There is reason why I am writing about love, a week after Valentine’s Day.  I didn’t want this blog to be lost in the avalanche of love related articles on the net. What I wanted to say is important enough for me to wait a week before posting about Love.

There is an age old saying that love makes the world go round and makes everything possible. Read on to find out how love will make it possible for you to take your brand to new heights and also make you a more evolved person personally and professionally.

Love of all kinds is the favoured topic of discussion this month and amongst that self-love is the most talked about. From well-meaning friends to social media influencers, everyone is telling you to love yourself. I am in complete agreement to this sentiment and strongly feel that loving one-self is not an act of indulgence but your duty towards your soul. A big part of the self-love philosophy is nurturing all aspects of your personality and allowing it to grow and thrive.

Surprisingly in all the discussions about self-love that I have been part of, I find one aspect mostly missing. This missing aspect of self-love is what I want to talk about today.

Work is an important part of our life, and even though it should not be what defines you as person, it still contributes a significant amount to forging your personality. It is vital to have a healthy relationship with your work, as it is to nurture the personal relationships that you have. And here I am not talking about office friendships or relationship with employees or boss or even your rapport with clients.

I am talking about your emotional equation with the work you do to earn your living. It is easy to say that do something you love and you will never work a day in your life. But that is not the case with most of us, even if we are in a profession or business of our choice, our relationship with it is constantly changing and evolving. Why it is necessary to love the work you do as much as it is necessary to love yourself.

The answer is really simple. Most of us look at the work we do as an inanimate thing. But I feel it is a living breathing entity that is greatly affected by the way we feel about it. Stick with me for a little while more before you write me off as crazy.

What I am trying to say is that most us don’t even realise that we are in a relationship with our work. And that like any other relationship, it requires love and care to grow and thrive. And this is where most of us fail. We put in the required hard work, we apply the business strategies and we do the necessary marketing, but all with a very detached and impersonal mode. What we really need to do business owners is to bring back emotion. To fall in love again with the work that once inspired us. To take keen interest in the history of our industry, to study in depth how people in our sphere function in other parts of the world, to be involved with each and every aspect of our work and infuse fresh energy into our business.

The hassles of doing business often make us forget why we started in the first place. We start looking at it only as means to an end. Instead of looking at our business as an avenue for self-growth, we start thinking of it as road-block to our happiness. The need of the hour is to not let our business overshadow our personal life by making it personally enriching part of life.

 We need to find the joy, the euphoria, the excitement that we felt when that first deal was inked or the first cheque was received. We need to recapture the interest we had and rejuvenate the imagination along with the ambition. All this is needed to rekindle the love you have for your work.

For this love is what separates great businesses from ordinary ones. By great I don’t mean big.  A great business is one that adds value to your life along with earning you money. A good business is one which will not just take care of your needs but also nurture your personality.  A successful business is one where you just increase your wealth but also have enriching experiences.

The relationship that we have with our work is going to be as long as the other vital relationships we have. So let us take stock and choose to fall in love again with our business.