Investment in Your Family: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part III)

"The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family."
Lee Iacocca, Philanthropist, American Corporate Executive


1: I learned saving from daddy and mommy
2: A family of egrets celebrating over the day's catch

Setting a good example for people to emulate starts with investing in oneself. The more we invest in ourselves, we create better opportunities and potential for success and when people see results, especially those close to us, who know what we’ve been up to, they begin to look into our lifestyle and ask about how we are able to do it, even little by little.

How exactly do we invest in our Family as our future business partners? We started with convincing them of a better perspective and way of life, through ourselves as the subject of a great personal life experiment. When even little change is evident, they will ask and start to listen. Here’s steps 2 and 3:

2) Get them to Listen, and then Guide them
Once they know what we are about or up to with this shift in perspective and applying The Hidden Investment principles, and are convinced, even at the least hint, by asking, we can then begin help them help themselves as well. The first step may take time though, all this getting them around to your side strategy, well, because of the complexities of the nature of individual attitudes. We have to remind ourselves that the last thing that we should be thinking of doing is quitting on them. There will be those who are easier to persuade, especially when they see results. A word of caution, though, in mentoring or teaching. Let’s not forget that it is their prerogative to determine what exactly they want to learn from us. Let’s keep from overloading them by volunteering information they do not need, yet.

3) Grant Opportunities and Give Experience
Let’s be leaders in our families. We may not be dad or granddad or mum or grandmum, patriarchs or matriarchs in our clans, but that does not mean we cannot be leaders in our families. Especially when we have proven ourselves successful in varying degrees and different endeavors, a lot of our relatives and immediate family members look up to us, for the younger ones and, set us as good examples by the elders. We then gain their trust. For those who were on our direct mentorship, we could give them great opportunities to test whether or not they have absorbed and practiced the ideas that we’ve shared. They can at least stand on their own and, as they say, fish on their own, since we have taught them to. We can extend opportunities to them and make them feel good at sharing not only responsibilities but also the potential for fruits, profits and gains to be shared to other members of the family.

Just note for the record, that this is definitely not about manipulating people for our future advantage. It’s about strengthening genuine relationships that last and a relationship built on foundations of manipulation for personal advantage is not going to last, and will even destroy lives, one of which could be our own.

The objective of this category is also to create more and more people like us in the family, so they can also reap the benefits of success for themselves at the very least, and at most, become our great success team and business partners. It’s always good to savor success, so much so is enjoying it with our loved ones.


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Investment in Your Family/Relationships: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part I)

Investment in Your Family/Relationships: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part II)

Again, The Five Basic Hidden Investments (Our Key Categories):

1) Your Greatest Asset: Yourself

2) Business Partners: Building Relationships

3) There’s Gold in the Hours

4) Sharing: Good Measure and Running Over

5) Making it Last: Wealth Management

Investment in Your Family: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part II)

“The family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.”
Dodie Smith, British playwright, novelist, and theatrical producer. Dear Octopus

1: Mother penguin teaches baby to dance
2: The family circle

In part I we ended with this premise: “There's just so much complexity with compatibility. We usually do not want to exert that much just for family and success in relationships, which are oftentimes viewed as liabilities, rather than assets”.

Let’s turn this around as well, then, and look at it in a positive light. What happens is that we begin to care and when we do, the situation starts to get better as well. Why? Because, we begin to focus on improvements and positive potentials in the people or things that we care for.

A shift in perspective or how we look at things or people, in this sense, transforms our instincts into well-meaning and nurturing actions which increases potential benefits for all. This shift, in basic and general terms can be described as a shifting from duty to delight. It is a shift in gears from doing or “caring” because of duty, because we have no choice because socio-cultural values expect us to, into caring because we believe in the value of uplifting our own well-being as well as our loved ones’.

See it’s all about relating ourselves and our importance to others especially the ones close to us, our relationships, our family and relatives. In terms of The Hidden Investment principles, the way we want to value ourselves because of our potential gains, investment fruits and advantages from ourselves, would be a great standpoint in valuing others as well, in that sense, and so much more, beyond that.

