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Our love languages transcend every area…

Written by Bongeka
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Have you heard of Gary Chapman’s book on the 5 Love languages? Believe me when I say this is not some cheesy love book. According to Dr. Chapman, there are five universal ways that all people express and interpret love. Dr. Chapman firmly believes that each person has one primary and one secondary love language and he advocates that people tend to give love in the way they prefer to receive love (http://www.sheknows.com). The 5 love languages are Words of Affirmation; Quality time; Receiving gifts; Acts of service and Physical touch.

I know in our world when someone mentions the word “love”, our default mode thinks romance. While it’s true that the word love is predominantly used in that context, however in my journey of maturity I have come to realise that actually, understanding your love language and others love language transcends across every aspect of life.

In light of the revelation of my love language, I was doing a bit of a self-evaluation exercise about some of the leadership roles I have occupied. According to Dr Gary Chapman’s Love Language test, my primary love language is Words of Affirmation.

In my self-evaluation exercise I began to think about most of the missed opportunities in the roles I have occupied. By my very nature I believe that I try my best to exude excellence in whatever I do. Usually when I start something new; be it a new project, new job, new role etc, I am full of excitement and bubbling with creative ideas- ready to implement. So I flourish in environments where I am constantly affirmed through recognition and praise. However, reality is most of the environments and leadership styles I have been exposed to, have not really supported this kind of love language. I have been in environments and had leaders skilled in criticism.

I recall the many great ideas and action plans I would come up with that never got off the ground or failed dismally because of negative words. When I am not affirmed I become complacent and I end up disappearing with the crowd. I think of all the inadequate things I witnessed and inside of me I would cringe because I knew I could do something to improve the situation, but I wouldn’t do it because I couldn’t get pass the horrible words spoken. Now don’t get me wrong, the work still got done, but inside of me I didn’t really care. I really tried to speak myself out of the negative words and carry on to do the work, but it was a difficult journey. I have also been in environments and had leadership styles that encouraged my creativity; gave me authority and ultimately consistently affirmed me through recognition and praise. I must say these were the times I really flourished. When I am in this kind of environment I really give it my all.

So when I got a hold of Dr Gary Chapman’s book and began to understand my love language, I had an Aha moment! And came to the conviction that this love language concept is true and it cuts across every area of one’s life. What was more powerful for me was I began to understand the love languages of others around me and I must say that has made my interactions more meaningful. I really think everyone needs to know their own love language and also come to a point of understanding others. Love is powerful and it cuts across every era; every nation, every business and history tells us that the people, who do great things and are remembered, are people who have, understood and appreciated the love languages of the humanity they serve.

Love,

Now I know why they taught us comprehension…

Written by Bongeka
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One of my favourite subjects at school was English. I had a really fantastic English teacher in High School, but I must be honest I never understood why we had to learn about Shakespeare and all the stories he wrote. But when I comfort myself; I suppose it was always the moral of the stories more than anything and the moral is something that cuts across every generation.

One of the things I’m glad we were taught was comprehension. I’m sure we all remember from our English classes the comprehension exercises we often did. I recall how we would be given a short paragraph or a short essay on a particular topic. We would be asked to thoroughly read the paragraph and as my teacher would say ‘ensure you read it more than once before you are able to answer questions’. To test if you really comprehended what you read, we were given a set of questions that we were required to answer. If you consistently scored good grades on your comprehension exercises, your teacher was pleased with your comprehension skills and your overall command of the English language, as comprehension used to carry a significant weighting towards your overall English mark. If we were given a take home assessment we were often encouraged to seek other sources over and above the paragraph to assist us in answering the questions more robustly.

Comprehension simply means “The ability to understand something”.

Why I am sharing about this? It recently hit me that we were raised to believe that going to school had a one dimensional purpose (i.e. getting good grades in order to go to University and get a good job). Though that is partly true and is the common reality, but I think we don’t appreciate enough the foundation, for life, that our teachers were giving us.

I believe that we were actually being given mental tools to know how to navigate this interesting and difficult journey of life. We need to be able to comprehend situations accordingly. I say this because we are increasingly living in a period where we have allowed the media to become the predominant source by which we understand the world around us. The initial role of the media was to serve as an independent body that provided us information about what is happening around us and we would then conclude for ourselves about what is truth and what is fiction.

I spoke about the comprehension exercise earlier because I believe our teachers were in some way trying to equip us with the ability to thoroughly understand situations we face on a daily basis and not just take things at face value. They asked us questions so that from our own perspective we could engage with the information and provide our own viewpoints. They even encouraged us to seek additional sources of information so that we come to understand that there is often more than one side to every story. We were being built up so that we could concurrently be independent and collective thinkers who are able to apply the knowledge we have gathered accordingly.

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