Build Then Bless
With Build Then Bless as the backbone of our culture, we get to hear a lot (and I mean a LOT) of really cool stories about the goodness that is innate in human beings. Our lives are constantly uplifted from listening to others share about cool experiences that they have had blessing others, ways that they have been blessed by other incredible people, and even just events that our team might not have been a part of but were able to witness.
Every week we meet together as an entire company and swap stories like this. It is the highlight of the week for everyone! It brings us all closer together as a team and truly inspires all of us to go out and spread more good into the world.
Build Then Bless is the best part of what we get to do at Lemonade Stand.
I’d like to share one of the recent stories that was told at one of these team gatherings. This is one of my all-time favorite Build Then Bless stories, and I hope that it helps ignite the spark inside of you to bless somebody’s life today!
Story Time
This is a story about a family and how that family was blessed by the actions of another.
I won’t go into a whole lot of detail about the situation (it’s not really necessary to show why this was so cool), but this family had been going through a lot for a really long time. They had suffered through trials together, and those trials ended up being the cause for the loss of the father of this family at a young age.
With that as a background, two members of our team found this family and desperately wanted to help—to do anything to help ease some of that pain and bring some joy and light into their lives.
They thought about this for a while until they came up with the idea of a weekend getaway. They thought this would be a great way to get the family away from everything for a few days—to give them some time to just be together and not worry about anything else and to be able to relax and make some good memories together.
One of those team members happens to know a guy who owns a really cool hotel not too far from where this family lives. He called up his buddy and explained what was going on and that he wanted to help them out by providing a little vacation for them. He told the hotel owner that our team would cover all of the expenses and to just let him know how much it would be to really take care of them and make sure that they have a great time up at the hotel.
So they picked out some dates and worked through some of the details of everything.
Well, when getting this information back to the family and surprising them with such a cool gift, our team found out that one day of the chosen weekend just so happened to be one of the children’s birthday. It would be their first birthday without their father and was going to be a really tough one. The family’s mother had been trying to think of something incredible to do for her child to make that day more special. The timing for this to come together couldn’t have been better for them.
They were so excited!
At this point of sharing the story, our whole team was in tears. We could have ended it right here, and it still would be one of my favorite stories that I’ve ever heard.
But it got even better.
Our team member called the hotel owner back to finalize the hotel booking and details of the trip. While on the phone, the owner told our team to not worry about anything. They were going to take care of this family on their own dime and make sure that they were taken care of. Not only were they giving them their best available suite, but they were also planning on sending them to an incredible dining experience at an upscale steakhouse. They were going to take care of these people, and they didn’t want us to send them a penny for it.
What???
They don’t even know each other! This was just something that our team wanted to do for this family!
We couldn’t even believe that they were going to do this for them. It was incredibly touching, heartwarming, and inspiring to hear.
It was so special to us that it wasn’t even our team who ended up blessing this family. Our team acted more as a catalyst, promoting a micro interaction that pushed another amazing person to go out of their way to just absolutely wow the socks off of this family.
This is what Build Then Bless is all about!
The family was so, so grateful to everyone involved and ended up having a wonderful time and were taken care of so well by the hotel and its staff.
Such an awesome story!
Takeaways
There are two big takeaways that I think we can all learn from this experience.
The first is that doing good, or even just being willing to do good, spurs others into doing just as much if not more good for other people than what you were planning on doing. Going out of your way to do great things for people and to bless other people doesn’t just affect you and the person being blessed. It has the power to affect anyone and everyone that is involved in any way in that interaction.
We have seen this principle time and time again through many other stories that our team has shared over the years. Whether it’s a trickle effect of you paying for someone’s meal behind you in a drive thru, which leads them to pay for the person behind them, which leads that person to pay for the two cars behind them, etc. etc. or picking up the grocery bill for a family in need, which leads the grocery store cashier to do something similar simply by watching you, all the way to someone else paying for an entire vacation that you had planned on sending someone else on – it doesn’t matter.
Your acts will always inspire others to follow suit.
The coolest part is that it doesn’t even have to involve money. You might shovel snow for one of your neighbors and that inspires your whole neighborhood to start shoveling snow for other people. Soon enough, you’ve built an entire community of do gooders from your one single act. You never know the kind of impact it can have, so just go out and serve. Bless people everywhere you go!
The other takeaway is a really important one. It’s something that I’ve been working on ever since reading The Go Giver. It is one of the lessons taught in this book, and it was a highlight to me from this story.
The principle is to be a good recipient of other people’s giving. In any interaction of giving there has to be a giver and a receiver. The receiver is just as important as the giver. Without a receiver, nobody would ever be able to do any of the giving.
When people get the idea in their head that they want to be more generous and more giving, this often comes along with the thought of “whenever someone wants to give to me, I won’t accept it. I’ll only give to others.” While having this thought isn’t necessarily wrong or evil, it can be detrimental for other people who want to give just as much as you do. Being open to receiving is just as important as being open to giving.
At first glance, this might seem like a backwards concept, but I encourage you to really think about that. In our story above, for example, there was probably a total of about 100 people who were able to be a part of the act of giving. These people have been uplifted and inspired by being a part of this and have been made better people because of it.
If the family had refused this gift because it was “too much” or they “didn’t want anyone to go out of their way,” then all of these people would have missed out on the opportunity to give and to be blessed by giving. Sure, the family was greatly blessed by the giving, but they probably ended up giving more to the other people just by accepting what was being given to them.
It’s a powerful and life-changing concept. Like I said, I’m still struggling to adopt this in my own life, and it can take some getting used to, but when someone wants to give something to you or bless you in some way, try to be more receptive to it and accept what they are trying to do for you. Remember, they want to be a giver just like you!
If you want a better explanation of this concept, I recommend that you read through the Go-Giver. It’s a great book with some great principles to live by. We read it as a company, and you are welcome to read through what we were able to learn in this other article here.
I also encourage you to reach out to our team if you’d like to learn more about Build Then Bless by following this link, and reaching out to our digital marketing team if you need any help in growing your business!
We love to help and serve!