Lead With Resilience

Building Relationships and the Resiliency Development Connection

Image Posted on March 12, 2014 Updated on March 13, 2014

Each person is the most important person in the world!

It is personal: Building relationships is absolutely a personal endeavor, and builds resiliency skills in others! 

It’s life, it’s personal, It’s about relationships, it’s so important!

Life is messy, we are not perfect, yet we are human, which makes us persons, which means that everything that we do is personal. We may think that we stand alone, yet even when we consider ourselves to be detached from a situation, like it or not, we are connected to the world. 

We are in relationships by choice, by chance, and by acquaintance.  We are actually in a number of relationships that we might not even realize.  If you have children, if you have students, if you are a boss, or an employee, if you are in some kind of relationship that involves love, desire and passion, if you used to be in a relationship, guess what, you are part of the world, people count on you, you are important, and these people you connect with or don’t are important to you.  You are a person! You belong to the world, and the world belongs to you.

As you ponder this further, consider that each person, yes, each person, is the most important person in the world, and each person that you meet, greet, and welcome into your life stream deserves your best efforts in connecting with them, and in your desire to strive to build a relationship with them that is based on dignity, respect, equity, trust, support, guidance, and dare I say love.  Building and maintaining meaningful relationships is one of the most important assets that any of us can add to our personal skills.

We, each of us, holds an immeasurable ability to convey positive healthy emotions to others, yet to do so in healthy ways, we must first understand the importance of each opportunity to build these healthy relationships, and we must be conscious in our thoughts and actions, and purposeful in our desire to meet others where they are in order to connect.  We must then act with purposeful intent to move the relationship forward.  As I mentioned this is messy work.  It can seem overwhelming and even a bit over-burdening to consider the importance that you have in so many lives, and yet, if you are an educator, as many of my readers are, you simply hold one of the most important roles there could ever be, that is to connect with your students to support their positive development and foster the development of their latent resiliency.

Connect with students via communication. Connect by finding out their interests. Connect with them by listening, understanding them, hearing about their families, learning what makes them tick, grasping that as individuals they each have unique ideas, feelings, perceptions of the world, goals, and difficulties that they have overcome, are enduring, or have yet to face. Connect with your students by showing them the stepping stones across the garden, the safe spots to cross the river, and by teaching them and preparing them for the next adversity that may come their way.  These moments are essential to positive growth and development and each of these moments cannot be under-valued in crafting each positive relationship.

Yes, it is true, each of us is moving so fast, at seemingly lightning speed, from one activity to the next, from one situation to the next, from one text to another, through social networking sites, back through our tweets, and we often forget, that the most important people that we have ignored during our days, truly need us the most.  

So, what to do? Well, stop, reflect, consider those around you, and realize that as people, the strongest of us has more than likely suffered significant losses, struggles, overcome severe trauma, and have developed a tremendous wealth of resources that we can share with others.  Each of us to some degree can make a positive impact if we choose to do so. Each of us can add to the collective betterment of our world if we choose to do so. Each of us has the ability to connect with those in our world to make a positive difference.  Will we? I hope so, because I believe that each person is the most important person in the world. How about you?

Robert A. Martinez, Ed. D.

#Resiliency, #Transformational-Resiliency, #Education, 

@ResiliencyGuy  @DrRobM_FSUSD