Holiday Gift Giving: Are you a Giver or a Taker?
There’s no doubt that holidays can be over commercialized. Black Friday starts earlier than ever in the quest for the right gift at a bargain price. But let’s take a step back and examine our innate personality traits that contribute to our being either a natural giver or a natural taker.
It turns out that our brains are hard wired toward one dimension or the other, according to Robert Moss, Ph.D. He says that the brain processes and encodes information about what feels positive or negative. Giver and taker relationship patterns stem from early positive and negative experiences, becoming encoded in the brain toward lifetime patterns. Takers associate positive emotions with taking power, control, attention, or material things. Givers associate positive emotions with giving to others.
Adam Grant, author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, adds a third dimension. He divides people into givers, takers and matchers. Takers are people who try to get as much as possible and contribute as little as possible in return, in order to achieve their goals. Givers do so without any strings attached. Givers help people by doing such things as giving advice, sharing knowledge or volunteering. However, few of us are purely takers or givers. Most of us are in the middle group, who are matchers. A matcher is somebody who tries to maintain an even balance of give and take. They keep score of exchanges, so that everything is right and fair.
His research focused on which group tends to be more successful in the workplace. Surprisingly, givers were in both the top and bottom tiers of successful workers. Givers build a stronger social network than matchers. Takers also build broad networks but they tend to burn their bridges and have to find new people to exploit. The difference between successful givers and failed givers is the degree to which they give of themselves. Giving can lead to burnout.
Givers are advised to set boundaries. Try to help some people, some of the time; not all people, all of the time. Grant talks about the five-minute favor: offer something of value to this person that will take five minutes or less. Be concerned about helping others, but keep your own interests in mind. This is a strategy that will keep you from running out of energy, time and resources.
Givers need to protect themselves from takers. They would be wise to determine if this person is a giver, a taker or a matcher. So how do you spot a taker? Takers are described as narcissistic, self serving and entitled. They use terms like “I” and “me” as opposed to “us” and “we.” They prefer to be photographed alone. Don’t look at how influential they are, but look instead at how they treat their subordinates, the people who work for them. Are they treated with respect?
If you’d like to know what your style is, visit Grant’s website, Giveandtake.com and complete the self assessment. I found that I am 60% Giver, 20% Taker and 20% Matcher. This came as no surprise given my chosen profession as a counselor. But it does explain why I sometimes obsess about purchasing the right holiday gift.