Every day 60 million e-mails are sent out around the world. MySpace alone has over 186 million users! Technology has given us so many ways of communicating, but are we truly connecting or just corresponding? Are we adding people into our lives who share our values or merely collecting a list of profiles? Are we deepening relationships or just maintaining them?
As much as we want to nurture every relationship, advances in technology have given us access to more relationships and less time to deepen them. And yet what most of us know, and what I have discovered working with more than 3.5 million people from over 80 countries, is that the quality of our lives is the quality of our relationships. And since life is relationships, relationships follow the rules of life—they either grow or die. Your relationships are as strong or deep as you choose to make them. If you spend quality time in your intimate relationships, if you connect with your families and your friends, those relationships will flourish. If you nurture your relationships with your clients and really meet their needs at a higher level, you build long-lasting connections.
Conversely, if you don’t grow your customers, you go out of business. If you don’t reach your family or friends, those relationships get stripped of the substance and texture they deserve.