Building Relationships, Commitment, And Love - L Is For...

We continue our series on how to build interpersonal relationships, whether with family, coworkers, friends, or that special someone...

Commitment and love are important to all of us; they are worth fighting for; they are worth working for. You also should know that in spite of many promises there is no secret for success, no checklist of things to do, and just as importantly no checklist of things not to do. But we do have suggestions, now continuing with the letter L. The focus is on navigate, neat, and need.

L is for leadership. Leadership. Some say that you have it or you don’t. Others say that it can be developed. Can we be sure that the seven-year-old head honcho on the playground will shine ten, twenty, or forty years later? Or putting the question another way, can we be sure that the seven-year-old squirming alone on the playground will remain so ineffectual the rest of his or her days? I don’t think so. I think leadership can be learnt and developed, at least to some extent. Start with little bites. There is always a project around that nobody wants to do. Bring it forward; make it happen. You may even be able to draw in Lazy Larry or Lackadaisical Lucy. And that’s just a start. The next round Larry and Lucy may already be firmly on your side. Or to be frank they may be mad as hell with you for dragging them out of their lassitude. Leadership can be built in small steps over time. And then when the big day comes, we’ll find out whether you really have The Right Stuff, or if you get the stuffings kicked out of you.

Squadron leader Peter Brown, hero of the Battle of Britain.

L is for learn. Life is a long-term learning process. Don’t be like the famous physicists at the turn of the century (19th into 20th) who fondly predicted that everything there was to learn about physics had already been discovered. The only thing that was left, according to these admittedly brilliant but sadly misguided scientists, was to add a decimal point or two to some basic measurements. Boy, were they wrong. Within a few years scards of discoveries erupted that lead to really great things like X-rays, the Atom Bomb, the Hydrogen Bomb, and lots of other goodies to numerous to list here. If only we could unlearn some of the stuff and learn to control other things. But there are limits to human learning.

Life is a learning process, right from the beginning.

L is for logic. Learn to think logically. This can help you, for example in human relations. After all, aren’t most people logical? Well maybe not; let’s look for another reason. Thinking logically can help you understand how software works. Sorry about that one. If you can’t remember which key to press for a given word-processing function logic is about as helpful as the manual two versions back. Actually it’s less helpful. The computer application gurus that are increasingly running our lives may not have had time to change the keystrokes. Doesn’t that sound logical? Seriously, sometimes logic can help you work your way through a jam. And sometimes it can’t.