By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
This week my Ponderings are about how you build relationships in your life. I have centred it around my writings and keynote, the importance of Significance.
There is something deeply human about wanting to matter.
Not in an ego-driven, look-at-me way, though I’ll come back to that, but in the quietest, most honest part of ourselves. We want to know that we are seen. That we contribute. That if we weren’t here, someone would notice.
We spend more time pursuing this than we perhaps realise. We write posts, we build our personal brand, we position ourselves as authorities in our field. And there is nothing wrong with any of that. These are the ways we become known. The ways we signal to the world, and to ourselves, that we have something worth offering.
Feeling significant to others changes something in us. It steadies us. It gives us the confidence to keep going when life stops being linear, and life is never linear for long. We all have seasons where everything feels harder, heavier, less certain. In those moments, knowing that we matter to someone can be the very thing that keeps us moving.
First, let me address the ego question
Because I know someone is already thinking about it, this all sounds a bit ego-driven, doesn’t it?
I would gently push back on that, I have thought a lot about this.
This isn’t about ego. This is about survival, and I mean that in the most primal sense. Think about early human communities. A person who existed purely for themselves, who contributed nothing to the tribe, who mattered to no one, they didn’t survive. Significance and contribution are inseparable. To be significant to others means you are giving something. You are part of something. You belong.
That instinct hasn’t left us. We are still, in so many ways, managing our survival, through our relationships, our work, our communities. Even the desire to keep those we love emotionally close, to ensure they know they matter to us, to want them to stay, none of that happens without contribution. Without showing up for each other.
So significance isn’t vanity. It’s the quiet proof that we are in this together.
Instead of asking how do I feel significant, this week I want to ask a different question: how do we give significance to others?”
So how do we give it?
How do we make the people who matter to us, in our families, our friendships, our teams, our communities, feel that they genuinely hold a significant place in our lives, our hearts, our work, our very existence?
Here are the questions I’ve been sitting with:
Do you give real time to the people who matter, or does your phone quietly steal it?
Do you listen actively, truly listening, or do you nod just enough to show you heard?
Do you spontaneously tell someone why they matter to you, not just when an occasion demands it?
Do you understand how they need to be seen by you, because it isn’t always the same as how you need to be seen?
How often do you think about what they need, rather than what you need from them?
These are not comfortable questions. They weren’t for me either.
The gift nobody talks about
We have entire industries built around personal significance, personal branding, leadership presence, visibility strategies. And they have their place.
But I wonder if the quieter, more powerful practice is the one we underinvest in: becoming someone who makes others feel significant.
When you do this well, when someone leaves a conversation with you feeling more seen, more valued, more certain that they matter, you don’t diminish. You grow. Your own significance deepens precisely because you gave it away.
That, to me, is what a community of people is really for. Not just to be known, but to truly know others. Not just to be seen, but to make others visible.
This week, I’d love you to think of one person in your world who needs to know they matter to you, and tell them. Specifically. In your own words.
Because significance, like love, only grows when it is given.
Pondering questions for this week:
Who in your life needs to hear from you that they matter, and why haven’t you said it yet?
Are you building your own visibility at the expense of making others visible?
What would change in your team, your family, your community if significance became something you gave rather than sought?
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