This post argues for the importance of learning how to help out before offering to lend a hand. Helping out is a great way to engage with your community and learn something new, but attempted aid without thought can make a project worse. Helping out is best done when we take time to consider a task and work patiently until we are comfortable with its objectives.
Can I Give You a Hand?
When you’re under a certain age, it’s almost always better for you to have the freedom to try and help with whatever task you wish. The opportunity to explore actions freely in the paths we choose is critical to building interest, relationships and a sense of the world we roam.
However, if you’re reading this, you are likely past this stage of development.
Pay attention when you are trying to lend a hand so that you make sure you are helping out and not making things more difficult.
Inexperienced Help May Make Things Worse
It is good to want to help others, but if one is unfamiliar with how to accomplish a task, their attempted aid can easily worsen a situation. Improperly handle a screw and you strip its head. Understudied legal advice can end both you and the solicitor (assuming you are kind enough to furnish faulty advice only to those who ask) somewhere far from where you sought to land.
You may read this and think “well, what if I’m trying to learn something new?” or “I can just tell it’s a difficult task and, while I don’t know where I’d begin, any help would probably be nice,” and I don’t blame you. There are many times when a second set of hands makes work easier, and it’s great to help someone who’s more knowledgeable about a task (if they’ll let us) if we want to learn from their experience. It’s just that you can’t go pouring windshield wiper fluid into someone’s transmission in the name of lending them a hand.
Learning to Assess a Task
When learning to do something new, it’s important to think about the goal of the task before beginning work (for more on this, check HERE). It’s prudent to determine which end of the toothbrush is best to clean teeth before applying toothpaste.
Taking time to understand a task makes it easier to outline your approach. You may not have time to study every detail of a plan, but a little forethought can save a lot of headaches. Let’s consider how this would apply to handling your own tasks, with painting a room as an example:
It’s time to paint our bedroom a new color. Great: we set aside some time to do it and pick up paint at our local hardware store. With paint picked out, we can get right to the task as soon as we get back from the store.
However, giving the project more thought can make it go much more smoothly.
When we take time to consider the task of painting our bedroom, we realize that the goal is more than simply applying paint to the walls.
We want our floors to stay paint-free, to avoid damaging furniture, and to apply the paint to the walls an an aesthetically-pleasing manner.
This bit of thought tells us that before starting to paint, we should distance furniture from the walls, lay down ground coverage to protect the floor, and clean the walls so the paint goes on without lumps. Note: I am no expert painter, and will take any pointers you feel like sharing.
We can complete tasks without taking time to plan out our decisions, but we are more likely to run into mistakes and have to re-do work. If we take a little time to prepare, our projects will run more smoothly.
How to Help Out Without Causing Problems
We may not know how to do everything perfectly, but we can often lend a hand when someone is in need even if we are new to the task at hand. Taking time to consider their objectives, along with working patiently and thoughtfully, will help you ensure you provide good help to those who need it.
Consider Their Goals
Just as we should think out projects we do for ourselves, we are wise to consider someone’s objective before offering to lend a hand. Spending time to think about what needs to be done helps us assist more effectively and avoid making roadblocks for the person we want to help.
For example, if your neighbor stops by and asks if you can give them a hand, feel out the task at hand. Do they need help lifting something? Do they need tools and thoughtful work or just another set of hands? How urgent do they seem?
Screening out basic details will make sure you are currently prepared to help, and you can continue developing information as you go. Your basic questions will help you understand if you’re in the right clothes to help out (have you ever been asked to move car parts when in a suit? It never seems to go well) and whether any preliminary adjustments would make you a more effective partner.
Beyond that, you can watch how they approach the task and ask follow-up questions to see exactly what needs to be done. For example, if your neighbor asks for help moving some wood and you notice they like it stacked in a particular way, you can build this into your assistance and provide more quality help (don’t worry, while this neighbor has a lot of requests, they always return the favor graciously).
While you are learning about a task and the best ways to lend a hand, it is wise to work slowly and deliberately until you are more familiar with the task’s objectives. This way, you can make sure your assistance actually helps.
Work Patiently
We may not always have time to study a task before assistance is needed (I’ve had neighbors stop by and ask for my help without explaining what they need done). In these situations, we are wise to work patiently and avoid initiating unnecessary mistakes (if you’re reading this and feel like you want to gain some familiarity with general home tasks, I tend to check wikiHow, a resource with articles on just about everything).
Working patiently and spending time look at the task as a whole before taking actions into our own hands will show what the person in need of help is trying to do (I say trying to do because, like us, the person in need of help may not have had the chance to read up on their task. They may choose a different approach from you, and arguing over the best way to do something while offering a hand is never great assistance).
Furthermore, we will start to see the major steps involved in the task and if anything can be done to make work easier. For example, if we are helping someone put up a light fixture and see them continuously putting down and picking up a tool, we can hold the tool and hand it to them when they’re ready. It’s not glamourous work, but it makes their life easier, shows you’re willing to help, and gets you closer visibility over the project, providing a better learning opportunity.
Conclusion
Sometimes, people need a hand. Just because you’re new to a task, doesn’t mean you can’t help. In fact, helping out when you’re new to something can be a great way to learn from someone with more experience.
If you want to help, take your time and try and learn exactly what the person you’re helping seeks to accomplish. From there, you can refine what you’re doing and might even make the task more efficient for you both.
We may not always find a way to make work easier, but if we stay curious and willing to help, we make ourselves better to work with and more available to learn along the way.
Any other suggestions? Let me know below.
-G
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