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You’ll be sold a variety of altruistic and moral reasons for helping others.
Some of those reasons will induce legitimate and poignant motivation to help those less fortunate or knowledgeable than yourself. Such reasons will depend on slightly victimizing the ones you help and labeling yourself to be more fortunate in some fashion. The dynamic in such a case, would center on balancing out an imbalanced sense of your mutual abilities.
Reasons for helping others which are dependent on victimizing them in some way may motivate you in the short term. However, such reasons don’t seem effective in eliciting a desire to help others on a continuous basis.
Such instances act as one-off episodes of victimizing those in your sights. They are unsustainable bursts of desire to help someone in need.
This article aims to introduce alternate, longer serving, and healthier reasons for adopting a helpful identity.
In an effort to do so, selfish – but fair – motivations for adopting an authoritative identity are explored. This article assumes that increasing your authority by helping others is a goal which nets positive results for yourself and those around you.
The aim here, is to present reasons why a selfish desire for the development of your authority can coexist with, and aid, your acts of helping others.
They’ll Thoroughly Understand How Hard What You Do Is
A limited understanding of the task at hand induces a limited appreciation for those who complete that task.
Though you may understand electrical work at the house to be complicated in nature, you’d appreciate a good electrician’s work in greater depth if you were explained each step of the process as they fixed an issue.
Your student’s or subordinate’s understanding of tasks you’ve grown to master will often be elementary compared to yours. Though they may understand the general goals at hand and general approaches of achieving them, your command of the complexities involved will be the missing key in the actual completion of those tasks.
By thoroughly attempting to help those who struggle in doing something you’ve mastered, you serve to enlighten them to the knowledge you possess. Though they’d learn from you, they will be unlikely to overtake you in skill level after just a few sessions in the context you’re masterful in.
They’ll thereby walk away having learned the material at hand in addition to realizing that what you know and do is much more complex than they’ve previously considered.
They’ll now understand you to know the details of the tasks at hand, and to have a command of the relationships each detail has with the other.
Tutoring others is thereby a mutually beneficial exchange. As the tutor, you not only serve to arm your pupils with knowledge of the subject at hand, but you indirectly command their future respect by illuminating just how much you know.
No Confusion About Who the Subordinate Is
As your pupils and trainees begin to appreciate the level of complexity backing the skills you possess, the distinction between the two of you will turn crystal clear.
Your leadership role will be vibrant and hard to overlook.
Without you having to deliberately project it, the subordinate role would have been stamped on those you train.
Helping others is thereby an effective way of leading them. It places them in the vulnerable position of admitting that they know less than you. Your publication of your command of the complexities in your respective field of expertise will do the work of clearly establishing your position in the pecking order.
Rather than being a leader who relies on constant, direct, reminders of their leadership position, your act of helping others will do that job. As long as you’re looked to for help by others, know that you’re one step closer to being a leader than they are.