Assalamualaikum,
First of all, apologies for not posting anything for the past two days. I was working at the Sureworks Education Fair in Mid Valley Exhibition Centre, and I was swamped after talking to dozens parents and students about their future with Monash Malaysia. I did, however, get some good conversation out of my encounters with a few of the people I met, so I’ll be writing about that soon insyaAllah.
Since I was working for the past two days, I took a day off from work today to rest at home. Man, it felt good to sleep in and catch up on much needed sleep. I also took my grandmother (from my Dad’s side) to PPUM for a check up, and on our way there, she imparted some words of wisdom that I felt I need to share (or at least write it down for myself to remember in the future).
If we want to be loved by others, we need to first love other people.
Nenek was mostly talking about my upcoming marriage to Aiman, and how I need to learn to love and treat his family as if they’re my own family. After all, a marriage is not just a union of two people, but of two families. I need to love his parents as how I love mine, and treat his siblings as how I treat mine (err, at least without the yelling and all lol). I also need to be fair to both side, such as buying gifts for his parents if I’m buying anything for my parents (like when I’m travelling, etc).
But, if you think about it, this can apply to our daily life.
When we argue with people, we tend to want to push our opinions forward. We fight, we yell, we want to win. We believe that our opinion is the best, that we are right. When in fact, we need to learn to understand other people. We need to learn how to see things from a different perspective. We need to try and understand why people think in a certain way. We need to understand how someone’s history has shaped their perspectives. And we definitely need to learn and understand that sometimes, there can always be more than one right answer to a question.
In a workplace, trust is not a given thing. As a person in power, you cannot force your people to respect you. You cannot make people follow your lead or accept your orders, if you yourself do not lead by example and listen to your employees. People often neglect this and feel like being in a higher position entitles them to command those in their team, but loyalty cannot be given freely. Nor is trust, or respect. You must earn them. You must learn to communicate with your team, to understand what they’re going through, to know what they need and require to grow and improve.
And in a friendship – you’d make more friends (or you appear to be friendlier or more approachable) if you are genuine to learn and know each other, instead of making ‘friends’ on the basis of “I need something from you” or “what can you do for me”. We need to change it to “what can I do or offer to you that can make your life better”, and treat each other with kindness and love.
Because in this world, especially with the many different dramas and problems going on, we can never have too many love going around.
Until next time, stay awesome. <3