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Quality of LifePosted 10/11/2006Richard Flint, CSP
How important is the home environment to the strength of the relationships that happen there? Do you have the energy to invest yourself in the family room? Do you make excuses for your lack of participation? Are you just too tired to be the person you need to be? How important is it that individuals have time for self? Do you ever resent what others ask of you? Do you get angry when no one seems to understand that there needs to be some time for you in this life? Do you excuse your emotions by telling yourself: "Someday there will be time for me?" You know the answers to these questions. Environment is critical to one bringing personal value to all they are involved in. Without a sense of personal value, there is a constant feeling of tiredness, frustration and nagging questions about the importance of your presence. Without the quality of personal presence, people tend to exist in what is, while they talk about what they would really like to see happen. As my marketing team and I have been searching for the direction we want to take our marketing and my program development, one theme kept resurfacing. I hear it each day as I interact with those who enter my life. That issue is lack of quality personal time in their life.
I don't think he is alone. How sad to know that each day you take the most precious gift you have - time - and spend it doing what you feel you have to do. I think there are millions who would love to win the lottery and walk away from this frustration. Yet, avoiding anything is not the solution; it is just a circle that will bring you back to what you were avoiding. I am watching a young couple go through a divorce. They have spent their time together drifting apart, rather than building a relationship. They talk about how tired they are of all the struggles, fights and lack of communication. The easiest thing, they believe, is to end it with a divorce. How sad it is to see lives that started with a sparkle end with anger and pain. How sad to see the punishment they are putting themselves through. Their love actually died from a lack of participation. Reality is that this is not about the job; it is not about the marriage going south. These are simply visible symptoms of a much larger fact. The Missing Ingredient People today are missing personal quality time in their life. They work to pay bills; they get married to have someone in their life; they get up each day hoping things will be different, only to repeat what they were hoping to avoid. The environment just feeds their frustrations. Their life has become a closet filled with incomplete dreams; ideas they are too tired to complete; relationships they don't have time for; conversations they don't know how to finish. No wonder they feel exhausted; no wonder they are tired and no wonder they simply survive, hoping tomorrow will find them hitting the jackpot. The real answer to this is to design environments that are quality-driven. There aren't many business environments that are quality-driven. Most are staring at the bottom line, rather than supporting the people who work in their environment. Too many in leadership don't have the energy or the understanding to work with the changing internal customer. They want things to remain the way they are, rather than pushing themselves to grow into the leader.
The mission must be to overcome this tiredness that is taking over people's lives and get back to a sense of living with abundance and quality. How do we do that? It will mean taking an honest look at what is and an internal discipline that is committed to not walking away because things don't operate on your timetable. It will demand the following agenda:
The challenge is having the strength to get beyond the emotional fatigue that makes up your life. Each day you design your life to accomplish one of two things: feed the confusion or find resolution. Which are you better at? Which do you spend your time seeking to achieve?
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How important is one's environment? How important is the work environment to one's personal productivity? How important is the business room to the personal fulfillment (or lack of) you feel when you go to work?
Recently, I was talking with one of my neighbors about this issue. He looked at me and said, "Know what? I get up each day and go to work. I do it because I have to. It used to be fun, but not any more. I play the lottery in hopes that I can win and walk away from this frustration. Yet, each week that I don't win, I feel a little more lost."
There are not many quality-driven home environments. Too many families are just trying to survive each other. Too many married people are more interested in their whims, rather than working to blend their personalities. Many parents are just too tired to really be parents. It is much easier to let "things" raise their children.
