What does it mean to you to be amazing? While everyone has a different idea of what constitutes an amazing person or amazing experience, we’d like to think that being amazing has something to do with making an Impact.
What impact are you making on the world? What difference are you making? And where are you making that impactful difference?
We’d like to offer six suggestions for answering this question for yourself and for taking steps to ensure you leave the Impact you want to.
1. Who/What Do You Want to Help?
Making an impact involves helping someone or something. This could be yourself, your spouse, your business, the Earth, children who are refugees, unadopted animals, families suffering from food insecurity, your next door neighbor, and on and on.
There is always someone or something that needs help, and when you know who or what you’d like to help, you’ll be able to focus on that and make the impact you’d like to make.
But how? How do you decide who or what you’d like to help? There are uncountable numbers of people and causes in need. It can get overwhelming and paralyzing to think about making a difference anywhere.
One way to narrow your focus is to ask yourself these questions:
What situation always tugs at your heartstrings?
What makes you angry about the world?
When you think of a person or situation in need, what pops into your mind immediately?
Your answers to these questions can guide you to a cause, an individual, or a group of people who need help.
2. What Are Your Talents?
It’s difficult to make an impact when you’re operating outside your zone of ability. If you’re terrible with numbers, for example, being the treasurer of your child’s PTA will not only be difficult, it will leave you unfulfilled. And when we’re unfulfilled, we tend to hold back in giving of ourselves.
However, if you are talented at making friends, you might do well as the activities chair of your child’s PTA.
Additionally, talents often match up with point 1 above: who or what you’d like to help. For example, you may ache when you hear of abandoned pets. You may also have a talent for working with animals. If you volunteer at an animal shelter, you will have a great chance at making a significant impact because your passion and talents will line up.
3. Empathize
People who make an impact have learned empathy. When we struggle to understand or care about somebody or something, it is nearly impossible to make an impact in that situation. But when we try to put ourselves in the situation of somebody else, we stop judging and start connecting.
From that place, we can understand how to help in meaningful, impactful ways.
4. Start With One Person
Making an impact can be on a global scale, but more often than not, our kindness and empathy makes the strongest impact on individuals. Being a supportive spouse, loving parent, caring neighbor, compassionate manager, or reliable volunteer is hugely impactful.
Focusing on individuals helps fuel even more empathy, and it has a ripple effect as those individuals then make individual impacts with others.
5. Stand up for Others
When a person, animal, or group of people are being mistreated, stand up for them. This makes a huge impact. When someone is mistreated and nobody says or does anything, that person feels like there might be something wrong with them. Standing up for them provides dignity to the individual while helping them feel cared for.
Think back to point 1 and 2. When your passions/interests align with your talents, you can figure out how to stand up for others. For example, if you feel drawn to help children who are refugees and you are a good writer, you can write social media posts that educate others about the challenges these children face. You could even volunteer to write for grants to support the organization, drawing on your passion for standing up for this group of individuals.
6. Give Back
Make giving back a part of your personal and family culture. Find a charity to donate to regularly, volunteer in the community, look for ways to interact with your neighbors, use your professional skills to help others, and more.
Remember that we all need each other, and your contribution is valuable and impactful. We all have unique talents that make the world a better place, and when we let our light shine, we show the world just how awesome it is to BE AMAZING.
Thank YOU for being amazing!
At Impact Marketing and Design, we make an impact on business owners who are striving to make an impact in the marketplace. We thrive on creating custom marketing campaigns to help you grow your business. Let us help you reach who you want to reach with the message that will make the most impact. Give us a call today at (888) 441-1233, or contact us online for a free consultation about how to get in front of your customers, and help them buy.