I Believe 100% That Helping Others is the Sustainable Way to Help Yourself When It Comes to Business.
Think about it. In simple terms, the products and/or services that you work with have to fill a need, satisfy a desire, or in some other way add value to someone or they are worth little. It’s pretty hard to succeed marketing and promoting something that is worthless. Granted, there are savvy people who do get away with it and profit in the short-term, but they are the exception, and the specific thing they are doing is not sustainable. That’s just simple economics and common sense. Supply and demand. There isn’t demand for something of no use to someone.
Sustainability is the golden egg of business in my opinion. It correlates to everything from quality of the offering to behavioral practices, to how you use your time, and how well you take care of the goose (you).
The last two things I mentioned are the cornerstone of this article.
There Will be People You Know, and Targeted Demographics, that Can be Helped Through Your Offering.
That doesn’t mean they want to be helped, or that they want to be helped by you. This is something that took me a while to learn, and chances are good that it has taken you a while too, if in fact you have learned this yet.
You will waste a great deal of time, and emotional energy trying to help someone who is unwilling to help themselves. When you are someone who has accepted full responsibility for how your life turns out, it’s easy to naturally think everyone else does too. After all, why wouldn’t they?
If you have an area of life that is not going well, you go to work on it. You look for how you can do better. You seek people who can help. You try things. This is smart. Life is too short and uncertain to accept something as “the way it is” when it doesn’t have to be.
The newsflash here is that not everyone sees things this way. I could write for a long time on all the supposed reasons why…and I say “supposed” because they generally aren’t real. They are rationalized excuses for not taking responsibility and ownership over one’s life and results.
Life is difficult. Challenging. Confusing. Seemingly unfair at times. So what. You can’t just decide to let your boat sit dead in the water because the winds, waves, current, etc. are tough. You have to find a way through, and at the same time, you have to have gratitude for all the good there is in the midst.
But again, you get all this. The key here is do you recognize who else gets it?
If you are spending your time trying to get someone else to see this, who hasn’t come to it yet, in order to help them do better, you will have not only wasted your time, but you will also have added time opportunity cost to the equation. “Opportunity cost” is an economic term for what else you could be doing with the same resources. In this case, the time you could have spent working with someone who is taking responsibility for doing better.
It’s Not Hard to Figure Out…
If you spend too much time with the wrong people, you won’t have enough time for the right people, and that time imbalance will make your pursuit unsustainable.
The other part of this is the emotional energy. Spending time trying to get someone to move is draining. You spend even more time trying to figure out what you are doing wrong that is keeping this person from taking a step. You can work on that infinitely and find no answer…because, provided you are being nice and respectful, the answer is that is has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with them. You cannot change another person.
This emotional energy drain impacts you two ways. One; it burns you out. It is a scenario where you are pouring out of your bucket of fuel and there is nothing getting poured back in. There is no fulfillment, feeling of accomplishment, no gratification of effort. It’s a pure mind suck.
The other area it affects you, is that it lowers the emotional fuel you have to work with others. It’s decreasing your effectiveness when you are with the right people. This is further augmented because this drain impacts how you are showing up in your personal life as well. It’s spilling into your other relationships, and this has another rebound effect that further makes you feel bad.
What Do You Do?
Be quick to see the signs. If someone is closed-minded, move on. If someone is a “know it all,” move on. If someone is making excuses for why they can’t, move on. If someone is less committed to helping themselves than you are to helping them…STOP immediately. The other thing to remember is that not everyone is your tribe. There will be some people you just don’t click with. Granted, the more skill development you do, the more you learn how to ask questions and listen, and the more you are in tune with how to navigate different types of personalities, the less others will ever feel like they can’t connect with you, but the reality is, some people are just not going to work with you.
This is a fundamental perspective that can have a huge impact on the joy you are experiencing in your pursuit, in addition to your productivity.
Waste no time trying to change someone and spend your energy seeking those who want to change.
If you need some Coaching, or Training for your organization, reach out to me.
Many Blessings, Todd
P.S. If you would like a roadmap for living your best life, or what I refer to as your “richest life possible” check out 3 Circles Living.
