3 Laws of Helping Others
By bebarrs
@bebarrs (7)
Philippines
October 17, 2010 5:50am CST
The desire to help is innate in every individual, it is like an embedded virtue in humans that no culture or nationality can breach.
However, helping others is not always that easy, you have to follow some basic yet very important rules and they are as follow.
1. Know who You are - Most of the people who really wanted to help will end up being
frustrated when they found out that they are no longer helping
the person at all. Ex. Helping the person to cope up with
stress when in fact, you yourself is struggling the same. -
You can not squeeze an Apple to give you an Orange juice.
2. Help others Help themselves - One of the common mistake of helping others is by
providing everything to the person what he needs and not even
bother to teach him on how to address such need truly by
himself. -
Give him a fish and he will eat it for a day, Teach him how to
fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
3. Help without Expecting Something in Return: It is better to give than to
receive.
2 people like this
5 responses
@hotaru_serizawa (69)
• Indonesia
18 Oct 10
I think helping each other is one of positive attitude for human as social creature.
The most important thing is we must help others with the pure good intention, I think its included in your rule #3.
Second, we must do that in a proper way, a way that can't make those people feel offended or humiliated or treated as a weakling or a looser by the helper.
Its true that we must help other without expecting anything in return. But I believe that our kindness to others will come back to us somehow. Maybe not to ourself but to our children or our parents or other relatives whenever they get a trouble.
I hope we'll be helpfull to others around us.
(^_^)
@GardenGerty (160663)
• United States
18 Oct 10
bebarrs, you and gracee have come up with some good matters for us to consider. I may not agree that all people innately have a desire to help. I have met people who for the most part do not want to help others. I think that the helping response has been squashed by their family and up bringing. In general, however, I do agree that helping is pretty important to many people but can back fire. I think this is an informative discussion that will remind many of us what it takes to really help.
@gunjanpri (603)
• India
17 Oct 10
nice. You have given a good philosophy to follow. This will make us think before helping any body.
@Graceekwenx (3160)
• Philippines
17 Oct 10
Bebarrs. May i add two more? Helping others doesnt always have to be direct; like for example; your friend is an engineering student and you happen to be a medicine student; if he has some difficulty on one of his college subjects; it is something that you really cannot tutor on him because your worlds are different; but... you can help him thru little things like referring him to someone who is knowledgeable on that arena. Like i said, it may not be direct but still you were able to help him out.
Second is, you can only help other people if they allow themselves to be rescued. Some people are just so full of pride such that they refuse any form of assistance no matter how sincere you can get; and others think that you are belittling them and they reject your helping hand.
@jackrobc (1)
•
17 Oct 10
I think that the desire to help is definitely innate in every individaul as you have said- but the ability to bring it out is subject to personality and circumstance. Particularly under confident individuals who are exceedingly moral and good natured may often pass up the opportunity to help due to the potential for the situation to end badly in their own heads.
As for your second point, it depends a lot on circumstance. The example of providing a fishing rod was indeed parodied by Frankie Boyle, who said 'Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Give him a fishing rod and he'll break it up for firewood- or swap it for a fish'.
