Relationships for Great Connections

Great Connections. When I think of Connections, I think of cell phones. You hear them ringing everywhere and see people talking or text messaging, in the bathroom, in the office, on the subway, in church. They are ubiquitous. Why do so many people have a cell phone? To stay connected to what’s going on. Everyone wants to be heard.

Married or single, young or old, male or female…every human has the emotional need to feel loved, to have great connections. When this need is met, we move out to reach our potential for God and good in the world. However, when we feel unloved, we struggle simply to survive. We want to feel connected.

Nothing has more potential for enhancing one’s sense of well-being than effectively loving and being loved. Whether divorced, widowed, or never married, your deepest emotional need is to feel loved, and your greatest successes will be obtained by loving others.

Remember when you first fell in love? I remember when I was in love. I felt like I was floating on air, all the time, happy. I wasn’t going to let anything bother me. I said “He understands me, and still loves me”.

Life’s greatest happiness is found in good relationships, and life’s deepest pain is found in bad relationships.

Remember when you had problems in your relationships, a bad connection? It was difficult to focus on anything but the bad connection, difficult to sleep, difficult to focus on your work and all the positive things. All of us experience changes in relationships, but few of us stop to analyze why a relationship gets better or worse.

The first step in understanding others is to understand yourself. What’s important to you? What do you value? What makes you tick? You can also ask others. They see a different side from what you see. Take a closer look at yourself. How well do you know yourself? How well are you connected to yourself? How do you become your own best friend?

Ask yourself questions, why are you like you are? Look at your family history of connections. If you’ve ever had pre-marital or marriage counseling, you know…they ask you about your family history. They are looking for patterns. Look at your patterns of connections, how you choose your friendships?? Are you honest with yourself, more than likely, you’re honest with others.
(Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. –Dr. Phil.)

When it comes to relationships, everything begins with respect, with the desire to place value on other people. “You can’t make the other fellow feel important in your presence if you secretly feel that he is a nobody”, (author Les Giblin)

The thing about respect is that you should show it to others, even before they have done anything to warrant it, simply because they are human beings. But at the same time, you should always expect to have to earn it from others. And the place you earn it the quickest is on difficult ground.

In order to gain more cooperation from others you must stop and listen and validate their opinions. It’s called R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Teenagers, Children everyone loves respect. The number one complaint children have against adults is that they don’t listen or try to empathize with them.

Remember that people behave in a way that makes sense to them. This effects our connections. What we all agree on is that…”we all want” to be a SOMEBODY whom SOMEBODY LOVES. Most of us feel unworthy of being loved by others so we develop conscious and unconscious strategies “to get” others to love us.