RULE TO BREAK

“Look after number one”

In a way, I don’t advocate breaking this Rule. But I don’t interpret it in the way it’s generally meant. The usual implication is that you should focus on your own needs and sod everyone else. In fact, like some looking-glass world, I’ve found that you need to put your own wishes on one side if you want to feel really good.

It took one of my children to bring this Rule into perspective. He came home from school one evening at the age of about 12 and said he’d had a great day. He’d helped out a friend who was having problems of some kind, and listened to another one who wanted to get frustrations off his chest. Then he’d noticed that one of the office staff was struggling to shift some stuff so he mucked in and helped. He told me he’d had a brilliant day because, in his words, ‘I like helping other people. It makes me feel good about myself’.

Like a blinding flash, I realized that he had put into a nutshell what I’d spent years failing to express so clearly. Somehow his phrasing was so simple that everything fell into place. I’d long since noticed that people who are always helping others seem to be the most content. The final Rule of my book The Rules of Love is ‘Other people are where it’s at’. My son, however, had identified the link between helping others and how it affects your self-image.

It’s difficult to emphasize how important this Rule is to a happy life. When you help other people it does indeed give you a strong and positive self-image, which in turn builds your confidence. It takes your mind off your own problems, and it means you like yourself more. It’s the nearest thing I know to a psychological cure-all.

It really doesn’t seem to matter whether you focus your efforts on your own family or on distant people you’ve never met. You can dedicate your life to charity, or spend it looking after your kids. You can do the weekly shopping for your neighbour, devote a day a week to the local charity, become a full-time doctor, or just keep an eye out for everyday opportunities to be of help. Obviously you need to be consistent to get those good feelings – it’s no good working with dedication for a charity six days a week, and then kicking old ladies you pass in the street on the way home. You need to put helping other people first all the time.

That doesn’t mean, however, that you should have no time for yourself. You don’t have to go out looking for people to help at all hours of the day and night. Don’t worry, you can still have evenings with your feet up in front of the TV. You can have fun, go on holiday, have nights out with friends. You don’t have to change your life (unless you want to). It’s an outlook, an attitude, a default setting. Help out wherever you see it’s needed, before you consider yourself, and you’ll unexpectedly find that ‘number one’ seems to be quite content thank you.