Author: Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy

Hi there! My names is Kieran and I am your Generosity Guy-de, to assist you to find your purpose. In a charity saturated world, I am the one that will walk beside you to help you navigate through the overwhelming noise and create the kind of change that you want to see. I started out my working life in banking. I found myself in Melbourne selling financial products to financial planners. After countless meetings in which I was told how many millions of dollars they each had in funds under management, I realised I didn’t care about that. Creating more wealth for the wealthy did not motivate me. So, I decided to find what did. Through a journey of community radio and some time with World Vision promoting 40 Hour Famine and partnering with philanthropists whilst working with Opportunity International Australia, I realised that what motivates me is to inspire individuals and businesses in Australia to discover their purpose in generosity. And that through their generosity they can ending poverty, one family and one community at a time, through the power of a small loan. Providing small loans and other financial services allows families in India and Indonesia to build their own small businesses and earn reliable incomes, giving them the tools they need to break free from the poverty cycle. I am married to Ash and father to Molly, Jethro, Harvey & Willow. Life is good.

The Banquet

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“Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.” Robert Louis Stevenson

Another way to put it is, ‘you reap what you sow’, or ‘all of your chickens will come home to roost’.

If you act selfishly, keeping others at a distance, living in a zero-sum style, you will damage relationships, people and places. Over time, at some stage you will be faced with the fruit of that sort of lifestyle.

But it’s not just a negative situation. If you spend time acting generously, loving others, giving time and space for those in your life, then you will sit down to a banquet of generous, loving, timely and spacious consequences.

It can be hard to be generous. I should know, I have been talking about it for years and still have moments of utter selfishness, but even in the striving for generous acts there is a reward that comes to others and, yes, to you too. The reward is relational for sure, but also financial. (See Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take).

This reward is not the reason that we strive for generosity, but it is the fruit that comes as a result of the actions. Being generous brings good things.

You don’t know what you want

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If you had no financial restrictions and could have anything you wanted in the world, what would you do?

Buy a massive house, maybe a mansion? Cars. Cars for sure. Expensive ones, fast ones, colourful ones, ones that make other people look. Clothes as well. The nicest suits, or dresses, or whatever people wear.

How great would that be, living the dream?

But would it be great?

If you have ever moved from a small home into a larger home, you will know that, whilst it is probably nice to have more space, sometimes you will miss the smaller, more intimate life you left behind.

There are always unintended consequences for the decisions we make.

I have talked about lottery winners before, and Adrian Bayford is another example. After winning almost £150m in 2012 he bought a seven-bedroom luxury mansion with his wife. Now, with his new fiancé, he is moving back to live with his mum in the 4-bedroom house he bought for her. He longs for the simple life, how things were before he was mega rich.

We think we want more and bigger. But what we really want is family and love. You can’t buy those things. When faced with unlimited options, we don’t know what we want, but I can guarantee you that money doesn’t change you, it only makes you more of what you already are.

Or as Notorious B.I.G put it, “Mo money mo problems”.

What on earth can we do?

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Poet and novelist Hermann Hesse said,

“To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping,

to smile without hostility at people and institutions,

to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters;

to be more faithful in our work,

to show greater patience,

to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism:

all these are things we can do.”

If you are struggling with what to do, if you are unsure about what action to take next, if you don’t know where to from here, read through the quote again and pick one. All of them are acts of generosity.

There is always a problem

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I’ve been trying to find a way to explain this concept which doesn’t result in depression.

Life is struggle, challenges, unexpected problems, obstacles, sickness, tiredness, and yes, depression.

Not all the time, but often and frequently.

At the same time, life is also joy, happiness, peace, completion, overcoming, laughter, fun and yes, exhilaration. We don’t experience these things in spite of the first list, but because of them.

We can experience joy in overcoming the struggle and challenges. We can experience peace in the turmoil of unexpected problems. We can experience fun and laughter in the shadow of the obstacles. We can experience a sense of completion amongst the tiredness.

But, it never ends. There is always another struggle and challenge to replace the one you have just overcome, and sometimes there are struggles and challenges that are with us always. (Cue the depression again).

So, we learn to find joy and rest in the struggle. Because when we look back, our greatest accomplishments were completed against the wind. The things we are most proud of usually are the things we achieved when the odds were against us, it was hard and we waded through some deep, tumultuous times to get there.

Don’t let it get you down. Find a way to be grateful for the challenges which are a creating a pathway for you to overcome them and achieve more than you thought possible.

If Carbs can be complex, why can’t I?

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Simple carbohydrates can be broken down quickly by the body and used as energy, leading to a spike in energy levels.

Complex carbohydrates take longer for the body to break down and used as energy and are released gradually. Both can be useful.

Simple Carbs can be found in processed and refined sugars.

Complex carbs can be found in fruit and milk products.

That’s the layman’s definition of complex carbs, you know, the explanation that I can understand.

So, if carbohydrates can be complex, why can’t I?

People are more complex than carbohydrates, dramatically so. So why do we continue to fit people into categories, or groups, or profiles?

I can be both shallow and deep, both serious and funny, both charming and offensive, both loving and a jerk, and everything else in between. Certainly I try to spend most of my time in the more positive areas of character but I’m not great all the time. Sometimes I make mistakes, I say the wrong thing, I am thoughtless in my actions, I am selfish. If you have any remnants of self awareness as you are reading this you will know that you are the same, which makes it more important that we provide grace to those around us and recognise that people, like carbohydrates, can be complex.

Let’s not write someone off because they said or did the wrong thing once – give them grace and boundaries, and invite them to try again.

The Generosity of Confidence

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“Confidence is your ability to see yourself as flawed, as imperfect, but still hold yourself in high regard.” – Esther Perel, quoting a friend.

