Love the Ones You're With

Over the past few years, like many others, I’ve come face-to-face with just how fragile life is. I lost a friend and colleague to glioblastoma -- a vicious, aggressive brain cancer that took him away far too soon. Watching him go through that battle from afar, seeing his strength even as the illness took its toll, was a sobering reminder of how quickly everything can change. A few years earlier, my wife's best friend from high school suffered a debilitating stroke, and her once-vibrant life was altered overnight, from a Ph.D. who traveled the world and had a beautiful independence to someone who is now completely dependent on others. My mother-in-law passed away after a five-year battle with dementia several weeks ago.

My story isn't unique, but these events made me pause and reconsider how I approach my own life, particularly the relationships I build at work. Because we spend so much time with the people we work with -- sometimes more than we do with our own families -- it makes you wonder why we don’t talk about love more often in the workplace. I don’t mean hugs in the hallway or being best friends with everyone. I mean the kind of love that leads us to genuinely care for our colleagues, to support them when they’re struggling, to celebrate their wins as if they were our own.

To love them as they should be loved ... Aristotle would call it philia ... is to will the best for them, to seek their good, without respect to any utility or pleasure received in return.

Love, as strange as it might sound in the context of work, is one of the most powerful choices you can make. It’s an act of defiance in a world that often encourages us to be transactional, to only give what we get, to prioritize our own success at the expense of others.

Reading about musician Matthew Sweet’s recent stroke was, in some ways, the final nudge I needed to write this. Life is too short not to love the people we spend so much time with. We can’t afford to waste our days in bitterness or rivalry, holding grudges over disagreements that seem monumental in the moment but, in the grand scheme of things, don’t matter nearly as much as we think. When you’ve sat by someone’s hospital bed, or you’ve seen how quickly an unexpected diagnosis can turn life upside down, it becomes glaringly obvious that work shouldn’t be about keeping score or competing with your colleagues. These are human beings, all. It should be about lifting people up while we still can.

It’s easy to love the people who love us back, who are kind and agreeable and who make our days easier. But what about those colleagues who seem more like enemies than allies? That’s when love matters most. If someone’s making your work life difficult, there’s probably more going on beneath the surface than you know. Maybe they’re overwhelmed, struggling with something personal, or just feeling unappreciated. When we respond to their negativity with more negativity, we’re just feeding a cycle that nobody wins. But when we choose to respond with kindness -- even when (especially when?) it’s hard, even when we don’t feel like it, we are the better for it.

Might people take advantage of this potentially one-sided exchange? Sure. But to borrow part of a quote often attributed to Mother Teresa, "...If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway."

You control you. You don’t get to decide how others treat you, but you do get to choose how you respond. And love, as strange as it might sound in the context of work, is one of the most powerful choices you can make. It’s an act of defiance where we're tempted to be transactional, to only give what we get, to prioritize our own success at the expense of others. It’s not about letting people walk all over you or pretending there aren’t real challenges in your relationships with coworkers. It’s about deciding that no matter how someone else acts, you will act with love.

For me, it took those moments of watching friends suffer and reading stories of others whose lives were suddenly interrupted to really understand the urgency. I don’t want to spend my days holding back, saving my energy for only the people I like or the tasks I enjoy. I want to be the kind of person who brings love into every situation, who finds a way to leave people better than I found them, even if it’s just in small ways.

I realize this sounds a bit lofty, even impractical, probably even uncomfortable ... especially in a profession like Internal Audit where we’re often seen as the “enforcers” or the ones who deliver hard truths. But I’d argue that our field is one where this is needed often. If we can bring love into a space that’s so often associated with scrutiny and stress, imagine what that would do to our teams, our relationships, our sense of purpose. Imagine what kind of impact we could have, not just on the work, but on each other.

And on ourselves.

Life is too short to do anything else. So, love the people you spend your days with. Love them when they’re easy to love and love them even more when they’re not.

You might just find that by pouring out more than you take in, you end up with more than you ever thought possible.