How Can We Be More Generous?
We want generosity, yet we see more anxiety in the company. We find relief in making others as anxious or more anxious than us. We look for solace in the fear of their eyes. Somehow, it makes us feel less bruised, less battered. What makes the situation worse is that we can spread our anxiety quicker than the preparation of our Subway meal in today’s hyper-connected culture. The truth is more important now than ever in acknowledging that there is no connection between the real world and anxiety.
Often, the anxiety that we experience, especially the ones induced by others, is more of an optional invention in exchange for attention than a legitimate cry for help.
For some of us, we pick anxiety to be our stimulus. It is the trigger point of our discomfort zone. It is an external boost signaling for good to be great and for fast to be faster. It is the alarm clock we set to get out of bed before dawn. The problem is, sometimes anxiety rings without us knowing how, when and why. It is the threat of foreclosure, an upcoming review or some sort of impending crisis.
When we act in accordance with anxiety, it is tempting to yell across the office to get things done. The alternative is to stand up from our desk, walk to our colleague and have a quiet conversation. It is not efficient, but definitely effective. In many ways, we rationalize various versions of yelling across the office as compared to being personal and engage not only in good faith, but in a good way.
We set these pressure prompts to serve us, but we ended up being the servants of these pressure points.
As a result, we stop being generous. When we’re asked to raise our hands as high as possible, we follow suit. When we’re asked once more to raise it higher, somehow we can raise our hands higher than before. Why? Because we’ve been conditioned since young that it is always safer to hold back a little bit. It is presumably better to be more guarded and keep to ourselves. We’ve all encountered the drowning man, and chances are many of us identify ourselves as the drowning man too. We’re too busy keeping ourselves from not drowning and we want everyone to know it.
We want everyone to know how terrible drowning is, so we can’t possibly ask about how your day was or lend a listening ear when we’re barely surviving on our own.
Yet on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve also encountered people who are willing to commit to a shift in perspective to place the focus not on their own problems, but to listen to what others have to say. As a drowning man, we all know how difficult it is. It takes a lot of effort not to be a drowning man, and it begins by trusting ourselves enough to know that we’re not actually drowning. This is where generosity starts. It requires the emotional labour of empathy. It requires the courage to share, when a big part of us want to hoard. It requires the dedication to awareness that what we say is not nearly as important as how we listen.
It requires the constant going against of our counter-intuitive gut feeling to choose to care and matter.
Being generous is not to be confused with being right. We may be right, but that doesn’t mean that people will care, pay attention or take action. Just because we’re right, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to listen. It takes more than being right to earn attention and action. The opposite of “more” is not “less.” If we are truly generous, the opposite of more is better. Everyone has an opinion, but no one has a guarantee. The paradox is that the generous person will continue to act generously accordingly as though he or she has a guarantee that one day we’ll all stop wanting to save ourselves, but to save others too.
