Relationships and You: Key to Your Success

In life, we build a lot of relationships: romantic, business, family, pet, etc. We also have a relationship with ourselves and with God, of course. The hierarchy of your relationship pyramid depends on your priorities in life. Others take their relationship with God as the most important relationship of all because here, the belief in the Divine Power is mightier than any other in the material world.

Perhaps what goes hand in hand with this relationship with God is your relationship with yourself. If you have the fullest respect and faith in God, it should only follow that you regard yourself also with respect.

In fact, people believe that when you have a deep relationship with God, no matter what your religion, every other relationship in your life works just as well. When you put the Divine Power in the center of all your relationships, even if things don’t always work the way you planned it, you do not lose faith and hope that whatever the problem is, it can be fixed.

However, relationships are not as simple as the above equation: God + you = happy relationships. It’s more like God + you + hard work + determination + compassion + respect + trust + understanding + the ability to forgive a thousand times over = happy relationships.

It doesn’t look promising now, does it? Who would want to go through all that trouble just to have good relationships with people anyway?

The Relationship Cycle

A relationship is a cycle that goes up; down, round and round, that you have to go through for as long as you’re in it. When you’re in something that’s static – no changes, no excitement, no motivational purposes, no inspiration – you can be sure that’s no relationship. That’s just you sitting beside a rock.

Life is actually just one big chain of different relationships that you have, have had, or will be having. One link that doesn’t work affects the whole chain.

So for instance, you have this great passionate and loving relationship with your partner but you have the worst kind of connection with your colleagues, who’s to say your romantic life wouldn’t be affected?

You could also be the world’s best boss but this has compelled you to be at work more often than you spend time staying home with your family. Your family life suffers but you’re raking in all the accolades and money in your professional life. Are you happy with this set-up?

God, Relationships and You

Now, say you concentrate first on the relationship that is most important to you, in this instance, your relationship with God. You’ve done everything that you’ve learned from the teachings, from Sunday sermons, and even from inspirational books but you’re still in a rut.

You don’t have money, you don’t have a healthy and loving relationship with your partner, you’re not excelling at work and yet, every single day you never forget to pray and ask for help from Above. Why isn’t this link working? Isn’t God supposed to make everything alright?

What many people don’t realize is that God is not a quick fix mechanism that you can simply turn on or off whenever the need arises. A relationship needs nurturing and care, for the partner and for your self.

If you love God above all else but do not treat yourself right, people take advantage of you; you then see this as some sort of sacrifice and you feel self-righteous. You think that you’ve been a saint, so why aren’t people kinder to you? There is no relationship here at all.

Links of a Successful Relationship Chain

How do you make the relationship chain work to your advantage so that all areas of your life are synchronized?

First of all, see the kind of person that you are when it comes to your different relationships. Do you maintain the same traits and characteristics with each of these relationships, or do you put on a different persona for each one?

Your authentic self should be the one that shines in all your relationships – “authentic self” being the one you truly are, of course. It is not a figment of your or other people’s imaginations. It’s not someone people and the society said you’re supposed to be, but someone you know to be truly you.

How many people do you know who are in relationships, jobs, friendships, and even social organizations that are just totally wrong for them – or at least, wrong in the sense that their true selves remain hidden because they are scared of being rejected?

Always, when you look at how you act in your relationships, there is an element of fear – fear of being left behind or alone, of not being appreciated, of not being promoted, of losing a job – a whole closet of fears that are often unfounded.

Remember that the other parties in your relationships are only people, too, who have their own struggles, issues and doubts. They are trying their best, just like you are. When you don’t see eye to eye with these people, it’s not your fault but neither is it theirs. You’re what you are and they are what they are – that may sound clichéd but it’s true nonetheless.

When you begin to accept that the world does not revolve around you and that, whatever you do, people will have their own opinions and no one’s going to stop them from coming up with their own conclusions – that’s when you’ll feel liberated and free to be yourself and build relationships with other people who have no problem with and actually rather enjoy who you truly are.

Relationships that are based on honesty can’t help but be genuine. They’re the sort of satisfying and fulfilling relationships that you’d want to keep. They would help you grow and succeed because you’d have the strength and the courage to take risks and dare new things. You won’t have anything to lose when you fail because your identity – your sense of self – is not based on material and superficial things like job position, reputation and popularity. If you lose your job, your reputation and your fame, you’d still be whole – and your genuine relationships with people who have accepted you for yourself and not because of what you have and what you stand for will remain standing as well.

In a nutshell, if you accept and love yourself and you have solid relationships with people who love you for yourself, you have already achieved the ultimate success. Career success, wealth, fame, and others as fleeting and temporary will be mere incidentals. They’ll be nice to have if they are available but they will not be the be-all and end-all of your life. If your life is a book, they’ll be the footnotes, not the main content.