On this penultimate day of Elul, the word that Rabbi Sommer gave us is Give. How appropriate. Last year I wrote about scarcity and abundance. This year I am thinking about helping people.

In the abundance model, you give away lots and lots of content, and charge for maybe the last 10%, the premium model, the one-on-one special coaching. But in general, you should set things up so that people can do quite well on what you are giving out for free, without paying for anything. You know, however, that they will do better if they pay you, and so do they. So it’s up to them to decide.

Today I stumbled upon (or maybe Facebook decided to give to me) a video by Derek Halpern, who is the brilliant mind behind the website Social Triggers. In return for signing up for his mailing list, he gave me a video and a PDF in which he explained in detail the different reasons people visit your site, really like what you have to offer, but don’t buy. The reasons range from indifference and skepticism to worry and procrastination. Quite fascinating, really. This is also the sort of thing I’m learning about in my company training, so it meshes together quite nicely.

Will I pay to get the training to deal with all this from Derek? Probably not. I’m already getting it from my company. But I do appreciate the way he laid everything out and made it easy for me to understand the different reasons people have been saying no to my offers. That is a gift he has given me, and I am thankful.

It made me think about the gifts that I can give people, as well. I already share a lot of content that I run into, whether it’s about health or business or just life. I’ve made my first tentative steps into coaching people, based on the little I’ve learned so far. Obviously I am not charging for any of that. I am grateful that my friends trust me enough to let me ask them questions about their state of mind. I hope those questions were helpful.

My teacher, Brooke Castillo, has a blog and a podcast, in which she gives away a lot of what she knows about coaching, about life, about solving problems. She is very generous indeed. I am one of the people who are paying her, because I want to be certified by her school, but I could see people getting great benefits from just following her blog and podcast. I would love to be able to provide that kind of value for free. I hope that one day I will.

What gifts do you give your community, and how do they relate to what you do for a living? Do you live by the abundance model, or by the scarcity model?