Principles just “are”.

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From 22/10/2006

I watched part of a fascinating documentary tonight on American lottery winners. Some of them won 20, 30 million dollars. The programme followed their decisions and life style changes etc.

The conclusion of the doco interested me because it’s conclusions echo my own beliefs, exactly. They said that how people were within themselves had nothing to do with money, and all to do with mindset. Those people who were happy and content with nothing, were happy and content with much. Those who were miserable with $10, were miserable with a million.

This is because principles of life cannot be violated, they just are. Our happiness comes from inside us. People who are negative and nasty are negative and nasty all the time. Their circumstances don’t improve their disposition. People who are selfish are always selfish. Bad character is never changed or healed with moolah.
We must learn to line our lives up to be in tune with the genuine principles of life: To love, to leave a legacy, to be a man or woman of integrity, to be committed to genuine loving relationships, to have a passion and vision bigger than ourselves. In these things we find real success.

I was reading a blog recently where the person said you can “build rapport in 30 seconds”. I totally disagree. You cannot “build rapport in 30 seconds”. You can pretend to like someone, you can use physcological tools to manipulate someone into thinking you understand them. However any genuine relationship takes time, lots of time.
No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. If you want real success then forget trying to artificially speed up the time required for a genuine relationship. People who genuinely feel understood by you will crawl over broken glass for you. But only the furnace of time will allow that relationship to flourish.

It takes months or even years to get to know someone, even close to well.
Usually we spend a year or so getting to know someone. Then as we drop our guards and behave more normally in front of each other we often find the real person is quite different. We then have to choose whether the real person is someone we want as a friend. That way the people we do remain friends with know that we know them and love them anyway. So building a relationship with the primary aim of getting that person to agree with you or behave in a particular way may be a relevant sales strategy, but it is a poor substitute for real friends and real relationships.
You cannot manipulate people into genuine relationships, you can only love them.

I freely admit that because I am a genuine people person I find this relatively easy. I love meeting people, getting to know them. I love to build friendships and I am really genuinely interested in people’s lives, family and history. Taking advantage of them never even enters my head. But so often as I build genuine relationships with people I reap financial benefits. I don’t understand it but I see it operating in my own life.

It sounds really cheesy but the more I genuinely try and love and connect with people, the more financial success I see in my life. How about you? If your bank balance was linked to the level and number of genuine intimate relationships in your life would the balance be black and growing or red and shrinking.?? Hello, is anybody still there??

Some thing to think about!!

Since writing this I have seen it played out many times in my relationships with others. i tis interesting to me that many of my first mentoring students, Ben, Jo and Rob and Mark and Sharon in particular, are now good friends of mine. Time has shown us all to have our faults but genuinely like and care for one another. They have proven, to me anyway, to be what I first thought them to be, great folks.

I have had other relationships however where the painted over spots eventually have shown through the veneer and I have had to terminate the relationship. These occasions gut me totally because I love people, I really do. But you have to choose to surround yourself with people who’s lives and principles match your own.

It is interesting to me that the people I now trust the most and choose to work with, like those mentioned above and Kris Pedersen and Farida and others, are not Christians like myself, yet they all display the hallmarks of character that I connect with, honesty, integrity, humility and a sense of humour.