apply this rule with all your entourage, and You will simply be amazed by the tremendous change and the outcome this law will have on your life.
