THE SCIENCE OF GIVING

Today’s show is on a topic very dear to my heart, and we’ll get right to it so those who are turned off by the very word can skip to the next episode and no time will have been wasted. The topic of today’s show is giving. The word itself conjures up different things for everybody. For some it’s a negative word, for others a neutral word, and yet, for others, a word that brings up good feelings that speak to the very person that you are at your core. Whatever the emotion that a word like giving brings up for you, it’s completely ok. That’s who you are, and our emotions come from our past so whatever those emotions, they’re rooted in something that happened to you in the past and they’ve become part of who you are as a person. Maybe you loaned some money to a friend and they never paid you back. You had noble intentions of trying to help out a friend, they screwed you over, and afterwards you said to yourself, “i’ll never do that again.” You tied that whole experience to the concept of giving and so for you giving is a negative word. Maybe you were at a point in your life where you were in real serious need. Maybe you were the friend that was loaned the money and you never forgot that act of generosity and so, for you, giving is a word that makes you feel good. Forget about the fact that you didn’t pay your friend back, you still have a good feeling when you hear the word. And for some of you, the word giving really does nothing. It’s a neutral word like shoe or table. Whatever your feelings about the word, what I hope to do in this episode is to bring a little clarity to, not only the idea of giving, but more importantly the act of giving. Of course, there are a variety of things that can be given, so a little clarification about the kind of giving I’m referring to. When I use the word giving, I am referring to ALL OF IT! Everything you possibly have to give is up for giving. We can give our time, we can give kind words, we can give another person help when needed, we can give our organs, we can give advice when asked, we can of course give financially, we can give of our resources like food, clothing, shelter, tools, and whatever else we believe we have available to us to give.

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Now, If you were listening, I just used a very important word. Do you know what it was? It was the word ‘believe’. This is going to be a recurring theme, if you haven’t already picked that up in my podcasts, because belief is what drives fully 90% of our choices, our behaviors, our attitude, and our actions on a moment-to-moment basis. At the time of this episode, the news of the coronavirus is being spread like wildfire throughout the world. In fact, the news is being spread far faster than the actual virus! Which is essentially just a cold. We get to see firsthand what actions people take based on their beliefs. We get to see what is happening to the financial markets, to oil prices, interest rates, events cancelled, flights canceled, states declaring a state of emergency, the whole country of Italy locked down, cruise ships being quarantined in foreign and US ports, and people stocking up on dry goods and toilet paper in fear of a total shutdown of society. Where is it coming from and why is all of that happening? Beliefs. Beliefs amongst the masses about what might happen. I’m not necessarily making a statement about whether or not I feel its justified, just simply pointing out how people act based on their beliefs. Never has it been more obvious than right now with the current situation. If you haven’t yet listened to the 3 part series called the Science of Success where I go in depth on the science of the brain and how our beliefs control almost everything we do moment to moment, including what we see and don’t see, I highly recommend you go back and listen to those episodes because they will play a big part in your understanding of giving. More importantly, they will help your understanding of WHY to give and give in abundance. In this episode, I intend to talk a little bit about the science of giving, what it does in and to your body and for the receiver of your giving, but I will also be talking about what we could call the metaphysics of giving. The laws of karma, the laws of abundance, the laws of giving and receiving and my understanding of how they work. If that kind of thing is a turn off for you, so be it, you can skip to the next episode without having to waste any more of your time. These are what I have come to know as the laws of success and they have worked beautifully for me and those around me so I want to pass them on to all of you.

