“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.

A positive wake is critical to our success, to our relationships, to our leadership. But there is only one way to determine the impact our wake has on others. They must tell us. That’s why feedback is a gift.
- Stephen C. Lundin, Ph.D. and Marshall Goldsmith, Ph.D.

Two of the greatest skills you can build to enhance your communication skills with others are related to the concept that feedback is one of the most precious gifts another human being can give us.

I worked for a company for five years once, and during that time I received one review from my manager. He never gave more because money was tight and people tended to associate reviews with monetary increases, but I genuinely just wanted to know if I was doing a good job or not, what I could work on to improve the company, etc. Nuthin’. I didn’t leave that job, I escaped. Psychologically, the lack of knowing whether the work I did made a bit of good was surprisingly important to me. At the next company I worked for, my manager was always there with answers to questions, and gave me constant praise and constructive criticism in the time I was there. Receiving the occasional pat on the back, or assistance in steering my work so it provided the most value, was as important to my job satisfaction as getting a paycheck every two weeks.

I’ve since become a feedback junkie. Sometimes the constructive criticism sort of feedback can be difficult (both to give and receive), but I’ve learned that in many cases it is also the most valuable. I’ve learned to identify those rare individuals that I can count on to poke holes in any theory, project, or idea I run by them - and once I identify them I make sure it’s a relationship I hold dearly, because it is unfortunately rare.

I should add one caveat to the concept that feedback is a gift. The type of feedback that is not particularly helpful is the opposite of constructive criticism, destructive criticism. If the intent of the person providing the feedback is to attack and harm rather than to be helpful, their words are generally valueless and can be quite poisonous if taken to heart.

So seek out opportunities to provide praise or assistance to your fellow coworkers or friends, and do so with a helpful heart. Like many things that are of a rare nature, your words can be of significant and lasting value to others. By providing others feedback, you are working to build empathy for others, a skill that will be of often unsung but still significant value to you in your life and career. And by listening to, and truly considering, what constructive advice people have for you without immediately going into defensive mode, you can increase your capacity for patience and humility. I am convinced that a consistent trait of a great leader, in virtually any situation, is the ability to simultaneously exhibit unwaiveringly confidence and unquestionable humility.

For anyone who might be interested in a sort of off-the-cuff, condensed version of the sorts of things discussed on Follow Your Passions, I also post quite regularly on FYP’s sister-blog, Hacking Your Passions. HYP’s stated mission is “to improve productivity, personal organization, work processes or any other areas that can be enhanced through harnessing an individual’s talents, joy, work ethic, strengths, skills, and above all - passions.” Hope ya like it.

I came across an article detailing findings by The Conference Board about U.S. Job Satisfaction declining. It provided a less than inspirational overview of the current situation in the workforce of the United States. But that piece of it above, about job satisfaction increasing as hours per week increased, has me curious to know more. Is it because people are making more money through working more hours? Are the people working more hours closer to retirement? Or, is it the reason that I find myself happier when I work more hours - I enjoy what I’m doing in my job?

More from the article - “Consumers rated bonus plans and promotion policies as the least satisfactory benefits of employment, with less than 23 percent claiming they are satisfied with their company’s policies. Satisfaction is also low for performance review processes, workload, work/life balance, communication channels and potential for future growth. Says Franco: ‘Perhaps, this is why two out of every ten employees does not see himself in his current job a year from now.’”

There are more obstacles than this between you and being happy in your work. If you let them become insurmountable, they absolutely will take you up on the offer. But all of these things are difficult if not impossible to control. There is, however, one particularly effective way at avoiding dissatisfaction in your work because of this mountain of reasons to be disgruntled.

Do what you are passionate about.

You can do this by finding a job you can be passionate about, or by taking the job you have today and unlocking how to be happy in it, but if you don’t figure out how to do one or the other, you run the risk of ending up a statistic.

Life’s creative solutions require alonetime. Solitude is required for the unconscious to process and unravel problems. Others inspire us, information feeds us, practice improves our performance, but we need quiet time to figure things out, to emerge with new discoveries, to unearth original answers.
- Ester Buchholz

The message today is a simple one, but important. In many common environments we find ourselves in - families, school, work, etc - there are times when the situation calls for you to be a dedicated team player, and others where strong independent contributions are needed. Leaders, for example, rely on their teams to realize success in whatever they are trying to accomplish. However, it is the decisive actions of that leader, the choices made when that leader is called upon, which are looked upon to provide direction and guidance. As much as that leader may take in advice and feedback from team members into consideration when making those tough calls, the gut instinct of that leader plays a factor important enough that they “own” the decision more than any other individual in the team.

When Michael Jordan played for the Chicago Bulls, winning the NBA Finals many times over, he was a phenomenal individual contributor. Without him, his team would have been hard pressed to be as successful. However, visualize a basketball game in which the opposing team had to only play Michael Jordan. Five against one, a very different story would likely be told.

The fact is, successful teams are filled with strong individual contributors. The more you enhance yourself as an individual, the more the team can benefit from having you as a part of it.