Are you relevant?

A worker stands on an assembly line watching part after part pass by. A teacher looks out upon the faces of disinterested students. A customer service representative takes call after call. A truck driver crests another hill. Each one with people in their lives that they want to matter to, but each one with some degree of doubt. Each one asking questions about their relevance in an increasingly faceless and virtual world – “Do I really matter? Can I somehow be someone who matters to someone? Am I making any difference?

"Is anyone listening?"

Age-old questions that we all probably ask more than we realize in various forms. We want to matter, we want to be relevant. We want people to listen to what we have to say – to take our words seriously. We want people to like our art, to buy our products, to utilize our services. We want the lives we intersect with to be impacted by having come into contact with us.

Is there any way to assure our relevance? At the Agathe Center, we’ve concluded that there’s really only one way of potentially assuring our relevance. It truly has to be about those we serve and not about us. Therefore, we seek to engage our clients over their needs as they have expressed them in response to our team's many questions. No one gets put through a program designed for someone else. Everyone is engaged over the questions they come with. We want 100% of any time they invest with us to be 100% relevant to their endeavors.

Relevance happens when the focus is on others and not ourselves, when the answers are formed only after the questions are asked. Maybe the question is not so much is anyone listening, but are we listening?