The Real Value of Reverence in Relationship
by Dan Coughlin
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2022 Issue 1
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everence is a dignified word. Since I’m a self-professed non-fancy word kind of guy, I had to look it up. It sounded so, well, fancy to me. This time I like the Merriam-Webster definition better than anything I could have come up with. The definition of reverence is “respect felt or shown.” I love that. It’s so simple. Success in relationships comes down to respect that goes both ways. Respect that you feel coming from the other person, and respect you show to the other person. The enormous value of reverence is true in marriages, friendships, families, communities and work relationships. Rather than trying to break respect down into seven easy-to-remember steps, I’m just going to share with you one remarkable example of reverence in my life. Jeff Hutchison I met Hutch in 1978 when we were 15-year-old sophomores in Mr. Calacci’s World Cultures class. We sat right next to each other. Hit it off from day one. He’s been my best buddy for 43 years.
In high school Hutch was already a salesman extraordinaire. He went on to have a fabulous career in sales as a salesperson and mainly as a sales executive. He’s worked for Proctor & Gamble, Brach’s Candy, Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Motus GI and a few other great companies. He’s lived in Texas, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Nashville. I was an aspiring teacher when we met. In the summers I worked at camps for grade school kids, and then went on to be a high school math teacher, soccer coach, and then an executive coach and seminar leader. I lived in Indiana, Chicago and St. Louis. Since 1981 we went to different colleges, lived in different cities and worked in different industries. Hutch has three children and I have two children, and they are all in their 20s. Our personal and professional lives never overlapped, except for three magical weeks in 1989 when we lived together in Chicago as he was moving to Chicago, and I was moving out. And yet somehow we have managed to talk at least once