Over-giving, which is a form of manipulation, usually. It's usually to get them to like you or to appreciate you or to think highly of you. It sometimes can be hard to tell what's appropriate giving and what's over-giving. Once again, as moms and caretakers, we tend to overgive. Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I'm a board-certified OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas, and I specialize in minimally invasive GYN surgery, which is, in layman's terms, robotic surgery. 

But this show is all about going where the scalpel doesn't reach. I'm also a certified life coach. In this show, The Dr. Crockett Show, we're bringing you all the conversations that I have with my patients. I have a curriculum. I have some order and schedule in how I'm doing this. There is a method to my madness. 

Today, we are talking about the fourth part of our curriculum. It's the fourth of the seven seeds behind me, and it's give. Yay! It's my favorite topic. I love giving. One of my love languages, my primary love language actually, used to be giving.

So for those of you who haven't caught the other seed shows, we've put them in a special playlist for you on my YouTube channel. Please go back and watch the ones about, let's see, there's an intro one, and then this one is be. That's about self-care. This one is heal, which is about fixing things that are broken. The pink one is love.

Of course, today is green for give because well, money. Kind of is obvious, right? But we're going to talk a lot more about giving other than money. No, I'm not going to ask for your money or anything else. I'm not selling you anything. The light blue one is grow. The teal is pray. The dark blue is attune.

As we're getting deeper into these seeds in our curriculum of what we're teaching, what we're starting to see are things moving from being self-centered, which is the very beginning, to seeds that are interactive with others that is what give is. The definition of giving is to freely transfer the possession of something from yourself to somebody else.

So when we're thinking about this in comparison to some of the other seeds, this seed is actually one of the first ones where we're taking something and transferring in between two people. It requires empathy. It requires understanding the other person and their situation, putting yourself in their shoes, and then figuring out what it is that they may need that you can help them with.

So this interactive love with tangibles is kind of how I think about giving in general. What are some examples of giving in your life? I already talked about the first obvious one is money, but also what about time? How you give of yourself and your time is literally giving your life source to other people. How do you give service? What do you do for other people? What is the transfer of your energy or the things that you can help people with?

What are the words that you give to people? Words have so much power. That's really an intangible, isn't it? Your words convey so much meaning. What you give people through your words, whether good or bad, helpful or not, is something that we need to really be aware of when we're thinking about speaking.

When we're speaking, we're not just talking for blah, blah, blah, blah. We're actually giving of our thoughts and our soul in a transference to the other people around us. Like right now, I'm giving you my thoughts about give. It is literally I'm creating and giving this talk to you through YouTube, which is really cool. You're giving me your attention and watching it. Hopefully, good thoughts and comments below. Don't forget. I'd love to have some comments from you about our show and what you want to see and what we're doing here.

The other thing of being an OBGYN that seems really obvious is the gift of life. When we talk about giving life to someone, it can be anything from giving them life-saving blood for a transfusion. Please, if you are an eligible donor, please don't forget to donate blood. We are currently in shortages all across the United States, and that is always a very worthy gift.

The gift of life could be from an organ transplant. In Texas, we have the ability to note on our driver's license when if we are in an accident, if we are an eligible donor for transport to give somebody literally a new heart or a new organ that they need if they're failing.

As mothers, we give life. We grow life inside of us. We give our bodies to our kids, our husbands, to everyone around us. We give and give. That's part of what we do as moms. But we're literally giving an unborn baby our nutrition, our emotions, our love, and giving them the incubator to grow until they can be born and have their own life independent of us. That's literally what giving birth is. I thought that was kind of fun to think about as I was creating this segment for you guys.

What you might notice when I'm talking about all these things is I'm talking about them in terms of things that are freely given. Let's talk a little bit about what giving is not. It's not giving if you're being manipulated into transferring something from yourself to somebody else. It's not giving if you're doing it as a codependent.

