Maniacs' Book Club ~ 5 Love Languages ~ Gary Chapman

This is our Book Club. Woo-hoo! So this month, we read The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman and I was introduced to this book I want to say in 2009.

I finally picked up the book and it was transformational in a lot of different ways. I always tried to bring things back to organizing because that’s our lane. That’s our home play and that’s where we go. So I think the way this book can be helpful is that when you understand how you motivate your loved ones or how they feel good about things or what is it that’s going to take for them to be onboard with some of your organizing projects, it’s good to understand their love language.

So the premise of the book is that there are basically five love languages and they are words of affirmation. Self-explanatory. Acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time and physical touch.

During our team meeting I asked, “Who doesn’t love words of affirmation?” and somebody on the team said, “I don’t really need any words of affirmation. That is not my love language.” So I think it’s always good to know how when you’re interacting with people, how to make them feel good, right? Because when you’re making people feel good, they will be much more likely to be onboard.

My personal love language, this is really – I was afraid of like putting this out into the world. But I said, “Why the heck not?” Right? I’m just going to tell you my love language is acts of service and I feel really good when somebody does something for me. It makes me feel like they really love me. My husband is actually really sweet. I recently – I said, “We need a new doorbell,” and he gave me one. I came home and I was super excited about the doorbell. So he kind of knows that doing those little things make me super happy.

So one thing that I think is interesting to apply this book is with kids. So there are several versions of it. This is clearly the one for relationships and I made my team read this one because I think we can all have better relationships with our loved ones and when you have better relationships with some people, I think it transpires with all people, right? So you can’t go wrong on that.

One thing that we all talked about is that sometimes, we give love in the way we think people want to be loved more than the way they actually want to be loved or the way we want to be loved ourselves, right? And the one interesting thing was I speak personally about myself. So my main dominant love language is acts of service and the love language that I give the most is words of affirmation, which is really interesting to me because that’s why I said, “Who doesn’t like words of affirmation?” and that was totally not the truth of a group of 11 of us that were hanging out together.

So it is important to understand your love language. It’s important to understand how you motivate others in your family with their love language. But it’s also important to figure out what love language you may be giving to people and how that may be motivating them back to be cooperative, especially when you’re talking about organizing.

One is, how does it apply for their brain-based, right? Are you a person with ADHD that has a hard time remembering, that has a hard time with focus? Maybe who doesn’t like multiple steps? How are you simplifying the system for them?

Two, is this something that it’s – it’s like does it go with their motivation? How are they motivated? Are you yelling at them about not following the system when their love language is words of affirmation? Are they acts of the service person and they would be glad to abide and follow the system that you gave them if it was simpler for them to use it? So I would highly recommend this book and there may be other applications you may find while you’re reading the book, that we would love to hear about it. You’re welcome to leave a comment below. We come back and respond to everybody.

Once again, thanks for hanging with us. I hope you got some benefit from hanging out with us today and if you have already read the book and you’re using it in some way that you find it significant to organizing, please share it with us.