TIP 45
FIND YOUR OWN FAMILY
Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.
It is extremely difficult to attract the success you want without close friends and family who love and support you unconditionally. What is success without loved ones to share it with? You may have the good fortune to be born into a loving and supportive family, but if not, it is essential to create your own family. Find people who will “adopt” you and love you just like a son or daughter. Not everybody is lucky enough to have parents who can offer this special love. Instead of spending time complaining about your parents or blaming them for your problems, it may be time to accept them for who they are and start looking for someone who can act as a mother or father to you. Fortunately, there are plenty of people out there with love to give, so if you look, you will find them. One of my clients realized that even though her own parents couldn’t give her the love she needed, her in-laws could. They took her in just like a daughter, and she accepted and loved them like parents.
Another client, Don, lost both of his parents when he was 14, and an aunt took him in and raised him. He is 33 now, and although he loves his aunt like a mother, he still yearned for someone to be a father to him. I suggested that he visit a retirement home and find someone there who had love to give. Don met an elderly gentleman who shared his love of baseball. He went to visit him every week, and soon Don felt that he had found the love and affection he had been missing. If you already have great parents, be thankful and acknowledge them often.
We often assume that our parents will be around—that there will be time to talk later. This isn’t always the case. A colleague of mine had always wanted to take her father to Sweden and had assumed that they would make the trip after her ailing mother passed away. Then her father unexpectedly developed kidney trouble and had to get dialysis treatments regularly. Things weren’t working according to plan, and she realized that she had better take him to Sweden as soon as possible or she might not have the chance. He found a neighbor to look after his wife for two weeks so that he could go. They had an incredible trip. He had never been in a hotel in his life and had never traveled because his wife didn’t enjoy it. He hadn’t been back to Sweden since he left as a teenager. They went to his old neighborhood and saw people he hadn’t seen in years and looked at the house where he was born. My colleague hadn’t heard her father laugh so hard in years. He said that the trip was the best thing he had ever done in his entire 83 years.
Do not wait to enjoy your parents. Let them know how much you love them with both words and actions now, while you still can.