So lets just get this out of the way right away so that I can repeat it several times throughout the show and then wrap up by imploring you to do it some more: the more you give the more you get! We’ve likely heard it our whole lives. Now, let me clarify that statement so that everybody fully understands what it means. Getting is not the reason to give. If I said to you, “Fred and Nancy, I want you to start donating 3 hours per week of your time somewhere that needs volunteers. I promise you if you do that you’ll get some kind of return beyond it just feeling good to give of your time.” The fact that I would promise somebody some kind of return on their giving, in a way, taints the request to give because it turns the act of giving into a request of some kind of return or reciprocity on the time given. If I said I just want you to give of your time because this place or organization needs volunteers, then you’ll come up with your own justifications for either doing it or not. You might be the kind of person who says, “ahhh, I’m just too busy to give 3 hours per week.” You might be the kind of person who says, “3 hours, no problem, I love volunteering, makes me feel great! I love to see the looks on the faces of those I’m helping.” In both cases, a person’s belief system dictates to them how they would feel if they had to give 3 hours of their time. One person might be wishing they were somewhere else the whole time while the other person couldn’t imagine being or doing anything better than giving that 3 hours to other people. The important distinction between those two is the different belief systems those two people have and, therefore, what they will get in return from the experience. So, for clarification, and this is a point that is rarely, if ever, taught when it comes to the act of giving, there are two channels of potential energy with every act. There is the outflow of energy leaving the giver, and then there is the inflow of some kind of energy coming back to the giver. There is the inflow of energy to the receiver and an outflow of energy from the receiver. What is never taught, however, is just how important the flow of both sides of that transaction are in the grand scheme of things. You cant have energy only flowing in only one direction, although quite often this is the case. For any system to be considered alive and healthy, there must be an inflow and an outflow. For your body to be healthy, there must be energy in in the form of nutrients, hydration, vitamins and minerals, and light, and there must also be an outflow of energy in the form of work by your body, excreting of the waste materials that your body has used up, and there should be some equilibrium, or balance, between the two over time. Where there is an imbalance in any one of those channels, there is dis-ease or illness, a lack of health. So, the first law (if you will) about giving is that there must be an outflow and an inflow. For there to be real benefit, there must be an openness to giving freely, but there must also be an openness to receiving the equal and opposite benefits of that giving. And we’ll talk about this more as the show progresses.

The second part of the ‘science of giving’, as I like to call it, is tied to something I talked about heavily in that 3 part series I did called the Science of Success where I talked about how words and thoughts are the language of the brain and emotions are the language of the mind and body. Remember, we distinguished between the brain and the mind by saying that the brain was that big mass of gray matter in your cranium that stores memories and makes calculations, while your mind is the more fluid and somewhat non-locatable collaboration between your brain, your body, and your emotions. The words that we use all have an electrical charge to them based on the meaning those words have for us. Those electrical charges are linked to the emotions triggered by our words, and our actions, and then translated by the mind and body as chemical reactions we call emotions. Why is this important and why do I keep bringing it up over and over in these episodes? Because what you believe, what you think, what you say, and how you feel about all of it dictates what gets programmed into your reticular activating system to either be on the lookout for as a security threat, or to totally zone out as unimportant to our survival. When you give, depending on how you feel about the act of giving, you are triggering a whole set of chemical reactions in your body, either good or bad, and that will determine what gets programmed into your RAS. Now, most people, when they give, get a nice hit of the pleasure hormone oxytocin. This is the chemical released in the body during sex, breast feeding, and other pleasurable activities. The great thing about oxytocin being released is that its release triggers your brain and body to want to release more of it. So, in essence, the thing makes the thing do more of that thing. When you give of yourself, depending on how you feel about the act of giving, you’re essentially doing for the brain and body what having sex does for your brain and body. If I need to bring you up to speed because maybe its been a while, that’s a good thing! Sex is good for your brain and body! It keeps you happy, healthy, young, connected, motivated, inspired, and more enthusiastic about life in general. Once you’ve tried it, you want to try it again, and again, and again! And so it is with giving. Once you do it, whether it be giving of your money, your time, your effort, or any of the other resources you have at your disposal, most people feel really good about it and they want to do it again, and again, and again. As long as you can tie good emotions to the act, then you reap the awesome benefits of giving. If giving does NOT make you feel good inside, then you very likely have some kind of personality disorder like sociopathy, narcissism, or you have some kind of unhealthy link in your past to the act of giving.

