Episode 124: Generosity with Ellen Rogin

Minette Riordan: Have you ever said to yourself I don’t have enough time?

Brad Dobson: I am so overwhelmed.

Minette Riordan: I need more clarity.

Brad Dobson: I don’t know how to do this.

Minette Riordan: My to-do list is miles long.

Brad Dobson: I’m exhausted.

Minette Riordan: There’s got to be a better way.

Brad Dobson: Hi there. I’m Brad.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Minette. Not only have we said all these things ourselves, but we’ve heard our community of creative entrepreneurs say them over and over again.

Brad Dobson: That’s why we created the Structure and Flow podcast. I’m Structure.

Minette Riordan: And I’m Flow, and this is the Productivity Podcast for Creative Entrepreneurs.

Brad Dobson: We believe that doing more and working harder are not the solution to your productivity challenges.

Minette Riordan: We believe in more play, more fun and more profit. Join us as we explore the interplay between structure and flow so that we can bring more grace and ease to your creative business.

Minette Riordan: Hello, and welcome to the Structure and Flow podcast. I am CEO and co-founder of the Path to Profit Academy, along with my fabulous other half.

Brad Dobson: Me.

Minette Riordan: Brad Dobson. And we’re taking a little bit different direction in the podcast. We’re not going to be talking specifically about productivity today. But we’re going to be talking about money, one of my other favorite topics. We’re going to be talking about generosity, and I think it’s going to all tie in really neatly with productivity by the end of the conversation. And we have a guest today. We haven’t had a guest for a while.

Brad Dobson: Welcome, Ellen.

Minette Riordan: I’m kind of excited to have a new face on the show, Ellen Rogin. Ellen, welcome.

Ellen Rogin: Thank you. So excited to be here with you two.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. Ellen and I met through another organization, had a great conversation and I got so excited about what you’re doing with generosity that I could not wait to share this. Because I think, and I’m sure you do too, that when you feel generous you feel abundant, you’re more prosperous, and all of that leads to better productivity at the end of the day.

Ellen Rogin: And profitability.

Minette Riordan: And profitability, yes.

Brad Dobson: So let’s dive into this, and what are you talking about when you talk about generosity? I mean, I think about helping somebody across the road or giving a million dollars as a philanthropist. You know, where on the scale of things? Is it all of those things?

Ellen Rogin: Yeah, to me it really is all of those things, and more. So certainly there’s financial generosity, which I’m a big proponent of. I think it’s actually a driver of prosperity which we can talk about. And it’s also doing kind acts and coming at your life and your business with a generous filter and viewpoint of how you can make things better for another person.

Minette Riordan: I love that. And before we go too deep into the conversation-

Brad Dobson: Oh, this gets me excited.

Minette Riordan: I know. It’s going to be juicy. We may be here a while. But first we should say why should you listen to Ellen? And who is she and why does she know what she’s talking about? So, Ellen, rather than sharing the bio which we will have in the show notes for everybody, tell us a little bit about your personal journey. ‘Cause I love your story of how you got to where you are today and why you’re so passionate about this.

Ellen Rogin: So I started my career on the financial side of things, in public accounting. And then for the past close to 30 years, I hate to say that ’cause it makes me sound old, but for the past 30 years have been working with people individually and helping them with their money as a financial advisor. During that time I’ve also written several books and been out there speaking, which now I’m focusing on, kind of all in, and sharing this information with a bigger audience. But one of the things that I realized super early in my career is that it wasn’t just about doing all the smart money moves or having lots of money that made people successful and actually content with their money. It was also a lot about their mindset and their approach to money that really had the whole package work.

Ellen Rogin: The financial services industry is really skilled at talking about what tends to be thought of as left brain kinds of things, the analytical, the budgeting. And I think pretty much ignores what people believe about money, what they do with it. Are they happy or not? I mean, we can all think of examples of someone who has tons of money and then maybe is miserable in their life. Or someone with very little means but is just feeling blessed and grateful. And you don’t have to be on either extreme. But the beauty happens when you can marry the creative, the intuitive, the visioning side of money with taking the right actions to make it work for you.

