Helping summary

What connects a doctor delivering a baby with a divorce lawyer? What links someone saving a life at the swimming pool with the grandson doing his elderly grandmother a favor? Let’s find out by looking at the three types of helping.

The first of these categories is informal help. This form of help is the most common and covers all of the routine cooperative, collaborative and alturistic behavior in our lives. It’s taken for granted as the basis for civilized society. The mother helping her child to tie his shoelaces, the shopper lifting a can of tomatoes off the top shelf for an elderly person or the first aid responder performing CPR at the scene of an accident – all are examples of informal help.

We don’t like to admit it to ourselves, but we know that many of our social relationships revolve around a simple mantra: “if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The nature of give-and-take can sometimes feel transactional.

In fact, we can see how closely our social relationships mirror the logic of economics by looking at some common expressions in the English language. We “pay” our respects and “pay” attention. We speak of the “pay-off” when something goes well. And we are “owed” the courtesy of a reply. Likewise, you can be “sold up the river” if you’re tricked into something you didn’t want to do. You can “sell yourself short” if you don’t do yourself justice in an interview.  

“All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare put it. And half of the time, we all feel like actors, fools and jesters. 

This too is revealed in the English language. For instance, even when we’re a long way from the theater, we still might remark that someone “gave quite the performance.” Also, we’re told to get our “act together,” or that we are not “acting like our usual selves.” Sometimes we even talk about our surroundings as if they were the stage. We long for a “change of scenery” or wonder what is “going on backstage.”

You’d think that helping would be the easiest thing in the world, but just like with many other aspects of our lives, asking for help isn’t always as simple as it seems.

For a start, receiving help can feel like a loss of status. Consider the male stereotype that real men don’t ask for help – they figure it out for themselves. It reveals the deep anxiety that lots of people feel when asking for assistance, especially men in Western countries within a competitive work culture.

You might have heard the phrase “he doesn’t help himself” when referring to someone engaged in a self-defeating spiral. What does that mean in more detail, though?

Firstly, sometimes we don’t reveal the full extent of our problem. Consider the spouse who frequently stands before the bedroom mirror and asks his wife whether his clothes still suit him. Rather than his fashion sense, his real anxiety might be the weight he’s put on. Similarly, when the company manager asks for assistance with team-building, her real problem might be that she has lost faith in her subordinates, but can’t face that fact.

We’ve all heard the phrase “sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind.” It’s what we’re told when helping someone in the usual sense would be counterproductive. But there are other ways in which our willingness to help can set people back too.

When you’re too eager to help someone, you might fail to see the extent of their problem or even misidentify their problem entirely. This is because people who request help might really be testing the waters and hiding a more serious difficulty that they actually require help with. For instance, if your child asks for help with his homework, it could mean that you immediately jump in to help without a second thought. But if he is still emotionally distraught after you’ve helped him, it could be that the problem wasn’t the homework at all, but perhaps something bigger, like being bullied at school, that he’s disguising.

We’re sometimes reminded that we’ve got two ears and one mouth. Or in other words, that we’d be better off listening more and talking less. Helping people is all about listening. But before we listen, we first need to make a humble inquiry.

To avoid the misunderstandings intrinsic to helping, it is best first to inquire. As we’ve already seen, the problem that we’re presented with often isn’t the full story. By inquiring in an open-minded way we can tease out the rest.