4 Chapter Four: Standing tall without casting a shadow on others

Everyone wants to feel respected and valued. One of the most important things you can do in your life is to help people feel that way—and avoid making them feel small and unappreciated. Much of Dale Carnegie’s good book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (a strange title for a book I believe is mostly about selflessness) deals with personal habits that will help you keep your ego in check and let you help others see their value and feel important. While I commend his advice to you for the pure purpose of helping others feel loved, you should know that, as Carnegie suggests, making others feel loved tends to make them feel love for you, trusting others tends to make them trust you, and making others feel important tends to make them think you are important. For these reasons and others, you will do well to honestly and authentically make others feel valued.

The challenge is that even your very presence can make others feel less important. Consider the children’s story, Hello, Great Big Bullfrog! by Colin West, in which the bullfrog feels smaller and smaller as larger and larger animals arrive. The larger animals do nothing but appear, but simply being there is diminishing to the bullfrog’s spirit (more about his role in the next chapter). At the end of the story we learn that anyone can be in the larger role. You will find yourself in both the larger and the smaller role at different points in your life. The trick is to be able to handle each well.

It is also true that simply sharing your gifts can make people feel smaller and less important. This is a very hard line to walk, because I don’t mean to suggest that you should not develop and apply—and enjoy—your areas of giftedness. You should simply be aware that whenever you get the highest grade on a test, score the most points in a game or create something of beauty, others may feel less accomplished, and so less important, as a result. This doesn’t mean not to try. If people perceive you are pulling back for their sake, they will feel disrespected—and you will not be honoring the talents and gifts you have. The issue is more one of how and where you apply or demonstrate your gifts, and what you do with the power they give you. If you apply your gifts in ways that obviously contrast yours to those of others and demonstrates your superiority [telling your story with more accomplishments in response to them telling theirs with fewer, adding your better voice to theirs in song (as in the scene between the sisters on the cabin steps in “The Bodyguard”), joining a game you know you will dominate], that will make others feel small. You may remember Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad story, The Dream, in which Toad is onstage with an announcer saying how great he is and Frog is in the audience shrinking with each announcement until he is gone.

If, on the other hand, you apply your gifts to serve others (assisting them in learning something, solving a problem, overcoming an obstacle or otherwise succeeding at something they have identified), that can make them feel successful, honored and important—so long as you are truly serving them and not “helping” with something you have decided they need.

It is vitally important to remember that you had nothing to do with your natural gifts, nor the setting into which you were born, and so neither should be a source of pride—feeling joy and giving praise that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” is good, but pride relative to others is not. You need to discover what you are meant to do with your gifts—and your challenges. Think of your gifts as the hand you are dealt in a game of cards—you had nothing to do with its quality, so feeling pride in it makes no real sense. It is not the cards you are dealt, but how you play them—and playing a poor hand well can be as thrilling and as much an inspiration to others as playing a good hand well. But you will never be able to play any cards well if you are continually showing them off along the way. And, by the way, always keep playing until the hand is done (run through the finish line)—sometimes there are surprises, even when it seems that all is decided.

The good news is that, where people have great respect for you and your gifts, your power to build those people up is greater. In a sense, your gifts are like electricity, especially those you have in the extreme: If used humbly, carefully and lovingly, others will pick up a glow and become energized by them, but if you use them too forcefully or to show off, they will instead “shock” others and make them shrink from you. You may have heard of the book, Zapp!, by William Byham in which good managers “Zapp” (energize and empower) employees, while poor managers “Sapp” (drain and dispirit) them. It is as if you have some capacity that others recognize, and the greater your gifts, the greater the power to energize or shock. As TobyMac suggests in his song, you should seek to Speak Life—to Zapp—whenever you speak.

One last tip: sharing your failures as well as your successes, and participating in things at which others are better than you will help balance the scales, giving them the chance to feel legitimately “bigger.” This can open the path to relationships of mutual respect based on the gifts of each person. Relationships do not work very well when one party has all the respect and power. So let yourself—make yourself—play games you know you probably won’t win. You might win something more important.

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