It’s just business…Yea

It is Personal…

I was thinking about this weeks ago. It’s taken a number of years, and yes, maybe it is true that life doesn’t start ‘making sense’ or ‘you don’t start coming into your own’ till the 50’s… but, for those who know me, you will be shocked, I am a ‘relationship guy’. It is deep in my bones. In fact, it goes deeper than bones. It is part of what I am, who I am.

“What does that mean?” you might ask.

Well, it has dawned on me, like a slow, warm sun rise, that I view EVERYTHING through the the spectrum, through the ‘lens’, through the paradigm, definition, and function of relationship. I think I am not the only one, but for me, relationship is the ‘hinge ’ for everything.

Let me illustrate…

When I think about work, where I have 60+ full time employees under me, I think about my relationship to them. The fact is, I don’t even ‘know’ I am thinking about them relationally till I cross into the ‘how did they react to me today? how did they respond to my directions today? how did I respond to them?’ etc. It is all based on how we connect and work together. It isn’t about the numbers, though numbers are very important. The performance of my team comes from the relationship that we’ve developed, not the raw numerical stats. My heart doesn’t beat around the numbers. It beats around ‘relationship’.

I now understand very clearly, many of the reasons why my first marriage came apart. I value, deep down, relationship. When I say ‘value’ I mean the reason I ‘do’, and ‘be’, is because of relationship. When the paper of marriage gets crumpled over and over and over, what is really going on, is that the relationship is being harmed. Yes we all know that we each crumple the paper from time to time, but when it is a weekly, or daily occurrence, something else is more valuable than the relationship. The relationship has become a commodity (a means to another end), and they, commodities, like toilet paper come and go. You don’t hear many folks speaking loving words to the paper do ya? And… your heart isn’t paper, it is a living, breathing, ‘knowing’ part of your Spirit, and it worth being treasured.

I have a relationships with inanimate objects:  my car (Patty), motorcycle (Aretha), airplane (Penelope) etc. I’ve put attributes, without thinking about it, that gives them personality. When I sit on Aretha, she is big, bad to the bones (in my mind), and runs like the wind. She sings like no other, hence ‘Aretha’.

Think about how many people, places and things you relate to through the lens of relationship. What are the things you can count on, what are the things you know you can’t count on?

How many times does it take for you to have a negative feelings about a car you drive; where you know it is going to break down, not start, or bounce down the road, and you just come to accept it. It is part of the fabric, color, and texture of what you know about the car. It takes on personality.

One of the airplanes I love to fly is the Piper Cherokee 140 (Penelope). It isn’t fast, it isn’t sleek, but it does fly like a bird and is stable as a rock. When you pull the power back, it also falls like a rock, which makes it easy to get down on final. But, without thinking, I view this through a ‘relational’ lens. 

And here is the catch… it becomes personal. How many times do our ‘inanimate’ objects let us down, and we get angry with them, fuss at them, and call them foul things?

“It’s just business.”

I hear it all of the time. But for me, all of life is personal. I so highly value relationship that when things go bad, it is personal. It is hard for me to disconnect. Do you have that?

How about, as dumb as it sounds, your relationship with yourself. When you let yourself down, what do you do, where do you turn?

It is personal, and those who have the gift of being disconnected about things don’t understand that some, like me, experience the world ‘through’ relationship, and when that gets upset, the world goes totally topsy.

The good things about this is those like me, view or ‘feel’ their way through everything. Facts matter but feelings close the deal. I think some of the best sales folks I have ever met (those are few), know that how a customer ‘feels’ about a situation matters as much, if not more, than the numbers. People are the same way, folks… you can give facts all day long about something, but how you make others feel, and how others make you feel, lands, hits home, fries the bacon, puts gas on the pedal, pulls back on the wheel, turns the lights on, etc.

The negatives to this… it’s personal. When things go badly, those that are relationally in tune will struggle with pulling back, or just pull away and get some breathing room to access because, well, it’s personal.

The lasting value – As Maya Angelou said “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Male or female, how we know this to be a truth.

I would encourage us all, to think carefully about how we make people feel or think as we interact with them. Business is personal, life is personal, being… is personal.

Be safe in your travels this week.