Week 4 – The Principle of Love
People with a well-developed Self-Image have a tendency to express an authentic interest in, and a high regard for other people. They have an innate awareness for other people’s problems and needs.
It is a psychological fact that our feelings about ourselves tend to correspond to our feelings about other people.
When a person evolves to feel and show more love and compassion to the needs of others, this invariably coincides with beginning to afford more self-care and love to themselves.
Humans have a natural tendency to want to reflect and impose their frame of reference on other people. They want you to understand how they see things first, they want you to see things through their lens, so you come around to their way of thinking.
We can apply the principle of love to build our self-image by experimenting with new habits.
One example involves becoming practiced at the habit of trying first to see the world through the other person’s lens before only then looking through our own lens.
This is the ultimate test of love and compassion for others. To become practiced at this requires a strong sense of identity and self-worth.
People who have developed a changeless core driven by unarguable timeless principles take on tests like this with relish. They know habits like this strengthen their self-image.
They learn to listen differently. They set out to get inside the other person’s frame of reference. They listen with empathy, with intuition, and with a sense of curiosity and enquiry.
As they master this habit, they find they are no longer scripted by ‘fight or flight’.Instead, they become practiced at taking the third alternative when communicating with fellow humans which is: “let me see if I can understand you first”.
This goes against our natural way which is to seek first to be understood. So, it takes a paradigm shift and it takes a strength of character. When you meet the other persons human need to be heard, to be understood, to be validated, then relationships thrive.
This is just one example of the execution of the timeless principle of love, that creates a ripple effect. It will make us more conscious of the difference this principle can make to our own life and the lives of those that we love, infact to anyone we come into contact with.
“If I have no other qualities, I can succeed with love alone. Without it I will fail, even if I possess all the knowledge and skills of the world”
Og Mandino.