Tag: Conversation

Doormat

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy1 Comment

Being generous is considered to be a ‘good’ thing…generally. But what if you want to achieve greatness, or do difficult things, or have hard conversations? There must be a time to put generosity aside to live in the real world, right?

How do you avoid getting pushed around and becoming a doormat for people because you are generous?

To start with, generosity is borne from a love of people. Here’s part of what that looks like:

Generosity Creates Boundaries

There is a time when simply giving something to someone, be that money, time, freedom, will cause that person harm. It can enable them to continue down a destructive path, or to hurt themselves or others. It is a special act of generosity to create boundaries which protect others and yourself from harm. Just because someone asks you for something it doesn’t mean you have to say yes.

Saying yes to something means saying no to something else. Be intentional about what you say yes to.

Generosity Has Challenging Conversations

Being generous to people means calling them out and inviting them into growth opportunities. It drives someone to embrace the discomfort of a challenging conversation because, by doing that, it has the ability to help someone else grow.

“I love you too much to not see you grow in your humanity” Derwin Gray, former NFL Player, Pastor at Transformation Church.

Generosity Trains

Generosity creates opportunities for people to grow, develop and improve their lives. It encourages people to change, giving them options.

It is not generous to keep people trapped in a cycle of need, dependence and ignorance.

Generosity doesn’t make you a doormat. Generosity empowers you to empower others on their own journey.

We Must Look After Our Own First

Published on by Kieran Johnson - The Generosity Guy1 Comment

“Surely charity begins at home and surely we must look after our own first.”

“We must take care of our own country before we could even consider taking care of somebody else.”

In an attempt to be part of the active conversation around foreign aid and its complexity, here are a few thoughts as to why the above comments, which seem accurate, are wrong. There are so many reasons why we need to reconsider how we look at the issue of foreign aid.

Firstly, and not for nothing, but ‘charity begins at home’ actually comes from the concept that charity gets taught to kids first in their home – that’s where we learn about helping others. It’s not a statement about how our care and concern for other humans must be, first and foremost, on the people that happen to live within the same arbitrary borders as us, and anyone who doesn’t fit into that just has to wait in line.

Secondly, the more money that we put in the places that are so close to us, that would just about be considered Australia, the better off we are. Take Indonesia, for example, the more money that we can put towards their education system, creates a better educated society, increased economic growth and a more stable region. We know that Indonesia will become the 4th biggest economy in the world over the next 20 years, so it makes economic sense to help end poverty there. Surely we can all agree that increased economic growth and stability in Indonesia and the Asian region as a whole is a good thing?

As the Australian Government says:

“Helping poor people out of poverty in areas of strategic importance for Australia is also good for our own peace and stability. Of Australia’s 24 nearest neighbours, 22 are developing countries with some of them particularly fragile and vulnerable.”

Next: Instead of bemoaning about how we are ripping our farmers off, let’s look at why Foreign Aid is good for our farmers.