Affirmations:
I am in service to myself and others.
I am here to be truly helpful giving the best I know.
I am always available for the highest good of all.
Life is for giving and I am the gift I have to give.
How Can I Help?
How can I help you, if I don’t know how to help myself?
How can I help, when I don’t have the energy or time?
How can I help, if I don’t know what you want?
How can I help, if I am not listening to what you want?
Folks often try to help because they are fearful or worried.
Some people interfere in others’ lives because they think they are helping.
Some times folks just don’t know any other way to express their love.
Look to see your motive to be helpful and who it really is helping.
When not asked for help, are you interfering?
When help is not wanted, do you think you know best?
When you make others feel guilty, are you really being helpful?
When you expect appreciation or reciprocity, is your help really gift?
Consider how you want to be helped.
Ask if you like to be forced to receive.
Look at how you feel about advice.
When do you feel others are meddling or actually helping.
A barometer for your true intentions may be:
Do you expect appreciation for your help?
Do you feel offended if they decline your help?
Are you waiting for payback when you need help?
Help is not helpful when you give without asking permission.
Help is not helpful if you think you know better than they do.
Help is not helpful if you make them feel inadequate or incapable.
Help is not beneficial if you are doing it for your own needs.
Consider your best help is to see and affirm others doing well.
Consider being helpful is appreciating what people do for themselves.
Consider remembering to ask first: “How can I be helpful?”
Help yourself first, so you are strong and able to give the help that is wanted.
Teach people how to help themselves, so they become independent.
Setting an example is always the best teacher.
Show rather than tell other how to do what they want to learn.
Encourage and affirm everyone to be strong and capable, happy and free.
Helpfulness is true service to others when you give what is valued and affirming to others.
See below the differences between “Helping, Fixing and Serving”
Here to be truly helpful as you serve yourself.
Betty Lue
Helping, Fixing, Serving
--by Rachel Remen (May 29, 2000)
Service is not the same as helping.
Helping is based on inequality, it's not a relationship between equals. When you help, you use your own strength to help someone with less strength. It's a one up, one down relationship, and people feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away more than we give, diminishing the person's sense of self-worth and self-esteem.
Now, when I help I am very aware of my own strength, but we don't serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all our experiences: our wounds serve, our limitations serve, even our darkness serves. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in the other, and the wholeness in life. Helping incurs debt: when you help someone, they owe you. But service is mutual. When I help I have a feeling of satisfaction, but when I serve I have a feeling of gratitude.
Serving is also different from fixing. We fix broken pipes, we don't fix people. When I set about fixing another person, it's because I see them as broken. Fixing is a form of judgment that separates us from one another; it creates a distance.
So, fundamentally, helping, fixing and serving are ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak; when you fix, you see life as broken; and when you serve, you see life as whole.
When we serve in this way, we understand that this person's suffering is also my suffering, that their joy is also my joy and then the impulse to serve arises naturally - our natural wisdom and compassion presents itself quite simply. A server knows that they're being used and has the willingness to be used in the service of something greater.
We may help or fix many things in our lives, but when we serve, we are always in the service of wholeness.
--Rachel Remen, from Zen Hospice