Loving The Most Important Person In Your Life
As always, I’ll start with a question to get your brain geared for learning:
Who is the most important person in your life?
Take a moment to think about that. I suspect that it won’t take too long to think about. I hear two quick and common responses when I ask my clients this question. Before we get into that though, there are two factors that help us determine someone’s importance: proximity and relevance.
Why proximity? People tend to become more important the closer they are to us. The people we happen to spend the most time with, family, classmates, people who share a common hobby or interest, or the people we work with, usually become the most important. But proximity alone in not enough, for we can be physically close to people without considering them important.
Why relevance? Relevance is all about how much of a difference they make in your life. This is the meaning they have in your life. This may come from being physically close to you, but it doesn’t always have to be. For example, you may have had only one interaction with someone who spoke something very inspiring or incredibly degrading and that brief moment can stay with you for the rest of your life.
So, understanding that someone’s importance comes from their closeness to you and their meaning to you, let’s revisit the question: who is the most important person in your life? Who are you closest to? Who is the single person with the most impact on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?
The answer: you.
You are the single most important person in your life.
But Scott, isn’t that selfish?! What about my spouse, my kids, my parents? [and if you’re religious] God is obviously more important than I am!
Before I go any further, let me enhance my statement even more: You are the single most important thing in your life.
That’s outlandish! What about my house? My job? My money? My time? My faith? I cannot possibly live without any of those things!
Those are true also! You are not important to the exclusion of everything else. You are important in addition to everything else. But what do you have the most control and responsibility over? Yourself. We all know this answer intuitively.
Whenever I ask this question in therapy, 70% of my client say “it should be me.” It is you! And yet, most of us don’t live according to that fact. The other common response is “my spouse/children”. And what happens when we don’t prioritize ourselves? We neglect ourselves to the detriment of ourselves. We end up living unfulfilling lives in one of the most prosperous eras in history.
Self-love does not have to be selfish
I know that there is a need to avoid selfishness. This is one of the reasons why we struggle with viewing ourselves as important. But what is selfishness? The actual definition of selfishness is “lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.”
In other words, in taking care of yourself, you are being considerate of others. Even as you learn to realize that you are the most important person in your life, other people are just as important. Learning to balancing these can be a hard, and it’s typically where I focus most of my work with my clients, and, when done well, yields the greatest investments in generating fulfillment.
So where to begin with learning to view yourself as the most important person in your life?
Start by getting to know yourself. What does your Life Worth Living look like?
Here are a few tips that I will leave you with to give practical consideration to:
Create joy within your responsibilities. Your responsibilities are mandatory, may as well enjoy them. Learn how to create joy.
Be fulfilled by your family. Take enjoyment from listening to your family, giving to them, serving them, and showing them how valuable they are to you.
Learn to be okay with your mistakes. Your value doesn’t come from accomplishment, accomplishment builds from knowing and living according to your worth
As we move into the New Year, my challenge to you is to prioritize your own sense of self-value. What you will find is that your natural desires for change will emerge from a place of freedom when you develop self-acceptance. When you set the focus on yourself as a worthy, value, capable person, your ability to grow and attain the things you want begin to naturally flow from an inner confidence that affects every single aspect of your life.
