When you are an ongoing contribution to your people and your customers, you never know what’s coming back to you, and you don’t have time to try to figure it out. Figuring it out is a waste of energy. With all the mental energy you’re using trying to figure out your return, you could be doing more giving. And the one “unimportant” customer you treat badly could very well have potential to refer more people to you than you ever thought possible, and there’s no way to figure out who that is ahead of time.
A business coach we were working with said, “Well, I gave my friend Joe a half-day of business coaching; he said he’d pay me when he could and he never paid me back, so that didn’t work. Giving doesn’t always work.” And he never thought about the fact that six months later, another friend passed along a major client to him. He thought they were unrelated. We think too small. We don’t realize that the person we’re helping is very likely not the person we’re going to get help back from. More often than not, we get it back from someone who has extra capacity to give to us. So the circle isn’t just between you and one person; it’s between you and everyone. You and the whole. Imagine the rungs on a ladder. You receive from the rung above you and you give to the one below you. Another way to say it is that you receive from those who have more and give to those who have less. In this context you don’t expect to get back from the person you gave to, but you trust that the universe will give back to you in other ways from other sources.
We knew a salesperson named Stan. Stan was an incredible top salesperson who had just joined a new company we were training. The first thing he did when he got there was sit down with everybody inside that company one at a time to get to know them. He treated them like gold, no matter what their position. He found out what their jobs were and he asked them how he could help them in his sales role. How could he interact with them in a way that would be most beneficial to them? He got to know them. And other jealous salespeople saw him as a real charmer. But they didn’t know why he was “wasting his time” with all those people in lower positions.
It’s true that Stan was a manipulator. But a great pianist is a manipulator, too, when his fingers manipulate the piano keys to perform a beautiful sonata. Stan didn’t have to try to work up some “trust” that everybody he was meeting with could someday help him. He didn’t care. He knows the universe so well that he has a certainty about the interconnectedness of everything. He has a certainty that kindness to one person is never wasted, even if that specific person doesn’t end up helping him in any way. He knows that his time is never wasted because it is a kindness invested into the system.
In the biographical movie Gandhi, when everyone around Gandhi was yelling about something the Jews were doing wrong, he stopped his followers and said, “I’m a Jew.” They were stunned and didn’t know what he meant. But his message finally sank in. What he meant was, don’t pretend Jews are not connected to us. Don’t make them separate. They are part of us.
Gandhi was trying to wake his followers up to a higher level of realization of the interconnectivity of everyone and everything.
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Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
—Voltaire
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Earlier in my career I joined with Michael Bassoff to create a very successful fundraising system called “RelationShift” fundraising. (Our book about it is RelationShift: Revolutionary Fundraising.) That system is based on shifting (actually, reversing) the relationship between the donor and the organization, so that the donor is appreciated in very large ways.
We have trained many nonprofit organizations in this system of giving more back to the donor than the donor gave them. Your gift to your donor is part of the interconnectedness of all spirit, no matter what. You can’t not get it back. You can’t break the system. We’ve proven this in our unorthodox fundraising system over and over, wherever it’s been applied! You can’t out-give the giver. You can’t give somewhere and not get more back. You can’t beat the system! It’s a system that exists beyond trust and belief. For it to really flow and function you don’t have to try to have faith in it. Let’s take electricity. Most do not truly understand how it works; they just know that it does. You already know it works. And when you’re a hands-off manager you don’t have to try to work up “trust” or “faith” in the principle of ongoing contribution. You already know it works. You can keep contributing to the higher good of the organization and just let your career unfold.
It keeps life simple. Joy and bliss are not complicated; they come from simple acceptance.
Steps to hands-off success in your life
Three action steps to take after reading this chapter:
1. Don’t hesitate to be of assistance to anyone and everyone in your organization. Too much time is wasted at work trying to decide whom to talk to.