Minette Riordan: I love that. And she’s not just an author, but she’s a New York Times best-selling author. If you’re watching on YouTube you can see the cover of her book behind us. And her book is Picture Your Prosperity: Smart Money Moves to Turn Your Vision into Reality. And I love the emphasis on vision, on creativity, on intuition, and that there’s so much more to the money story than just, hey, let’s get money in investment so that we’re thinking about retirement. Like it’s really based in core values more than anything.

Ellen Rogin: Yeah, and I was thinking about your audience of creative people. And what I’ve often heard from people that tend to be more creative is they’ll say things like, “Oh, I just don’t have a head for money.” Or, “I’m really not good at this.” And I think they’re actually awesome at it. It’s just they’ve been taught through growing up or whatever that those aren’t the skills that make you good at money. But really, if you don’t have a vision of where you want to go or you can’t be more creative or listen to your own intuition, I don’t think you’re as successful with money as you are if you’re just focused on the analytical things.

Minette Riordan: I love that. I love that perspective ’cause I’m on a personal mission to completely bust the myth of the starving artist. Like I am so over hearing people say you can’t make money as an artist, and how that has squashed so many people from feeling successful in their lives. There’s a lot of amazing artists who can make a great living by shifting some of their belief around their money mindset.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I think those things come to us as secondary or tertiary learning. If we’re lucky, we’ll learn about our art as a primary skill. But we don’t learn about business, we don’t learn about money very much at all in our formative years, I think. And it’s to everyone’s detriment.

Minette Riordan: And I think that it is a skill, right? That business building is a skill. Money making, keeping, saving, investing are skills. Art making is a skill and we can all get better at all of those things. But let’s pull the conversation back around to generosity. And what inspired you to go down this path of generosity and really make it kind of a focal point of some of the work that you’re doing?

Ellen Rogin: I think it was two things. One, when I think about building my business, initially I was really lucky to learn about networking from a woman whose name is Suzanne Stone. And I ended up in a networking group she was in, and she gave me advice very early in my career. It was one of those groups where you share leads, and she said, “Ellen, every time I go to a meeting every month, I want to be the person who talks about the most business I gave. And what you sow, you reap. And if you’re out there supporting other people in their business, whatever that looks like, whether you do business with them or you refer them or you bring them somewhere where they can get more business, it will flow back to you. And not necessarily from the person you gave to.”

Ellen Rogin: So that belief about how to grow my business, which was really a generous approach, how can I support you in growing your business, was fundamental in terms of me being able to grow a business very early on. And that’s really a start of how can I be more generous? And in the financial services industry, there’s this old expression like you give to get. And that’s not what I’m talking about. This is a give to give. And it will flow back, but who knows from where?

Minette Riordan: Right.

Ellen Rogin: The second part, which is more of the financial giving, is when I wrote my first book, with my co-author Melissa Burke, called Great With Money. Melissa taught me a lot about this idea of giving a percentage of your income away. I mean, there’s lots of religious background to that, but the idea that really sank in for me is if I pick a percentage of the money that I want to give away, I’m loosening my grip on money. So if you’re hanging on so tightly to what you have, and you think back in 2008, 2009 during the recession, people were so freaked out, right? They had all this belief of I don’t have enough, just at the time when people in their lives and charities needed their money more than ever.

Ellen Rogin: Well, if you’re clenching your fists hanging on to what you have, how can you possibly receive? It’s even with the visual of clenched fist. Now, on the other side there’s people that are always giving, giving, giving, giving, giving. And for whatever reason, they have beliefs or attitudes that it’s not okay to receive. That doesn’t work either. They’re both important, giving and receiving.

Minette Riordan: I love that.

Brad Dobson: Right. Who was it? Didn’t Gretchen Rubin in one of her archetypal, was the one who just kept giving?

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: I think that was right.

Minette Riordan: I think maybe the obliger tends to totally over-give.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, they just give and give and give, and never find value in themselves.

Minette Riordan: Right.

Brad Dobson: Or to receive things. I’m interested, you mentioned that a lot of the tradition about generosity comes out of religions.

Minette Riordan: Tithing, I think, she was talking about specifically.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, I guess. I see it a lot as compassion, like comes out of Buddhism. So is that something that came out of your personal tradition, something you learned from other people?

