It’s important to remember that even when you act with the best intentions, you don’t always know what is best for someone else.

Here are some guidelines to determine if you’re really helping someone or not.

You make people dependent on you.

As the old saying goes, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

When you focus only on people’s temporary needs, but you don’t teach them how to take care of themselves, in a way you make them a type of prisoner to you or someone else.

Because if someone is completely dependent on someone else for food or happiness or success, then they can never be truly free to live and sustain their life on their own.

This kind of dependence can be helpful, but only in those rare cases where people are completely unable to take care of themselves. For example, due to a severe mental or physical disorder. Otherwise, fostering this kind of dependency is usually harmful and unhealthy.

You try to do things outside of your power.

One of the worst ways to help people is to try to change something that is outside of your power. Because when you intervene in problems, especially ones which you have no knowledge or experience in, you can often make a situation worse.

It’s important to accept that sometimes you aren’t capable of helping someone. Sometimes you need to let go and let things take their natural course. After all, you are only human, and you don’t have the time and resources to help every person in every given situation.

You try to help people who clearly don’t want your help.

Another common mistake is trying to help people who don’t want your help. When you try to change something against a person’s will, it can often backfire and make them rebel against you. They may do the opposite of what you say just because they don’t want to feel like they are following your advice.

If someone doesn’t want your help, it’s important to respect that. As I mentioned before, you don’t always know what is best for everyone, and sometimes someone else’s perspective is going to be a lot different than yours. Make sure you respect people’s boundaries.

You only help with the expectation of something in return.

In some situations, you may find yourself only helping people because you expect to get something in return. While humans are in many ways soft-wired to act reciprocally, I don’t think this is the best attitude to go about helping people.

Most people don’t like to be helped by others who aren’t doing it genuinely. They may even find it insulting. When helping others, be careful not to do it out of ulterior motives, but instead because you have a real desire to help people become more happy and successful.

If you get something in return for your good deed – awesome. If you don’t, then the satisfaction of helping someone should be enough.

It’s a significant milestone to me, but more importantly it’s provided me with a lot of experience about what it means to build a following.

I’ve certainly learned a lot of important things over the past few years, and I still have a lot more learning to do as well. I hope to share at least some of what I’ve learned here in this post.

In many ways, I think these principles apply to anyone who is trying to build a following around anything – whether it’s promoting a band, or building a business, or recruiting people around a certain cause.

Most people won’t care about you.

When building a following of any kind, it’s an unfortunate and discomforting fact that most people will never give a damn about who you are or what you do.

That’s because we vary so much as individuals. We each have a different array of values, interests, and priorities, and many times those values, interests, and priorities don’t match up with other people.

You have a metal band? That’s great, but the truth is 90+% of music fans probably don’t care for metal.

Should that discourage you? Absolutely not. It’s a trend you are going to find in almost any niche, so don’t beat yourself up when most of the people you try to reach out to are apathetic toward you.

Usually it’s nothing personal. It’s often just a difference in character. Maybe what you do just isn’t their “thing.” Or other times people are just too busy being distracted by other stuff.

This principle is especially important to keep in mind when you are first starting out, since it may take awhile until you start noticing some positive feedback (or any feedback at all, for that matter).

A lot of people will actually like you.

Building a following takes time and patience, but I promise you that eventually you will start finding people who actually like what you do.

The truth is that despite how unique you may be, there are still many others out there who share your values and interests, and who will therefore appreciate what you bring to the table.

So often I come across people who have a fervent passion for something, but they don’t pursue it because they question whether anyone else will care. I’m here to tell you that, yes, you will find plenty of people who care – so long as you care – and you remain persistent in searching for the right people.

Once you start finding those people who like what you do, start actively listening to what they have to say about you. What is it that they like exactly? If you dedicate yourself to building off their feedback, your influence will continue to grow.

A few people will absolutely love you.

Over time while building a following, you will begin to come across that small percentage of people who absolutely love you and everything you do.

These individuals make up your “core tribe.” They hang onto every word you write or say, and they continue to come back to you for more. Often times they share your work with others, which is one of the most effective and organic ways of expanding your influence to new people – by word of mouth. The more you have other people creating a buzz around you, the less you have to promote yourself. And the truth is people always trust the word of a friend or family member more than they trust a random stranger who is trying to sell himself.

So despite these individuals being only a small minority of the visitors you get, they are easily your most valuable asset. They bring support and enthusiasm to your message that you can’t possibly create all by yourself. And in many ways, these people add tremendous value to the work that you do.

Every great message needs loyal supporters. And when you find people who care that much about you and your work, you should reciprocate and give back as much as possible. Treat them with the utmost of respect, and many of them will have your back for life. The benefits from maintaining these kinds of relationships is incalculable.

