Help, here comes ‘help’.

I have a bee in my bonnet about ‘help’.

I find that giving help is an art and most of the time help is very unhelpful.

And I think that it all depends with whose agenda the help is given.

Help based solely on the giver’s agenda is like this for me:
When I don’t ask for help, I get it.
When I want help, I don’t get it.
When I obviously need help, I get help but what I was doing gets taken over and I am left on the sideline feeling helpless.

Let’s look at my own experiences.

When I get invited for dinner, I always go and help in the kitchen.
Not because I checked that help is needed, no I help because I need to give it (my agenda!).
I find it really hard to sit and do nothing when I know somebody is working away in the kitchen. So I get up, be nice and ‘help’ from my own agenda.
However I recently discovered something. I find having somebody hovering around while I am cooking dinner not that grand. When I am making a special dinner I actually want to be left alone. As a result of ‘help’ I have burnt a sauce, I forgot to garnish a dish and I found dishes in my dishwasher when it wasn’t working.

So, what if it is the same for the hosts I am trying to help?
Is my personal agenda, my need to help actually a nuisance to them too?
I can imagine it is, so now I actually ask first and if they say “no”, I suppress my own agenda and sit down.

During the evening events we are holding it goes like this.
I have a system to get everything packed away as quickly and efficiently as possible once the event is over.
I also know what is ours and what belongs to the event centre.
Then I get occasionally offers of help and before I have caught my breath to answer, off the helper trots with the wrong stuff to the wrong place. So in the end I have to repack everything and I have to go and hunt for our own stuff.
Their agenda, needing to be helpful is sweet but totally mucking things up. What I would like is an agenda that is aligned with my own. Then they would ask what they can do and really listen to instructions before trotting off.

When my computer plays up and I am showing my annoyance, it goes like this.
As John and I share an office he suffers. To put an end to it he helps and his agenda for helping is to restore order and peace as quickly as he can. This doesn’t serve me as he takes over while I sit on the sideline feeling helpless and I am not learning how to deal effectively with my own computer problems.

So I have learned to think twice before offering to help and to avoid the reaction “Help, here comes help”.

Now I have shared my experiences with help being unhelpful, what are yours?