How to Help Others

When you listen to other people tell you what they want, what they think they need, and the help that they want you to give them, most of the time they are wrong.

They can be wrong in a couple of different ways. The two ways I’m most familiar with are wrongness from ignorance (they can’t predict very well what will actually happen) and wrongness from not recognizing what the actual problem is. These two things are almost never orthogonal.

Wrongness from ignorance about the solution ultimately comes down to not thinking through the future all that well. For example, when job hunting recently, I was doing a programming test on my own laptop, which was timed. This was a cheap, used laptop that just wasn’t up to the task, and I had to wait a few minutes to build and run tests. When you have 45 minutes to an hour, these minutes can mean the difference in passing or failing, hence getting or not getting the job. So I went out and got myself a new laptop, and I got a beast of one–32GB of RAM, high end processors, 1TB SSD. The works. I’ve had it for 6-8 months, and I’ve probably never pushed the memory usage over about 15%.

Wrongness from ignorance about the problem usually means we get stuck on one specific explanation of the problem. For example, we might have a roommate who is messy. One part of the problem may be that the roommate doesn’t care enough to clean up because they are a bit demotivated and lazy. Another part of the problem might be the roommate’s upbringing. A further, and more important part of the problem, may be how you are interpreting messiness, or how you’re communicating with the roommate. There are likely an endless number of contributing factors to messiness, but we usually just focus on one and hammer it over and over again (they are lazy), hence missing other potential solutions.

Which brings me around to an observation I have: you can’t help someone else if you yourself are not centered. If your mind is wandering about, following and chasing after whatever the other person is saying without pausing to interpret it holistically, you may succeed in giving her what she wants, and utterly fail at actually helping her. And in order to be centered, you need to work on yourself. When you’re centered, you can more easily see their blind spots.

Another critically important ingredient in being centered is calming the nerves of the person you’re trying to help. Culture, and the people you surround yourself with, influence your emotional state. Science observes circuitry in the brains of almost every social animal–and humans are among the most social of all animals–dedicated to mirroring emotions. When someone else is agitated, there’s a reason to be agitated. When someone else is calm and thorough, there’s a reason to be calm and thorough. And in all cases, over time, most people will adopt that emotion themselves

I’ve come to realize this point very much by accident. For many years, I was trying to give my wife exactly what she said she wanted, and was met with results that I wasn’t happy with. She wasn’t getting any better, we weren’t getting any happier, and I was only gaining in frustration.

After some period of time struggling in this way, at a certain point I realized it was never ending and fruitless. Instead, I started to investigate why I wasn’t okay internally, and tried hard to find methods that would allow me to be okay. Later, when she starts being wrong about what will solve her problem for her, I focus my energy on those methods that should bring me back to center. After many months of doing this, I notice how much more often she is centered and okay, and how much less time it takes both of us to notice when we’ve gotten caught in our spinning minds.

This is important, and we must be very careful with this.