Happy Thanksgiving! This episode is coming out the day after Thanksgiving, also known as Black Friday – a day of crazy deals and holiday shopping (which I have written a few articles about recently on my Inc column) including, Why Black Friday Is the Perfect Holiday Sale According to Neuroscience, Why Year End Is Actually a Bad Time to Send Gifts to Clients, and Why Offering a Deal at the Holidays Isn’t Right for Every Business and Should Always Be Done Thoughtfully.
I’ve also been thoughtful about a year-end deal from The Brainy Business – and we’re having one! In honor of this episode, it will be called the Gratitude Discount (details below). Last year at this time, episode 23 was all about reciprocity and the benefits that come from giving gifts. While today’s episode is about gratefulness, there is a reason I brought up last year’s reciprocity episode to kick us off today. Gratefulness and reciprocity have an important thing in common…a tie that can bond them together…which is a feeling of happiness and joy.
Doing things for others, giving things away, can help you to feel happier. And, as you learned in that episode on reciprocity, people want to give something in return; they can feel good from receiving AND from giving. It creates a nice virtuous cycle that I like to extend beyond the holiday season…though this is the perfect time of year to talk about this sort of thing. Reciprocity is the act of helping someone else to be a little happier. Giving away things, even in business, needs to be genuinely about that thing and not what you will get back. This episode explores how our brain filters for gratitude and how those principles can be applied in life and business.
