Why do we actually fail at helping others?
“Before helping others, put on your own oxygen masks”
I recalled these wise words of our air hostess as our flight experienced turbulence.
Ever had that moment when you share with your friends or family that you are thinking about losing weight or joining a guitar class and you are bombarded with advice from the pseudo-experts about how you can lose weight by following a particular diet or reduce the tummy fat by applying some oil they found on the internet and the stories of their relatives how they learned to play the guitar so well.
And you get to hear all this just after you express your interest. Just imagine what all you have to go through when you actually decide about something and share it with your friends and family.
Try telling them that you decided to get married and see their response and suggestions from how many children you should have to how to impress your in-laws and even about family planning.
“People are full of advises, waiting for the crisis, eager to tell you what needs to be done, even when all they have done is nothing and none.”
Trust me, we are one of them.
We are always at forefront to give suggestions, fill in the empty pages of others and that too when we neither have filled ours nor we have any ink.
We cannot solve the puzzles of others without giving them a part of ours to fill the missing space.
- Sometimes I feel that the reason we are so desperate to give advice to people is that somewhere we have been through that situation and it went out of our hands due to our negligence, laziness to take efforts or lack of initiative and we always find it easy to make people realize how experienced are we despite of the fact that all we have done is mourn and nothing else over what happened with us.
We realize that we are unable to change the situation because of our attitude but we also realize that every time we give an unwanted advice to others our brain makes us feel that we have gained what we wanted to.
2. While on the other hand one more reason we won’t be able to help people is people tend to refuse to listen to those who are constantly nagging them about doing something but they themselves are hollow at the inside.
People wants to follow role models who have actually done something about something they are talking about.
If you have never built anything or done anything enterprising and lecturing people about building a company, if you never treated people well and telling people to respect others, if you never gave an helping hand to someone and are conducting a workshop on community service then people are definitely not going to listen to you and over a period of time they may even lose respect for you.
People want someone who can empathize with them, someone who have walked that road before or is ready to walk it with them, they don’t like dry words and shallow guidance. They can get it from the self-help books too.
3. I often ask people during my seminar what kind of people they want to become, “I want to help others and do something for society” They almost reply in chorus all the time.
It is true that we all want to create an impact, be a hero and nowadays social service is cooler then it was before. But we must understand that we will be unable to help people if we ourselves lack the strength or skill.
Like
“Two beggars can understand each other’s hunger but they cannot solve it.”
So if we want to help people lead happy life, often the best way is to polish ourselves, brush up or skills, improve our knowledge and sweeten our intentions.
Change starts from self and if we improve, our surroundings will improve and thus the lives of those people will improve who we care about.
In the exam of life apparently there are no theories only practicals.
The mother cow does not sit the baby cow down and do a SWOT analysis on the ways to eat grass; the mother cow simply begins eating grass and the baby cow takes note of it. — Josh Harris
There is nothing selfish in helping yourself before you take on the mission to help yourself because the life don’t run on mere good intentions but good intentions powered by strength and improvement.
Even the radius of your self-centeredness is large enough, don’t forget that you are at the center of the circle. Only when our lamps are lit and contains sufficient oil we can go on a voyage of lightning those candles of others. Only when our mental state is in tip top condition, we can make others happy. Only when we are stable, we can help others balance their lives. Only when we realize that if humans are worth taking care off and we are one of them to deserve equal importance, we will be able to do justice with others.
“ Don’t tell them, show them” — Proverb
So next time before rushing out to help someone, be sure you have put on your oxygen mask of
Health
Confidence
Skills
Peace
Happiness
Knowledge.
To learn more on how you can hack your personality to be better, read this
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About the Author
Ameya is an author and a speaker who believes that the simplest of the observation can lead to greatest discoveries.
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