Chronicle Editor
Nolwazi Mnikwa, Relationships
TO boast is to brag, to gloat, and to blow one’s own trumpet and it is to show off. Love does not have with it any of the attributes of boasting. Love carries with it humility and modesty. Boasting is an underlying characteristic of pride and pride is not a trait of love. If anything, pride is the root cause of strained relationships, break-ups as well as divorces.
Love as mentioned in the previous weeks is a doing word. It is an act, it is something that is done. This means that love is given. It is in understanding the principle of love being given that you understand that you cannot boast to someone you love and that you cannot be proud to the person you claim to love. When you boast, you are pointing to yourself, you are shifting focus and attention to you. Whereas when you love, the focus and attention is given to the one you love. Love is focused on the one who is loved, it is an outward perspective as love is an act of giving.
When you find you are in a relationship with someone who is constantly trying to prove to be better than you, that person is highly likely not in love with you but in a competition with you. Love has no competitiveness to it. Instead love builds, it nurtures, and it accepts differences and works on motivating each other for the better. In marriage, friendship, family relationships and in the workplace, instead of you constantly trying to outdo the next person, showing love is helping, motivating and nurturing the other person to improve on themselves so they achieve better results. A person who boasts strangely believes that boasting gives them a sense of control, the person somewhat believes that by boasting, he or she is in charge of how he or she is perceived by people. On the contrary, people perceive a boastful person as simply boastful.
At times people boast as a strategy to gain acceptance, confidence and love. However, being boastful does not bring about these results. Instead a boastful person finds he or she has less friends or relations. This is because boasting and pride go hand in hand and people tend to shy away from proud individuals. In order to receive love, one needs to be able to give love and not boast nor be proud.
How can one overcome being boastful? In order to overcome being boastful, you need to overcome feelings of inferiority.
Low self-confidence, low self-esteem and an inferiority complex are among the reasons that cause one to boast. When you are able to overcome these feelings, you are well on your way to overcoming being boastful. When you have a sense of self-confidence, you do not need to find affirmation through boasting, you do not need to market yourself through boasting in order to be noticed.
Another way in which you can overcome being boastful is to avoid comparing yourself to other people. Focus on your own goals and work towards achieving those. In doing so, you will not have the time nor energy to be focused on what someone else is doing, you will not have the time to compare yourself to other people and needless to say that you will neither have the time nor need to boast.
To overcome boastfulness, it is important for you to have a set of values and standards that you live by. In doing so, you will measure yourself against your set standards and values. This will eliminate the need to look for validation from other people, which ultimately eliminates boastfulness and pride.
In conversation, when you pay attention to what the people you are conversing with are saying, you find that you will naturally brag less. This is because the focus in the conversation is not on yourself but it is on the other person and what they are saying. There are times when the person you are conversing with will say something similar to what you have experienced, done or achieved before. That is not an opportunity to activate bragging mode or comparison mode. It is however, an opportunity for you to learn how to overcome bragging by suppressing that “even me” urge.
When you feel the need to impress the people you are conversing with, with unnecessary or irrelevant details, my encouragement to you would be to hold it right there. If the information is irrelevant and unnecessary, why say it? Wanting to say the unnecessary and irrelevant information is the urge to brag, so in suppressing that urge the best thing to do would be to not talk about the unnecessary and irrelevant details.
Another manner to which you can overcome boasting is by giving credit to other people. If someone helped you with something, give credit to them. Giving credit to other people takes attention away from you. If anything when you give credit to other people, you come across as modest and humble which is what love is.
Love does not boast, neither is it proud. Love is giving, caring, nurturing and helping the next person to be the best version of themselves. Love does not compete, neither does it look down on another person nor does it make one person appear better than the other. Love is humble, it is modest, it does not shout for attention but it is calm because its presence is felt without the need to draw attention in unscrupulous, immoral, boastful and proud ways.
I would love to hear your thoughts, comments and feedback as well as relationship topics you would like to have covered. You may send these to [email protected] or to +263775978857. Keep safe and be blessed.
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