SEVEN HELPING PILLARS

SEVEN HELPING PILLARS
By
William Cottringer, Ph.D.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.” ~Dr. Seuss.

We are all born with an innate desire to be successful and help others. There is wisdom in the saying, “you can best help yourself by helping others first.” But this process is tricky—because you actually have to figure out how to do both things at the same time.

The biggest challenge of helping yourself involves seeing the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and then actually doing something productive to close this gap. Ironically, learning how to do this is the first step in learning how to help others.

Many of us make a living trying to meet this challenge, and sooner or later we find out that helping ourselves and others may be easier said then done. So, what are the secrets from the school of hard knocks?

Here are seven helping pillars. When used wisely, they can help close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, so you can help others do that too. Oddly somewhere in between, you lose track of who you are helping (and that is how you know you are being successful!).

SELF-UNDERSTANDING

Progress in being able to understand and help others starts with your own self-exploration. This self-exploration is aimed at finding out who you really are, where you are going and how you can best get there. You have to ask many tough questions and go through some difficult, painful living to ever get close to these answers. There are too many wasted good intentions in trying to help others, when this first stage of personal development is skipped or rushed. Sometimes learning about yourself is so uncomfortable that you just want to run away from it. But your gap just gets wider until you finally have the courage to confront and deal with it. Wide gaps are easily noticeable by others, very unattractive and quite disruptive to the helping process.

BALANCE

You can’t attract other people to ask for your knowledge and good advice, until you start appearing humble, patient and well-grounded inside your own skin. You have to practice living what you are preaching and eliminate areas of your own life in which you have slipped precariously out of balance. You may take things too seriously and not laugh enough, you may talk too much and listen too little, or you may think too much and not feel enough. Worse yet, you may over-identify with what you are convinced you know to be true and are unknowingly alienating yourself from others as an arrogant, obnoxious know-it-all. Getting back in balance is often strenuous work but the payoff is worth it—it gives you an advantageous viewpoint in which you can see in all directions. And that includes the reward of seeing where you want to be, which is the first step in getting there.

CONFIDENCE

You really can’t begin to help others close their gaps until you learn how to close your own. Sure, you might be able to give others the noisy symptoms of your success, but not the genuine stuff without the experience and reflections. Attaining accurate self-understanding and achieving balance are starters. But the real proof in the pudding is when you test and prove a very fundamental belief—the certainty that you can affect reality positively and get where you want to be yourself. This may take a lot of dismal and uncomfortable failures, but the willingness to keep trying and endure adversity is what builds real confidence and this confidence is an attraction magnet for others. It shows as a delicate balance between vulnerability and competence. We are all searching for genuine confidence and she who wears her Sunday-best is a natural salesperson in the helping business.

CREATIVITY

Most problems in life require clever, creative solutions. And with all the chaos, complexity and overload of unfamiliarity today, it is even more so. And sometimes the best things in life—including creativity—are cleverly hidden right under our noses. Helping others often requires creative solutions and so it is important to tap into this valuable resource. The quickest way to discover creativity may be to redefine it in order to make it more readily accessible. Try viewing creativity as simply “the ordinary act of seeing a common thing with renewed interest, looking for new and unusual ways to apply what you are seeing, and figuring out a simple, clear way to communicate your new knowledge to others.” In other words look closer, see more and tell better. A more lofty definition of creativity puts it unnecessarily beyond our grasp.

REVERENCE

A fundamental covenant we all must follow is to respect our fellow human beings. The best way to convey respect is to practice small, ordinary acts of love and compassion with others at times when they least expect it. Such reverence is the stepstool needed by those who are trying to catch up with the rest of us and the stepladder needed by those who don’t even know they are left behind. When you learn to communicate reverence reverently, people listen because they sense the truth, sincerity and good will of what you are saying. Of course you have to learn how to be truthful, sincere and good-willing first, which may be a life-long learning task. And in the end you may find that it is the enthusiasm of your reverence that speaks louder than anything else you are trying to say.

ACCEPTANCE

The only true way to change another person’s problem behavior is to try and do the most difficult thing you can ever do—to accept the unacceptable. None of us are willing to change anything until we feel we are completely and unconditionally accepted for who we are—foibles, shortcomings, mistakes, bad breath and everything else that comes with the whole package. Such acceptance is not passive denial but aggressive understanding. Most bad habits originate from the unconscious and are fueled by on-going inadvertent reinforcement; this makes them almost impervious to ordinary intervention techniques. Gradual awareness and increased understanding help dissolve all problems and this is what helping acceptance is all about. And it is never a question of whether it works or not, it is more a matter of how much effort and patience are you willing to invest, without having expectations of an immediate reward?

TIMING

There is a saying, “In anything, timing is everything.” This is quite true in helping ourselves and others. Good timing is always crucial for success and bad timing can ruin the day. The best timing for helping others happens after we have mastered these other six pillars ourselves. Then time will take care of itself. Ironically, we often get the cart before the horse by rushing into trying to help others before we have readied ourselves to do this.

Practicing these seven helping pillars will greatly improve your chances of being successful in helping yourself and others. Really all you are trying to do is get in better sync with how life is.