Fingerprints, Snowflakes and You

Relationships seem to be the “in” word these days. Of course, good relationships are preferred to bad relationships. And the closer the relationship gets to a bonding, the better the relationship.

Families strive for closely-knit relationships and suppliers work to establish strong relationships with their customers and professionals with clients. Universities want to relate to their students and government desires a positive relationship with its constituents.

If you set out to define relationship, you could describe it as a connection between at least two entities. But the relationship doesn’t begin with the binding of two entities. It begins with a single entity. You will never build a strong positive relationship with a customer—or anyone else—until you have a strong positive accepting relationship with yourself.

How to build an accepting relationship with yourself

How do we develop a strong positive accepting relationship with ourselves that enables us to have strong positive relationships with others? Here are four practical guidelines to follow in developing a better self image.   

Accept yourself, which is the foundation for relationship building.

Accepting yourself begins with the thought that you are unique, unlike any other person. Like fingerprints or snowflakes, no two people are exactly alike—you do not have an “identical” twin. Unlike fingerprints and snowflakes, you are special. Though you are important never confuse the idea of importance with self-importance.

If you are to accept yourself, you must get past the idea that some people are more important than other people. You are important and so is everyone else. Often we prioritize or judge people, including ourselves, according to a counterfeit status code. The guidelines may be: wealth, power, education, physical appearance, nationality, occupation or other outward class signs. Accept yourself by knowing you alone can achieve your purpose for being.

Appreciate yourself, which is another way of saying have a healthy self-esteem; feel good about you.

A person appreciates themselves in direct proportion to their self-esteem. Esteem means to value. Therefore, self-esteem is how much you value yourself. It is my experience that others will value you no higher than you value yourself. Someone wisely stated, “If you put a small value on yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.”

My parents taught me that there is nothing more important in relationship building than the honest value you put on yourself. “You see in others,” my father would say, “what you see in yourself.”  If you like yourself, you will like others. If you dislike yourself, you will have a dislike for others.

Have an awareness of your potential, which is to focus on what you are capable of doing, not what you cannot do.

Having an awareness of your potential is the result of knowing your strengths and weaknesses and then working to develop your strengths. Our ability to build strong relationships depends on the development and use of our special talents or abilities. Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton wrote in their book, Now Discover Your Strengths, “Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.”

Discover your strengths and then play to these strengths.

Acknowledge success, which is achieving what you want to achieve unencumbered by the judgment of others.

We need to acknowledge success because everyone has experienced success in some form, some people more than others. Often, because of lack of self-esteem, people will down play their achievements or credit them to luck. The size of success doesn’t matter. And luck, as someone has described, is what you have left over after you’ve given 100 percent.

It does not matter how you slice or dice it, success is success. We best acknowledge our success when we use it for a foundation to build on to achieve our next success.  And we must never forget, success like failure is repeatable.

True relationships in life depend on a willingness to accept and appreciate the awareness of our potential and success, no matter the size. In the end, we have relationships with others in direct proportion to the relationship we have with ourselves.

To improve our relationship with others, we must improve our relationship with ourselves. We must not think too much of ourselves or, think too little. Deepak Chopra was exactly right when he wrote, “Each of us is a unique strand in the intricate web of life and here to make a contribution.” When each of us contributes our uniqueness, all of us are more successful.

Three Point Success Summation

SUCCESS THOUGHT: Accept yourself for who you are. Be comfortable with yourself but never complacent. Everyone has room for growth. Relationships are not static things, they are growing and must be cultivated or, they are stagnant connections subject to decay.

SUCCESS QUOTE: “Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.”— St. Francis De Sales

SUCCESS ACTION: For the next 30 days let your first thought each morning be one of thankfulness for who you are. Like fingerprints and snowflakes, you are one of a kind. Celebrate your uniqueness.

My book, "Mentor In The Mirror" has hundreds of motivational ideas on personal and professional success. It is available on Amazon and Apple. Gift a copy to a friend. It will change their life, for life.