That term took me a long time to understand, but a codependent is somebody who is behaving in a way to appease another person. A codependent means they are not acting on their own thoughts or their own emotions. They are looking at external circumstances, usually a person or a partner, and they are adjusting what they are giving in the means of their emotion, their love, their time.

They're adjusting it to that other person. They are codependent. They are dependent on that person outside of them. That is not giving. That is not freely transferring possession of something. That is doing it to get an end result.

It's not coerced. If somebody is twisting your arm to give money, that's coercion. That is not gift. That's not a gift. If somebody is coercing you to provide your time or your service or to say a specific thing or act a certain way, that's not giving. That's not freely transferring possession of yourself or your physical objects to somebody else.

Another type of thing that is not giving is something that happens really commonly in families these days that I'm seeing generationally. That is our grandparents grew up in the Depression era where there was scarcity mindset. There were not a lot of things to be had.

So, they grew up taking very good things of the few things that they had and they became very valuable to them. They passed these things on like furniture, heirloom jewelry, China, silver, pianos, whatever, sewing machines. They passed their household objects down to our parents' generation.

Our parents' generation inherited all those beautifully handcrafted linens and laces and furniture. They were in a place where they needed it. A lot of times they integrated it into their household. Then they grew up, and they have their own set of possessions.

Then what happened to my generation is all of a sudden we see something that's very quickly becoming hoarding, which is when families have attached such meaning to the objects that they're gifting to the next generation that the next generation feels obligated to keep those objects because it's not just a table, it's grandma's memory. An attachment that's coerced to that thing that the person that's on the receiving end may or may not feel.

Even if they do feel that attachment, there comes a point where we just cannot continue to take on all the generations of wealth. Now that our society has evolved to a fairly non-scarcity mode society, we're not in Depression era. We have an abundance of things. Now what I'm seeing in my children is they don't want the China. They don't want the grandmother's furniture. They don't want the fancy silver or the glasses. They don't want any of it. It doesn't mean anything to them.

When we're thinking about giving, it doesn't do me any good to give my daughter a special brooch that was her grandmother's unless she really feels like that has some meaning to her also. Meaning can be lots of different things. She may feel sentimentally attached to it. She may also attach financial attachment to it.

But giving is not transferring something to somebody else with the expectation that they are going to have the same sentiment or feelings about it. It's also not giving with the expectation that you're going to ever get it back. This comes in very important when we're talking about lending money to family and friends.

One rule that I've always followed is if I'm going to give somebody some money, if they ask me for a loan or for money, one thing that I do is if I'm giving it, I'm not attaching an expectation for it to come back. I'm giving it freely to them. If they're able to at some point repay it, that's really honorable and wonderful. That's definitely part of the discussion up front. But in myself, I'm not attaching meaning to that gift that I'm giving. I'm not attaching an expectation that I have to have that gift back.

Once I've given something to somebody, whether it's a piece of furniture or a special gift that I picked out for them, what they do with that gift is also none of my business. That's a really hard thing for some of us to get through because a lot of us, especially if we have gift giving or gift receiving as a love language, we're making those physical things or those transfers of energy, we're making them mean something that not everybody else shares in the same way.

So for me to force somebody else to think of the gift that I gave them in a way that I was giving to it doesn't do them any good. So if I pick out a super beautiful coffee mug for my friend Starley, and I give it to her, and I'm thinking of her, thinking what would she really like, and I'm going to get her something really special and something she'll enjoy. We have all of this wind up. I give it to her. Most of the time when we are given a gift like that, we show appreciation.

But in the back when Starley gets that cup back home to her kitchen, what she does with that cup really is independent from the emotion and the support that I was transferring to her in the gift. That object doesn't have that in it, like we like to attach to it. So whether she loves that cup as much as I do or more and fills it with diamonds, or she looks at it and goes, this is the ugliest thing I've ever seen and trashes it, those are none of my business. They don't impact the giving that I had in that transaction with her. We need to be good about releasing people from those expectations.

