“No more gifts,” the woman told me. “We’ve given him presents for every birthday, Christmas, and special event, and not once has he said ‘thank you’ or written us a note.” When her son married, she took in his stepson, about age six, as a full-fledged member of the family. “Now he’s turning twenty, and that’s it,” she said with sad conviction.
I know well the impact of a lack of thanks. After spending hours preparing for and giving two presentations recently for women at churches at no charge, I never received a note of thanks, email, or even a phone call. I’ve since decided to make myself charge a fee. I have told other people in the past, “If you don’t value yourself, then what you offer must not be worth anything.” It was time to take my own advice. Shortly after that, I was invited to speak at a women’s event. I said upfront what the fee would be, and they accepted. They were most gracious in welcoming me, setting up a table for my books, and thanking me afterwards verbally and with a written note. Oddly, it seems when I charge a fee, my message is valued more highly and I even sold more books.
Yesterday, a female vendor next to me at a Christmas Fair shared a similar story. “A friend invited me to make a presentation to about one hundred people. I worked on it for months! Afterwards, nobody said thanks, and my friend simply told me what I had done wrong. I’ve never made another presentation and that was the end of the friendship, too.”
When people give gifts, whether physical or their time and talent, it’s very important to express appreciation. We all need to model giving thanks ourselves and teach it to our children and grandchildren, as well. Otherwise, we, too, may experience, “No more gifts.”
by Kathleen Vestal Logan, MS, MA November 26,2018