Ellen Rogin: Well, I learned that it was part of my tradition but it wasn’t part of my upbringing afterwards. My parents, I think, were generous but they never talked about charitable giving, even though they did it. And so this was talking about a learned skill. So when Melissa and I started writing the book, I’m like, “Okay, I’m in.” And every quarter, I would do it quarterly, I would take 10% of my income and we’d put it into a separate account. It was just a savings account, nothing fancy. And what it allowed me and my husband to do is a few things. First of all, starting this made me feel okay with it ’cause I wasn’t giving it all away right away. So if I had any little bit of fear like, oh, my gosh, I’m putting so much money in this account, it’s like I could always take it back if I needed to, which I never have.

Ellen Rogin: And once it was in that account, Steven and I knew what we had to give. So if someone was walking in a breast cancer walk or someone passed away and we wanted to make a donation to a charity in their honor, we found ourselves being more generous ’cause we knew what pool of money we had. We also found that when it was a charity that was important to us, we could make a bigger donation because it was all planned out. We’ve taken our family on many volunteer vacations around the world. And that was where the money came from to do that too. It’s a charitable contribution. So it’s done some really beautiful things for us, just by having that discipline of moving money into a separate account earmarked for giving.

Minette Riordan: I love that. Totally love that.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, it is beautiful. So I’m a listener and I’m really not making a lot of money right now because I’m a starving artist. What is it that I can do to be generous? How can I give?

Ellen Rogin: Okay, so let’s talk about a couple of different things. Let’s start with the financial because that’s, I think, where you were going with this. If you choose a percentage of your income, whatever percentage makes sense to you, and earmark it for giving, then as you make more money you proportionately give more. And if you make less, you can give less. And every bit of money makes a difference. You know, someone might think, “Well, what’s my $10 going to do for X, Y, Z organization?” A friend of mine is very involved in Alzheimer’s research and she’s like, “Are you kidding? Yes, there’s some big grants we get but it’s thousands of small donations that really make a difference.”

Ellen Rogin: Or maybe it’s to a friend in need. I don’t have anything on where you give your money to. It’s up to you and what feeds your soul. So I think you can start with a small amount. Research and giving is very interesting. There is something called subjective wealth, and they found that the way our brains work is when you make a charitable donation your brain processes this as, “Oh, I must be rich to be able to do this.” And so you start to feel wealthier. Giving $500 gives the same buzz as getting a $10,000 raise.

Minette Riordan: Wow.

Brad Dobson: So it’s like a mindset feedback loop. That’s really cool.

Minette Riordan: But it’s also the endorphins, right? A sort of adrenaline hit too of feeling generous. So I love that it’s like a whole body impact when you give. Whether it’s $5, $10, 500, 5,000 or 5 million, you still feel the impact of that.

Ellen Rogin: Right. And that endorphin, I mean, there’s lots of research on kind acts and generous acts, and how that makes … I mean, it’s like the dirty little secret with giving. The reason we do it is it feels so good.

Brad Dobson: Right.

Ellen Rogin: I’m sure everyone can think of a time you did something nice for someone, and it feels good to do that even if it was just a small thing. The other day I was at Costco and I was actually upset about something else that was going on, and I was really trying to widen back a little bit and go, “Okay, how can I not be so focused on this?” And as I was taking my cart back there was the car next to me, this woman unloaded hers and I grabbed her cart. And I’m like, “I’ll take it back for you.” And then when I went there to the cart she’s like, “Oh, my God, thank you so much.” Like I didn’t even need a thank you, but a kind act can make a really big difference for someone. And even just that little bit of an act of kindness.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, I love that. So in the work that you see yourself doing going forward, how does generosity play a role in that?

Ellen Rogin: Well, I believe that generosity is the new currency in business and the people that are going to do well are people that are out there seeing how you can add value for someone else, how you can be generous with not only your clients but your team. Like what’s the most generous response you can have to somebody? It will, I believe, truly bring you more prosperity and success in your business and make you and everyone around you feel better.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So say more about this idea of generosity being the new currency of business, ’cause my head’s kind of spinning and I’m thinking about giving referrals and leads is one way that looks like. What else does it look like in terms of growing your business?

