Have you ever gone to a restaurant and had absolutely terrible service? You know, that one night where you pay a babysitter, wait over an hour for a table when they told you 20-30 minutes, only to finally be seated and to be served by the waitress who can’t keep up with her table and keeps bringing you a Coke instead of a Diet? There is nothing like paying for terrible service.
In the awesome book I am reading, The Go-Giver, it says Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. How can this apply to us? In what ways do we serve people around us? It is easy to think that when being served that the person who is serving is the server. What if we changed the way we think and look at a situation with two people and view both as servers. In every situation, whether you are being served or someone is serving you, both individuals have an opportunity to serve.
In the scenario I shared above, we talked about the waitress having poor serving skills. But what if we stopped to think, “why might that waitress be having a rough day?” For all I know, she could have just lost a loved one, she could be working hard to pay off medical debt from surgeries, or she could be going through a terrible divorce. We walk through our daily life coming into contact with people on a surface level, rarely knowing what is going on inside.
We need to shift our focus from How can others serve us? to How can I serve others?
Serving others is a lifestyle, not just an action or a thought. When we train our brains and hearts to serve others no matter the circumstances, we bless those around us, and in turn we are blessed.
In The Go-Giver’s 2nd law of stratospheric success, the authors are referring to compensation. I don’t believe they are referring to just income. And when they are talking about the amount of people you serve, I think it goes way beyond your co-workers. It is viewing yourself as less than those around you and making a daily effort to help show others that they are of worthy to you on any level. From your spouse to your boss, to your waitress. When you change your thought from How can I be served? to How can I serve?, we begin to set that same example to all of those we come into contact with.
The author says, If you want to increase your value, increase the amount of people you serve. Every day we have several opportunities to serve those around us. When we use polite words while flying through the drive-thru at McDonalds, we serve the worker with our words. When we are speaking to our spouse after they have had a rough day, we can serve them with words of affirmation. When we take the time to write out a card to someone we know who needs it, we serve them with our time. When you see something that needs done, and you take care of it even though it’s not your responsibility, you serve that person with an action. Everyday, we have the choice to serve all kinds of people around us. In what ways can you change the way you serve? How can you add value to the people you come into contact with daily?
I challenge each one of you today to stop and think about the way you serve the people you come into contact with each day this week. If we all live with a serve others aspect we can add value to so many more people lives on such a larger level. Increase the amount of people you serve, and you compensation increases.