Five Ways of Thinking to Become a More Helpful Person
All of us want to be helpful to someone else in our life, but our help often falls short. A small mindset shift might make a dramatic improvement on the ways we help others.
From the last two decades of teaching public servants, I’ve noticed that effective helpers tend to think differently about the world, themselves, and the people they want to help. These five ways of thinking aren’t exhaustive, but they can make a big impact on how helpful you are. They’re also evidence-backed ideas, taken from medicine, social impact, economics, and psychology.
After you’ve looked these over, I’d love to know: What else do you find makes someone more helpful?
Consider opportunity costs.
For every act of help, there’s another way—perhaps better, perhaps worse—we could help instead. When we do things for others, we often do it instinctively and fail to consider the alternatives. This simple question, “What could I do instead?” almost always improves your thinking.
Imagine you have a neighbor who just lost their job. Your instinct might be to start sending them job openings at your company. But in the immediate aftermath, what they might need instead is a listening ear to help them process what happened.
Assume less.
If you’re good at empathy, defined as perspective-taking, then you’re more likely to be a helpful person. But, we might misunderstand what the other person is really thinking and feeling. We can solve this problem by simply communicating more than we think we need to. Ask questions and share your plans and intentions to help so you get feedback from the person you’re helping.
It finally took my wife telling me that she doesn’t want flowers for Valentine’s Day for me to stop buying her flowers. (She didn’t want to hurt my feelings and I was just doing what I thought a husband was supposed to do.) I’ve become a better gift-giver to her by just asking her for a list of things she would love. I then either choose something from the list as a surprise or use the list for inspiration to get something else. I’m quite proud of the fact that I found what is now her favorite brand of tea.
You don’t need more emotional empathy. In fact, you might be better off with less of it
Empathy comes in three kinds, emotional empathy, cognitive empathy, and empathic concern. Emotional empathy—where we feel what we perceive other people feeling—is common to helpers. But it’s rough, especially when we mirror someone’s suffering. Plenty of research shows that you don’t need to be high in emotional empathy to be an effective helper. In fact, too much emotional empathy can backfire and cause depersonalization, making you far less helpful to others.
I teach students who go into public service and many of them struggle with constantly feeling the suffering of others. One of them shared with me, “I have often felt that I need to respond in a state of semi-distress in order for serious situations to be taken seriously.” Another said, “I had always thought empathy was the greatest amount of love you can show another person…Yet I can see and feel the burnout that comes from only having emotional empathy.” The quality of your help is not measured by your feelings of distress for someone else!
Expertise matters, and you can get good-enough expertise reasonably quickly.
We sometimes try and help in ways that are beyond our abilities and knowledge, and so our efforts fall short of meeting the need. It’s good to turn to experts for advice, rather than assuming we can fix a problem we’ve never fixed before. Temper the instinct to help first; cultivate a habit of learning first. We live in an age where experts are constantly sharing their insights. Even just a little bit of learning from an expert can make you a dramatically more helpful person.
When our son was diagnosed in high school with OCD, the best thing that happened for us as parents was getting some simple, but very helpful training from therapists who specialize in OCD treatment. In fact, it corrected ways we’d been accommodating his OCD and unwittingly fueling it. Of course, he also got expert treatment from trained professionals. The help of experts has benefitted him and us immensely.
You can cultivate compassion deliberately.
If there’s anyone in your life that you don’t feel positive feelings for, but you want to, there is a way to feel more compassion for them. Research on loving-kindness meditation indicates that compassion is a skill than can improve with practice. The essence of it is to use a moment of quiet and reflect on the positive feelings you have for someone you love dearly. Then while you bask in those feelings, try to imagine something similar for the person you struggle to care for. This is essentially a kind of practice.
I personally believe that compassionate prayer (praying for one’s enemies) can have a similar effect. There’s ancient wisdom in Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and Islamic practices that cultivate love for enemies. But remember, this being hard doesn’t mean you can’t get better at it. It just takes practice.
What other ways of thinking can make us more helpful people? I’d love to hear from you.
