One of the ways I’ve learned to create success in business is by actively helping people – to provide some product or service – before they ever pay anything or become a client/customer.

In countless industries, both in my own businesses and those of my clients, I’ve seen the willingness to ‘go first’ in giving be a beautifully effective strategy for creating clients, customers and prosperity.

The catch-22 to overcome however can be summed up like this: ‘How do I come from a place of pure giving, when really I know it is a strategy for getting business?’

Until recently, my answer has been to take it moment by moment and day by day. It was to ask yourself, “Am I willing, at least for this moment/today, to ONLY give?”

This works in that it snaps you out of the transactional reality and absolves you almost fully into the reality of giving.

Dependably though, this reality soon melts away and you return to a transactional way of being; I give to you so that you will give to me. 

Recently I spent a day with a man who lives service more deeply than only one other man I’ve ever met before. The man’s name is Steve Hardison and he is a ‘coach’ in Phoenix, Arizona. (Calling him a coach is a bit of a misnomer, but that’s another story.)

I won’t go into all the details of how I experienced this now, but what I got from this man – someone with a client waiting list years long and whose clients pay him upwards of $1,000,000 to work with him – is that service is not his ‘strategy’ for creating clients.

Service is not his tactic. Service is not what he does BECAUSE he wants clients. Service is not what he does SO THAT people will become clients.

Service is simply what he does. Full stop.

In fact – service is WHO HE IS.

By being service, he DOES serve people. And by being this way, clients DO happen.

However, these two occurrences are as separate as the sky and the ocean.

This distinction of ‘Service as Strategy’ vs ‘Service as Being’ is important because it changes the inner story that has attachment to an outcome keep sneaking back in.

When you move from ‘Service as Strategy’ to ‘Service as Being’, you automatically stop keeping score.

A weight rises from your shoulders and no longer must you qualify, filter or concern yourself with the likeliness that something will come back to you.

When you simply BE SERVICE, life works itself out.

I got this during my hot yoga class, standing in a warrior position and staring out the window. Sweat dripping down my face, breathing in and out, I watched the tree outside just sit there. The oxygen I sucked into my lungs came from that tree. It didn’t ask me to give it carbon dioxide first. It just gave me oxygen. Not because it was transacting oxygen for carbon dioxide, but because creating and giving oxygen is just what it does. It just serves.

My new story is to be like Steve and to be like the tree outside my yoga class.

I am Service.

Are you with me?

COACHING QUESTIONS:

• How are you using service as a strategy to create business?
• How would what you are doing change if service instead became something you ARE?