Jobseeker Columnist (May 2009)
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
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The short answer is everything! Absolutely everything! To me, love is such a difficult topic to write about. Love is so abstract, so difficult to quantify and it means different things to different people. I have |
to admit that sometimes the logic of love escapes me. Maybe it is because when emotion comes into the picture, logic goes out the window. Perhaps also because of the diversity of uses and meanings, coupled with the complexity of our feelings involved, love is unusually difficult to define.
Though that didn’t stop me from “Googling” “Types of Love” just so I can learn more, then the search engine returned 73 Million and a hundred results, enough to turn my eyes into large saucers. Most of the web sites define between 4 – 9 types of love. Seeing that I am a simple person, here’s the simple list: -
1. Security Love
2. Friendship Love
3. Romantic Love
4. Unconditional Love
I realize a common trend from my research, another form of love is missing from the equation. Self love. No, not the “in front of the computer at night” type of self love, but the kind that improves our self esteem, assists our self worth and makes us generally love ourselves. Have a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: -
Notice that as the hierarchy moves up, our needs move from external needs to internal needs. Also note that self esteem, confidence and respect are above love. Which means that we all need love, we need friendship, family and intimacy and this is a precursor to our ability to love ourselves and hence a precursor to self actualization. I like to think of self actualization in a simple term; peace. Peace with the world, peace with circumstances, peace with our accomplishments, peace with ourselves and peace with others.
By learning how to love others and ourselves, we achieve a state of happiness. We commonly mistake the opposite of happiness as sad, when in fact it is opposite sides of the same coin. The true opposite of happiness is boredom. If you look carefully, people at peace are rarely bored and self actualized people are at peace.
So how do we love and be loved just that little bit more?
I believe to be loved is simple. You need to bee good with people, be patient with people, be understanding of people, be less judgmental with people, be kind and generous with people, be firm yet fair with people. Yet even though I have gone through lots of personal development, sometimes I can be a handful; I can be too forceful at times and insensitive to people’s needs. Have you ever met terrible persons? Those nasty people who seem to be very happy to bore a hole through your heart when given an opportunity? I have a sincere believe that mean people don’t mean to be mean because we all do the best we can with the knowledge we have. If nasty people would only know what they were doing was self defeating, then they would stop doing it.
To love a little bit more is a little more complicated. To love others more is to first love ourselves more. If we don’t love ourselves, we will tend to depend on others for our source of love. This is actually okay, until the other person doesn’t feel like giving love that day, then we will feel unloved, rejected and angry. Loving ourselves mean developing a sense of self worth, a sense of self esteem. Many times we lose our self worth when others have a nasty comment about us. Many times, we lose our self esteem when we assume that people are thinking badly of us. The truth of the matter is, people have hardly any time to think about themselves, let alone to think about you. Here is the question, when was the last time you thought about a bad thing your brother, sister or friend did? Most people’s answer would be, “long time ago.”
Once we love ourselves more, we will be more understanding, more accepting, more patient and hence more loving to others. This means growing ourselves mentally and spiritually. Want to get ahead in life? Love is the key. If you would like a guide on how to love yourself and others more, check out these books: -
• Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – John Gray
• How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Here’s a book about understanding others by understanding yourself: -
• Personality Plus – Florence Littauer.
Wouldn’t we all like to love and be loved just that little bit more?
Peace,
Edmond is a qualified civil engineer who has been working in the engineering field for 5 years. Switching career in motivational speaking and training, he was the performance consultant at the Malaysian chapter of Dale Carnegie Training. His love of motivating and inspiring people prompted him to start up Education Republic with a few others.
He can be reached at edmond@edurepublic.com
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(Source: Jobsdb Malaysia)
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