Follow Your Passions

Note: the work below is a compilation of several items I have written previously on the subject of compassion for others and giving of your self. It has been edited, tweaked, cobbled, massaged, and then submitted to the Spread the Love NOW! Group Writing Project, hosted by Wade of The Middle Way, Kenton of Zen-Inspired Self Development, and Albert of Urban Monk.Net. Enjoy!

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
- Winston Churchill

Giving your time, energy, and resources to others is a rather magical act, in that you personally will reap huge benefits as well. You might think that working for a day on, for example, a Habitat for Humanity house is just going to help those who will someday live in it. I’d like to suggest that there is a myriad of things you’ll get out of the experience of giving.

• You’ll feel good doing it.
• Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.
• You will learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected.
• You’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.
• You’ll make the world better.

I encourage you to spend a little time today thinking about what your strengths are, where your passions lie, and what sort of opportunities might exist in your community to use your strengths and passions in a way that will help others.

Good From Giving

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
- Anne Frank

There was a Friends episode in which Joey was determined to show Phoebe that there was no such thing as a truly selfless deed, because when you do good things for others it makes you feel too good to be counted as totally selfless. As you know if you watched the show, Joey was a wise man.

Giving your time, energy, money, and other resources to someone who could benefit from them just about can’t help but make you feel great inside, even if you don’t actually see the eventual outcome of your generosity. Like the butterfly effect concept, you never know what monumental effect a simple act of kindness can have on an individual, a family, or even a community.

Interestingly, the more you give, the better you’ll get at it. Giving of your time or money forces you to become a better steward of those resources, increasing your time management skills and your awareness of your finances. In fact, most leading financial magazines I read have endorsed giving ten percent of your income to a cause you are passionate about, because the increased awareness of your savings and spending habits usually reaps enough personal benefit to offset the ten percent donation in the long run.

Yep. Giving of yourself, however you choose to do it, can be a downright selfish act. So go treat yourself by sending a check to your favorite charity, or indulge yourself by spending the day serving food to the homeless.

A Source of Strength

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

Most giving opportunities involve working your physical muscles, your mental muscles, or both. One way or another, you’ll become stronger.

Giving can be a very small thing. When you smile at someone who opens the door for you, chances are you put them in a better mood. You’ve used your muscles in your face and arms in the process.

I recently spent a morning opening about a thousand cans of fruit cocktail for individuals and families that need a charitable source of good meals. I don’t know that there were muscles in my body I didn’t use by the time I was through!

Being a part of a charity walk some weekend doesn’t just provide a good opportunity for physical exercise, it also provides an educational event for you to learn more about whatever cause you are walking for, what research is being done towards a cure or solution, and how you can get more involved if you are interested.

There are museums, libraries, theaters, zoos, schools, and other institutions striving to provide positive learning experiences to the public, and are yearning for people to support their efforts through donations of money, resources, or your time. Think about the potential knowledge you could take out of working one day a week or month at a museum. Think of the positive change you could make in a child’s life by talking to them about the animals they’re looking at, or the play they just watched.

My examples focus on helping humans, but there are certainly other causes out there! Giving to a local animal shelter, working to preserve a historic building or landmark, or somehow improving the environment - the opportunies are out there, and plentiful enough that there is surely something that you could get involved with tied to your particular interests, and make a positive contribution to.

Connectedness

If you have a chance some day, I encourage you to take the StrengthsFinder exam from Gallup. It is an exam that enables you to identify your strengths, then work on action items to utilize and keep growing those strengths.

I bring it up, because I took the exam, and my number one strength was “Connectedness”. There is a lot of explanation and discussion about what that means, but I think this quote sums up perfectly how someone with this strengths filters the world.

“Sometimes I just look at my bowl of cereal in the morning and think about those hundreds of people who were involved in bringing me my bowl of cereal: the farmers in the field; the biochemists who made the pesticides; the warehouse workers at the food preparation plants; even the marketers who somehow persuaded me to buy this box of cereal and not a different one sitting next to it on a shelf. I know it sounds strange, but I give thanks to these people, and just doing that makes me feel more involved with life, more connected to things, less alone.”
- Rose T., psychologist

Through giving, you can learn to look beyond your own self and begin to see more ways in which we’re all connected. I come back frequently to the idea that giving can be a very small act, or a very large one (or, ideally, some combination of all sizes of giving, intertwined into your daily life). You’re likely giving throughout your day and not realizing it.