Now, for some, it is quite daunting to see and then believe that our parents, kids and siblings could be potentially great business partners. We keep on thinking about the hurt if any in the past, incorrigible attitudes and idiosyncrasies since these are the people we have lived with for the longest time. But as we’ve noted earlier, it is very much possible, for there are great businesses out there that have been run by families along with the vicissitudes of the nature of business. The first thing that we need to have is a change in viewpoint.

Although it’s true that we can only choose our friends and not our family or relatives, we can also choose to be on one side with our immediate team, none other than our nearest and dearest.

Now, how exactly do we invest in our Family as our future business partners? We'll consider these following first steps starting with one and will be continued in the next article, Investment in Your Family/Relationships: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part III)

1) A Good Example is A Great Teaching
The way we start to deal with ourselves in The Hidden Investment should extend to the way we should treat our potential business partners as well. It starts with showing them, first by sharing with them directly this great insight or philosophy on financial success and success in general, and then by setting a good example in practicing what you preach in terms of taking care of yourself, saving, balancing activities, stress management, financial planning and other activities that we will also discuss in the future.

Putting our ideas into practice is one great way to get our potential business partners to listen, much more if we succeed at it and that trickles of the great change we’re aiming for are becoming evident, little by little in our life.

We’ll continue with the next steps 2 and 3 tomorrow with our conclusion of this three-part Hidden Investment key category.

The family for a basic unit presents such complex behavioral implications. It should not be surprising since our individualities, basic values and how we view life can be traced in the roots of the tree that we are most “familiar” with.

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Investment in Your Family: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part I)

Investment in Your Family: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part III)

Investment in Your Family: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part I)

“we are each other's business:
we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
Gwendolyn Brooks, U.S. poet and novelist. Family Pictures, Paul Robeson


1: Sunset walk with dad, mum and kids

2: Close family ties: A small herd of dolphins

It's really surprising to see most quotations on the family mostly by famous Western persons are on the negative side. The usual finds are on how the family is like a prison or comparing it to a life of hell or something less than that extreme portrayal.

The thing with relatives and family is that we cannot, or we do not have the power to, choose our relations. And this idea that we have to live, grow and deal with people we are not sure we will like (well, if we've been thinking about it before our birth), sparks the ire of many individuals.

A lot of events in our society, from the awful to the appalling, are blamed to the family as its basic unit. What we do in the bigger scope of human relationships stem from how we deal within the smallest medium of daily social interaction. This has been the basic standpoint of many schools of psychoanalytic thought such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the other sailors of the subconscious.

It is also true that sometimes, we find tragic flaws of not a few successful people in their family trees, either in the roots or the twigs. A wealthy and frugal businessman can be drained of his earnings by his spendthrift wife, or in some cases a hardworking career mother can be unduly complemented by a drunkard. That is pretty basic, other complications include, having spoiled brats daddy-I-want-a-pony-and-I-want-one-right-now as kids, and having a marred relationships with parents and in-laws.

We can look at this and turn around and see big big family-owned businesses prospering, bearing fruit, and even further strengthening along with their family ties as well. They may have black sheep in the fold, but they're generally in harmony. There is no question then which is the better set up, we will always want to prosper and succeed along with our immediate family.

There's just so much complexity with compatibility. We usually do not want to exert that much just for family and success in relationships, which are oftentimes viewed as liabilities, rather than assets. Yes, liabilities - mum and dad's healthcare, the kids going to college, and sometimes financially helping our poorer relatives - all these are necessary expenses that are good in themselves and also an indication of certain family values.

Let’s turn this around as well, then, and look at it in a positive light. What happens is that we begin to care and when we do, the situation starts to get better as well. Why? Can we think of our family as our assets in business and financial sense? And how exactly do we do that? Let’s explore that next.


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Investment in Your Family/Relationships: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part II)

Investment in Your Family/Relationships: Building and Maintaining Relationships (Part III)