The meaning of relationships!

It is relationships that give us meaning and enrich our learning

To be healthy, functioning people, we need to feel good about ourselves. We need to feel that our time and energy is spent in meaningful ways. Meaning nourishes us. When we run out of meaning, everything else slows and stops. We get depressed.

We generate meaning primarily through relationships. The most meaningful tend to be relationships with other people, but we also have relationships with our inner selves, our career, our community and religious, political or other groups with which we identify, as well as with ideas and activities we engage in. Any or all of these relationships can give our lives meaning and, therefore, make us feel good about ourselves.

In many work environments we are surrounded by other people, yet these circumstances, historically, have not encouraged the cultivation of meaningful relationships.  If we spend our time not having meaningful relationships, when we could, then an opportunity is lost.  In a school environment, a teacher may be in contact with many students (up to a hundred or more) yet may have meaningful relationships with very few.  And meaning goes both ways, students have a need for meaningful relationships, and to have those with their peers they need to see them modeled by adults.

Camille Pissarro - Market at Gisors - 1899

The situation that pertains in modern society, by default, is depriving us of the relationships that we could have, meaning there is a gap in the meaning that we could be enjoying and if that gap is large enough then it affects our health and wellbeing even to the extent of suffering depression.

Schools, of all places, should be webs of deeply meaningful relationships enriching the lives of students and teachers alike.

This is where the future lies.

You can download a pdf version of Why We Teach here.  Click here to see a replay of a recent webinar that explores the Step Back to Empower program.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.  Earlier blogs can be found here.

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