Starting a Successful Business–How Do You Relate to Your Business?

A business friend of mine recently shared a powerful insight about running a business. She wasn’t trying to. She was actually talking about love.

How could love have anything to do with business, though? It’s surprising, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I’d better fill you in on how the topic came up.

The story behind this insight
She wrote about her struggle with opening herself up to romantic relationships after years of hiding from them behind her work. She’s been forcing herself to reexamine her views on relationships and on life after realizing that she’s been using her work for years as a way to insulate herself from life.

As part of her exploration of honesty and vulnerability, she’s been blogging her thoughts on this journey with a group of trusted friends. She commented that she was trying to think of love more as a verb instead of as a noun.

She pointed to the tendency that many people have to treat a relationship as a noun, as an object, as something they OWN. She felt that when you view a relationship as a static thing, it becomes impersonal. It becomes an object that you possess because it serves YOU.

Her breakthrough was to realize that a relationship is not an object, but an action, a verb. She said she was consciously trying to think of relationships as an act of relating rather than as a static possession. She is trying to change her thinking so she sees relationships as a series of actions through which she and her beloved interact.

How this applies to your business
I was struck by this beautiful insight and wanted to share it with you. I also wanted – as I so often do – to relate it also to business.

If you’ve read much of my insights, you know that I strongly feel that running a business centers around building a relationship with your customers. So it immediately occurred to me that I, as a business owner, risk falling into the same mindset that she was fighting in her quest for a romantic relationship.

Do we treat our business as a noun, as an object we possess strictly for our own benefit? Or do we treat it as a verb, as a series of ongoing efforts to build a mutually beneficial relationship?

Think about that as you carry out your business tasks of the day. How can you act to the betterment of those relationships today?