Some examples of how I have given recently - watch for a few you recognize in yourself:

• placed my empty cardboard cereal box into the recycling bin instead of the garbage
• smiled at the clerk at Target, thanking her and telling her what a great job she did
• turned the lights off in the house before leaving to use less energy resources (thus reducing pollution and my electric bill simultaneously!)
• bought a calendar for a friend because she likes cows
• said hi to my neighbor and asked what he had planned that day

All of these actions helped me to connect with my environment and/or community, all of them took minimal effort relative to the potential benefit, and all of them are examples of giving.

Look around in the world around you as you go about your day. Think about your interactions with people you come in contact with, and how you can improve someone’s day with just a few extra words and/or smiles. When you walk into a store, think about everyone that was involved in making your shopping experience there possible - clerks, managers, shippers, suppliers, manufacturers, and far more. When I was returning an item the other day to a store, I watched as the clerk took care of the transaction with ease, and thought about the people who were involved with creating a system of technology, ideas, and policies that enabled the clerk to so quickly and efficiently take care of me. I thanked her, but as I walked away thinking about some different sorts of experiences I’ve had at return desks, I also said a silent thanks to the establishment that made both my experience and the job of the clerk so easy and painless.

We’re all connected, to our environment and everything that exists in it, in ways we’ll never realize. By giving your time, money, and resources to something you believe in that is bigger than yourself, you extend your awareness of what is beyond your self, and increase your opportunities to learn more about the ways in which you are connected to others.

Giving Strengths

“The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value.”
- Charles Dudley Warner

By actively giving, you’ll figure out where your “giving strengths” lie.

As Mark Sanford puts it, “Giving is an art. That requires practice.” If you don’t feel you have money to give, you can give of your experience, your skills, your time, or other resources you may have. Experiment with getting involved in different kinds of giving, with different kinds of organization involved in your efforts. Maybe you’ll go volunteer on a Habitat for Humanity project and find out you excel at bashing your thumb with a hammer but not much else when it comes to home construction. That’s okay, the next day you can go teach high school kids how to manage their money when they get older. The day after that, you can read to children at your local public library. Eventually, you’ll find something that matches your skills and interests with a place you can do the most good with them.

I don’t like to think of people as “tools” or “resources”, but consider the old adage about chopping down a tree with a sledge hammer. You might get it done, but you’d have a much easier time of it and be able to chop a lot more trees down if you used an axe or a saw. By finding something you’re a great fit for, where you can thrive and be passionate and use your strengths to accomplish big feats, you’re maximizing your giving potential.

Change Your World

“If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love’s reach.”
- Margaret Cho

By giving, you’ll make the world better. Maybe not always “the” world every time, but certainly “your” world. And since we’re all connected (see above), that starts becoming one and the same, see?

Leadership is said to be about serving others, so it stands to reason that by giving to others, you are in fact becoming a leader in your community. The more you give, the more you begin to understand inherently what it means to be a great leader. The world needs leadership, perhaps today more than ever.

In the book Good to Great, one of the absolute keys to a “Great” leader is that he or she possesses, somehow, near limitless amounts of both confidence and humility, simultaneously. By learning to go outside of your self and learn ways in which we are all connected, finding what your strengths and interests are and how they can be applied to charitable acts, and activily going out and giving in the ways you are passionate about, chances are you will encounter situations and people who will encourage and hone your confidence and show you reasons to be humble. Chances are if you are reading this blog post, you’re far better off in life than most of your fellow mankind, and it is hard to truly understand how fortunate you are, how much you have to be thankful for, and not be humbled as a result.

I don’t have unrealistic goals for this blog. I hope it reaches someone else, but even if it does just reach one someone else and cause a shift inside of them, changing something in them that makes them want to do something nice for some fellow human being, the possibility of that snowballing into a community-changing event is… well, it’s big enough that I’ll keep trying, keep giving. To you.

How you perceive reality creates your reality. If you perceive a reality in which you can make positive changes, you’re well on your way to changing the world you live in.

First of all, I apologize for my absence. Many things are afoot in my life that are making writing a challenge, but I am working diligently to resolve that issue and get things moving again here soon. I’m hoping to get a few posts written this weekend, I certainly have enough material floating around in my head to provide some content worth reading.

I am looking into alternatives to my ChipIn widget to collect donations moving forward. I am sad because I really like their organization, but they made the decision this month to only allow me to collect the funds via PayPal, and I… don’t completely trust PayPal. I understand the reasoning ChipIn gave me for the change, but that doesn’t change my feelings about wanting the funds to be deposited directly into the checking account I’ll use to send the money on to the chosen charity for that month.

