This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to consider being generous with your time. While boundaries are wise, people are generally a good use of time.

So be generous with time when you can. There is a famous passage from First Corinthians that

is read at weddings about love. You probably remember how this starts from the last wedding you went to

with the statement that love is patient. I was pondering recently what it means for love to be patient,

and I realized that fundamentally, patience means being generous with time.

When love is patient, it means we aren't rushing off to the next thing.

We are giving people enough time to be heard and seen.

This plays out in all sorts of ways.

It can mean chatting with a teenager,

even though it is bedtime, and you are tired.

It can mean listening to your spouse as worries, even though you are annoyed about something

else he or she did.

It can mean taking time to encourage a direct report, even in the middle of a packed day.

It can mean graciously listening to your elderly neighbor tell that same story about her

grandchild again. Time is ultimately limited. And so this generosity is costly in a way that being

profligate with money is not. You can make more money. You cannot make more time.

And so a lot of time management literature talks about saying no more often. And perhaps there is

something to that. But when we can say yes to the people in our lives, it strengthens those relationships

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