Have you ever thought about your love language? And have you ever noticed how much your love language is reflected in your business, and in the way you communicate with the world around you? Do you know the love language of your partner? And do they speak yours? 

Let’s take a step back, review the five love languages, and what they actually mean:

• Words of Affirmation: You feel loved when someone tells you how beautiful you look today. And you think you express love to someone doing the same thing in return, in complimenting them or saying anything nice to them.
• Acts of Service: You feel loved when someone does something for you, e.g. your wife cooks a meal for you. In return, you feel you are giving love if you do any sort of act of service to someone. For example, you bring out the rubbish or pick up your lover from work. 
• Receiving Gifts: You feel loved when someone gifts you a present and vice versa. Gifts make you feel really appreciated, and the size of the gift usually doesn’t matter.
• Quality Time: You feel loved and you think you are giving love in spending quality time with people. This could be a simple visit to the cinema, to the restaurant or simply a stroll along the beach while having a quality conversation. It doesn’t have to be a luxury holiday, even though that would be awesome.
• Physical Touch: You feel loved when someone touches you in any way and you most likely love to hug people and keep touching them randomly while you are interacting with each other. Physical touch being your love language doesn’t mean you want to have sex with a lot of people, it simply means your body responds to that sensation of being touched and wanting to touch. 

“If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.” – Scott Stratten

Every person has at least one love language, most of us have two, some others have three. Figuring out your own love language should be pretty easy, right? Think about it for a minute, when do you feel most loved and appreciated and when not at all?

And what about the love language of your friend, partner or employee? How can you find out those and how will this improve your relationship with any of those people? The answer is easy.

Here’s how to figure out the love language of another.

Pick one person out of your circle right now and think about which of the above-listed activities they do the most. Investigate their personality for a few minutes. You’re likely to see a pattern of behavior which they keep doing over and over again. If they are complimenting you or other people around themselves all the time then their love language is words of affirmation. They are expressing out to the world what they understand as love and are on a subconscious level looking to get this in return. 

If your girlfriend keeps buying gifts for you or she will never miss out on buying flowers or a small souvenir for her mother when you visit her family house, it’s clear what her love language is.

Now comes the exciting part. Once you have figured out the love language of the people around you, you can start speaking it. Even if gifts don’t mean anything to you, but you have now understood that this is your wife’s number one love language, bring home more gifts and you will see your relationship change drastically.

If your employee’s love language is quality time, take them out for lunch and have some really high-quality conversations with them. If your mother’s love language is acts of service, do the shopping more often for her and so on.

Now since you understand the entire concept of love languages and how to handle them, you also don’t need to feel offended anymore when someone around you doesn’t speak the same love language as you do. This will change your entire perspective on people’s behavior and how you see your relationships. 

“If we are to develop an intimate relationship, we need to know each other’s desires. If we wish to love each other, we need to know what the other person wants.” – Gary Chapman

I will leave you with a challenging question: Do you think your business expresses your love language in any way? Yes? No? 

If it doesn’t, maybe it would be a good idea to stop and reflect back on how happy you are in your business. Maybe you are in the right place already, but hey, if it doesn’t feel aligned, there is nothing wrong with re-inventing yourself and your business path. 

What’s your love language? Share it with us below!