Coffee Break

S2E5: Helping Others Shine

• Dianne Whitford • Season 2 • Episode 5

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This week's episode was inspired by a presentation I heard last month about helping others shine, and the comment that "helping others shine doesn't decrease your own shine." Sometimes we get our egos tied up with our contributions, and it can seem like helping others shine somehow reduces our own value. In this episode, I talk about why I struggled with this concept a little bit, and talk about some ways that we can help each other shine. Shine on!

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Dianne:

Hey everybody, it's Dianne from Coffee, Grit, and Inspiration, and this is your weekly Coffee Break podcast. I am excited this week to announce that we hit 250 views. This is still a pretty young podcast and don't have a huge audience yet, but the fact that we have that many views, makes me feel super good. And I wanted to thank all of you for listening. Also, if you haven't had a chance yet, and you do look at the blog, we have a new look. I applied a theme, a new theme for the new year. It had its own set of snafus where I accidentally sent out a bunch of new article emails to everybody by mistake. So, if y ou got those, I'm sorry. Otherwise it's finally where I want it to be. It looks really nice and I really like it. So check it out and tell me what you think. Another thing I wanted to tell you about this week is, there's been a couple of people that asked about how they can best support us and I, I am so appreciative of anybody that asked that or anybody that wants to support us. I really appreciate all of you, and there's a lot of really simple ways like liking the YouTube videos, liking our posts, giving us comments, subscribing to the blog, all of those kinds of things. Super easy. I'm gonna set up a page on the blog, which I'll link in the description that gives a little bit more info if you're interested in that. And then lastly, we've got a new theme that we're starting this week called resilience. We're going to be talking a lot about resilience and while this particular podcast doesn't have anything to do with that, you can see those posts on the blog. And all of the posts from our last theme, which was critical thinking, have been collected and put together in a page as well. So you can head on over to the blog and check that out. Again, thank you so much everybody that's listening, tuning in, commenting, giving us ratings, reaching out. It really, really, really means a lot. I really, really appreciate it. I hope you guys know that. So today's topic, is not about how you can support us. It's about how you can support other people. It's about helping others shine, and you know, celebrating successes, bringing their days up, helping them succeed. This came to me because I was at an offsite last year. It's so funny to say last year when that was just like a month ago, but a month ago I was at a offsite with my team and my boss gave a presentation about helping others shine. And one of the things that she said was helping someone shine doesn't reduce your own shine. And that...I struggled with it and I went to her afterwards and said, you know, I, I, I love this that you said, but I am, I am struggling so hard with it. And she asked me why and it took me a while to figure it out. And after thinking about it for a long time and really doing some self examination, I really think that that concept struck me hard because I identify a lot of my self worth through my work, and so when I think of helping other people shine, then I worry that if I give someone the the credit or the contributions or someone else is contributing more than me, that my value decreases, that my work is not as important or that people won't think I'm valuable. So like giving that away to somebody else, does that make me worthless? I get so wrapped up in what I'm contributing and whether I'm contributing enough that I forget about the overall goal. For me, in the work that I do, that's delivering a product. So I work in IT, we do a lot of software development. Our goal is to deliver a product out to an end user that helps them, that improves their life in some way, things like that. That's the overall goal. So when I get so wrapped up in what I'm personally contributing, what I can put my name on, I'm losing sight of that overall goal of trying to deliver a product out to an end user. And when I let my focus on my contributions get in the way, then I then I'm actually holding the team back, holding the project back because I'm more focused on what I'm contributing than what- whether or not we're as a team achieving the goal. What I was forgetting is that life is not a one-man show. Life is a team sport. You don't get through life without help from other people. The best projects that I've ever been on are ones where everybody collaborated. Everybody had a voice, everybody had a contribution, everybody played a part. No one person can be the star. No one person has all the answers. A project that is a result or an effort that is a result of multiple people contributing is better for those multiple perspectives and if the goal is, if the end goal is made better, then it doesn't matter as much what the individual contributions were. If someone else shines and if you help someone else shine, it doesn't mean you're not shining. It doesn't decrease your own shine. And I think that's what my boss was trying to say that took me forever to understand, is that helping other people in their contributions doesn't make your contributions any less. If someone else shines, it