Adding value means leaving a mark, leaving a little piece of yourself with every person who passes through your life. Adding value means sharing, giving thanks, bringing out a smile, helping, making someone else feel good; making them laugh when they least expect it, improvising in the art of loving, being happy with what you do and with what you do for others.
Adding value has nothing to do with your bank account or your material possessions. It is about everything you can give from the heart.
Adding value means giving your best to live in harmony, going to sleep happy because someone is happy today and you have played a part in that happiness.
Adding value means looking at another person from deep within yourself, recognizing their happiness as your own.
Adding value means answering a question, helping a schoolmate, telling a joke at a gathering full of long faces. It means being authentic.
Adding value means living in the present, aware that you are changing lives, aware of your power and your reach. Believe it or not, you are also adding value to the lives of everyone close to the person you have just helped, because the effect will stay with them for the rest of the day. When they get home, they will be less anxious, less stressed, and able to feel gratitude toward themselves and those around them. The sense of well-being that fills them, which you helped bring about, will be shared when they get home, consciously or unconsciously.
So start today with the person beside you. Ask yourself what words they need to hear that will add value to their life—always from a place of love, not from your ego. If you act from your ego, you will have the opposite effect. You will still leave a mark, but not in the best way.
Practice with your family, your neighbors, your friends. You will feel good about yourself, and at the same time, you will leave traces that change days, that change lives.
“We are not what we do or what we think; we are only the mark we leave behind.”
MJ Bustelo