To not put too fine a point on this… if we relate well to ourselves the chances are we will relate well to others.
Compassion is one way to help successfully navigate life changes and relationships.
Compassion gives us the power to be open minded when we are challenged by circumstances or people. I believe we can never know exactly how someone else feels. It is an anomaly to say “we walk in other’s shoes”. But… we can walk beside, we can try to understand how other people feel or think … one of the great the mysteries of life is that we can never ever really know what another person is thinking.
This ambiguity, this attempting to understand and never really “knowing” is our dilemma. How we deal with this is with compassion.
Tolerance, Care, Responsibility, Respect, Knowledge and Gratitude.
Tolerance… to be able to tolerate the ambiguities we must face every day, all day there is a need to be able to understand, walk in the shoes of other people, be open to ideas and conflicting emotions, ambiguous signals we get from other people.
Caring for another person means being able to care for yourself. Without self-care you are unable to be of use to others.
Responsibility means being able to see the ramifications of your actions, or non-actions.
Respect for other people and respect for yourself leads to others respecting you. Of all things people most want it is to be heard and hopefully understood. Respect for another’s ideas goes a long way to the feeling of being heard.
Having knowledge of other people allows us to better appreciate their individuality. Each of us has an idea of how we would like things to be. Understanding, recognising and embracing individual ideas oils the wheels of the community.
Gratitude is recognition of other people, what they do, how the think and how their feelings are sometimes affected by our actions.