For some, confidence is all about bravado. About ‘faking it til you make it’. About focusing only on the good things and covering over anything that is bad so that no one sees it, and so it doesn’t exist. It is strength. It is power. It is arrogance.

They also would consider humility a weakness, and something to be avoided at all costs because you ‘cannot be strong and humble’.

I strongly disagree.

There is a strength that comes with being self-aware enough to know that you are flawed, and you are imperfect, but at the same time you can be confident in who you are and what you bring.

Failing to recognise your flaws and imperfections is not strength, or confidence. That is weakness. Everyone else can see it. Even if you think you are excellent at hiding it, it seeps out. Everyone knows you are flawed and imperfect. Don’t kid yourself, because you would be the only person you are kidding.

This humble strength is innately generous. It gives you space to recognise that you aren’t what you want to be yet, but even so, who you are right now is awesome. You can be confident in that.

We All Lose

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If you line up ten people and ask them to tell a story about the worst thing that has ever happened to them, you will notice two things…

  1. Some people go through some incredibly heavy stuff
  2. Everyone has lost something or someone, or had something or someone taken from them

If you have gone through something traumatic, firstly, I’m really sorry that has happened to you, but also you are not unique. We all have some level of trauma in life eventually and it’s a waste of time trying to compare who has had the most trauma or the hardest life, because whilst someone else may have technically had a harder time, it does not diminish the challenges you have faced. Life is hard.

The real key is what you do with those challenges. Do you let them overwhelm you and break you down, or do you use them as fuel to grow in spite of the obstacles? Sounds simple, but certainly not easy.

There is the phenomenon of Post Traumatic Growth which can occur. Unfortunately, for it to happen there needs to be trauma, and then a heck of a lot of work to turn it into something beautiful. But loss and tragedy don’t automatically mean things will stay negative and bad in life. Sometimes they can be the catalyst for the greatest things.

We all lose something, and/or have something taken away from us. It is how we live in and through that tragedy that creates what type of life we have.

But where are the sea lions?

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“I made the booking and didn’t know what was going to happen” a Friend told me, when describing a trip she had organised to swim with sea lions in the ocean.

It turned out to be a wonderful day at a beautiful spot, but no sea lions turned up. Undeterred, she said “sometimes the sea lions don’t swim with you.”

The truth of that became embedded in my mind and is something that I come back to regularly. It captures our world perfectly and flies in the face of what we think we can control.

You can do everything within your power; make the booking, turn up at the right time, wear the right gear, have the right mindset, but in the end there are things that are outside of your control that can get in the way. Sometimes sea lions don’t operate on our schedule or according to our wishes.

In response to that we could waste time and energy cursing the sea lions, or our bad luck because we missed out, but generally the only thing that we can do is to accept that sometimes sea lions don’t swim with us.

It is highly likely that in any one area of your life right now, something outside of your control is stopping you from doing something that you want to do, perhaps they are sea lions, perhaps something else – are your cursing or accepting?

Remember, sea lions run on their own schedule.

Your Unhealthy Opinion

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“You always own the option of having no opinion.” – Marcus Aurelias

“Can you believe this?”

The question startled me from my own thoughts – I don’t remember what I was thinking about because of the interruption, but I do remember that I was enjoying my thoughts. So, I started this interaction from a grumpy place.

“Believe what?” I asked tersely.

“What this politician said. They are only looking after their own interest and don’t care about anyone else. This guy is a real jerk.”

Honestly, I don’t even remember which politician this conversation was about, but I do remember feeling like this other person was trying to draw me into the drama they were experiencing in their own mind.

I’m not a fan of drama, real or perceived. I am also not a fan of someone trying to recruit me to be a party to their drams, real of perceived. I think it is a waste of time and energy.

Now, sometimes I have felt like a jerk for that and maybe like I am being heartless. When that feeling comes up though I am reminded of Marcus Aurelias and his thoughts on opinions (see the above quote).

It’s healthy to care a great deal about some things, if you don’t that’s a problem. But you don’t have to care about everything. You can’t possibly. If you did it’s likely that at some stage you would give too much energy to something you can’t change and not enough energy to something that is truly important.

The beauty is that you get to choose what you care about and have an opinion of. If something is not in your top 3 or 5 or 10 priorities, remember, you don’t need an opinion.

Get Out of Your Head

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I sometimes have what I call an ‘out of body experience’ where I almost come to terms with the fact that I can only view the world through my own eyes in this present moment, but at the same time there are billions of other people doing exactly the same thing, and this has been happening my entire life, and I assume for a long time before that (I don’t actually know, I wasn’t there but people I know were). How can I balance the entire weight of human history and everything that has ever been done with the reality that I can only experience this moment by myself in my own head. It’s like the sound of one hand clapping, or a tree falling in the woods etc.

Being inside my head is mostly boring I admit, but at times it can be a chaotic, trippy and enlightening place. The problem is that if I stay that I get so caught up in my own thoughts and feelings that I feed my selfishness and offer no value to those around me.

Maybe you can relate, or maybe for you it’s a different experience of a downward spiral of troubling thoughts, or unhappy feelings, or a land of insecurity. But generally getting stuck in your own head with your own thoughts for too long doesn’t end well.

The greatest weapon we have against selfishness, unhelpful thoughts or feelings or insecurity when we get caught in our own heads, is generosity. There is a reason that on the steps in the 12 Step Groups, is to ask their members to be of service because it helps them get out of their own heads.

When you do something for someone else it is a circuit breaker for your own thoughts and feelings. Being of use to another person stops your downward spiral, even for a moment, and helps you see that there is a whole world of people right in front of you, who you can do something for.

That is of greater value that any ‘out of body’ experience I can create for myself.