Investment in Wellness

What does it mean to invest?
What does wellness or wholeness mean?
What are some synonyms of wellness?

If I could take all of these questions and boil them down to one concept that embodies the totality of wellness, it would be relationship. We meet all of our needs -directly or indirectly- through our relationships with others. The irony is that when we are out of sorts, we attack the very people we need.

It’s all about relationship. From the cradle to the grave, two universal human needs are to love and to serve. No matter the venue – home, family, workforce, salesmanship, community involvement, volunteer work, government, law enforcement, or breakthrough sciences like Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, it is all about the state or quality of relating.

Relationship is about people skills. The foundation of people skills is about valuing the individual. Everything requires people. Everything is about people. We never get anything in life without having someone we need to thank. Psychiatrist William Glasser suggests that except for abject poverty, incurable illness or living under tyranny all human misery is a result of failure to have a good relationship with those people important to us.

Four great relationships of a lifetime. The four relationships include self, God (higher power), people in our quality world and the rest of the people in the world. All of these relationships are interconnected and affect each other.

Shakespeare had Hamlet to proclaim: “To thine own self be true and it follows as surely as night follows day thou canst not be false with any other man.”

What we give into the life of others comes back into our own. As we are true to self, we will be trustworthy in all our dealings with others. As we invest in determining self-motives, we will lessen judgments of others. As we genuinely assess our human flaws we become less critical of others. As we understand our humanity, we will have compassion for those weaker and appreciation of those stronger.

Anytime we are improving one relationship, by default we are improving all our relationships. Anytime we are destroying one relationship, by default we are destroying all our relationships. Even though circumstances change, all categories of relationships have value. All are worthy of investment of time and energy.

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