So the phrase, the more you give, the more you get is really only half of the story. The real statement should be something more like, ‘the more you give, the more you get, as long as you feel good about the act of giving, are open to also receiving, and you believe that you have more than enough to give and by giving you are keeping the flow going.’ Of course, that kind of saying is way too long and tedious to make for a fun little phrase, but it’s the reality. I could talk for a couple hours about the benefits to you as a human by the act of giving, but what I really want to emphasize with this episode is the often unexplained and rarely talked about aspects linking how you feel to what you do. This is super important when it comes to giving because how you feel about it when you do, or maybe said a better way, how doing it makes you feel, will determine the benefits to you from the act of giving. “But wait Blaine, I thought the benefit of giving is in the act itself!” And you’d be right my friend, that is one of the great benefits of giving. Its ONE of the benefits of giving. There are many benefits to giving, both for the giver and the receiver. One of the benefits is simply being able to…as long as you feel good about doing it. Again, you can give away all of your stuff to Goodwill and somebody will have the opportunity to buy it at a relatively low cost. That’s a one way benefit. It’s a benefit to the receiver of your giving spirit. But if giving away all of your stuff made you feel like shit, then it was a one way transaction that may benefit somebody down the line, but the flow has stopped with you. I gave away lots of stuff in my divorce, stuff I didn’t really want to give away at the time. It was stuff that represented lots of my life energy, hard work, a big part of my net worth, good memories, dreams, goals, desires, and money. We could say that that’s not the same type of giving we’re talking about because I wasn’t giving of my stuff freely, it was actually being taken from me by force of law. My point about that is that I could very easily attach bad emotions and memories to the word ‘giving’, and the act of giving if I stayed in that negative emotion of what I told myself at the time was me ‘giving’ away all my stuff! Thankfully, having the knowledge that I had about all of this stuff I was able to tell myself even before I gave it away that it was like a benevolent donation that I was giving and that it was simply the universe telling me just how wealthy I actually was. It allowed me to focus on what I did have, which was two awesome boys that I adore, my health, my body, my arms and legs, my intellect, my brain, my ability to create, my businesses, my future and on and on that list went for me at the time.

And yes, I made a list! I knew that for me to be able to give away what was essentially half of my life’s work and feel good about it, I needed a list of benefits so that I could feel good about it. Again, we ask ’why is this important?’ This is important for several reasons. One, giving is obviously beneficial for the receiver when it is done regularly and by many people. If more people feel really good when they give, regardless of what they’re giving, they’ll give more and more often. If they don’t feel good about it, they aren’t going to do it or they’ll do it only out of guilt or fear, and they’ll do it begrudgingly. This means a one way benefit. A benefit for the receiver only. For giving to be truly powerful, there must be a two way benefit. The receiver receives something, and the giver also receives something, even if only a wonderful feeling and the release of oxytocin. To be clear, the giver does not have to receive something directly from the receiver of their generosity. That’s not the way the law of giving and receiving works. The way it works is that by giving, you are activating the law. By giving, you are telling yourself just how rich in that resource you are and how joyful you feel when you give it away. You don’t have to keep score; you don’t have to expect a return from the very person you give $5 to. That’s not it. But here is the secret friends, you must be open to receiving your end of this benevolent universal transaction! When you give and you activate the law of giving and receiving, you are going to get back in return more than you gave. That’s simply the way it works. If you ask me how, the only thing I can tell you is that that’s the way nature works and, therefore, the way the universe works. When you give a plant water, the plant takes the water and returns more buds, more leaves, more flowers, more oxygen. When you give your body good nutrients, it gives you back more health and vitality. When you give your muscles a challenge, like lifting heavy weights, they return to you muscles that are stronger than they were before. We can look all around in nature and see this law in action because its directly tied to the universal law of currents or flow. We can look in our bodies and see that for life itself, there must be a constant give and take of oxygen, blood, and nutrients. Fresh oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. The carbon dioxide we exhale is fresh air to the plants and trees around us. There is a constant flow of energy and wherever that flow or energy is stopped, or hoarded, decay and death of that energy are certain. Nature abhors a vacuum so where something is put out into the world but not allowed to return, nature destroys or fills it with its own plan. But wherever there is flow or currents of energy in nature, there is health, vitality, expansion, growth, and energy.

