Rethinking Wealth and Prosperity – Community Post from @coblyn

Today it is my great pleasure to introduce a community post from Life Coach and all round lovely lady Christine Livingston. If you don’t already, please check out her blog or go chat with her on Twitter in 140 characters or less.

Christine very kindly offered her time to Give A Brick after my now infamous wish list. This first post from her is very special to me as I had no idea that my offering to help had had that much of an impact.I was just doing what I do but this post has taught me that none of us should underestimate the difference that we can make and has empowered me to keep doing what I do.  I look forward to hearing what you think but now, it’s over to Christine:

Eleanor’s generosity was what grabbed me. Before we even started to get to know one another, she just reached right out and offered me something.

No spammy sales pitch and no strings attached.

Just one decent human being who was able to get beyond herself for a moment and dare to share an idea that might be valuable to me.

Of course I sat up and took notice of her!

Givers and Takers

Folks, the world needs more Eleanors. The Givers. Those who offer themselves and their talents to the world first, ahead of considering what the world is giving them in return.

Compare them to The Takers. A current example with which we might identify the term is the Goldman Sachs bankers who are in the process of dividing up their $3.6bn first quarter bonus pool. I know that not all bankers are self-serving, heartless so and sos because I happen to know and work with some who are salt of the earth human beings. And I know that their contracts of employment, and current competitive practice commit their companies to paying them through the teeth. But they are currently being vilified as the biggest rogues of all time, accused of filling their pockets while the rest of the world pays the price for the financial service industry’s and governments’ greed and ineptitude.

But the truth is that we’re all Takers. These last years many of us, and I include myself, have been quite happy to live beyond our means from time to time in order to buy things that we coveted but couldn’t really afford. From property, to holidays, to fashion, to gadgets – we’ve happily lived what our governments told us was a prosperous life.

The craziness of this “must have” culture was driven home to me last November as I stood one Saturday in a queue waiting in the rain to get into the H&M store in London’s Oxford Street. I do like style and fashion. But I wasn’t ready to watch rail after rail of clothing being devoured like the prey of some starving vultures. To my mind the “pieces” were quite disappointing. Yet a force beyond quality and value-for-money was at work and people were buying, regardless.

What drives us to be like this? Fear that there will never be another opportunity? Greed of wanting it all, despite whether we need it or not? Thinking that we deserve, whether we can actually afford to pay in the long run? Concern that if we don’t have what everyone else has and everyone else judges as “good”, we might be judged as lacking in some way?

Scarcity

Whatever, I notice how these things serve as the carrots that keep us in a certain place. We have to stay in the game of big jobs and long hours so long as we’ve mortgaged ourselves to the hilt. We stay at arms length from our friends and families whilst we are driven to compete with them. We get to believe that we’re good people so long as we can keep our show of wealth and prosperity on the road.

Sad, really.

The thing is, I don’t really “get” how amassing lots of money and material goods, with one eye over our shoulders, amounts to being prosperous. Do you?

In fact, let me stick my neck out and say that I actually think what’s at work isn’t prosperity at all. What’s at play here is its more sinister shadow.

Scarcity.

Still, I notice it’s the word “prosperity” that’s being used by the political leaders around the current UK General Election campaign. Gordon Brown has been urging people to choose a “Labour Age of Prosperty” And, writing last September, when the campaign was unofficially warming up, David Cameron wrote about The Sustainable Route from Austerity to Prosperity.

I suspect it’s a bit of a lure. Hoping to hook our deepest fears and uncertainties untethered when the first signs of economic disaster started to raise their ugly heads.

Prosperity

So, what’s real prosperity? Well, let me share what it looks like to me:

• It’s about people not confusing wealth with richness. Wealth is about money and possession. Richness is a quality of being. It’s about valuing who we are in our entireties; our gifts, talents, relationships, fortunes and opportunities. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with being financially well off, but we can be rich without being wealthy.

• It’s about people believing that they have enough. Knowing that we can stop spending or eating or drinking or whatever it is, guided by a sense of knowing that we’ve been appropriately nurtured at a given point in time.

• It’s about trusting in a bigger universal energy to support us in ensuring our needs will be taken care of at the point in time when they.

• It’s about putting who we are into the play of the universal flow and knowing that we will be rewarded for doing so.

• It’s about letting go of our illusions about the control of wealth and possession.

• It’s about honouring and respecting people for who they are and what value they add in the broadest sense, rather than by how much money they make or what they have or haven’t got.

• It’s about giving first, knowing that the world will give us back in ways we can’t yet see.

Which brings us back to the beginning. To that reaching out to make a human connection, for the sheer pleasure of making a human connection.

Yes, my friends, the world needs more Eleanors.

And I wonder, what are your definitions of wealth and prosperity? What challenges do you confront in being A Giver, living in a scarcity culture, and how are you getting round them?

Christine Livingston is a coach and writer, who helps professional people wanting to work and live on their own terms. With a successful career both inside and beyond the corporation to draw from, Christine gives the support, challenge, tools and inspiration that enable people to thrive. She blogs at www.adifferentkindofwork.com and if you find this article interesting, why not subscribe to her RSS feed.