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The No-Entitlement Attitude

In order to make your contribution bigger than your reward, you have to have what we call a No-Entitlement Attitude™. This means you believe that you have to make some kind of valuable contribution to others before you deserve any reward. We talk about this with our entrepreneurial clients because it’s an attitude that all entrepreneurs must have. If they don’t succeed in offering something that others perceive as being valuable, they won’t stay in business for long. But everyone can benefit from having a No-Entitlement Attitude, not just people who run their own businesses, as Gaynor Rigby realized one day early in her career at The Strategic Coach.

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Gaynor is a remarkably talented, capable, bright woman with a big heart and big dreams. She left England at 18 to come to America because she felt she could have a bigger future here. After being a nanny, first in Cincinnati and later in Toronto, she took a job at The Strategic Coach as a receptionist. The company was small then, and she had big ambitions. Reality was not living up to her expectations. She was in a bit of a funk about her life, not feeling that she was making the progress she should be, unhappy to have gained some weight, and, she admits, generally feeling sorry for herself. Why wasn’t the world cooperating and helping her to achieve her dreams? Could people not see what she had to offer?

Then one day, in a workshop, she heard Dan talk about the fact that entrepreneurs know they have to create value before they expect any reward, and suddenly it dawned on her: she had been waiting around for opportunity to come to her, when what she needed to do was to go out and proactively find ways to contribute. It was a life-altering realization.

Immediately, she began to apply her considerable resolve to transforming her life. She began to eat better and exercise. She started looking around the office for systems and structures that could be improved, and began initiating these improvements herself, coming up with plans, running them by Babs and Dan, and getting the OK to go ahead and make changes.

Today, Gaynor is director of sales and marketing for The Strategic Coach. More people report to her than to any other team leader in the company. Initially building on things she learned as a nanny about how to motivate people, she has grown into a highly talented and respected manager known for her ability to take on just about anything and get it done, and then delegate or systematize the maintenance and move on to the next thing. She’s happy with where her life is now and the fact that it’s been created entirely on her own terms. All the rewards she wanted, and a good many that she never expected, have come as by-products of her contributions. They’ve allowed her to see even bigger possibilities and to seek out ways in which she can use her talents to have even more rewarding growth experiences. And she’s the first to acknowledge that the day she decided to make her contribution bigger than her reward was the day she made this bigger and still-growing future possible.