Anyway, I think I have found a very good alternative, but it will take more time than I have right now to get it set up. When I do get it set up, I will anounce the new charity and the new goal.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path. - Buddhist saying

If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody. - Chinese Proverb

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. - Anne Frank

Our friends should be companions who inspire us, who help us rise to our best. - Joseph B. Wirthlin

Listen to people as they talk to you through out your day, and you will quickly find that they all have problems. Colleagues who keep complaining about the way something never works right, or how a process doesn’t make any sense. Friends who are trying to improve their careers, or go back to school. In fact, you don’t have to listen to them to find out something is amiss - just watch your manager’s body language, or note a family member’s mood being unusually negative. Someone who is normally talkative and outgoing being reserved and quiet instead.

The signs are all around us, and where there are signs, there are opportunities to help. Of course, the person has to want the help or you can’t get very far in your efforts. But I have found that once I changed my approach and thought process when it comes to acting on opportunities to assist others, people were generally not only open to having my help but were very grateful for it.

My natural tendency used to be that I was being respectful by just butting out of issues people were facing. If I met a coworker for lunch, and she told me about something she just couldn’t find the answer to, or a project she didn’t know how to take the next step with, I would listen with a caring ear and process what she had said, but then drop it there and move on. It occured to be at some point, though, that some of the times people were telling me these things, they were either consciously or unconsciously asking for help to get past their problems. So I’d get back to the office, pop onto Google or some internal resource, and look up the answer to what they were looking for. If someone was trying to figure out the next step to a project, maybe I know someone who would be good to point them in the right direction and make that connection for them.

These are both small gestures, don’t take much time or effort, but could make a huge difference to someone’s day. Expand this to a way of thinking, of viewing the world, and suddenly you are helping lots of people every day, in both small and big ways. You may be thinking that this sounds like you’d spend a lot of your time helping others and not be able to get your own work done in the process. Allow me to suggest that you will find you can get more of your own work done by doing more for others. By helping others, you are building connections, and those people you are connecting with and helping have skills and contacts that can likewise help you get your projects done and your questions answered. Ever hear the phrase “it’s not what you know, but rather who you know”? This is how to really put that quote into action in a huge way.

Keep the circle going. Help others, and when others help you thank them for it. Heck, send them a little thank you card just for something small someone did for you every once in a while. Think how you would feel if someone took the time to do that for you, how great it would be to find that in your mailbox. Actually hand-write it yourself on real paper rather than an e-mail (e-mail is fine but lacks the feel of that personal touch for most people still).

You’ll be astounded at how enriched your own life quickly becomes if you have a small filter in the back of your mind constantly sifting interactions with other as they occur and looking for the gems of opportunity to show themselves.

Hi folks, the main post for today is below. I just wanted to add an extra item this morning to share that I made the January donation to National Public Radio. It was a donation total of $35 (I kicked in a few bucks myself, least I could do to recognize your generosity last month).

Thanks! I’m excited to see what we can deliver to Maggie’s Place this month. Traffic to the site is up, and I’m very grateful and encouraged by how much of it is returning visitors.

Update: Gadzooks! Someone donated $50 today! People never cease to inspire me.

Today was one of those days that was filled with amazing opportunities and successes, but leaves you exhausted at the end of it. I’m going into “relax” mode and sort of taking the weekend off from the blog. But if you are in the Phoenix area and heading to the FBR Open this weekend, I’ll be volunteering at one of the food tents on the 16th green. The money raised is going to Special Olympics, so stop by and say hi, and buy some of… whatever it is they have me sell.

See you Monday folks - some exciting stuff planned for next week. Don’t forget about our new charity for February, Maggie’s Place.

Think about your day, and the people who are a part of it. I don’t just mean the ones you interact with on a regular basis or have formed some sort of relationship with. I’m talking about that girl up there in the front row of your class, and the guy with the graying beard sitting three cubicles down from you at work. I’m talking about the woman behind the counter at the convenience store you buy coffee from every morning. Yes, I’m even referring to the stranger driving by you in the other direction down the road you live on, the one you pass all the time on your way in and out from home.

Who are these people? What are their backgrounds? What can they do, what do they do, what are they passionate about? You don’t know? Then what’s stopping you from going up and asking them? You literally never know what sorts of things they might know that could directly impact your personal goals in huge ways, or what people they know who could be your next best friend, or accountant, or mail carrier. Think about all the things you know, all the people you know who have a lot of skill in different things - how might you be able to positively impact the right person’s life?

You’ll never know until you ask. If you’re a bit timid about going up to a stranger and introducing yourself, here’s how to get over that feeling: go up to a stranger and introduce yourself! Ask them a general question about who they are, what they do, let them know you’re just curious about them. People love to talk about themselves, so you won’t have to work too hard to get the door open so that your next encounter with that person will be easier and more fruitful. Do that a few times, and you’ll find meeting new people is remarkably easy. Sure, some people just want to be left alone, at least when you approach them, but I doubt they’ll do worse than just seem a bit preoccupied and wanting to get back to what they are doing. And that’s okay, you just move on to the next person for now.