Over-giving is when we give more than is comfortable to somebody else. So we need to be careful sometimes about when we decide to give somebody something. Over-giving, which is a form of manipulation, usually, it's usually to get them to like you or to appreciate you or to think highly of you. It sometimes can be hard to tell what's appropriate giving and what's over-giving.

Once again, as moms and caretakers, we tend to overgive. Over-giving can be a type of addiction. It can also be a scenario where we are giving despite it not being healthy for us. So, for instance, if I only have $100 in my bank account, and I have to give somebody $90 of it, and I only have $10 left for myself, and that's not enough for me to have food for the next week, that would be an example of over-giving.

It's easy to explain it with money, but we can do that with all of our resources, our time, our energy. So if we are giving to the point that we are harming ourselves, that's called over-giving. That's not a healthy form of transferring possessions freely to somebody.

Now, over-giving is a little different than over-delivering. I just want to mention that. So when we talk about creating services for other people or creating content for people or whatever we're doing in our lives, there's this idea of over-delivering. This is a really cool way of giving.

That means that when you're doing something for somebody, you're giving more than was contracted for. You're not only providing what you promised to provide them, but you're going that one extra step further to make it even better for them.

So I really think that to be able to walk that line between appropriate giving, contractual giving, over-giving, and over-delivering requires us to have a lot of awareness and insight and empathy. That's kind of getting into the last seed, which I haven't hit too much yet, but that's the attunement seed. That's the figuring out the alignment, where we are in alignment with ourselves and with others. We're going to overlap these two topics between giving and attunement when we get to the seventh seed, which is that attunement.

One last little thought I'm going to leave for you, and I thought this was kind of fun just because I like double entendres. That's when a word or a phrase means two things. One of the phrases we use here on The Dr. Crockett Show is love draws a bigger circle. It has a double meaning. So love draws a bigger circle. It's always more inclusive. It's always increasing its capacity to love and provide that emotional support in this world.

But it also draws a bigger circle in that it's always looking to be more inclusive, but it also draws a bigger circle. When you practice love, you're also attracting more of that. So it's drawing a bigger circle of friends and a bigger circle of influence. So I love that as a double entendre.

I think this word give also is kind of a little double entendre. Can you think of what the other meaning of it is? It's something that we've talked about here on the show before, and it's really important for the second seed, which is healing. I got it. That is resilience.

The word give also means to bend without breaking or to have resilience, like the tree gave in the wind. The branch swayed in the wind, it had resilience and give. I really love this because in a world that's so often black and white, it's really a great thing for us to practice not being so rigid, like a branch that would break in the wind, but to be more like the willow tree and learn to bend with the breezes and bounce back, to have that resilience.

That practicing of giving without breaking, that having give or resilience is part of what moves us forward through difficult times and helps us grow as human beings. So I just wanted to leave you with that thought. Along those lines, I was reminded of one of my favorite songs.

For those of you that have listened to the podcast that's the audio version of The Dr. Crockett Show, it's all over like Google, Spotify, and Apple podcasts. It's called Becoming Virtuosa. I did that podcast through COVID in 2020. Then we’re adding on to the show from The Dr. Crockett Show. But when I was doing the podcast, I always did a thing at the end of it, which I'm thinking about bringing back. Y'all let me know if you want me to do that.

But I used to always ask my guests what they were listening to, what they were reading, and what they were watching that week. We always tack that onto the end of the show. That was kind of fun. So this kind of reminded me of that.

Brandi Carlile has a song called Before It Breaks. The lyric kind of goes let it bend before it breaks. It's all about talking about going through difficult times and learning how to have that resilience and not just breaking when things get difficult, but learning that ability to sway and move and bounce back.

So I want you all to think about that this week. As you're thinking about giving and moving through your life, think about what you and what others give to you. Just enjoy that transaction and the love that's freely given between each other.

I hope you have a wonderful week and remember to like and share and subscribe the show. Thanks for helping us grow. I will see you next week on The Dr. Crockett Show. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.