It is THAT time of the year – the season of Love. With Valentine’s day commercialized to the maximum, it is impossible to ignore the myriad displays of candies, flowers and hearts at every nook and corner in most parts of the world. Instead of making this all about romance and love, I want us to focus on relationships – all kinds of it!
No doubt all of us are in multiple relationships with the various people in our lives- as parents, siblings, aunts, grandparents, friends, colleagues and so on. We schedule time to take a look at our health(with the doc), our wealth(with the financial planner), our homes(with home maintenance of various sorts) and so on. Do we schedule time to look at our relationships? Do we plan when it comes to some of the closest ones in our lives? It may sound silly if I tell you to do a yearly assessment of your relationships, but trust me in this day and age it is much needed! With technology clamoring for our attention every minute of our lives it is becoming a matter of paramount importance for us to schedule time for people and to schedule time to assess the relationships with these people. We attempt it in a vague and haphazard fashion when we set goals such as I want to find the love of my life this year or I want to improve my relationship with my mom. The reason it is vague is because we do not take that extra 30 mins to really think about where the relationship is, where you want it to be and how you plan to get it there. If you can do that health check for every important relation in your life, you will make a ton of difference to each of these relations, since you show YOU CARE! In the case of finding the perfect person for a relationship – You need to assess your expectations of the relationships, your reality when you have tried to get in this relation and the steps you can take to get there.
This Valentine season, spend some time on this Relationship Exercise:
- Take stock of all the relationships in your life.
- Categorize them on a scale of 1 -10 (1 being least important and 10 being most important. Be careful to distinguish between proximity and important, you meet your colleagues everyday and they may be at 10 on proximity but 3 on importance whereas your mom who lives in a different state may be 3 in terms of proximity and 10 in terms of importance)
- For the most important ones(ratings 6-10), go through the following questions:
- What relation do I share with this person? What state is it in now?
- Where do I want it to be? How do I want it to look and feel?
- What is the gap in where it is now and where I want it to be? How do I get it there?
At the end of the day, each and every one of us is searching for someone to love and care about and to be loved and cared about in return. So take some time to plan and make your relationships soar this year! I hope you try this and look forward to hearing your experience with this exercise.