Ellen Rogin: Great. So, clearly when you give referrals and leads, that’s one way. There’s something about building a corporate halo that people want to do business with good people. So there’s a couple of ways that that can look. It can be supporting your clients or customers and their good work. The nice thing about having that charitable account is that I like saying yes when someone asks me to support their good act. I feel like I’m giving them a standing ovation for their work in the world, even if it’s not my charity. As long as it’s not something I’m violently opposed to it, which has never happened. That’s one thing.

Ellen Rogin: I think there’s also you don’t do volunteering to get something personally back. However, you can share your good work with the people you do business with. So in my office there’s a picture of our daughter Amy with some of the kids that she became friends with when we’ve been to Ghana, right? So that leads to a conversation. Now, I’m not doing that so people are like, “Oh, Ellen goes to Ghana and does good work there.” But why would I keep that a secret? It’s something that I believe in and it’s been helpful. And so people want to do business with people that are doing good things.

Minette Riordan: So I love that, ’cause I think that sometimes people do get that perspective, “Oh, it’s bragging.” Right? I mean, women in particular tend to think it’s bragging to talk about their successes and achievements or their generosity.

Brad Dobson: Well that’s the Jewish tradition, right, is to give anonymously.

Minette Riordan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brad Dobson: I can’t remember what it’s called where the best kind of giving is giving anonymously. I’m not saying that that-

Minette Riordan: Is good or bad?

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: But what I loved what you said is that it creates this opportunity to have a conversation about what matters to you, which leads to connection around core values. So for me, looking at generosity from the perspective of creating deeper relationships with people.

Ellen Rogin: Yeah, for sure. And so my head’s spinning with a couple of things. So I’m Jewish by background and I’ve done some research on what they call tzedakah, which is giving is our responsibility.

Minette Riordan: There we go.

Brad Dobson: There we go.

Ellen Rogin: But the interesting thing is, and I’m not sure about if that’s the highest form of giving. It very well may be. The interesting thing is for a lot of the Jewish organizations like the Jewish Federation where they’re trying to raise huge amounts of money, I’m from Chicago and a really big donor, they actually publish how much people give.

Brad Dobson: Interesting.

Ellen Rogin: ‘Cause they found when it was totally anonymous, people didn’t give as much. So who knows on that?

Brad Dobson: Right.

Ellen Rogin: And I think the thing, even on how I would reframe that for people that want to be kind of quiet about it or they don’t want to brag about it, ’cause I’m not talking about bragging, but what if instead of you feeling like you were bragging about it, you were inspiring someone to do more kind acts themselves?

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Brad Dobson: Right, right.

Ellen Rogin: A different reframe of the same thing.

Minette Riordan: It is absolutely a beautiful reframe of that. And I think it’s true for everything that I teach in business about when we celebrate our successes it totally inspires people. And we’ve had a couple of different times in our lives where we’ve done things that were just about us, and they inspired other people. And our intention wasn’t to share to inspire. Like moving across country, just packing up our kids and our family and moving across country six years ago, people were like I can never do that. Or Brad’s a three-time iron-man triathlon. And after his first one, so many people were like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s so inspiring. I couldn’t do that.” And yet he’s done it three times. And if Brad can do it, you could do it too, right?

Brad Dobson: Right.

Minette Riordan: And so it’s noticing that perspective of when we share from a place, I think, of authenticity and a place of generosity and vulnerability of this has been my experience, like I would love to hear your story about taking your kids to Ghana, how amazing. What a fabulous conversation. It is inspirational. It makes me curious and more connected to you, and has nothing to do with I’m trying to make a sale or I’m trying to close a deal or anything like that.

Brad Dobson: Right, right. I think it’s like a subset or a bigger part of your authenticity as a business or a person, right? I love the term corporate halo, and it would be easy for someone to say, “Oh, you know, that’s somebody who’s just trying to be better than everybody else.” But I don’t really think it is when you’re genuinely giving and you’re just starting from a place of giving. And you’re not doing the giving or the generosity, I think you hinted at this or said it earlier, you’re not being generous for corporate reasons. You’re being generous to be generous.

Minette Riordan: Right.

Brad Dobson: Not trying to get something out of it.

