Collaboration is key to success, and when it comes to collective efforts, who can understand the significance of teamwork better than PR/Communications professionals? Comms functions require a collective approach and skills to engage with people from diverse backgrounds. Generosity is one of the crucial aspects of the collaborative approach, which is unfortunately becoming rare in today’s intense competitive environment. In a quest to achieve our goals, we sometimes become too self-centric and start nurturing individualistic values. The greed to have it all makes us operate with a limited mindset. We become transactional in our approach and lead with a give-and-take mindset. This approach is short-term and hardly adds any value to our lives. On the contrary, greed and selfish attitudes can turn detrimental interpersonal relations. Most importantly, these negative emotions can lead to anxiety, fear, discontentment and frustration and hamper our growth.
Generosity is an act which helps us remain grounded and evolve beyond limited beliefs to achieve a higher life purpose. I came across an insightful video of Buddhist monk Nick Keomahavong on generosity, where he shared ways of embracing the giving attitude for happiness. In the present scenario, generosity may have few takers, but it helps to remove the negative traits for accelerated growth. I believe generosity is one of the vital aspects of the comms profession, which is driven by collaboration and relations. Hence, comms pros should inculcate generosity to enable inclusive growth of the profession by offering a helping hand to those in need.
Here is how inculcating the quality of giving can help us find the higher purpose of life.
Enrich Knowledge with Sharing
Generosity does not mean offering expensive and complicated stuff. It is a simple act of giving time, monetary support, expertise, knowledge or resources to those who seek it the most. Whether it is sharing a potential prospect with a job seeker or sharing a learning opportunity with aspirants, a simple helping hand can make a huge difference. Sometimes, people hesitate to share their knowledge because they fear losing relevance. However, when we start maintaining secrecy in our approach, we create trust issues with others and ruin relations. However, when we share knowledge, resources or wisdom with others, it helps to open up doors of new opportunities and helps us expand the scope of our understanding of the world.
Build Credibility and Trust
People with the right mindset can have a positive influence on our growth. It is crucial to cherish relations beyond personal and professional gains by adding value to others’ lives. People who offer selfless helping hands often enjoy respect among their peers. The quality of giving helps them build credibility and trust. It helps them boost the productivity of their teams and achieve business targets efficiently.
Win –Win Approach
Sometimes, we enter into relations with the sole expectation of gains and neglect people who do not directly influence our work. This win-or-loss mentality and selfish approach to offer assistance only for something in return can ruin relations in the long run. Generosity helps us get out of a limited mindset of give and take. Develop a win-win approach where everyone is mutually benefitted and happy. Avoid people pleasing but give deserving shoutouts who offer their expertise/ assistance.
Inclusive approach
Generosity helps in building empathy and respect for others. A workplace driven by generosity helps foster trust and encourages people to express their opinions and viewpoints freely. When we do good things for others, it automatically boosts our confidence and self-esteem. High morale of the team leads to higher productivity and performance. Generosity also helps in building mental clarity as we start discarding stuff which no longer serves our purpose and focus on work, which offers true value addition to others.
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