Receive to give
Fred Rogers famously encouraged children to “look for the helpers.” For the leaders I coach, that advice no longer quite fits. They’re the helpers now. But if they’re going to avoid burnout, they need to help differently.
How can we do this? I’m brought back to another segment on Mister Rogers Neighborhood, a short conversation about giving and receiving. While we typically focus on giving, Rogers said, receiving is actually more important.
As leaders, especially mission-led leaders who see themselves as serving a purpose greater than themselves, the role of giver comes naturally. Giving is why we get up in the morning. It’s what makes our work meaningful. It makes us feel like heroes.
Yet, the role of giver is fraught with risk.
Even though we might be trying our best to get it right, we can overreach and may even make the situation worse. We feel useless as helpers.
Our attempts to help may be met with rejection. All our help leaves us feeling cynical and resentful.
We may come up against challenges that outstrip our capacity to give. As helpers, we end up feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, and lost.
Psychologist Christina Maslach reminds us that those feelings of uselessness, cynicism, resentment, overwhelm, and hopelessness are all the seeds of burnout. They are signs that our helping, our giving, is costing us too much.
When that happens, we need to flip the script. All along, here, we’ve been seeing our role as mission-led leaders as operating only in one direction. We’ve been assuming givers can’t receive, that helpers don’t need help.
Leaders need to know how to give, but to lead well, they also need to know how to receive.
We can receive help from many places, but one of the greatest sources comes from simple acts of enjoyment in everyday life.
We allow ourselves to receive this help through what psychotherapist Aundi Kolber calls “compassionate resourcing,” in which we consciously seek small bits of goodness, calm, and kindness throughout our day.
Those bits of compassion and kindness will be different for everyone. We might read books or listen to podcasts that help us grow, take short walks, eat cookies, talk with a friend—or just look out the window at the sun cascading through the fall leaves.
These resources may seem small, but Kolber sees them as the building blocks of strength and resilience. We need lots of them, in small doses, administered when we need them. The best part is that they’re available to all of us. We just have to look, receive, and enjoy.
How do you resource yourself? How can you resource yourself better? Book your free Discovery Session here.