So lets get into how to activate this universal the right way and for the benefit of all. As we just talked about, its vitally important to understand this concept of currents and flow. Even though we tend to refer to this idea as the law of giving and receiving, its really just the law of giving because even in our receiving, we are simply allowing someone, something, or somewhere else to give. When we receive a gift, we area allowing the giver of that gift the opportunity to reap the wonderful benefits of giving. If we turn the gift down, we stop the flow by not allowing the giver to also receive. So, when we open ourselves to receiving, we are allowing the current of giving to continue. The law of giving naturally entails the act of receiving then because to give means allowing something to be given to you as well, and from any direction and any source. Its when we try to control the direction of our receiving that we insert negative emotions into this benevolent universal transaction, and we create stagnation. Where there is anger, fear, hatred, expectation, or any other form of negative energy around the act of giving, there is a stoppage of the flow of energy. If you give with the expectation of return from the direction you gave, that is called a business transaction and is not the same as giving with no expectation. I’m not advocating for you to work with no expectation of getting paid my friends, please don’t misunderstand how this works. That would simply be bad business. What I am advocating, however, is that whatever you seek to be, do, have, and experience in your life, give it to someone else first. “WHAAAAAAT! You’re telling me that if I wanna be rich, I need to make somebody else rich first?!” What I am saying is that if you want to have or experience more of something, give as if you were already abundant in that resource and the world will return more of that resource to you in return, as long as you can activate the positive emotions within you around the thing you’re giving and as long as you remain open to receiving. That’s it! Its literally that simple my friends! Yes, if you want to experience more financial abundance in your life, create bigger channels of abundance in your world. The way to do that is the same way you’d build up your biceps. You’d go to the gym, stretch out, find some weights, lift them, curl them, do pull ups, and some cables to break down the muscle fibers. Then you’ll go home and make yourself a nice healthy meal or protein smoothie, drink lots of water, get lots of rest, and over time your muscles will grow bigger to handle the increased load you placed on them at the gym that day. You don’t curl some weights one time and then stare at your biceps demanding that they grow. You give your time and energy, you feed the muscle, you have some faith that its working, and then you do it again next week. Over time your biceps will grow to handle the increased load.

It works the same with giving. If you want a bigger bank account, you go to the bank, you pull out $100 dollars, you go to a restaurant, you find somebody eating dinner and you pay for their meal in secret. You have just sent out $100 into the universe with happy joyful emotions and chemical reactions in your body. You’ve just given instructions to your subconscious mind that you’re rich enough to do that, meaning you have more than enough, which means you’ve programmed your RAS to be on the lookout for more evidence that you have more than enough, which means you’ll begin to see more of it in your life, you’ll begin attracting more opportunities in your direction, and what you’ve also done is you’ve activated the law of giving which means you will be given at least that much in return and in some form. Now, as I’ve already mentioned, it can come in any form and in any direction. When we give, we don’t then wait for somebody to come out of the shadows and hand us $200. No, we give freely with no expectations because we reap the benefits of the good feelings we get when we do. But we are also very open to allowing the universe to deliver more to us in return in any form and from any direction…and it always does! What most people are simply horrible at doing is connecting their good to their giving. Meaning, keeping a regular gratitude list to recognize when good things come your way. When good things come your way and you don’t recognize them, in a way you are stopping the flow of goodness in your direction. You have to become a super sleuth of goodness and abundance and start to recognize what we call in the coaching program, evidence of success. When you see a dollar laying on the ground and pick it up you have a choice. You can pick it up and chuckle devilishly as you tell yourself, “oh well, one person’s lack of awareness is my benefit”, or you can pick it up and say to yourself, “thank you universe! Thanks for showing me just how abundant I am and showing me that it comes in from all directions.” When you reach into the pocket of a coat that you haven’t worn in a year and find a $20 bill, evidence of the law. When you get a credit in the mail on a bill you had completely forgotten about, evidence of the law. When you get a request to join a new appraiser panel and it turns out to be a good one, evidence of the law. When an old friend you haven’t heard from in years reaches out to you, evidence of the law. When you find some hidden expenses in your business that you can eliminate and save that money forever going forward, evidence of the law. When you get a clean bill of health from the doctor, evidence of the law friends! Its not an exact exchange of medium for medium. You don’t always donate money and get money donated back to you in return. No, you donate currency, which means a form or current or energy, and then you’ve activated the law of giving. The law of giving basically says, whatever you give of freely and joyfully will be returned to you in some form multiplied.

