Yes, I was once a “Taker.” No more! In this episode I’ll explain what a Taker is and how to be more of a Giver.
Tap here to take the quiz: https://www.adamgrant.net/quizzes/give-and-take-quiz/
Tyler Small: Tyler, he said, whenever we talk, you always end up asking me for something and it makes me feel so awkward. I realized in that moment I was a taker. I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence. And what I just described was a conversation I had with a friend a while back and I realized, Oh my goodness, I'm a taker.
[00:00:29]And so I really started working on being more of a giver. Okay. And in terms of Adam Grant's book, Give And Take, I just want to describe the three different types of people that he talks about in the book. And then I wanted to share with you a resource and what I did with it.
[00:00:49]First, he talks about givers, the people who generally contribute to a relationship and they always want to help other people. Takers, they may say that they want to help other people, but they're really taking away from all of their relationships systematically. If someone's there to give they'll take, if someone else is there to take, they'll try and take from them. And so they generally drain their relationships.
[00:01:18] Matchers are somewhere in between. Where they believe that whatever the other person is willing to give they'll give that amount. So it's more of a trade of value. If the other person has given them something, they feel like they need to reciprocate. But only if someone gives them something. Or if they do contribute something to the relationship, then they feel like the other person owes them something in return. It's transactional.
[00:01:48] So givers, takers, and matchers. There's a quiz on Adam Grant's website that you can take to find out if you're more of a giver taker or a matcher, encourage you to take that.
[00:01:59]There's a link in the description of this episode to that quiz it only takes a couple of minutes to fill out.
[00:02:06] So one of the really interesting parts about all this I wanted to include is that a cross industries that Adam has studied, givers tend to be the top performers and they also tend to be the bottom performers.
[00:02:22] How could that be? So he talks about how givers on the bottom tend to be taken advantage of. Givers on the bottom, don't really distinguish other givers from takers or matchers.
[00:02:36] So what happens to these givers on the bottom? Is that takers find them and take advantage of them. They take from the givers and they take, while the giver says, Oh, I like to help people. I should help. It's not a healthy situation. And they end up killing their careers. Their family lives.
[00:02:58] Every element of their lives can end up being destroyed as they sacrifice everything for takers who are basically black holes.
[00:03:09] And while the givers on the top are the ones who are very careful to not become the doormat, the givers on the top will give to a taker. And as soon as they realize that the taker is systematically take, and that's the type of person they are. They shy away from that relationship. And they conserve their resources to give to others, especially who they find to be givers, other givers, and they create strong relationships with other givers.
[00:03:43]And that's why they succeed because in order to have a high functioning relationship you have to have two givers. That's the most effective, highest efficiency relationship that you can have two givers.
[00:03:57]And so you can imagine that when I found out I was a taker, I was quite a bit disturbed by this. I had actually read Adam Grant's book. Not that it wasn't a great book. Like I loved it, but I just didn't have the knowledge right after that, until someone called me out on it. In different words, my friend had said, Tyler, you are a taker.
[00:04:20] So what did I do? I went back and read the book again. And after reading the book again, I set some very specific goals. And of course, after reading the first time I wanted to be more of a giver, but, unfortunately reading books, doesn't always do it for us, that's why I created the Five-star Approach as a simple system.
[00:04:41] But anyway, I set some very specific goals and luckily with the feedback of a friend who really cared about me, I was able to see that I had this pattern of ask ask, ask, and as I set those specific goals, I set out to change who I was to change how I interacted with others.
[00:05:03]So after I got that feedback from my friend, Was it about the same time that I started using the Five-star Approach for more of my relationships. And I found that by using the Five-star Approach, I was able to become more of a giver if provided the context and the thinking patterns I needed in order to quickly turn around all those relationships.
[00:05:30] What was the result? The result was quite amazing. As I started using the five-star approach to become more of a giver. I started hearing something unique. I noticed several times a day, people were telling me, thank you so much, Tyler.
[00:05:47] And I realized I had done it. I'd become a giver. And I owed it all to the Five-star Approach and people like Adam Grant and my friend who gave me more context to see a blind spot that I didn't know about before. So thanks Adam Grant, and thanks friend, who I'll definitely share this episode with I'm Tyler Small, and this is Hacking Emotional Intelligence.