people Archives - Page 2 of 7

March 16, 2024February 15, 2024 by Pete Wiley

Keeping your Sense of Self with Others

I just returned from an annual weekend in the woods with my college friends. We do this every year, and this year was our fortieth!! I (obviously) love spending time with those guys, and we know each other as well as friends can. We spend time catching up, “reveling,” making chili, and playing cards (pitch). For the duration of the event, we are with each other every moment. There are few people I would be able or willing to spend this much time with all in one go, but these guys are in that category. It is still a challenge, not because of anything they do, but because being with people generally is challenging for me—especially when it’s constant and for an extended time. The introversion voice is strong.

January 6, 2024December 28, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Tiers of Ties—The Nature of Our Connections

How many friends do you have? Are they all created equal? The levels of connection that you have with people matter. How you behave around them, what you confide in them, and how much you ask of them matters. What you get from them also matters—how they make you feel, your experiences with them, and what you learn from them.

July 8, 2023April 20, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Responsibility in Relationships—Developing Bonds of Trust

My son is twenty-one, and I trust him completely.

Well, almost completely. He’s tried to pull some fast ones over the years, but on the whole, they’ve been very minor. I’d almost be worried if he hadn’t. All of us go through a process in our relationships of establishing how much we trust one another and how trustworthy we are. Part of that includes exploring the boundaries and finding the balance between words and actions that we perceive as beneficial to us (e.g., a child getting away with something) and those that build trust. In terms of trust in relationship with others, there are several ways to think about it. One is the component of trust in the parts of our lives that come with significant responsibilities, such as taking care of our children, as well as other aspects of our relationships and our professional duties. Another is our trust in others based on the strength of the relationship. This kind of trust depends on our experience with other people as well as how trustworthy we are. We can also think about trust as an attachment to a certain outcome—we trust something is going to happen. While this isn’t necessarily bad, we should guard against becoming too attached to a particular behavior or condition and stay open-minded as to what we might encounter on our path.

in Mindful / Proactive 0 comments

June 10, 2023April 14, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Knowing People—Incorporating Empathy into Our Interactions

How much time do you spend getting to know people? Not just what they did over the weekend and how their kids are doing, but really trying to get a feel for who they truly are and what drives them. Most interactions take place on a very surface level. We engage in small talk or interact on the basis of what we’re intending to accomplish, and the rest is often just minimal politeness. There’s nothing wrong with a pleasant passing of the time, but if we become closer with people, we might have deeper conversations and get to know them better. We can learn to guide our interactions based on that knowledge and those insights. However, unless we make a consistent effort to get to know people andincorporate that knowledge into our interactions with them, we aren’t taking advantage of opportunities for much more meaningful and rewarding relationships.

in Mindful / Open Mind 0 comments

Indifference. Painting of a figure shut off from the world.

May 13, 2023April 6, 2023 by Pete Wiley

Why Should I Care? The Nature of Indifference

When we swat a mosquito, we don’t necessarily have any hostility toward it or its actions; we are indifferent. We are merely getting rid of an annoyance. That may be our attitude toward a great many things in the world—we don’t give them much thought, and we don’t care that much, if at all. For us to care about something, it must have some kind of emotional connection to us. We must have a reason for feeling something, positive or negative, about it and how we interact with it. Sometimes our indifference is affected for a purpose, sometimes it is genuine. Sometimes indifference is intentional, while sometimes it is due to a lack of awareness. Sometimes we are aware, but there is no emotional connection—there is no common frame of reference that would make us care. We can know something or someone well but still be indifferent due to how little they are involved in our lives. And, in the same way that we should be aware of why we have strong emotions about something, we should be aware of when and why we don’t.

in Emotions / Mindful 0 comments