Here’s a challenge to you: make it a habit, a goal, a true focus, to introduce yourself and ask a non-evasive question to one new person every day, just to get the ball rolling. “Hi, hey, I come in and buy coffee from you all the time but I’ve never introduced myself - my name’s Iain. Has it been a busy morning?” Next time you talk, maybe ask if they go to school, or maybe something they are wearing will give you a clue to a hobby or interest. they might end up not being someone you connect with, but they might hold the key to an important goal you’ve been working on.

Connecting with other makes us feel good. I think you’ll be surprised how positive an impact it would have on your own life if you did it more often. It may require you to get outside of your comfort zone a little, but let’s not assume that’s a bad thing.

First of all, I’m really excited that $30 has been donated in January to assist National Public Radio in continuing the incredibly inspirational work that they do. Today is the last day to donate for the NPR campaign, though if you want to have NPR or any of the other charities we give to come around again, please post a comment and I will be glad to make that happen.

For February, the charity I have chosen to collect for is Maggie’s Place, a home for expectant mothers who are alone or living on the streets. With help, hopefully these mothers can start by living their dreams of having healthy, successful children, and perhaps start following their other passions in life and find success, stability, and happiness in their future.

Have a charity you’d like featured in the FYP Give-O-Meter next month? Post a comment or drop me a line!

We hear phrases like “giving back to the community” and “community outreach” all the time. But what is “community”? A quick Google search provides the following definitions (among others):

- a group of people living in a particular local area
- a group of people having ethnic or cultural or religious characteristics in common
- a group of nations having common interests
- profession: the body of people in a learned occupation
- agreement as to goals
- a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other

Well, that clears it up, right?

Basically, the common thread is “a group”. Generally it indicates a group of humans, though not always, and if you are supporting “your community”, that indicates it is a group of humans you are a part of.

What communities are you a part of? When people volunteer or donate, they often select something that has touched them on a personal level, indicating somehow they feel tied into that community. This is a very natural thing for us to do. But maybe you don’t feel particularly tied into any of the most visible charitable organizations. Does that mean you can’t make a difference you feel great about?

Allow me to challenge you to stretch your mind about what communities you are a part of, and can make a big difference in by volunteering your time, money, and talents. Here is a list of some of the communities I feel tied into, which all tie back into the definitions of “community” listed above:

- the college I graduated from
- my current employer
- my family and friends (and things which are important to them)
- my church
- the city I live in
- my country
- the human race

That last one might be the most important towards saying what I am trying to say, which is - you ARE part of a community. No matter what. And you can give back to your community, you can reach out to your community, however you define that. You can make a difference.

The classic holiday crooner Jon Bon Jovi once suggested that he wished every day could be like Christmas. I have heard people from outside of New Jersey also express a similar notion.

I presume these people aren’t referring to songs about George Michael giving his heart to someone the previous Christmas who proceeded to throw it away. Nor do I suspect they yearn to clash eternally with a thousand soccer moms in the toy aisles while trying to make their way back to the electronics department at Target.

No, I imagine people wanting every day to be like Christmas comes down to some combination of the following:

* receiving kind gifts from people who care about you
* giving gifts to those we appreciate
* sending cards out to people we haven’t communicated with as often as we’d like
* celebrating the birth of Christ (if that’s what you’re in to)
* volunteering or collecting food for the hungry, or giving toys to kids who can’t afford them, etc. – charitable works
* forgiving others (and if need be, yourself)
* spending quality time with family and friends sharing meals, playing games, etc.

I guess my point of all this is… there’s really no reason any of these things should be limited to one day a year.

So enjoy your Christmas, one and all. And have a Merry January 17th too, just for the heck of it.

I thought it was about time I defined the mission of this blog more clearly.

The Follow Your Passions blog is my attempt to spur people into doing what they love and loving what they do. It’s about owning whatever you’re doing with your life and making the most of it. It’s about becoming a leader in the communities you are a part of, however you define those communities for yourself.

Leadership. Mentoring. Giving. Enriching our own lives and the lives of those around us through our choices, our words, and our actions. Living happy, satisfied lives as productive, contributing human beings in the time we’re given to be with one another.

Each month, I’ll be collecting contributions from anyone who wishes to participate, and donating them to an organization that embodies the spirit of following your passions. For January, the target organization is National Public Radio, which you can contribute as little as $2 to or as much as you feel like via the ChipIn widget over in the sidebar - credit card, PayPal, however you prefer. If NPR doesn’t align well enough with your interests to give, stay tuned and I’m sure one month I’ll pick an organization closer to your heart we can work together to do some good for.