doesn't mean I didn't. If a project is successful because of a group effort, it doesn't mean I was irrelevant. It probably sounds, it probably sounds everyone like I'm a huge big ball of ego and I promise that's not the case. I don't, I think that a lot of us probably have a very personal stake in whatever it is that we're doing, whether that's for our jobs or in our lives at home with our family, whatever. We have a personal stake in that. And ego of course is just the sense of your self esteem, the sense of your self importance and of course you can have too much and have an inflated self-importance. That's probably a different podcast cause that's not really what this post is about. But when I let my sense of self esteem, my ego get tied up with the wrong things. If I get, if I let it get tied up in the wrong things, like for example, how much I'm contributing to a project, then any fluctuations or anything that affects those contributions or that affects my work, makes my self esteem take a hit. So what I'm realizing is part of this whole topic is getting our self esteem, deriving our self esteem from the right places and from right things. I think I need to do another podcast about that because this podcast is supposed to be about helping other people shine. But I just thought it was really interesting to kind of think through what my resistance was to that idea when I first heard it and try to understand what prevents me from doing that on a regular basis. Why do I get all anxious about it? And I think that that's what it is, is that I have this fear that by helping somebody else, giving credit to somebody else, letting somebody else take the lead, that somehow that decreases my own value. And I don't believe that that's true. I don't believe that that's true. So I'll explore that more in a different podcast. But for this podcast, what I wanted to talk about is helping others shine. So sometimes helping others shine does mean giving away the credit for something. It could also mean lifting them up, helping them demonstrate their value, helping their inner light burn a little bit brighter, facilitating opportunities for them, or even just brightening their day. And that brings me back around to the original statement that my boss made, which was helping other people shine does not decrease your own value. It doesn't decrease your own shine. And bringing others up doesn't have to bring you down. So I, I did as usual a Google search on, to get ideas on ways that we could help others shine. And so I came up with a few myself, and then I got some ideas from some other sites. I'll link them in the description. But what I wanted to talk through today, I've got five ideas that I want to share today for this podcast. So the first one is about sharing opportunities. There's probably people that you can think of that have things that they're really good at, maybe things that you're not good at and maybe there's opportunities that you're aware of that those people would be especially suited for. So maybe you could recommend people to other people,"Hey, so-and-so is really good at this. She'd be able to help you with that". Or something like that. Not only does the person you're recommending feel good because they get acknowledged for something that they're good at, but you still get a little bit of recognition there for facilitating a happy solution. Amplify others' thoughts. So the second one is amplify others' thoughts. And this might be more applicable in a professional situation. Where this applies for me and may for you as well, is when you're in meetings with people, you know, a lot of times I spend a lot of time on the phone, I'm in a lot of conference calls, in a lot of meetings, and there's times where you come to the meeting and there's points that you want to make. You want to make sure that you bring up X, Y, Z topics. And sometimes those topics are brought up by others and rather than be focused on, you need to be the one to bring up those topics. Maybe when someone else brings those topics up or someone else makes the point that you were thinking of that you amplify what they said, not pretend they didn't say it or take it and pretend like you said it, but amplify,"Hey, you know Dianne, Dianne made a really great comment that I want to make sure that we pay attention to and here's an additional thought on that. What does everybody think?" Something like that, the person that you're amplifying will feel supported by you in that meeting and it helps them feel a sense of unity with you. So this is a great relationship building thing as well as a way to make someone else shine. It also reinforces the idea that you wanted to support or present in the first place, whether or not you made the point, the point got made. The third thing is recognition. So recognizing someone that's, that's kind of like one of those things where I don't think we do it necessarily do it often enough or in a meaningful way. Anytime someone gets recognition for something, they feel good. How you get that recognition to people kind of depends on the person. Some people appreciate private recognition, some public recognition, some you know what money, some want favors, you know, whatever. Any kind of recognition people want it because it helps them feel valued. And so it's something that we should make sure that we deliver. And one way that we can help others shine is not only to deliver that recognition but also try recognizing people for something that they either may not realize that they're even doing or for something that they may not get very much recognition about. So I think about people sometimes that