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Psychologists Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan have demonstrated that
giving has an energizing effect
only if it’s an enjoyable, meaningful choice rather than undertaken out of duty and obligation. In one study, people reported their giving every day for two weeks, indicating whether they had helped someone or done something for a good cause. On days when they gave, they rated why they gave. On some days, people gave due to enjoyment and meaning—they thought it was important, cared about the other person, and felt they might enjoy it. On other days, they gave out of duty and obligation—they felt they had to and would feel like a bad person if they didn’t. Each day, they reported how energized they felt.

Weinstein and Ryan measured changes in energy from day to day. Giving itself didn’t affect energy: people weren’t substantially happier on days when they helped others than on days that they didn’t. But the reasons for giving mattered immensely: on days that people helped others out of a sense of enjoyment and purpose, they experienced significant gains in energy.
*
Giving for these reasons conferred a greater sense of autonomy, mastery, and connection to others, and it boosted their energy. When I studied
firefighters and fund-raising callers
, I found the same pattern: they were able to work much harder and longer when they gave their energy and time due to a sense of enjoyment and purpose, rather than duty and obligation.

For Conrey, this is a major difference between teaching at Overbrook and volunteering with Minds Matter and TFA. In the Overbrook classroom, giving is an obligation. Her job requires her to break up fights and maintain order, tasks that—although important—don’t align with the passion that drew her into teaching. In her volunteer work, giving is an enjoyable choice: she loves helping high-achieving underprivileged students and mentoring less experienced TFA teachers. This is another way giving can be otherish: Conrey focused on benefiting students and teachers, but doing so in a way that connects to her core values and fuels her enthusiasm. The energy carried over to her classroom, helping her maintain her motivation.

But at Overbrook, Conrey couldn’t avoid the obligation to give to her students in ways that she didn’t find naturally exciting or energizing. What did she do to stay energized despite the sense of duty?

During one particularly stressful week, Conrey was struggling to get through to her students. “I was feeling miserable, and the kids were being awful.” She approached a teacher named Sarah for help. Sarah recommended an activity that was a hit in her classroom: they got to design their own monsters that were on the loose in Philadelphia. They drew a picture of a monster, wrote a story about it, and created a “wanted” ad so people would be on the lookout. It was exactly the inspiration that Conrey needed. “Our ten-minute chat helped me get excited about the lesson. I had fun with the kids, and it made me more invested in the curriculum I was teaching.”

Although Conrey’s decision to ask another teacher for help may not sound unusual, research shows that it’s quite rare among selfless givers. Selfless givers “feel uncomfortable receiving support,” write Helgeson and colleague Heidi Fritz. Selfless givers are determined to be in the helper role, so they’re reluctant to burden or inconvenience others. Helgeson and Fritz find that selfless givers receive far less support than otherish givers, which proves psychologically and physically costly. As burnout expert Christina Maslach and colleagues conclude, “there is now a consistent and strong body of evidence that a lack of social support is linked to burnout.”

In contrast, otherish givers recognize the importance of protecting their own well-being. When they’re on the brink of burnout, otherish givers seek help, which enables them to marshal the advice, assistance, and resources necessary to maintain their motivation and energy. Three decades of research show that receiving support from colleagues is a
robust antidote to burnout
. “Having a support network of teachers is huge,” Conrey affirms.

But Overbrook didn’t have a formal support network of teachers, so where did Conrey get her support network? She built one at Overbrook through the act of giving help.

For many years, experts believed that the stress response involved a choice:
fight or flight.
Since burnout means we lack the energy to fight, it’s natural to choose flight, coping by avoiding the source of stress. Burnout experts Jonathon Halbesleben and Matthew Bowler studied professional firefighters over a two-year period. Sure enough, when the firefighters
started to burn out
, their performance ratings dropped. Burnout made them less concerned about achievement and status. Consequently, they invested less effort in their work, and their effectiveness suffered.

But surprisingly, in this study, burnout didn’t decrease effort across the board. There was one place where firefighters actually
increased
their effort when they felt burned out: helping others. When the firefighters experienced signs of burnout, they were more likely to go out of their way to help colleagues with heavy workloads, share new knowledge with supervisors, give advice to newer colleagues, and even listen to colleagues’ problems. Why would burnout increase their giving?

UCLA psychologist Shelley Taylor has discovered a stress response that differs from fight or flight. She calls it
tend and befriend
.
“One of the most striking aspects of the human stress response is the tendency to affiliate—that is, to come together in groups to provide and receive joint protection in threatening times.” Taylor’s neuroscience research reveals that when we feel stressed, the brain’s natural response is to release chemicals that drive us to bond. This is what the firefighters did: when they started to feel exhausted, they invested their limited energy in helping their colleagues. Intuitively, they recognized that giving would strengthen their relationships and build support (at least from matchers and givers). Although most givers are aware of this opportunity, it appears that only otherish givers actually take advantage of it.

Conrey Callahan built her support network by tending and befriending under stress. When she was at the pinnacle of exhaustion, she started mentoring TFA teachers and several of the younger teachers in her own school. One of the teachers Conrey mentored was Sarah. In the course of mentoring, one of the exercises that Conrey taught Sarah was the monster activity. Conrey had forgotten about it, and when she reached out for help, Sarah reminded her about it. The advice itself was helpful, but it also strengthened Conrey’s sense of impact: she had given Sarah an activity that was a big hit with her own students.

Otherish givers build up a support network that they can access for help when they need it. This, along with chunking giving so that it’s energizing, is what makes otherish givers less vulnerable to burnout than selfless givers. But how do otherish givers stack up against takers and matchers?