Why multiplied? Well, just like the bicep example, whatever you exercise and feed grows. When you exercise your feelings of abundance and wealth and you send it out into the world happily and with no expectations, the universe gives back to you more to match your feelings and then you have more to give. You see, most people get this backwards. Most people say, “when I have $X, I’ll start giving.” I have bills right now so I’ll wait until those are paid off and then I’m going to start giving. That’s not the way it works. Maybe you don’t feel you can give financially, ok, that’s fine. Just know that you are programming your subconscious with the message that there is not enough to go around yet so hoard. If you don’t feel you can give of your money, that’s ok, you’ll likely always be in that state financially, but you can also give of your other resources. You can give your time, your smile, your helpful advice, your kind words, your uplifting words to another person, whatever it might be. Whatever you give gets returned to you in some form multiplied. The better message is that whatever you want to be, do, have, or experience, give to another. If you want more love, you must give more love. If you want more affection, you must find a way to give it first and have no expectations of the direction it can come from. If you want better clients, you have to become a better client first, give more of yourself in some direction, and its is likely more and better clients will come your way. Its not a guarantee, but what is guaranteed is that when you give, the energy is returned to you in some form multiplied over time. It never fails my friends! And its all tied to what we discussed in the science of success series regarding what you tell yourself about what is possible, what you’re capable of, what you have, what you’re grateful for, and what you have to give. When you give and you feel good about it, you activate the law. When you decide to give of your finances, it is imperative that you give happily and with excitement knowing full well that its because you have more than enough, your gift will make somebody else’s life better, and that you have a gift of your own coming your way at some point in the future and it could look like anything! You have to constantly be tuned into your gifts, your gratitude, the flow of abundance in your direction, and just how healthy, happy, prosperous and profitable you already are. If you have bad feelings about it when you do it, you stop the current and taint the whole process.

I’ll give you another little tip to help you on your way to health and wealth. When you pay expenses, do it with a mantra. When you pay bills, do it with a mantra. Whats a mantra? Any word or phrase you say to yourself to activate an emotion or a particular state within yourself. When you are uploading an appraisal file to a portal and you have to pay a $10 or $20 upload fee, don’t bitch about it friends, that only activates negative emotions and its telling your subconscious how poor you are and how you’re being robbed. The world isnt fair! there’s not enough to go around! Somebody doesn’t deserve this money! No, when you pay that fee thank whomever you are paying for reminding you just how rich and lucky you are that you have the $10 or $20 to even do that! Activate the law of giving and think of the $10 or $20 as a donation from your wealth fund! Remember, how you feel about things and the programming you do internally will determine what you experience externally! You create your outer world with your inner world. When you get upset about bills, expenses, portal fees, taxes, or any other cost of doing business, you’re telling yourself subconsciously that there is not enough and that things aren’t fair. Instead, thank the bills, the expenses, the taxes, and everything else as a reminder of just how much you have and how lucky you are to have it. By doing that, you are activating the law of giving, you’re turning the bills and expenses into benevolent donations in your mind and your heart, and then you get some kind of benevolent return from the expense. Paying bills for me is not an unhappy and stressful time, it’s a time of recognition and evidence of success! I pay bills and I thank every single one of them for giving me the recognition that I have the heat from the gas bill, the lights from the electric bill, my house from the tax bill and mortgage payment, and I give all of them freely in the recognition that my payment is sending the money I traded my life energy for out into the world to help somebody else and I bless it. I feel good when I pay bills because it reminds me that I have it to give and, do you know what happens? More of it magically comes to me everybody month and in bigger amounts and in different forms.

Give my friends! Give of your time, your money, your energy, your words, your experience and expertise, your uplifting attitude, and all of the other resources you have. Give like you’ll have more to give next month and trust that you will. Give with happiness and joy, not anxiety and fear. Start the flow and keep it going. Give and be open to receiving. Let others feel the great feeling of giving by being a good receiver. And become a master of seeing the evidence of your abundance all around you! I want to thank you for giving me the wonderful gift of your time my friends! In case you haven’t figured it out yet, you have been allowing me for the past year and a half give of my time, my knowledge, my viewpoints, my expertise, and my love for doing so. By allowing me to do that you have also, in turn, allowed me to receive the amazing benefits I get every time I write and record an episode. Every time somebody posts a kind word on social media. Every time somebody reaches out to me privately to compliment me on a show. Every time somebody reaches out and says they’ve put into practice something I talked about or taught on the show and they’re reaping the benefits. All of those things are the return I get for doing this show and I have all of you to thank for allowing me to do that. This show is the perfect example of the law of giving and we’ve both been able to hopefully reap the benefits of the law my friends. From the bottom of my heart to the top of yours, I thank you! And until next week, I’m out…