Personal Finance

Habitual giving is a key foundation for success

GIVE

When you genuinely give, you get to naturally attract people, opportunities and rewards to yourself. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

If you have watched the movie The Godfather, you know what he did over and over again ... give first.

The holy grail in building a lasting success mindset is the ability to attract opportunities and reward to ourselves like moths to a candle.

Unlike The Godfather, it is imperative that we give without the expectation of reward. To add value to those who need it, that they may in turn want to reward us for our service, kindness or consideration... Of course without the murder and never-ending fear-based manipulation that The Godfather employer time and again.

There’s an easier way to go about things and that is for us to stop selling ourselves and start being valuable. Our value needs to be genuine and must come in advance of any promise of gain.

Many who lack this information waste plenty of precious time “positioning” themselves instead of just getting down to the real work of becoming valuable with their craft.

Being of service needs to be our default way of being with both strangers and those familiar to us. This invites people to not only know, but trust us. It influences them to naturally think of us when they encounter challenges that our services solve. We get to naturally attract people, opportunities and rewards to ourselves.

It is quite common to hear disgruntled employees speak of low moral caused by low pay over the years. Consider this; low pay over the years is a reward for low service over the years.

It doesn’t matter who we are or what we do or which organisation we do it at. Because of the precise nature in which nature works, it is impossible to give good and get bad in return.

If our current career opportunity doesn’t appreciate the good we give, we keep giving the good because our service is to the universe. Our employers are simply channels through which we serve.

Continued good inevitably attracts a more appreciative employer to us in which case we wouldn’t sullenly sit around complaining.

By God, I wish our recently elected members of Parliament would embrace even a tenth of this principle.

With all due respect to the leaders we just elected, they remind me of the fresh college graduates with very flowery remuneration expectations without having ever given any service at all. Such expectations are based on gaining rather than giving. Never works. If it does, it’s not sustainable.

No one could have put this more succinctly than Jane Willhite when she said; “Givers gain”. Ms Willhite’s quotation is based on the law of causation. We are all spiritual beings.

This is the cord that binds us as humans and the spirit is always for greater expansion and fuller expression - never for disintegration. It is for this reason that we all seek to do, have and become more.

When we honestly seek to be of service to others, we satisfy their need for increase and full expression of their spirits in one way or another. It must be clear to all who interact with us that we take pride in doing this.

An integral aspect of giving is that we embrace it as a way of life. It must be spontaneous. If you find yourself debating on whether or not to give, it means you’re considering that famous radio station - WIIFM.

And that makes it trading as opposed to giving. Trading is the tendency most people mistakenly refer to as giving. You wouldn’t argue that selflessness is the same as selfishness, would you now? When giving, the “What’s In It For Me (WIIFM)” does not even begin to come into play.

Genuine giving is meant to be a free flowing action. It should be a part of our habitual nature. When giving without the expectation of reward, the universe organises itself to send abundant reward in our direction.

READ: Clear thinking is the first major step to attracting sweet success

The law of causation can be stated in many different ways; action and reaction are equal and opposite, energy always returns to its source of origination, what goes around comes around and so on. Now, knowing that energy returns to its source origination, would anyone intentionally send out unhelpful energy? I think not.

You know the universe is completely deductive in nature. It doesn’t have the ability to sift the good from the bad. It simply receives and reacts by sending like energy back to us. It is precisely for this reason that we must continually work at altering our paradigm, improving it and consequently, our results - our lives.

With this awareness, let us set out on our journeys with better expectations of how long everything will take to manifest. Let us clearly understand why sticking with giving as a way of life is so important.

We will not only reduce but totally eradicate crippling frustration when the breakthroughs don’t come overnight because I think there is a lot to be said about realistic expectations. Let us desist from “trying to get” opportunities and rewards which is a self-centered and needy view of things.