Donating Time and Expertise

     Yesterday I spent the morning conducting a 3-hour workshop for more than 30 local non-profit organizations, as part of a regional HR association event.  This was one of those requests that always seems less disruptive many months before the event.  In fact, I had agreed to do it more than 6 months ago, when nothing that far into the future could possibly be that big of a deal.  However, in a week in which I traveled across the country and back, and in which I was juggling many other (paying) client commitments, it wasn't my top choice for how to spend my first day back home.

     Nevertheless, I made it a point to block out all distractions and to simply be present to doing my best job in the moment.  The audience deserved nothing less than that.  

     When I got home later in the day, I was reflecting on two thoughts.  The first was the importance of the "abundance mentality" I wrote about one time last year.  By that I mean thinking of the world as an abundant place and thinking of my capacity to serve and to give to others as plentiful, rather than limited.  When I think from a perspective of limits or scarcity, I tend to want to more carefully dole out kindness.  However, when I see kindness as something I don't have to conserve or limit, I'm able to give more freely.

     The second thing I was reflecting on was one of the "Fundamentals" I used to teach in my former company.  It was called, "Practice A+ness as a way of life."  This Fundamental is about having intense pride in the quality of what I do and making sure that my work reflects the highest standard of which I'm capable.  On days when I'm tired, or less motivated, it's my passion for A+ness that pushes me to still deliver a high quality talk or to provide my very best thinking to a leader that I'm coaching or to a company for which I'm consulting.  While the audience might not perceive it as less than my best, I would know.  And that's really what A+ness is about -- a deeply personal commitment to excellence, even if no one were to know but me.  

     

Scarcity or Abundance?

     This evening, I find myself coming back to a topic I think I wrote about at some point earlier last year, and it's the notion of whether we have a scarcity mentality or an abundance mentality.  Let me explain what happened today that led to those thoughts.

     I was giving a talk this morning to a group of CEOs to whom I had previously spoken last summer.  This was a chance to find out how much they had implemented of what I taught them, what obstacles they still faced, and what additional help they needed.  After the meeting, a woman asked me if I could send her some examples of material I had written for others as it would help to give her some ideas.  Another CEO asked if I could give him some feedback on some of the things he had recently written.  

     As I thought about their requests, I found myself caught in a tricky spot.  From a professional standpoint, the nature of these talks is that I get paid (though not a ton) to provide value for the audience, but the meaningful compensation comes when they engage me separately as a consultant to work with them on implementing my ideas.  To simply "give away" too much of my intellectual property without them engaging me is a bit foolhardy.  And yet, a part of me intuitively feels that it's better to err on the side of giving away too much than giving away too little.  And that's what had me thinking about scarcity vs. abundance.

     When we think from a scarcity mentality, we have a general point of view that the good things in life, whether they be tangible resources like food or money or less tangible things like intellectual capital or even love, are limited in quantity.  The  natural implication of this thinking is that we should dole them our carefully, for these things exist in limited supply, and there may not be enough to go around.  

     The opposite approach is to have an abundance mentality.  This point of view is founded on a belief that we generally have a more than ample supply of the good things in life and that whatever we give away tends to get replenished anyway.  When we subscribe to this approach, it's easier to give freely to others because we're not worried about "running out" of whatever we're giving.

     As it relates specifically to the example from today, I chose to think from abundance and to err on the side of giving away too much.  I reminded myself that the more I give away, the more comes back to me in one form or another.  I've accumulated a tremendous amount of knowledge, experience, and wisdom about certain topics over the years.  That wisdom does little good when it's saved and stored away like money in a bank account.  It's not like I should be saving wisdom to be used on a rainy day when I don't have enough. No, the point in accumulating wisdom is to give it back to others who can benefit from it.

     I'm learning to realize that the more I share "my stuff", the more it spreads out into the world far and wide, the greater is my contribution to others.  Sometimes that's done in one-on-one conversations; other times it's done in my speaking and consulting; and still other times it's done in my writing in blogs and other places, not to mention in the example I try to set.  In the end, I try to trust in the world that I ultimately get what I need.  Financially, I do end up getting compensated handsomely, and well beyond my needs, from a variety of sources, regardless of what I've given away.  And just as importantly, my compensation takes a variety of forms.  It's not just money.  The satisfaction I get from seeing and knowing the impact I've been able to have for others is itself a significant form of compensation or payback for my effort.  And the old adage that you reap what you sow seems clearly to be true.  The size of our reward tends to be in direct proportion to the size of our contribution, in all its various forms.

     I see the world as abundant, and I'll continue to remind myself to give from that perspective.