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Helping Inventory
This inventory helps
you assess your impact in many areas. If you keep a calendar or diary, it
may be helpful to review it. And when you consider your
impact on friends, you may want to review your address book or
phone bill. The more carefully you do this inventory, the
more accurately it will mirror your efforts.
I.
What are the different helping roles you play? For each of
the following areas consider any conscious efforts that you made
in the last two months.
a)
Volunteering
b) With family
c) Informally (helping friends, or helpful interactions with
strangers, also include citizen actions)
d) Professionally (include pro bono work and coaching co-workers)
e)
With money (include charitable donations and socially responsible
investments)
f) Through ecological personal lifestyle actions (recycling,
composting, buying ecological products, etc.)
g) Other (including political)
h) With yourself
II.
Read all five questions below before answering any:
1.
Which of the above helping situations have been rewarding? What
are some moments of success and appreciation?
2. Which seem only marginally helpful?
3. Which forms of helping have yielded mixed results, both
positive and negative?
4. What efforts to help have not yielded clear results, either
positive or negative?
5. Which of these forms of helping have been draining? What
isn’t going well?
III.
Mistakes made through omission and ways that you have hurt others.
Consider broken promises, harmful actions, and failures to fulfill
your duty or accepted roles. There are two categories to
consider: First, situations where the offended person is
liable to remember and still consider it a source of hurt or
neglect. Second, situations where you perpetually fail to
live up to your standards and where you feel bad about it.
(Measure failures in terms of realistic expectations, not in terms
of ideal or perfect behavior. For instance, there may be a
thousand ways you failed to be the ideal friend, but consider only
conscious acts and gross omissions. Another example, if you
are a parent, your child may sincerely feel that you’ve let them
down by not buying them a brand new car, but their expectations in
that case may be unrealistic. Hence, it shouldn’t be
counted.)
a)
Volunteering
b) With family
c) Informally (helping friends, or helpful interactions with
strangers, also include citizen actions)
d) Professionally (include pro bono work and coaching co-workers)
e) With money (include charitable donations and socially responsible
investments)
f) Through ecological personal lifestyle actions (recycling,
composting, buying ecological products, etc.)
g) To yourself (keeping in mind tendencies such as over-critical
thought, poor self-image, etc.)
h) Other (including political)
IV.
Other people’s perspectives.
In Parts II and III above, you are judging your actions from
the perspective of the helper, not from the point of view of the
person or persons receiving the help. To form a more
accurate assessment of your helping, return to Part I.
In each area, where possible, ask a person who knows of
your actions in that area to give you candid, thorough and
balanced feedback.
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