As we begin to talk about putting this to work, we will begin this discussion with self first. When we talk about productivity and all areas mesh together, we begin to see a circle develop. The psychology of self-esteem points out the direct relationship between self-esteem and productive work. In observation, the better you feel about yourself, the more productive you will be; the more productive you are, the better you feel about yourself. When we in the Ag-community add the 3rd element of event control it sometimes helps us to become more productive and get better organized. Perhaps the best scenario is to get more control over the events in our lives. When we are in control we feel better about ourselves.

This is an example of how all three areas mesh together in our lives:

Event control in our personal lives in the Ag community becomes fairly easy to control because of our laid back scheduling that we can maintain. The events in our business world are 180 degrees the other direction. There are very few events that we can control, ie, weather, market price, pests, etc.

Another area that tends to pull our self-esteem down is in our personal relationships. The next exercise will give some insight into the relationships that we are involved in and help us to “score” how effective they are in our every day lives. The following list of questions below gives some insight into whether a relationship is health or unhealthy, mature or immature. Answer the questions yes or no. Add up the number of yes responses on each page. If the majority of responses are yes on the healthy list, congratulations!! If the majority of the responses are yes on the unhealthy list, then you need to reassess that relationship, figure out where the problem areas are, and work on improving them. If the numbers of yes responses are evenly split between the two lists, then your relationships are probably immature. Communication and patience will greatly help immature relationships to become mature ones.