Personality and Family Life
As we have
discussed earlier under session ‘NLP concept of personality’, personality is
not the external outlook of a person but it is mostly internal. It is the sum
of attitude, behaviour and habits. These attributes are internally developed. A
person acquires the required perceptual inputs for personality development from
his ecology where the person is born and brought up. Remember once again that
the family, relatives, peer groups, educational institutes, social
organizations and the society are part of the ecology. Of course the foundation
laid by a good set of genes have wonderful roles in building personality especially
in contributing a ‘fit for purpose’ physiology!
A lot of elements in the ecology
influence the developments of attitude, behaviour and habits, the building
blocks of personality. Values, believes and customs within the ecology have
major roles. For example there is a phrase in English ‘the mom’s God’
which means a child believes in the God of its mom and the child also believes
in the religion of its mom. How the child talks, walks, eats, acts and reacts
mostly depends on what it learns from the ecology. The child’s life values, skills and customs
are mostly adopted and learned from its ecology.
The ecology of a person is different
from that of another person in one way or another. Even for twins some of their
ecological elements may differ such as friends and teachers. The books they
read and the subjects they study also may differ. All these elements have roles
in making their personality unique.
Different personality creates
different interests and approaches. Thinking process of one person is
different from other. One may think positively and the other negatively. One
may be more patient than the other! One may be short tempered. Because one is born
and brought with lions and the other with cattle and one with a horse and the
other with a donkey! A vulture brought up with chicken’s never fly high!
Only by keeping these facts in mind we
can discuss about family life. Marriage is the diffusion of two cultures. Many
couples forget this and lead a miserable marriage life. They may have
everything that can be acquired by money. They have wealth but no health
because of mental stress, tension and anxiety cause physical illness. Psychosomatic
diseases are the result of mental disorder, ‘soma’ means the body and
‘psych’ means the mind. Mental illness causes physical ailment also.
Different attitudes and interests of
partners will possibly clash. If one partner has a positive attitude towards a
particular thing and the other a negative, there will definitely be a clash
unless both or at least one partner manages to scarify the self interest. Say
for example one partner is a vegetarian and the other non-vegetarian, there may
be a chance of clash about the menu. If one prefers different romantic life
than the other probably their bedroom will be a hell. One may like picnic and
the other movies, one likes reading books and the other prefer to sleep, one
loves the parents and relatives the other think the parents are problem, one
want children soon and the other consider children as a nuisance. These clashes
will continue until they manage to do some adjustments and sacrifices in their personal
interests.
Different attitude and interest cause
different behaviours and habits. If a partner doesn’t like involvement of parents
that partner prefers to send the parents especially in-laws to an old age home.
The one who loves children always likes to deal with kids and the other person stay
away from children. In many families especially in the Indian Subcontinent the
female partner sacrifices her interest when there are clashes. Such family seems
to be strong from an external point of view but the grievances and mental
stress experienced by these brides are being disregarded.
Then, how to make the family a heaven
when a lion weds an elephant or a wolf weds a fox! It is a million dollar
question! We have to introduce the term Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ)
here. It’s not at all a new term now a days and it has great importance in
personality development training programs. EI is the capacity of a person to
be aware of, control and express emotions and to manage interpersonal
relationships intelligently and empathetically. The term EI is created
by Peter Salavoy and John Mayer and popularized by Dan Goleman in his book ‘Emotional
Intelligence’.
Experiencing emotion is the
fundamental nature of human being. Animals also have emotions however one of
the basic differences between a human and an animal is that human being can control
their emotions but animal can’t much of it. We can’t blame animals as a whole,
there is a proverb in south India says ‘donkey cease sexual urge by crying
loudly’. Isn’t that an intelligent behaviour?! I mean to control the emotion is a skilled
cognitive exercise.
Couples must be aware that emotions
can drive one’s behavior and impact the other partner positively or negatively.
Therefore it is necessary to learn how
to recognize, understand and manage emotions both our own and others especially
when we are under stress. One partner should try to understand the personal
interest, values and customs of the other with due respect and empathy.
Partners should accept the fact that both are human beings with emotions and
feelings at the same time different personality. Both have unique personality
and have self esteem. Husband and wife are equal shareholders of a joint
venture partnership!
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) can
help people in identifying their interests and habits by studying their representational
system, the way by which they perceive experiences and how they process it. This
is included in the subsequent sessions of this NLP online training program. I
don’t want to list out Top Ten points or something similar to it to make your family
life wonderful. You can’t make your life wonderful with such bullet points because
most of the problems in life are magnification of emotions. Hence I want you to
learn NLP to understand, control and manage emotions and make your family a
heaven.
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