Getting Help By Giving Help
Living A Life of Focus – Part 8
Building and helping others helps me. The best way to help yourself starts with helping others. You want to ensure you’re planting a huge field of helping others so that you will reap a bountiful harvest of the help you need to produce in your life. Why would you think someone would desire to help you when you never help someone else? Whatever you sow is the only thing you can reap? Whatever you give is the only thing you receive?
The Thought or Concept:
“When I help get what they want, they will help me get what I want.” – Zig Ziggler
This focus statement taught us that selfishness, the opposite of love, helps us get nowhere fast. Ordinary people are the most selfish of people. They desire the very things they are unwilling to give and it’s this very attitude that’s working against them to keep it that way.
The Practice:
So if helping others is key, here’s what I decided to do to get it right:
- Change my thinking towards others first.
I never considered that my goals in life should have people as recipients. Let me give you an example. When Steve Jobs created the iMac, he wasn’t creating it just so that he could use it. He created it so that people like you and me could use it. So his first thought had to be how can his dream to make a computer help others first, not himself. In the same way, you must think of how your dream can help others first before your dreams can ever help you. - Use my gifts to serve others so that it’s genuine.
“The gift is greater than the person.” – John C. Maxwell
John Maxwell said something here. Your gift (since it came from God) is always bigger than the person. The person could be a mess of a person, but the gift can change the world. Have you ever met a person like that; someone so gifted yet comes off as less of a person? Think of all those you know who are famous for doing great things, but when you think about the individual they too tend to have issues that don’t match the size of their gifting. The point is this, your gift is bigger than you, therefore it’s meant to serve someone other than you. Treat it this way. - Encourage others to do the same and not make the same mistake.
Once you alter your thinking to go beyond what’s normal by helping others, you’ll soon experience others beginning to help you. It serves no one, it helps no one, if you don’t share it with those you can, your world. Encourage someone else to take this leap to use everything they have, you have, I have, to help someone else. BTW – this too is helping others and will cause help to come back at you.
I knew I could use all the help I could get so I went after obtaining help only to find out I wasn’t getting any. Getting help from others has a prerequisite. That prerequisite is to help people first. This goes against normal thinking and it’s the very type of thinking that helps produce the results that normal people don’t have. If you want uncommon results you have to give up taking the normal approach.
Today is Friday!
After spending a year with this focus statement (and I still hold on to it), it continues to serve us well. In fact, our eyes have gotten off our need to have help but rather to serve others which has brought us unexpected help. Today we have a dedicated team helping us do what we do. What will you do with this focus statement or will you just continue down the common path of wishing you had some help? Helping others helps me and helping others will help you.
Share this focus statement with someone you know could use a little help today.
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