How do the people in your life know you love them? Is it assumed or is it actionable? It’s an easy question on the surface, but when we dig into it, the complexities are obvious. Showing love, communicating that we care so deeply for another person can get messier than we would hope. Think back to one of those awkward moments of puppy love in middle school and you’ll know what I mean. You try to show love by picking on the person you like and somehow being mean to show love just never landed right. Shocking.
As adults, we need to be more aware and nuanced with showing love. The obvious place to start is with Gary Chapman’s infamous love languages. Five categories of giving and receiving love help our lazy brains figure out how we can act and talk. Here’s a quick review:
- Gifts: the act of giving and receiving gifts as a sign of love and care
- Words of Affirmation: using our words to affirm our love for another or complement various aspects of what we love.
- Quality Time: expressing love with undivided attention and meaningful interaction
- Physical Touch: using small physical gestures to show love toward another
- Acts of Service: doing something appreciated for someone for their benefit
These love languages are incredibly helpful to understand people in your life. To know how you best receive love and prefer to show love, can lead to a meaningful conversation regarding your interactions. However, many people rely on these in theory but fail to enact them except in grand gestures and big moments.
Buying a great Christmas gift for a partner is certainly an expression of the gift language but if that’s the only time of the year you bring something home, you missed the mark. Similarly, if you set aside a special dinner for your anniversary to spend quality time together but miss the moments of sitting together and reading on a random Wednesday, you’re probably off base. The love languages are at their best when they are incorporated into everyday life in big and small ways.
My language of choice to show love is acts of service and I like to think I’m pretty good at it. It might mean I’m fairly poor at the others (something to work on) but it offers me a way to connect with people across my life. Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned about acts of service is that the best way to implement them is not to think of them all the time and go big, but to create what I call, “habits of service.”
Usually, we think of habits as good or bad for ourselves. We start exercising daily or end a habit of sugary drinks to be healthier. We start reading every morning to connect with our minds or spirituality. We take up a habit of drinking water before coffee in the morning. We stop checking our phone first thing when we get up. We’ve all heard these before, and they all are “me” focused. Habits of service turn the power of what we know about habits and make them “they” focused.
If it isn’t enough for you to want to create habits of service for the good of others, consider that research has shown time and again that doing nice things for others is a great way to be happier. Giving makes you happier than receiving. Volunteering boosts your levels of dopamine like an Instagram notification that your favorite influencer just liked your cat picture. Taking the extra step to do something nice for another person, benefits you basically to the same degree as it does them. So, if you’re selfish, being unselfish is actually going to fit you just fine. Lucky you.
The challenge with habits of service versus general acts of service is that they are easier to neglect. It’s easy to remind yourself that you volunteer at the soup kitchen every year at Thanksgiving or that you want to clean the house when your wife goes out of town. Those are big and intermittent. Habits, the smaller acts that take place every day or every week, are easier to forget and to underestimate.
I want to suggest that to show love, if you can make habits of service part of your daily or weekly routine, you’ll level-up your relationships. Nothing complicated. It’s as simple as applying the same skills to build these habits as you did to start working out or whatever you’ve changed.
Habit building strategies:
- Complete the act of service each day for 30 days and it’ll stick.
- Write the new act on a sticky note where you’ll consistently see it to remind yourself.
- Plan for service. For example, to remember to make coffee every morning, set out the supplies the night before.
- Create feedback loops. After you complete the act of service in mind, create a way to notice that it was accepted. In the coffee example, you could see if your partner used the Keurig or took a cup that you left out and you get feedback that it is useful.
- There are a ton of others. Go check out James Clear’s Atomic Habits or Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and you can apply their ideas to these relational habits.
I won’t belabor this too long as I recognize the concept is simple enough to get in a few hundred words. Plus, you all are smart and have probably already started thinking of habits of service you have now and ones you could create. The last thing to say is that a true act of service doesn’t need recognition or a “thank you” to be valuable. Make these habits for the other people you love, not to fill your own ego.
Fair warning, creating these habits will put you on the hook to continue them for a long time. This isn’t bad, it’s good. Seth Godin in his new book, The Practice tells of the real practice in Turkey of placing bread on the hook. When someone fortunate buys bread, they purchase a second loaf to put on the hook. When someone in need comes by they can ask if there is any bread on the hook and receive the blessing of someone else’s giving. Being on the hook requires more from us, but only in our culture is being more seen as a burden. Be more generous and loving, it’s good for you.
Let me give you some examples of habits of service to start your thinking and then this weekend, share out other ideas so that we can all start to build more into our lives at home, work, school, and friendships.
Habits of service ideas:
- Make the coffee each morning. Put out the K-Cup, find your hipster and pour it over, or go old school and make a pot.
- Make the bed. If your partner or pup isn’t still in it of course.
- Clean the dishes. Every day, not just sometimes, and even if they aren’t the ones you made dirty.
- Lay on their side of the bed to warm it up for a bit. No one likes a cold bed)
- Go for a walk with a friend. Even when you’re busy, it’s good for you too.
- Feed the pets in your home or offer to do so for neighbors out of town. This is an easy one and the pets will love you too.
- Start the car on cold days. Good for the person and the car plus getting into the cold in the morning has some great health benefits.
- Open doors for others. Car doors, business doors, whatever. I know this can backfire sometimes in the social justice circles but do it for the folks you know will appreciate it.
- Answer an email sent to a group. When those dreaded “reply all” emails come through that everyone plays virtual nose-goes with? Take care of those for the group.
- Turn on the heater in the room people spend the morning in. My wife is always cold so when she does yoga in the morning, it’s super easy to hit the power button on the space heater for her.
- Scrape off the car next to yours in the parking lot. Every time you clean your car off, take care of the one next to it.
- Put an extra cart away in the grocery store parking lot. Don’t be that guy who leaves your cart in a parking space and take care of one of those guys while you’re at it.
- Connect people. When you meet someone new, jump on email or LinkedIn and try and connect them to someone you think they could help or be helped by.
Before we go, I feel obligated to mention that there’s a flip side here. Habits of service are easy to miss and take for granted when they are done for you. Be sure to be on the lookout for when others are enacting habits of service and recognize them.
Weekend Challenge
Let’s go at both parts of this idea. First, write a list of the habits of service that you already hold. Then create space to write down three more that you want to integrate before 2020 comes to a close and get started with them this week (bonus points if you share those ideas on social media and tag me).
Next, soften your eyes to the acts of service others might be doing for you. Just try to notice them over the next few days and then make a list at the end of the weekend. Share the list with the folks who enacted the service and thank them for all those little, daily, and seemingly insignificant acts.
2020 is ending everyone. I’ve seen a lot of satirical celebrations as a tough year goes to history. But the reality is that nothing will be different in your life on January 1 than it is on December 31 unless you change it. The government can’t fix it, your partner can’t change you, and your boss isn’t responsible. You are. Start with these habits of service now and they’ll carry into strong relationships for 2021.
Have a good weekend! Best today, better tomorrow!