Years ago, Dutch psychologists studied hundreds of
health professionals
. They tracked the amount of time and energy that the health professionals gave to patients, and asked them to report how burned out they felt. A year later, the psychologists measured giving and burnout again. Sure enough, the more the health professionals gave, the more burned out they became in the following year. Those who gave selflessly had the highest burnout rates: they contributed far more than they got, and it exhausted them. Those who acted like matchers and takers were far less burned out.

But strangely, in another study, the Dutch psychologists found evidence that some health care professionals seemed immune to burnout. Even when they gave a great deal of time and energy, they didn’t exhaust themselves. These resilient health care professionals were otherish givers: they reported that they enjoyed helping other people and often went out of their way to do so, but weren’t afraid to seek help when they needed it. The otherish givers had significantly lower burnout rates than the matchers and takers, who lacked the stamina to keep contributing. This study pointed to an unexpected possibility: although matchers and takers appear to be less vulnerable to burnout than selfless givers, the greatest resilience may belong to otherish givers.

Part of the reason for this is illuminated in fascinating work by Northwestern University psychologists Elizabeth Seeley and Wendi Gardner, who asked people to work on a difficult task that sapped their
willpower
. For example, imagine that you’re very hungry, and you’re staring at a plate of delicious chocolate chip cookies, but you have to resist the temptation to eat them. After using up their willpower in a task like this, participants squeezed a handgrip as long as they could. The typical participant was able to hold on for twenty-five seconds. But there was a group of people who were able to hold on 40 percent longer, lasting for thirty-five seconds.

The participants with unusually high stamina scored high on a questionnaire measuring “other-directedness.” These other-directed people operated like givers. By consistently overriding their selfish impulses in order to help others, they had strengthened their psychological muscles, to the point where using willpower for painful tasks was no longer exhausting. In support of this idea, other studies have shown that givers accrue an advantage in controlling their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Over time, giving may build willpower like weight lifting builds muscles. Of course, we all know that when muscles are overused, they fatigue and sometimes even tear—this is what happens to selfless givers.

In
Utah
, a seventy-five-year-old man understands the resilience of otherish givers. His name is Jon Huntsman Sr., and his tiny photo from his company’s annual report appeared in chapter 2, in juxtaposition with the full-size photo of Kenneth Lay (you might also recognize him as the father of former Utah governor and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman Jr.). Back in 1990, the elder Huntsman was negotiating an acquisition with Charles Miller Smith, who was the president and CEO of a chemical company. During the negotiations, Smith’s wife died. Huntsman empathized with Smith, so he decided not to push any further: “I decided the fine points of the last 20 percent of the deal would stand as they were proposed. I probably could have clawed another $200 million out of the deal, but it would have come at the expense of Charles’ emotional state. The agreement as it stood was good enough.”

Was a CEO’s emotional state really worth $200 million to Huntsman? Believe it or not, this wasn’t the first time Huntsman gave away a fortune during a negotiation. Just four years earlier, in 1986, he made a verbal agreement with a CEO named Emerson Kampen. Huntsman would sell 40 percent of a division of his company to Kampen’s for $54 million. Due to legal delays, the contract wasn’t written until six months later. By that time, Huntsman’s profits had skyrocketed: that 40 percent of the division was now worth $250 million. Kampen called with a matcher’s offer to split the difference, proposing to pay $152 million instead of the original $54 million. Huntsman was poised to bring in nearly triple the original agreement. But he said no. The $54 million was good enough. Kampen was incredulous: “That’s not fair to you.”

Huntsman believed in honoring his commitment to Kampen. Even though the lawyers hadn’t drafted the original purchase agreement, he had shaken hands six months earlier on a verbal agreement. He signed for the $54 million, walking away from an extra $98 million. What type of businessman would make such irrational decisions?

In 1970, Huntsman started a chemical company that reigns today as the world’s largest. He has been named Entrepreneur of the Year and earned more than a dozen honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He’s a billionaire, one of the
Forbes
one thousand richest people in the world.

As his deal-making choices show, Huntsman is also a giver, and not just in business. Since 1985, he has been involved in serious philanthropy. He is one of just nineteen people in the world who have given at least $1 billion away. Huntsman has won major humanitarian awards for giving more than $350 million to found the world-class Huntsman Cancer Center, and made hefty donations to help earthquake victims in Armenia, support education, and fight domestic violence and homelessness. Of course, many rich people give away serious sums of money, but Huntsman demonstrates an uncommon intensity that sets him apart. In 2001, the chemical industry tanked, and he lost a sizable portion of his fortune. Most people would cut back on giving until they recovered. But Huntsman made an unconventional decision. He took out a personal loan, borrowing several million dollars to make good on his philanthropic commitments for the next three years.

Huntsman sounds like a classic example of someone who got rich and then decided to give back. But there’s a different way of looking at Huntsman’s success, one that might be impossible to believe if it weren’t backed up by Huntsman’s experience and by science. Maybe getting rich didn’t turn him into a giver. What if we’ve mixed up cause and effect?

Huntsman believes that being a giver
actually made him rich
. In his giving pledge, Huntsman writes: “It has been clear to me since my earliest childhood memories that my reason for being was to help others. The desire to give back was the impetus for pursuing an education in business, for applying that education to founding what became a successful container company, and for using that experience to grow our differentiated chemicals corporation.” As early as 1962, Huntsman told his wife that he “wanted to start his own business so he could make a difference” for people with cancer. Huntsman lost both of his parents to cancer, and had survived three bouts of cancer himself. Curing cancer is so deeply ingrained in Huntsman’s fiber that he has even prioritized it above his political ideology. Although he worked in the Nixon White House and has been a longtime supporter of the Republican party, Huntsman has been known to favor Democratic candidates if they demonstrate a stronger commitment to curing cancer.