“You spend time with your family? Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.”
Don Vito Corleone, “The Godfather”
Effectively managing your relationships as a man is a skill set that is imperative to being successful in both your professional and personal life. Good men are self aware, emotionally intelligent and mature when it comes to managing their interactions with others. This is because they aspire to be respectful and demonstrate empathy and humility towards everyone they encounter in order to receive it in return from the people they encounter.
As good men, we often need to work at maintaining our relationships with not only our partners or wives, but also our immediate and extended families, as well as the people we work with. We need to be aware of the fact that our words and actions have an impact on the people around us in either a positive or negative manner. At times, we need to be emotionally intelligent enough to manage not only our own emotions, but others as well.
Being self-aware of your own emotions as men and more importantly, your own personality traits, is something that most people don’t spend a great deal of time considering or analysing. Yet for your journey of self improvement and empowerment, taking the time to know yourself better is imperative.
Self-aware men that have a good understanding of themselves and how their personality either helps or betrays them when having to deal with people are highly effective men. By improving your emotional intelligence and knowledge of self will help improve both your personal and professional life.
Sadly, there will be times when you need to end relationships for the greater good of your own personal well being and that of the people around you. These moments in time can be harrowing and painful, yet necessary. Empowered men that are confident and capable surround themselves with people that possess the character traits they desire. ‘You show me the ten people you spend most of your time with and I’ll show you your future’ is a sensible and valuable metric to measure the value of the people you surround yourself with.
Our lives as men can not and should not be lonely ones. We need to surround ourselves with people that make us want to better people and better men. We also need the skill sets required to manage these relationships so we can strive to succeed in our personal and professional lives.