The fourth component to a “Success Personality” is to be giving. This is the next part in my series of what is required to have on-going success throughout your life; what personality traits you need to be a lifetime success.
All the ingredients of a success personality include:
A good personality is one which enables you to deal effectively and appropriately with environment and reality, and to gain satisfaction from reaching goals which are important to you.
The fourth component is…
GIVING:
Successful personalities have some interest in and regard for other people.
They have a respect for others’ problems and needs. They respect the dignity of human personality and deal with other people as if they were
human beings, rather than as pawns in their own game. They recognise that every person is a unique individuality which deserves some dignity and respect.
Organisational psychologist Dr Adam Grant wrote a booked based on his PhD work tiled ‘Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success‘. After years of studying the dynamics of success and productivity in the workplace, Dr Grant discovered a powerful and often overlooked motivator: helping others.
In the book, Grant explains that in every workplace, there are three basic kinds of people: Givers, Takers and Matchers. Grant surveyed over 30,000 people across industries around the world and found that most people are right in the middle between giving and taking.
He studied dozens of organisations: had engineers measuring their productivity; looked at medical students‘ grades; studied salespeople‘s revenue.
Grant found the worst performers in each of these jobs were those that tended towards giving. Engineers who got the least work done were the ones who did more favours than they got back; the lowest grades belong to the medical students who agree most strongly with statements like, “I love helping others,”; the lowest revenue were the most generous salespeople because they “…just care so deeply about my customers that [they] would never sell them one of our crappy products.
However, in every job, in every organization studied, the best results belong to the Givers again. Givers go to both extremes. They make up the majority of people who bring in the lowest revenue, but also the highest revenue.
The same patterns were true for engineers’ productivity and medical students’ grades. Givers are overrepresented at the bottom and at the top of every success metric that you can track.
It is an excellent book and I would highly recommend it to anyone but he eloquently summed up a lot of these concepts in one of his TED Talks. In the speech and book, Grant breaks down these personalities and offers simple strategies to promote a culture of generosity and keep self-serving employees from taking more than their share.
… because givers are often sacrificing themselves, but they make their organisations better.
We have a huge body of evidence — many, many studies looking at the frequency of giving behaviour that exists in a team or an organisation — and the more often people are helping and sharing their knowledge and providing mentoring, the better organisations do on every metric we can measure: higher profits, customer satisfaction, employee retention — even lower operating expenses.
Dr Adam Grant
Read more… Are You A Giver or a Taker?
Rule 5 of Successful Team Work: Rush and Point
It is has face validity in psychology that our feelings about ourselves tend to correspond to our feelings about other people. When a person begins to feel more charitably about others, he invariably begins to feel more charitably toward himself.
The person who feels that “people are not very important” cannot have very much deep-down self respect and self-regard—for they themselves are “people” and with what judgment they considers others, they themselves is unwittingly judged in their own mind.
One of the best known methods of getting over a feeling of guilt is to stop condemning other people in your own mind…
… stop judging them…
… stop blaming them and hating them for their mistakes.
You will develop a better and more adequate self image when you begin to feel that other people are more worthy.
Another reason that Giving to other people is symptomatic of the successful personality is because it means that the person is dealing with reality.
People are important. People cannot for long be treated like animals or machines, or as pawns to secure personal ends.
Hitler found this out. So will other tyrants wherever they may be found—in the home, in business, or in individual relationships.
𝙀𝙭𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙞𝙨𝙚 𝙋𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙘𝙧𝙞𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣:
The prescription for charity is three-fold:
- Try to develop a genuine appreciation for people by realising the truth about them; they are unique personalities, creative beings.
- Take the trouble to stop and think of the other person’s feelings, his viewpoints, his desires and needs. Think more of what the other person wants, and how they must feel.
- Act as if other people are important and treat them accordingly. In your treatment of people have regard for their feelings. We tend to feel about objects in accordance with the way we treat them.
Yours optimally,
Scott
This post is inspired by and a modified extract from the book, ‘Psycho-Cybernetics‘ by Maxwell Maltz