Ellen Rogin: I was just reminded of, and so I started my career in public accounting. I was working for a big auditing firm. It was horrible for me. Was that my career? And when I knew I wanted to get out, I would come home every day after work and just kind of be miserable. And I don’t know what made me do this, but I’m like, “You know what? I need to go volunteer somewhere.” And I ended up volunteering with elderly people. And within three months I had a new job. And I think that the other thing that doing kind acts does is it takes your attention off you and your issues, whatever that is. And it wasn’t like I got the new job from someone I met through volunteering. Sometimes that happens. But I think that there’s just this way of like other benefits that come out of that. I also want to make sure we talk about the receiving part of giving.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. And before we go there, I have one more question about giving. And I agree that we want to go to the receiving part. But I also am curious about time. We’ve talked a lot about money, giving. And I love the idea of just setting up an account where it just goes into the account and then either quarterly or annually you decide what to do. But can we talk about time and people saying they have really busy lives, they don’t have time to give or they’re over-giving of their time because they think they don’t have money to give and they’re compensating? What happens in relationship to time and generosity?

Ellen Rogin: Well, I think people really need to figure this out for themselves too. I remember hearing a woman who runs a place called Misericordia in Chicago, which helps developmentally disabled adults. It’s a housing place for them. And I remember her saying that she’ll have mums of young kids say I don’t have time to volunteer. And she said, “How can you not do that and be an example for your kids?” I was, oh, like I was that mum sitting in the audience. I’m running a business, I’ve got two little kids. And so some of it’s finding the thing you’re interested in sharing your time with.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Ellen Rogin: And finding the way that it works for you. So a lot of my volunteering now is when we do go to Ghana I’m there for two weeks. So I love my volunteering and work.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Ellen Rogin: And I’m on a board, whatever. But that’s like my big volunteer time, ’cause that seems to be what works for me. Now, other people may be able to do something or choose, not that I couldn’t do it, but do something every week. And I think to your point, that if people are over-giving, that’s something to look at too. Like are you taking care of your whole life by doing that? Because it’s not okay, I don’t think that it’s the bigger picture, to give to the point where you’re not taking care of yourself. ‘Cause then you have less to give ultimately. If you don’t have enough money in your business, you can’t give. If you don’t have enough time or you’re not taking care of yourself physically, how can you give? It’s really all tied in with that.

Brad Dobson: Yeah, and there’s more than enough places to give.

Minette Riordan: There absolutely are.

Brad Dobson: You could fill your time with them.

Minette Riordan: So we live in Santa Barbara, California, which statistically has the highest number of nonprofits per capita in the United States.

Brad Dobson: I didn’t know that.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. It’s a crazy stat about SB. Lots and lots of nonprofits in a very small community. And so the nonprofits are struggling because there are so many of them, and they’re all diving into the same well. But one of our clients took a really interesting approach to this. It was really important to her to give and be generous. And she realized that she was over-delivering on her time. She didn’t quite have the amount of money that she wanted to give, so she started tracking her time and attaching a dollar value to her time. And so she put a real limit on the number of hours and dollars that she was giving. And I thought it was such a great perspective ’cause it shifted her mindset that time is money. And that so she was able to really cut back and be very, very specific on how much she was giving. And I thought that was a really beautiful perspective and a great way to approach it. If you don’t feel like you have cash to give right now, give your time a dollar value.

Ellen Rogin: I love that. I love that suggestion. That’s great.

Minette Riordan: So let’s talk about receiving. Because generosity, there’s two sides of the equation here.

Ellen Rogin: Absolutely. There cannot be a giver without a receiver. You know, many people have been brought up with the idea that it’s better to give than receive. And I don’t think that’s true. I think they’re both important. Research on generosity has shown that people that are givers live longer, they’re happier, they’re healthier. Kids that give are more successful as adults. They have lower rates of depression. So if you are not open to receiving, you’re hurting somebody’s ability to give. It’s actually a selfish thing to be not open to receiving in some ways. And when I speak, I often give the analogy of checking in on this when you think about compliments. So a lot of the audiences I speak to are women’s audiences, and women tend to communicate in compliments.

Minette Riordan: Oh, this old rag?

