Today, I want to talk about something that is extremely important - Why we do things. I don't want to focus on what motivates you to go to work or school or do clean up after yourself, although all of those things are very important. I want to focus for a few minutes on what why we do things for other people. What is our motivation? I can already hear some of you thinking, I don't really do anything for other people. But I think you probably do and don't know it. The question I have today is why?
Is our motivation for helping others just purely to help them or is our motivation for helping other people so that we can get something in return from them? Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish why we do things.
Let me illustrate. Part of the time I was growning up we lived on a street called Sherwood in River Oaks, TX (Mom, it's definitely not Tulane as you will see). Now my brother is about 4 years younger than me and it just so happened that we had friends who lived down the street who were the same age as us. We played together a lot. When the weekend came, we always wanted to spend the night and basically asked my mom to do a kid swap. One weekend, I would go to their house and my brother's friend would come to ours and the next weekend, we would switch. So we would try to con our mother into letting us do this. How did you con her you ask? (Disclaimer - we were not exactly the world's smartest con men in those days.) We decided that if we cleaned the house top to bottom to "bless" mom that she would be in a better place to let us go. Notice that our motiviation was never really to bless mom but to get our way. Little did we know that all she wanted was for us to help and she would let us go anyway. As I said, we weren't the smartest cons and mom laughed at us all the time.
That's really cute because we were little kids right? Well, let's grow things up a little and you will see that this manipulation can really be a problem. As I have said before, I am a giver. I really like to give to others of my time, money, etc., and this is a very good thing to do. But what would it look like if I was "giving" something to someone with the expectation that they would do something for me in return? That is a really bad place because it's no longer a gift but a tool used to manipulate someone to get my way. I constantly have to check my motives to make sure that I am just giving to help. Does that surprise you? It shouldn't. We are all that way. We all have a mind that wants what it wants and it can be very easy to get off track with why we do things.
As a matter of fact, I caught myself doing this several weeks ago. It wasn't intentional on my part and when I figured it out, I was more than a little bothered. There was a situation that I really wanted to see go a certain way. Now my way wasn't a bad way to do things and ultimately I might get what I wanted all along. But during this time, I recognized that I was putting a lot of pressure on the situation and might have caused someone else pain because of it. I didn't even really understand what I was doing until I stepped back and took a look at the situation from a distance. Once I did, it was pretty easy to see what I was doing and I immediately put a stop to it.
Worse than that, I hear people tell me that their motivation for doing a certain thing is to get even with our hurt someone else. This type of conduct is terrible. I know of a certain situation where a guy says hurtful things to this other person just so he can humiliate, intimidate and manipulate them. Folks, that type of behavior just shouldn't be.
So let me ask you this. What is your motivation for the way you treat other people? Are you doing things strictly for their good or is there something inside you that is trying to get what you want from them in return? You may not even know that your motivation is wrong. When is the last time you took a step back and looked at your motiviation for the way you treat others? I bet you don't think about it much but it's important.
And that's another Opinion of the Minion
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