Happiness among Givers and Takers
A few nights ago, on my drive back home from the middle school I work at, I caught myself marveling at the give and take of the waves bordering the lake-side highway. In the rush of everyday life, amidst the clamoring of getting ready for work in the morning or preparing for instruction in the evenings, it is remarkably easy to forget how our giving & taking actions influence ourselves, and each other.
We often “give” to our friends and families in big and small ways, and lean into them to “take” support. Similarly, our relationships with our coworkers often rely on a healthy and collaborative “give” and “take.”
But what I wondered that night was why some of us feel so content giving and taking, and others don’t.
In my attempt to find more information, I started to explore New York Times Best Selling author Adam Grant’s theory about being givers, takers or matchers. I wanted to construct a formula aligned to what happy people did, so I could replicate that and create better relationships. Based on my take on Grant’s theory, here are some thoughts.
Are you aware of whether you are a giver or taker?
Self awareness is the first step towards liberation from repeated disappointments and identifying patterns in our behavior can help us start. Objective self-evaluation can easily evoke unpleasant feelings. The toughest part for me was to remind myself that:
The point of reflection is not to reinforce our beliefs about ourselves and feel good but to genuinely question them in order to uncover motives possibly buried under denial.
Givers
Givers proactively put in effort in place of others, they will even take on the mental burdens that belong to others. Extreme givers always offer help, at times even without being asked. Givers can be at different points on the continuum: giving up their time to listen to your baggage, creating and executing solutions, running chores for you, taking care of your responsibilities.
Givers essentially postpone their priorities to help others succeed.
Takers
Takers seek and accept assistance all the time. They may be well meaning people who are simply insensitive to the needs of others and preoccupied with their own to do list. Their perception regarding the amount of taking they indulge in is mostly an underestimate of reality. They often do not introspect and they rationalize taking by being convinced that they are too busy with real priorities.
Takers have a heightened awareness of doing even minor things for others and a weak sense of getting major help from others.
Matchers
Matchers give and take in equal measure. They might help a lot and also ask for help when they need it or there might be matchers who neither help much nor depend on others to get their job done.
Matchers are people who keep a good balance of giving and taking.
Are you usually a giver, a taker or a matcher? Most of us, just like me, think of ourselves as givers. Or, at least, as matchers who are balanced in the amount of giving and taking they do. Because if we didn’t, we would probably feel guilty about being takers and living with constant guilt would cause internal strife.
Is there a formula for happiness?
Who do you think is happier? A giver or a taker? Or is it not that simplistic…
Happy Takers
Happy takers accept help all the time, almost as a right. At best, they perceive themselves as being just a tad bit of a taker. They feel entitled, they think that the givers are lucky to associate with them, and they may even believe that they are doing the givers a favor by providing them with opportunities to help. They may even believe that they are doing the givers a favor by providing them with opportunities to help. They view their givers as having excess time, money and resources to help.Their go to line is “my plate is full.” Happy takers believe that the discussion about being a giver or a taker is unnecessary, since they feel that them taking isn’t really a “big deal”, they are friends — why bring business into friendship?
Happy takers are unable to see a major difference between themselves and their givers: the givers proactively offer help and they don’t. Happy takers see themselves as having a busy life with real priorities including a non-negotiable leisure time.
🔲 Do you avoid offering help?
Happy Givers
Happy givers willingly help others, they do not feel threatened by the success of those who they help and do not easily get overwhelmed. They are somewhat aware of being givers but it does not bother them and they don’t dwell on it. They give in a measure that is comfortable for them.
Happy givers easily manage their own priorities along with the tasks of their their takers that they choose to help with.
🔲 Do you often help others without feeling the load ?
Unhappy Takers
Unhappy takers are mostly well meaning people who are aware that they get help more than they provide help. They justify being takers by thinking of the situation as temporary, but they are not at ease — they have a nagging feeling of doing something wrong that they are unable or unwilling to pinpoint.
Unhappy takers feel overwhelmed with their own stuff and their intention is to help others once they have more time. They want to change but are unable to put effort into it at least for “now”.
🔲 Do you think you will help “later” in life when you have more free time?
Unhappy Givers
This is the category I was most interested in, especially since I perceived myself as a happy giver but after proactively reflecting on how often I complained I realized that I was a very unhappy giver.
Unhappy givers are worker bees who self-pressure themselves into helping others. They are very acutely aware of being givers, yet they grudgingly grab other people’s work. They may seek external validation and feel that if they say “no” then others won’t find them valuable. They feel secure knowing that people need them and they almost suffer from a fear of missing out. They want to limit the giving but feel compelled to give and may even dig for extra work in their attempts to help.
Unhappy givers have a lot of built up resentment. They get overwhelmed helping others and worry about their own priorities being put on hold. They blame the takers without realizing how they encourage them. They get stuck in a vicious cycle of grabbing work to help and feeling resentful.
🔲 Do you feel that you are always busy helping others and people use you?
Is happiness all that matters? What about the quality of your relationships?
Is happiness the only criteria? Do I have to think about the ethics of my give and take behavior as long as I am a happy giver or taker?
I guess, we have to rethink if we are concerned about what is ethical and if we feel that we have an objective duty towards fairness, even if it may reduce our happiness.
🔘Is it fair to all stakeholders?
What about the quality of your relationships? They may be getting strained over time due to the imbalance of giving and taking.
How do you take action if you want to shift your position on the giver-taker continuum?
Take a look at the graph below to assess where you are by self-identifying your spot on two dimensions — your satisfaction with giving and your comfort with taking. Depending on your initial perception of your position you may want to shift from one category to another or shift your position within the continuum of the category you fall in.
Decide whether you want to:
- stay where you are
- move just a bit to being more or less of a giver or a taker
- move a lot
Actionable strategies for making change
For Extreme Takers
🔲 Who is your top giver? Who do you often ask for help? How do you express your gratitude to this person? How can you make up for all the time spent on you?
🔲 Empathize with your giver, and maybe once in a while see if there’s a way you can help them out as well. Try not to make their load heavier.
🔲 Try and refuse help with your chores even if someone volunteers. Proactively ask to be taught how to fish, instead of asking for the fish
🔲 Make your go to sentence be — “This is my responsibility. I will do it myself”.
🔲 Offer help to at least one person today.
For Extreme Givers
🔲 Identify your consistent takers and understand why you are willing to help. The simple process of keeping their names in the top of your consciousness will enable you to evaluate their requests for help more objectively. You will be aware that this may possibly be part of a behavior pattern that you have enabled and that you can break.
🔲 If you are feeling as if a lot of your time and energy are going into helping others, limit the time you allocate to helping others. Say, “I will allocate ten minutes for this person’s task”. Or whatever time you feel is reasonable, just don’t let it be an open invitation to a huge portion of your time.
🔲 If you feel compelled or pressured to help, provide support for the person to do it themselves but don’t do it for them. Often times, the best thing to do is “how to fish”instead of fishing for them.
I could not discover a physics type formula for happiness. All I know is that being happy does not directly correlate to being a selfless giver or to being an unabashed taker. The answer seems to lie towards the middle ground of being a matcher.
Just like the waves find a balance by giving and taking as they hug the shoreline, it is up to us to reflect and make choices that define the relationships we would like.
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