Ellen Rogin: That’s exactly what it is. Right, so either it’s diminishing the compliment, like you said this old rag, or it’s throwing it right back. Like, “Oh, Minette, I love your blouse. It looks great on you.” “Oh, but your bright pink is so pretty too.” You know, it’s not taking it in. I think about a time once I was doing some video stuff and I was having my makeup professionally done, and the woman who was doing it said to me, “Ellen, you have such nice skin.” And in my mind, I didn’t say this out loud, I’m like, “She tells that to everybody.” Like my skin’s not that great. Could I have just said thank you? But even if she was saying it to make me feel good, that’s still a gift. That’s fine.

Minette Riordan: Yeah.

Ellen Rogin: And so one way to practice this is to notice your response. ‘Cause it’s really throwing a gift back in someone’s face without saying thank you, if you’re not taking in their compliment.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. This is something I’ve worked really hard on the last five or six years or so, is just being in that space of just saying thank you, right? Just saying thank you. And when you say thank you, then you actually believe it. You’re more likely to believe the compliment as well, then instantly go into that place. And I’m seeing this talked a lot about in business right now, in terms of people showing their work and putting their work out into the world and asking for money in return for their work. That too is an act of generosity. When you have a gift, a talent or an incredible solution to someone’s problem and you’re just sitting on it, right, that’s also an act of selfishness. Because even if you change one person’s life, to me it creates this beautiful ripple effect where it has an impact on that person, who goes and touches more people, who touch more people.

Brad Dobson: Sort of like not sharing your artwork.

Minette Riordan: Kind of like not sharing my artwork. Yes, he’s laughing at me. It’s been a very emotional journey for me over the last number of years to go from sharing my work to showing my work to selling my work, right? Which are all different things. And so I have a lot of empathy for people on similar journeys. But I think that it behooves us as women to share our gifts.

Ellen Rogin: And to remember that people value things they pay for.

Minette Riordan: Yes.

Ellen Rogin: So sometimes when I was doing financial advising, I would do a pro bono consultation if someone really couldn’t afford our services. But there is people value advice. They would value artwork, they would value consulting more when they pay for it than if it’s just given to them for free. They may be more committed to following through if you have them pay for it, so it’s sometimes selfish to not be asking for the money that you deserve for the work that you do.

Brad Dobson: It’s interesting. There’s sort of this commonality between the discussion about generosity, the discussion about receiving, the discussion about value, monetary value, spiritual values, societal value. They just kind of intersect in this discussion where there’s a commonality between them. It’s like you said, the term currency is a good one. There’s an exchange of value that goes on there. And that flow that we talk about in some of our money mindset sessions is true for generosity in the same way as it is for money.

Minette Riordan: I tell my clients when they’re paying their bills and they’re worried about it, and they’re in anxiety or annoyance, to pause and to literally pay their bills with love. Maybe write a little thank you, because that one payment of an electric bill supports the people in the electric company who keep your electricity running. And then they pay their taxes and that supports the school system. Money has to stay in continuous flow for us all to be successful. And I personally just believe there’s enough to go around. Which makes me really curious about this concept of the abundance activist. Would you like to share a little bit about that?

Ellen Rogin: Yeah, sure. So it’s really based a lot on what you were just explaining. That there’s people out there thinking in more abundant ways, and people thinking more in scarcity ways. And I think a lot of our world problems are people who think in scarcity ways. The pie is only so small, I can’t win. You know, we both can’t win, right? I have to win, you have to lose. And it’s very restrictive and it’s not the way that I see the world works. I think the pie is ever-expanding. If you think about love, is there enough love to go around? Of course. There’s not a limited supply. And I feel like that with abundance as well.

Ellen Rogin: I also know that when you’re focusing on what’s working well in your life, what’s going well, having positive conversations, being grateful for it, it’s easier for things to flow through to you. Just a small digression and this is they’ve found that when people are super stressed out about their finances and they’re really focused on what isn’t working, your IQ actually drops.

Minette Riordan: Wow, wow.

Ellen Rogin: You can’t make a good decision. So it’s a very practical thing. Besides, it feels crappy to be focusing and scared, and it’s easy to get that way with money. When you can focus more abundantly about how there’s opportunities out there, the universe is a good place out there to support you, you have more of a likelihood of being able to create that for yourself. So this idea of being an abundance activist was really started with this idea of how can I be more generous and focused on it? So I mentioned I wasn’t brought up to be stingy and not help people, but it wasn’t something that our parents talked about a lot.

