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Are you a giver or a taker?
“My father said there were two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. The takers may eat better, but the givers sleep better.”
Marlo Thomas
It is the old wisdom that says that fundamentally there are two types of people in this world, givers and takers.
The crucial question, though, is which one are you?
Let us first of all investigate what giving and taking actually means. As we have already seen the right action is one where you create a win-win scenario between you as an individual and everything else which is called the collective.
If you are a giver it means that over a period of time you are creating a bigger win for everything around you than you are for yourself. You are selfless.
So what is wrong with this approach?
The problem is that this lifestyle is not sustainable and as a result it can only be maintained for a certain period of time.
If you imagine your life as being like a rechargeable battery then the charge of a giver will tend to run down until they are no longer able to give any more.
For this reason you will find that most people who suffer nervous breakdowns tend to be givers by nature.
They quite literally want to help others and forget to help themselves.
"Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, "What's in it for me?"
Brian Tracy
If you are a taker it means that over a period of time you are trying to create a bigger win for yourself than for everything around you. You are selfish. This tactic often works in the short-term but when people become aware of your true colours this strategy does not work well in the long term.
The internet has meant that selfish short-term strategies to, say, defraud people or provide a poor service cannot last for long because everyone gets to know about it. The long-term damage to a person’s reputation is always greater than the short-term gain.
Achieving balance is about balancing the give and take. People tend to be naturally one way or the other and so it is necessary to learn new habits, like a right-footed footballer learning to kick with his left foot. A sustainable lifestyle is always more productive in the long term than an unbalanced lifestyle which can only last in the short-term.
Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life's deepest joy: true fulfilment
The natural frequency and flow of life
If you tapped a tuning fork you would find that it vibrates at a certain frequency specific to that tuning fork, known as the resonant frequency. The natural frequency would depend on the characteristics of the tuning fork.
If you imagine all of us to be like unique tuning forks it can be seen that each of us has our own natural frequency. Becoming aware of your frequency is the first stage to actually living in harmony with it.
So what does the natural frequency mean?
The first component of your natural frequency is timing. Any comedian will tell you that it is often the timing more than the content that will make people laugh.
Put simply when you do things is just as important as what you are doing.
Forcing the pace and trying to move to fast is a common mistake people make and is often caused by a lack of awareness and sensitivity to what is happening around that person.
Life behaves in exactly the opposite way to what you would expect. Forcing the pace slows you down whilst going with the flow speeds you up. The choice on timing is always yours.
In any given moment we have already seen that there is only one best action that forms the ‘win-win’ between the individual and the collective.
In terms of what you do the range of how you react to a given situation is determined by the range of possible actions and reactions in your ‘toolbox’ and your choice of which one to apply.
Some people always react in the same way to certain situations. This could mean that they have a limited number of possible reactions available to them and tend to follow conditioned responses in autopilot mode.
Alternatively, someone may simply always choose the same way to react despite having the ability to react in lots of different ways.
Either way, what you do or how relevant and appropriate it is to your environment determines how close you are to your natural frequency.
Flowing with the natural frequency of life means choosing the right action at the right time.
Tuning into and applying your unique natural frequency is the key to achieving balance.
So how can I live in tune with my natural frequency?
The first step is to acknowledge and become aware that the natural frequency exists.
The second step is to listen carefully to the feedback that is happening all around you. Learn to become the owl that looks and listens, sits in the tree and observes and becomes more aware of its environment.
Achieving Balance involves adapting and connecting your own actions with the ever-changing environment in which you find yourself.
Physicists talk about causality, which is the relationship between cause and the effect. In essence, you need to become more aware of the relationship between what you are doing and the effect it is having on everything around you.
The third step is to work on increasing the possible number of actions and reactions that you have in your ‘toolbox’ so that you have a better chance of choosing an action that is the most appropriate for any given situation.
The fourth step is to introduce more adaptability, flexibility and context into your actions and reactions so that you do not always behave in the same way and what you do is more in tune with and more appropriate to the situation you are in. Always make your choices consciously and become more aware of conditioned, reflex responses.
Finally, you need to become more conscious of the timing and fine-tune it. If you are more aware of the natural flow of things you can achieve more with less effort. The harder you push the more resistance there is. You will find an optimum pace which is the balance between pushing and not pushing. When you are at the natural frequency you will know it instinctively, it just feels right.
In life you will always meet obstacles. Everyone has tried to smash these down by ‘banging your head against a brick wall’. The natural frequency is all about being aware of the obstacles but flowing around them like a river along the path of least resistance, the path of least effort. Work smarter, not harder.
Your life should flow, at your natural frequency, along the path of least resistance, like a river, going around the obstacles towards your destination to fulfil your destiny.
Another aspect of the natural flow is whether you are ‘chasing’ life or ‘attracting’ it.
It is the old adage that if you are chasing after a partner then you cannot find one. It is as though you have a sign on your forehead saying you are desperate. On the other hand when you have a partner you suddenly receive loads of offers from prospective partners.
Forcing the pace, or chasing life, has the effect of reducing the number of options open to you whereas tuning in to your natural frequency, or attracting life, has the effect of increasing the number of options available to you. In a nutshell, you become a stronger and stronger magnet the more in tune you are with your natural frequency.
If you become perfectly in tune with your natural frequency you become a magnet of infinite power and all options become available to you, the field of all possibilities.