A recent big family reunion prompted me to think about what makes us unique.
Although we are all family, some of us are sometimes surprised to see how different we are.
Even though everyone had roughly the same background, upbringing and mother tongue, we can be extremely different in the way we see the world.
That is not unnatural at all. Actually, it’s who we are.
We receive a lot of information from the big wide world out there. We use our five senses to interpret this information and make it our own.
We don’t even know we are doing this, it is unconscious, we can’t help ourselves.
On top of everything else, there are three important factors that make us unique.
- The most important factor is our values. We get our values primarily from our parents, then from our family, our extended family, the schools we go to, from our friends and from our community.
- The second factor is our beliefs. Beliefs are what we hold to be true at a specific point in time.
- These values and beliefs influence the third factor, our behaviour.
This set of factors also has a massive influence on how we learn.
We all learn things in a different way.
Even at school, where the subject matter is the same, the way we learn it is different. So, it is easy for us to learn certain things and maybe not so easy to learn about others.
Thinking about our uniqueness and how all of us see things with different eyes, expressions like common sense just don’t make any sense!
In fact, what is common sense for me may not be common sense for you. Expressions like “it is obvious” …for the same reason, aren’t obvious at all.
When you accept your uniqueness, understand it and incorporate it in your daily life, what you get is an improvement of all your relationships.
The ones improving the most are the more “Formal” relationships. They can be with your co-workers, either as a team member or as a team leader, with your clients and if you have a family, with your children’s teachers and other parents.
When you are thinking about having that difficult conversation, maybe with a staff member, think that we all see the world in different ways. This, perhaps, will change your perspective: a difficult conversation may become a conversation of discovery. You can explain how you feel or where you come from and the other person can do the same.
So, you can realise you have different ways of seeing the same things, which is not bad. Even if you can’t reach an agreement, you can agree to disagree and move on.
This can give you clarity, for example when you have a client and you don’t understand a problem they have.
Understanding that we are all different and unique gives clarity on how flexible we want to be and we can be.
If you can’t be flexible and you can’t meet the client’s demands, then perhaps saying “no” is not at all terrible. Sometimes, saying “no” is just natural.
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But most important of all, accepting that we are unique and we all experience reality in our own way reduces stress dramatically.
It helps us keep our anxiety and frustration under control. This is the ultimate benefit: to keep your emotions under control, so you have a healthy life.
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If this article resonates with you, talks to you and you would like to know more about how to do it, let’s have a chat. Get in touch with me to have a free consultation.
Otherwise, please do share this with others: the more you share, the more others may benefit from it.
Here’s the video version of this article:
