Are you a person who gives a lot?

If so, read on and if not, do it anyway. 

There types of personality which are prone to care for, to be generous and to make a lot of effort in many of their interactions or life projects. This has many positive aspects because you one can enjoy good times, it is possible to do a good job and achieve goals.

So far so good, but watch out because excessive giving can have detrimental consequences for everyone involved.

Sometimes giving is accompanied by an unconscious price tag. This is because what we truly seek with that behavior is acceptance and to be loved. We may not realise that the act of giving is can carry an emotional debt, something we expect in return. Wishing, deep down, that the person, situation, or job will return the effort we have made.

However, life doesn’t work like that. What we give doesn’t always become what we want to receive. Creating expectations that are neither appropriate nor realistic. Making it impossible to settle all those mental bills we have been issuing.

Excessive giving can lead to profound disappointment that causes sadness and can also end in a loss of interest, in that person, situation, work or project. This is a shame because despite having given a lot, the consequences can be the failure of that relationship or thing. 

It’s not easy to solve this challenge. It is not only about making your rational mind want to give less. It is about learning to ask, and to realize when to stop giving. There is a time when giving is no longer useful because we start to suffer. In the beginning we may not be aware of it, because giving makes us feel happy and good about ourselves. But there comes a time when we start to notice that we are not receiving and that the scales between giving and receiving are not balanced. This is where we start to feel bad. 

It would be nice to put the brakes on before we get to this point because sometimes the damage is already done by the time we start to notice it. So a healthy step can be pausing before giving to question ourselves when, once again, we go beyond the strict and necessary. 

We may ask ourselves: What am I looking for with this? If it is simply pleasing the other person or doing a good job, perfect, but if paying close attention to our motivations we identify our expectations to receive, then giving so much may not be appropriate. It could be time to take action, both rationally and in our subconscious, to only give when we do so without a price tag or high expectations from that job, relationship or project.

If you are one of those people who don’t find so easy togive, it’s possible that for you, an interesting reflection might be to identify if there’s someone important in your life who gives a lot. Even if you find it wonderful to receive, you might want to try and balance the giving for the sake of the relationship. Either, by giving a little bit back or slowing down in what you receive discreetly because what you get can carry silent expectations.