IN RELATIONSHIPS, THERE ARE GIVERS and there are takers. Each one is a personal invention, and each one gets a different result.
The givers have fun with other people. They are confident of their position as givers, while the takers are usually paranoid about being exposed as takers and losing the relationship.
A few years ago, I had the entertaining privilege of co-writing a book called RelationSHIFT. It was about raising money for good causes, and it described a “shift” that occurs in a relationship when it goes from taking to giving.
The shift that occurred was a deliberate reinvention that anyone can do. And although my co-author, Michael Bassoff, and I originally applied the concept to fund-raising, I later saw that it applied to all relationships, professional and personal. When we shift from being takers to being givers, the relationship always gets better.
Working with salespeople, I noticed that the ones who struggled the most were seeing themselves as takers. They called for an appointment and apologized for taking someone’s time on the phone. Then they asked if they could take more time in person to demonstrate the product. At the demonstration, they soon got around to asking if they could take some of the customer’s money.
It’s a life of taking. So it’s small and miserable.
There’s nothing more depressing in relationships than feeling like you are taking more than the other person is from the relationship—feeling like you are a relationship thief. The Band sings about this pain in the Bob Dylan song “Tears of Rage”: “Tears of rage / tears of grief / why must I always be a thief?”
I love studying happy salespeople’s relationships with their customers. Like Robert Louis Stevenson said, I believe that “everyone lives by selling something,” and you can learn a lot from the world of sales. For one thing, the great salespeople don’t see themselves as takers.
They give for a living.
They give their time; they give their advice; they give an offer of friendly service; they give a promise of a caretaking professional relationship. They bring a great product to the world, and see themselves as making a contribution to the lives of their customers. They glow with energy. That energy comes from the giving concept they hold of themselves.
“Self-concept,” says Nathaniel Branden, “is destiny.”
And so, the givers who work in sales prosper. The universe rewards their giving by giving back to them.
The takers, however, are weakened by their poor concept of themselves. They always feel inferior to their customers.
The shift of reinvention from being a taker to being a giver is a shift that requires action. The act of giving itself is what first activates the spirit, and soon the giver is soaring into a new dimension of life.
Most people have a hard time giving because they have misunderstood the results of previous attempts. They remember being disappointed and victimized. They don’t trust giving because they think they have given before and have been burned.
But they have not.
What they have called giving was actually a form of trading. Trading is not giving. Trading is an act that focuses on what the return will be. True giving does not focus on the return. It focuses on the giving. The giver gives without conditions, and then moves mental energy right away to the next person to give to, and never looks back.
Accomplished givers become filled with self-respect. Often, they are former takers who have reinvented themselves. They are not giving in order to get happiness in return. The happiness is already there. It lives inside the act of giving.