See Yourself as a Beacon of Hope

If you and your cause can shine brightly when so many see darkness, you will attract people. And what they’ll do may surprise you.

After all, plenty of folks are eager to lift their gaze from problems to potentials — and they’ll put their energy and money where they see promise.

So go ahead and shift their attention from the apparent despair that the world presents … to the hope that’s also all around us. (Your organization’s very existence embodies that hope, even if we tend to take it for granted.)

Here’s the deal: The first and easiest step is to remove one word from your vocabulary: “needs.”

Starting with needs gives us a diminished view of the future. Just enough to get by, rather than the world we most desire. It shrinks the dream, drains the energy and sets us up for burn-out.

So where do you start instead?

You shift the conversation from needs to what you have going for you. And once you’ve seen how energizing it is to remove “needs” from your talk, you’ll want to stop thinking about them, too.

What do you want on your mind instead?

Hope.

That’s what feeds the philanthropic deed (and voluntary action of all kinds).

And how do we get hope? By paying attention to our strengths, assets, success, values, learnings — in short, everything we have going for us.

Pretty simple? Well sometimes easier said than done.

Decades ago, in a tiny book written for civic leaders, I boldly proclaimed that “organizations have no needs.”

“People have needs, communities have needs,” I wrote, “but organizations have no needs. Organizations have solutions.”

I’ve since come to see that our organizations offer even more than “solutions.” We have resources to bring to bear to invent the future. (Isn’t that even more energizing?)

If we look beyond money, we can see that the desire to contribute and make a difference, the will to act, and the hunger to see results are every bit as abundant now as ever.

Today, it’s more important than ever for organizations to position themselves as places where people can apply themselves to create the kind of world they want.

We can do it. I mean those who work in the field can elevate the conversation. It takes courage. (Good thing there are ways to fortify your faith in the future and the bravery to get there if you are really serious about this.)

Next: How Do We Break Through the Noise?. Take a quick 3-minute break to hear how one of your colleagues reset his aspirations higher than he’d ever thought possible.