They say that people may forget what they spoke to you about, what they experienced with you, but they will never forget you made them feel.
Do we think that when we treat people in a way that makes them feel valuable, that our own value will decrease? And is this why we treat people in such a way that they will feel insufficient, weak, inadequate and helpless? Is our opinion of ourselves so low that we immediately like to see the status of someone we just met as being below us?
Today, I experienced something which caused me to ponder on these questions and I remembered how our Prophet treated his companions in such a way that they each thought “he loved them the most.”
Was our Prophet not afraid that if he made them feel important and close to him, that he would lose his respectability before them? Of course not. Because he gained his respectability not from the table which he sat behind, but directly from his lofty station before Allah subhana wa ta'ala (glorified and exalted).
Leading people and having them work in a way that is productive is only possible through having a truly respectable character, in addition to having the technical know-how. Because it’s this character that will give life to technique.
We must never forget that the respect that our children, students, those working under us – in other words, people we happen to lead for whatever reason – have for us and the level to which they remain attached to us, has to do with how we make them feel. And I wish we could keep in our minds that a person we meet for the first time could be someone deserving of our respect, and we should not feel compelled to have that person remind us of who they are in order for us to grant them our respect.
