Helping | offering | serving

Last week, I talked about defining what is important and even essential to you. This week, I will share some thoughts about serving others.

As we discussed last week, sometimes by responding to the urgent, we answer someone’s ask, but are we really serving them?

Indeed, what we might take for helping others is not really serving them. Are we serving or just pleasing?

Serving is the opposite of pleasing.

The most efficient use of your time is serving. Serving is always effective. It always has an amazing (though sometimes delayed) return on investment of energy. The least efficient use of your time is to please people with it. To try to win approval. To impress someone.

Most people who feel stuck are devoting their days to trying to figure out what other people could be thinking of them. It's an endless, fruitless, hopeless task of rolling a stone up a hill, only for it to roll back down, fighting to win the acceptance and love of others.

Besides that, even “successful pleasing” never lasts. As you wake up the next morning in a cold sweat, trusting no one to remember how you won them over. So, it has to start all over.

Ineffective people think they need more and more love from others. They go to their counselors, mentors, coaches, therapists, and religious guides and they ask, “How do I get more love coming my way?”

Here is what they never ask: "How can I love more than I am now loving? How can I serve more profoundly and more often than I am?"

…And then there is helping, which can ironically create tension, the opposite of the intended purpose.

The person you’re seeking to connect with might not want to believe that help is possible. There’s solace that comes from being really and truly stuck, and hope might not be on their agenda.

Or there might be resistance to thinking about what help would look like. Because visualizing it brings it one step closer to happening, and that can be scary.

Perhaps the person has danced with hope before and discovered that people who mean well don’t always follow through. It may be that an offer of help feels temporary and selfish, not generous.

And it could be that the problem the person has built is so perfect and permanent that no help is possible.

Ultimately, the only way to know if help is possible is to try it.

To sum up, stop pleasing, try helping and start serving, with love.

Question:

How can you best serve others?