there's something I noticed that they do really good and maybe they don't know it. They don't know that they do that well or it's something that's kind of obscure that maybe no one else has complimented them on before. And try to recognize that. So like imagine someone gives you a compliment on something that no one else has ever really given you a compliment on before that you don't get complimented on very often that type of compliment sticks with you. You remember it. And maybe maybe it's something like, gosh, I didn't even know I was good at that or I didn't think anyone noticed that. And that can be so much more impactful than just a generic...although, you know, generic recognition is good. Something that is is a little bit unique, may help bring somebody up even more. Another thing related to recognition, so for this one, you're kind of getting two for one. Another thing related to recognition is to be specific about your recognition. So this person did this specific thing, which I really appreciated because it helped us do X or it made this better. That is a lot more impactful than this person always does such a great job. Both things are good, you want to hear both things, but the one that's specific is a lot more meaningful and impactful to the person that hears it. The fourth one is when you get good service, tell their manager. I think a lot of times we like to give feedback when something needs to be fixed and that feedback is good. Any feedback that helps somebody improve is good. I think it's equally as important to give feedback about positive things that happen and I think sometimes we forget that. Whether you are at work or grocery shopping or out to dinner or going to see a movie or whatever, if you get good service, tell their manager, tell the person that has influence over their career growth or their raises or their promotions or whatever. It may surprise you to realize how much weight and emphasis is placed on positive feedback that comes to a manager when that manager is working on promotions or raises or something like that. I can tell you that as a manager of people, one of the first things that I'm looking at when I'm going through, you know, does this person, how much of a raise should I give this person? Does this person deserve a raise? Should they be promoted? Can we justify them being promoted? All of that kind of stuff. One of the first things we look at is what is the feedback look like? What feedback is coming in from the people that she's with? And it's even better when that feedback is unsolicited. So if someone emails me out of nowhere and says,"You know, I worked with so-and-so the other day and this was really a really great experience. I really appreciated her, you know, whatever it is that they did was really awesome". That is so cool. It's cool because I didn't have to go reach out to that person to get feedback. It's something I can share with the teammate to make them feel good and it's something I can use to, to say, Hey, I want to give so-and-so a raise because here's all this feedback that I'm getting from the other people. So I guess the point I'm making here is when you get good service, whether it's at work, when you're at the grocery store, wherever it is that you are, tell the manager. And the reason why you should tell the manager is because the manager is the person that has a lot of influence over that person's growth and that career. So the last point that I want to make is, sometimes you just need to give away the credit. And I'm not, and I think that's a just a good habit to get into anyway. We talked before about this is not a one man show. Nothing, most likely, that you're doing in your life is just strictly a one man show. It's important to recognize the contributions that others make. And so by saying,"give away the credit", I don't mean pretend like someone else contributed or pretend like you didn't have anything to do with an achievement or a solution. It just means when some, when some recognition comes your way about something that happened or when you want to talk about something good that happened to acknowledge the other people that contributed in addition to the work that you did. We don't get through anything in life without help. And like I said, the best projects I ever worked on are those that were collaborative where everybody had a contribution, so make sure that the people that weren't involved know that it was a team effort and take a little extra effort to recognize those that gave a little extra effort to the project or whatever it was that you were working on. So that's what I have for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this. I got all fired up when I was writing the outline for this podcast. At first, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to talk too much about it, but I really feel like this was such a cool topic and such a great thing to think about, how we can lift other people up and then let's just remember that lifting other people up doesn't bring us down. It doesn't reduce our shine. It doesn't make us look tarnished and them look shiny. It can only help everybody. I've put a few links in the description for some sites that I found that kind of supported this idea. There is no video this week. Those, if there's anybody out there that was watching the YouTube videos, my camera battery was not charged and I just didn't want to wait for it to charge up. So there's no video this week, but my camera should be all charged up by next week, so I have one for you next time. I hope you guys have a wonderful, wonderful day. Wonderful, wonderful week. Shine on everybody. Bye now.