Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Redefining High Performance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me every week as I share short, quick episodes. If you’re new, finding us for the very first time, every week I bring to you a 10-minute or less podcast that just brings out some key ideas, something actionable that you can take and use within your week. The exception to that is about once a month, I bring a long-form interview and this is somebody who is incredible. The guests that I’ve had just bring a unique perspective to the conversation of high performance, and so every once in a while, we’ll mix one of those in, but today I want to talk to you in the next few minutes over the benefits of service.
Yeah, it’s that time of year, but I’ll tell you what’s gotten me thinking about this. My second child, Tanner. My son is a junior in high school. He’s involved in his school student council, and during the month of December they have a program that they call “Do Good December.” Well, this year, Tanner is in charge of organizing a large initiative within that called Chuck Your Change. So they’re at every major school event asking people to donate and gathering change, Venmo, whatever it is, and they raise a ton of money. They go and purchase Christmas for families in need. And it’s just an awesome experience, and I’m watching the excitement in his experience, the way that he participated last year and had a chance to deliver Christmas, and just the joy that it brought. My older daughter, Andie, did the same thing with that same student council, and it reminded me of probably my favorite Christmas memory. When I was in high school, I was involved in a student leadership program called DECA. I was involved in student council too, but our DECA leadership group decided. that we were going to do something around Christmas. My friend Shannon said her church had families that they were adopting. And so, as a DECA organization, we decided to adopt a family. It was the Garcia family. They lived in downtown Denver. Father, mother, and 3 little kids. And so they gave us all the information, sizes of the kids’ needs in the home, wish lists, all the things, and we went to work asking everybody we could for money, right? Knocking on doors, asking parents, teachers, friends, businesses, whatever it was. And we raised a lot of money, and we went and purchased Christmas for the Garcia family. We took my mom’s Tahoe, we dropped all the seats down, loaded it all up in this Tahoe. And on Christmas Eve, we drove to downtown Denver to this little home.
We went and knocked on the door. Mr. Garcia, we had arranged with him so the kids weren’t there, right? So it was just gonna be a surprise. We started bringing Christmas. Well, as I carried in this first stack of presents to put under their Christmas tree.
I walked over, and there was this little Charlie Brown Christmas tree in the corner. And it had one present underneath the tree. And the present had a name on it, and it was not the name of the parents or the name of the kids, because I knew those names. And I was just curious, and so I went over, as I was walking out the door, I asked Mr. Garcia, I said, I noticed a present, but it’s not for you. Who’s the present for? And he said that’s for one of our neighbors. They don’t have money for Christmas.
And in my just reactive, I don’t know, 18-year-old state, I said, but you don’t have money for Christmas. And he said, “that’s okay because we’ve found that Christmas is more enjoyable when you give to other people.?
That line will always stay with me, because it reshaped my perspective. It helped me to see a truth that I had not seen before.
And I don’t think that’s just true around Christmas. In fact, I started to do some research to look at what happens. When you serve, when you give, when you reach out to other people it not just benefits to the other person. Obviously, there’s benefits there, right? There are people in need, there are people who need our help, there are people who would benefit from you reaching out, from you doing something, from you providing something, from you just showing up in love whatever it is, they’re gonna benefit in a huge way, but you’re gonna benefit. I would argue even more. So, research has shown that.
When you serve other people, there’s a natural benefit of you actually come away happier. Right? They call it the helper’s high. But as you serve other people, it releases positive chemicals, oxytocin, dopamine, other things within your brain that help you to feel joy, that help you to feel good. And so sometimes we need to do that to get outside of ourselves. Sometimes we need to do that to bring purpose and joy in ourselves. I once met a lady who told me that after her divorce, she was struggling with depression, right? And she finally realized she needed to go serve, and she got out of bed. For the first time in 3 days, and she went to a soup kitchen, and she just started serving people, and she said she did that every day for almost 45 days before she really felt like, this new sense of self and sense of purpose, and it’s fantastic. It’s gonna make you feel happy.
It’s also going to make you healthier. They’ve done studies that show that you are healthier when you serve other people. Your body’s immune system is protected, your ability to fight off and deal with pain, all these things, they diminish.
You will be healthier. And one of the most interesting findings to me, there was a study that was done at the University of Kent in southern England. And they did this study where they did what’s called a cooperation game. What they did is they divided people, they have this group of people, let’s say it’s 60, I don’t remember the number in the study, and they gave them all a certain amount of money. And what they would do is they would double that money. Well, they’d ask everybody to contribute their full amount of money into the pot, and then they would double the pot and then they divide it evenly among the people of this game. And the idea would be that if everybody donated equally, everybody would incrementally increase their money, right? It was an equal playing field. But over the course of the game, there were some people who were crafty, right? They didn’t donate their full portion into the pot, but then they would take their full portion from the pot in an attempt to get ahead. So the game played out. And then, at the end of it, they divided people into groups. And they ask those groups to elect a leader. And here was the interesting finding of the study to me is almost 97% of the leaders who were elected were the people who gave the very most in the cooperation game, and the study concluded by saying, when people see you give, when they see you serve, they automatically view you as a leader. So it’s not just that you’re happier, that you’re healthier, you actually increase your influence as a leader, because there’s something in that. When I see you, and I know you’re a good person, I automatically trust you, I feel good around you, I want to be around you, it’s attractive. That’s influence.
And so, this year, as we come into this holiday season I want you to think about how you can serve, who you can serve.
And understand that the why is not just for them, but it’s actually going to benefit you. Service serves the server. And I hope that you’ll start doing that over the next few weeks. It’s gonna bring you an immense amount of joy, it’s gonna make you healthier. It’s gonna increase your influence, and it’s gonna bless the lives of people around you.
I hope everyone has an incredible holiday season. Thank you very much for listening, and I will be back again next week.