Dear LPG,

I am guessing that most of the people who will read my LPG post today are likely to be pensioners because that is what the website says on the box (I mean that is what the LPG website implies by virtue of its name), and as older people, if nothing else, we have one thing in common.  We are the group of people who have experienced and done the most.  The older we are, the more likely to have come across the largest number of people, and to have honed our skills of working out which are good, which are bad, and which are funny, which are dangerous and which people are just worth avoiding.   

We often find it really easy to work out which of the people we know are worthy of the title friend and which we are more inclined to dodge, and experience also teaches us how to make these judgments much more quickly after meeting new potential friends for the first time.

But it occurred to me the other day that, like many of us, the one person that I forget to assess properly is me.  If nothing else lockdown got me trying to work out what kind of person I really am.  As we go through life I am wondering if I am the only person that is not altogether happy on that score, and I suspect not.  What I mean is that I think that I could be a nicer person sometimes and that every now and then we should take a good objective look at how we come across to the people around us, because no matter how ‘OK’ we think we are there must always be room for improvement.

I have always thought of myself as being a fairly good person to be a friend to, and while I know what physical things I would like to improve about myself, I feel fairly happy with my character.  After all, I always think I am right.  With this in mind I spent quite a few of those lock-down phone calls asking my friends what sort of person they think that I am and, when I asked for the honest truth, I found that I do have some irritating habits that I never even thought about.  Armed with the honest comments that I received as answers to my recurring question, I found out that it was not absolutely wrong of me to think that I am a reasonable friend on the whole but, I was surprised to learn the similarities in answer when it came down to the things about me that irritate my friends.   

My next stop was the internet to work out what qualities I need to brush up on and I found a few pointers, which I thought that it would be good to pass on to my fellow readers.  Although many of them appear to focus on younger people there are some lessons to be learned.

In the light of the fact that staying positive is one thing that I mentioned, I don’t think this is a subject to dwell on too much, but giving it a little thought and spending a little time on improving your relationship with yourself can only improve your relationship with the people around you.

CP, Brockley

CP offers a few internet suggestions that might get you thinking just a little about self-improvement on the personality front…

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