Ellen Rogin: So I started this concept of creating a wristband, and it just says Abundance Activist on it. You could use a wristband like this or you could just use some bracelet that goes back and forth. And the idea is that every time I do a kind act, an act of generosity, I move it to the other wrist. So it could be mentoring, it could be writing a charitable check, it could be really giving someone a total compliment. It could be receiving when you know you’re receiving to make the other person feel good. Does that make sense?

Minette Riordan: Yes.

Brad Dobson: Yeah.

Ellen Rogin: You know, when my mum was alive and she used to want to do stuff for us, sometimes I was like, oh, I don’t really need your help. But it made her feel good. So that being open and receiving was an act of generosity, and so I’d move it to the other wrist. When I started to do this it had me being much more aware and awake to the ways that I am generous, and maybe the ways that I’m less than generous. You know, we all have different ways we do it, right? So I noticed, and I’m not proud of this but it’s something for me to notice and get better at, that I tend to be more generous when it’s convenient for me.

Brad Dobson: Sure.

Ellen Rogin: So happy to help you if I’m not that busy, or happy to help you when it’s something that’s important to me. Where my husband is generous in totally different ways. He doesn’t know you guys. If you were coming to Chicago and needed a ride from the airport, he’d be there to pick you up.

Brad Dobson: Wow.

Ellen Rogin: Be happy to do that. And so is it good or bad the different ways we’re generous? No, it’s just a noticing in how can I step up more? Another way to use the wristband is to shift the conversation. When people are super doom and gloom, like, oh, my God, the market’s been up for nine years, it’s got to go down, or things are so scary, or whatever it is, if I can shift the conversation to something that is more positive, more optimistic, having them think about what’s really working well, then I’m being an abundance activist in the world.

Minette Riordan: Wow, wow. I love that. So how can I become an abundance activist?

Brad Dobson: I want to be an abundance activist. I want to be their first.

Ellen Rogin: Yeah. Well, I’ll send you guys wristbands.

Brad Dobson: Perfect.

Ellen Rogin: But even for those listening that don’t have a wristband, just be aware of it. It can be a rubber band, it can be a bracelet. And just notice, and maybe set a goal. Five times today I’m going to do a kind act for someone. It can be a smile. It can be calling someone who needs you. It doesn’t have to be donating a kidney.

Brad Dobson: Right, right, right, right, right.

Minette Riordan: I love that and I’ve loved this whole conversation around generosity and abundance, and the give and take of both being generous in your giving and generous in your receiving. Such a beautiful conversation. The work you’re doing is so important. So if people want to learn more about you or find out what’s up with you, where can they go to find out more information?

Ellen Rogin: Yeah, sure. So if you go to ellenrogin.com, that’s E, L, L, E, N, R, O, G, I, N dot com. First of all, there’s a generosity quiz right on my website that will tell you whoever you are, ’cause we’re all different.

Minette Riordan: Oh, awesome.

Ellen Rogin: And then if you go to ellenrogin.com/goodies, there’s also two visualizations that you can download for prosperity flow. And anyone who has kids, there’s a special report on there on how to have more abundant children in your life.

Minette Riordan: Beautiful. I love guided visualizations.

Brad Dobson: I’m ready for this.

Minette Riordan: Yes, totally ready for this, being an abundance activist. Ellen, thank you so much for your generosity of time today. We know how busy you are and we so appreciate you. And we just want to really champion what it is that you’re doing. This is so important.

Brad Dobson: Thank you so much, Ellen.

Minette Riordan: Yeah, thank you.

Ellen Rogin: And what a joy to talk to you about this. My favorite podcast.

Minette Riordan: Yeah. It’s just so exciting to talk about it. And we’ll have links in the show notes for how to connect with Ellen, where to go find out more information and how to become an abundance activist yourself. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you on the next episode of Structure and Flow. And if you loved this episode, go give Ellen some love on iTunes and tell her how much you loved, and if you’re going to become an abundance activist.

Brad Dobson: Cool. Bye, guys.

Brad Dobson: Thanks for listening to Structure and Flow, the productivity podcast for creative entrepreneurs. To find out more about this episode and others, go to pathtoprofitacademy.com and click on the podcast link.