To Get More Freedom, Set Others Free
A while ago when I was working in construction, I had a client who hired us to remodel their office. It was the perfect sized job for me—a young construction manager with no idea what I was doing—to take on alone without a lot of interference.
Everything went fine until the end when one of the cabinets showed up wrong. It was one of those situations where it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. The client described what they wanted wrong, the carpenter built it wrong, and I never stopped anyone to say, “Why doesn’t this look right?”
“How do I fix this when no one’s right?” I asked myself. I didn’t come up with an immediate answer, so I did what most new hires do when they run into a problem they can’t solve: I went to my boss and asked, “How do I fix this?”
And in much nicer and more encouraging words, he responded with, “I don’t know. You *$&%ed it up, so you figure it out.”
It was tough to hear at the time, but it was exactly what I needed. And I did figure it out.
In the grand scheme of things, this is an “unimportant detail”—almost not worth mentioning. Yet, it played a big role in my life going forward. I’d never been in a situation where I had to figure something out on my own. There was always a safety net for me, and when things got hard I usually jumped into it.
Whether he planned it this way or was really just too busy to help with a minor problem, I don’t know. But what I do know is my boss taught me something very important about freedom that I’d never fully understood:
To get more freedom in your own life, set others free.
When I learned I really was able to solve my own problems—even if I didn’t have the answers at my fingertips—I started doing it more often. All of a sudden, I was taking on more responsibility and figuring things out better and faster. It just took a nudge to push me out of my comfort zone.
It’s not your responsibility to solve everyone else’s problems, but if you want to help anyway, you’re probably better off helping them help themselves than handing out solutions.
This concept is obvious to any parent with a child that needs help solving a puzzle. If you do it for them, they get nothing from it. But if you guide their hands and explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, the next time they just do it themselves.
The example from my life at work seems silly and insignificant when you compare it to serious problems in the world like hunger, war, and poverty but it’s the best one I have.
And when you look at people and organizations that take on serious problems, it’s easy to see that most successful ones teach just as much as they give.
Kiva gives loans to poor entrepreneurs in third-world countries to start businesses that help their communities. Their repayment rate is over 98%.
Heifer International, one of the biggest non-profits in the world, teaches hungry families how to farm and then gives them livestock to practice with and feed themselves.
I don’t know if the people who run these organizations are looking for more freedom in their lives, but they get it anyway, and they get to help a lot more people because once they’re done, they rarely have to go back and rescue the same person again; they know how to rescue themselves.
If you want more freedom, focus on setting others free.
Whatever side of the equation you fall on—freeing or being set free—this is an important experience to have. And like mine, it doesn’t have to be a terribly profound or world-changing event—it just has to happen.
The great thing about freedom is that once you have a bit of it, you naturally want more. And you want others to have it too.
Show someone else what a little freedom is like and end up with more of it yourself. It’s a gift that really does keep on giving.
So now a question for you: What can you do in the next ten minutes to bring a little more freedom to someone else. Let us know in the comments.
—
Image by: Gianni Dominici