7 Ways to Make Volunteering Stick
By: Brent Croxton of RealizedWorth.com (This post originally appeared on RealizedWorth - find an excerpt below and the entire piece here)
As the holidays approach, many of us are looking forward to slowing down, spending time with family and getting some time to reflect. Such reflection often includes brainstorming new intentions for how we want to improve our lives in the coming year. For some, that bulleted list will include volunteering. Maybe it’s been a meaningful practice in the past and they’ve gotten away from it? Or, maybe they are a newbie and have been wanting to try it out? Like all resolutions, the question is – will it stick?
. . . If you are wanting to making volunteering in 2013 a regular practice, here are some good guidelines to help you make it stick.
- Connect with real people. Volunteering that is more likely to bring on the well-being associated with the helper’s high involves personal contact with real people, over that which is less personal like stacking chairs or collecting canned goods. The forming of a genuine bond with another person is the basis of the good that comes to the helper. The focus needs to be on moments of relational connectedness, not how much we accomplish. When there is a genuine bond of empathy, there is a healing that occurs for the both the helper and the one being helped. In Luks’ survey, the helpers with personal contact were more likely to report experiencing the helper’s high as well as increases in self-esteem and the physical signs of stress reduction.
- Do it often. Not surprisingly, gaining the most out of helping depends on how often we do it. Luks’ study showed that the more often people volunteered, the more often they experienced the helper’s high and reported good health. The ideal frequency is about two hours per week. Building these two hours into your weekly rhythm is a pro-social behavior that seems to lead to a more helpful attitude toward others the rest of the week, which helps the benefits to cascade.
- Help strangers. Another curious finding of Luks’ survey was that assisting strangers was more likely to elicit the helper’s high than helping family and friends. Luks suggest that “in coming to the aid of a stranger, we get to decide for ourselves whether to help or not and how to proceed. That sense of freedom is a great boost to our sense of self-control, which is another factor that determines how much stress we feel.”[2] This relates to a point that we often make at RW about the need for the volunteer to move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation in order to really get hooked on the experience. “Have to” volunteering doesn’t sustain the volunteer over the long haul. There is something powerful about a freely given act that is pure gift (not under compulsion) that leads to rush of good feeling and the possibility of getting hooked on the experience.
- Find a shared problem. When the helper and the helpee have something in common, like having the same illness or having gone through a similar ordeal, the feeling of bonding and the sense of achievement is greater. Our capacity for empathy is shaped by our experiences. If your own experience tells you something about the experience of the other, then you are in a position to have more empathy and experience the affiliated connection more powerfully.
Read the entire post on RealizedWorth.com
