Nobody wants to give, everybody wanna take. That’s the popular practice by humans. Giving help is now seen as a competitive strategy that might backfire. What has led to the decrease in genuine help over the past decades? This article explains that and more!

Life is a one-way traffic. It gets creepy and keeps playing us hard anywhere it wants us to feel the pain. But in the reality life is not a competition. Life is about helping and inspiring others, so we can all reach our potential. Everyone has goals, and we need each other to actualize these goals. It may sound funny, but humans are close-knitted animals. We tend to need the support and care of each other.

A Couple Having a Healthy Relationship, Image Courtesy of The Today Show

Take for example, in a relationship. There is flow of communication. There is a close built circle of love and foundations to making sure the relationship survives its early years. In the family circle, we see the same thing too, you fight with your siblings, they eat your cake and fries, they piss you off, and in the end you still love them just the way you are. So why do we get all close knitted and still find it difficult to support and build fellow individuals up?

What Makes Helping People So Challenging?

According to Science of People, it was examined that there are 4 types of people who are difficult to help. They include:

Difficult Person, Depiction Courtesy of Nourish Books

• Downers are also known as Negative Nancy’s or Debbie Downers. They always have something bad to say. They complain, critique and judge. They are almost impossible to please.
• Better Than’s also are known as Know It All’s, One Uppers or Show-Offs. They like to try impressing you, name-dropping and comparing.
• Passives also are known as Push-Overs, Yes Men and Weaklings. They don’t contribute much to conversations or people around them and let others do the hard work.
• Tanks also are known as being explosive, a handful, or bossy. They want their way and will do anything to get it.

Other reasons for finding it hard to helping others include:

1. Not Willing to Deal with Past Hurt.

Whatever unhealed pain we have from the past will eventually spill out onto the people in our lives today. Most of our irritation in relationship today has nothing to do with the person in mind, but an unresolved issue with someone in the past.

When Mark De Jesus was in pastoral work, there were numbers of people that would come into the church with a hostile position towards me. “I had really just met them, but they had this critical attitude towards me already. I knew instantly that there was hurt form a previous pastor that has not been healed and addressed”. When we are mad our spouse, it usually goes back to a pain issues with the opposite sex in our history, usually leading back to mom and dad.

Quite often, we take our hurt and we make it very black and white. We have a great journey that ended with some rough relationship departures, and we end up saying the whole experience was terrible. We end a marriage of 20 years than went sour and we see the whole marriage as being a complete failure. We look at old friendships that moved into new directions and see them as completely bad friends.

Black a white thinking is a sign of an unhealed perspective in relationships. If you look back at people as being 100% against you all the time or 100% evil in every step they took, there is probably some unhealed pain that needs to be addressed. I am careful to label anyone as a enemy, because that solidifies a hurt that cannot be healed effectively.

2. Too Many Don’t want Honest Conversation.

A startling realization occurs when you don’t have a honest relationship with someone. Many times its because the person cannot handle the truth and honest interactions. This is difficult, because a lot of times we do not know how to have honest conversations without accusing. People think they are being helpful by being honest, but they are just blasting people with accusation. Honesty needs to be handled with care.

Honest conversations bring an invitation to connect at a deeper place of trust, who show one another to be trustworthy in handling each other’s heart. When helping someone, its important to establish trust and love, so safety can be present. But even when doing that, you can still have struggles in being able to have honest conversations with people.

3. They Want You to Rescue Them.

Beware when someone puts a superman cape on you, where they want you to rescue them from their dilemmas, without them taking responsibility for change. Helping someone is useless if they do not want to do the work. You can find our rather quickly if the person is willing to do whatever it takes to grow, or if they are putting the pressure on you for their growth.

Accepting the superman cape is a very delicate position. Why? You might just become a minion! In this case, a very foolish minion. While, accepting certain responsibilities towards someone is a great step to redemption, it doesn’t guarantee genuine restoration of values on them!

How to See Beyond and Still Help!

Image Quote by Quotefancy

According to the Author of Jason Steed, Edelweiss Pirates, Archie Wilson, occasional journalist and Radio Host?—?Mark A. Cooper, he says you always have to look beyond what you can see. Life has no remote, so you have to get up and change it yourself.

In a world where it’s very rare to get the needed help from your family, friends, relatives, acquaintances, and even strangers, the lyrics by ID Cabasa in the intro of this article will quite resonate with you. However, if you have given up hope in humanity, take a look at what you can do to get back on track and become someone’s superhero!

1. Set Great Boundaries.

The most loving and healthy people often have the most clear boundaries in their life. They don’t do it in anger or coldness. These boundaries flow naturally. Boundaries are not emotional walls, but healthy setups so that the relationship can flourish effectively.

Boundary setting is actually a powerful expression of love. But most people do not see it that way. This is because so many were not disciplined properly as children, so when someone sets boundaries, they consider it an unloving act. When it reality, those boundaries allow for love to flourish very effectively. You will have the best relationships with those who responded well to boundaries.

2. Sharing Knowledge

One of the easiest ways to help others is to simply share your knowledge. You don’t have to be in front of a classroom to teach. Every day there is an opportunity to educate someone about your area of expertise. The key is to keep educating yourself so you can stay ahead of the curve.

3. Finding out what’s valuable to them

The number one rule of helping people should be to find out what’s actually valuable to someone. You may spend time and effort helping someone with something that they didn’t even want help with. Make an effort to ask them where they need help, and keep that in mind when you see an opportunity.

4. Making them aware of an opportunity

It’s important to keep an eye out for opportunities. It could be good press, a potential partner, or a general business opportunity. Once you see an opportunity, think about who could benefit from knowing about it. One of the ways I like to help my employees is to help their friends, relatives or significant others if they’re looking for a job. A lot of times I can use my business connections to find a potential good fit.

5. Volunteering your time

Time is valuable and most people understand that. When you take time out of your day to help a friend, they remember it. I try and do a guest webinar every couple of weeks for contacts so they know I’m willing to take time out of my day to share my experience with the community. Even if it’s not something as public as a webinar or podcast, set aside some time to help a contact. It could be as simple as helping them move to a new home.

Now lets face the hard fact that helping others isn’t always easy as it’s been talked about. It can sometimes derail your schedule and cost you time, money and other resources. It can even be interpreted the wrong way. However, don’t give up on helping people!

credit: top image, Helping an Individual, Image Courtesy of Mark DeJesus