Some people will hate you.

While building a following you will eventually come across certain people who will criticize you or hate you for a variety of reasons.

It could be that you or your work represent something that they vehemently disagree with. Sometimes differences in values can create real conflict. It’s an unfortunate, but very real part of human nature.

Other times, a person may just be envious of your success and they’d rather see you fail so they can feel better about themselves. This kind of hating often stems from low self-esteem and insecurity – and it’s also pretty common.

The only way to successfully deal with “haters” is to ignore them and continue on despite them. If you really believe in yourself, your values, and your work, then you’re just going to have to persist forward regardless of what some people may think. All I ask is that you don’t be too surprised when met with this resistance.

The good and bad of building a following.

As you can tell, building a following isn’t always a completely pleasant experience. You will undoubtedly experience a lot of frustration and criticism, and it’s going to take some time, patience, and dedication before you start to see some traction with people who actually appreciate what you do.

I just wanted to write this post to get you more familiar with how things will probably break down as you reach out to more and more people. The distribution of these 4 categories (apathy, like, love, hate) will vary from person to person, but almost anyone who has ever built an influence has had to deal with each of these.

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This means our happiness and success largely depend on the relationships we build with others.

When building relationships on a day-to-day basis, we really only have two distinct choices we can make:

1. We can choose to build positive, meaningful, healthy, and productive relationships with the people we interact with.

2. Or we can choose to build negative, empty, toxic, and destructive relationships with the people we interact with.

Knowing how to maximize the positive relationships and minimize the negative relationships is key to living a happy and satisfying life.

Positive relationships encourage personal growth.

One benefit to positive relationships is that you encourage each other to grow and flourish. Friends like seeing friends succeed and achieve their goals. And most of the time, good friends are willing to help you in anyway they can if it means seeing their buddy be happy and successful.

Positive relationships give you support during tough times.

Another huge benefit to positive relationships is that they provide support during tough times. We all have our bad moments, whether it be health-related, money-related, or something else. Thankfully, having a supportive social circle is one of the best ways to stay strong, persist forward, and get a little bit of help when we need it.

Positive relationships enable you to collaborate and work together.

The more we get along with someone, the better we are at collaborating and working together. Human relationships thrive when individuals can combine their skills and talents, and successfully create something greater than the sum of their parts. This is the stuff that makes businesses and other social institutions work.

Positive relationships create feelings of pleasure and joy.

One of the more obvious benefits of positive relationships is that they make life more enjoyable. Good friends, family, and co-workers make life an overall more pleasant experience – we enjoy spending time with these people and we often share positive moments with them on a frequent basis. They provide that extra flavor to life that we can’t find by ourselves.

Positive relationships add more meaning to our life.

Having positive relationships in our life increases our sense of purpose and meaning. When we have a real, positive effect on someone else, we feel like we are making a significant difference in the world – and we are.

Positive relationships enrich our life story. They fulfill our need to belong in a community and they give us a stronger sense of identity. Without this sense of belonging, we can often feel isolated and disconnected with ourselves. But once we find our place in society, we become more comfortable in our own skin.

Positive relationships live on through other positive relationships.

The relationships we build have a much broader influence than just ourselves and our immediate social circle. They also influence people who we may never know exist. When you create a positive connection with someone else, that person is more motivated to make positive connections with other people. Our actions and relationships, therefore, are part of a much larger chain of events that are what influence society as a whole.

One of my favorite studies illustrates this phenomenon well: when we do acts of kindness, others are more likely to repeat that act of kindness toward another person. In many other ways, the relationships we build can influence how others build relationships in the future.

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For example, if we repeat a thought like “I’m a smart and happy person” 20 times every morning, then we may begin to actually believe that about ourselves.

Reciting these beliefs is said to work because increased repetition of certain thought patterns (and neural pathways) is said to condition our brains to begin thinking in these new ways.

It’s kind of like working a muscle: the more repetitions you do, the stronger the thought will become.

Limitations of affirmations

I think there is some truth and usefulness to affirmations (I’ve shared some of my own affirmations with you guys before); however, I also think there are some limitations if we solely rely on affirmations to build new beliefs.

The reason I believe this is because our beliefs are very multi-faceted and dependent on a wide range of different factors – our moment-by-moment conscious thought is only the tip of the iceberg.

We can repeat a specific affirmation thousands of times inside our head, but if it doesn’t match up with our map of reality, then our unconscious mind will reject it.

Beliefs are not isolated thoughts that float through our head every now and then, they are embedded in a context of other information and mental processes.

Other factors that can influence our beliefs include:

• Reason: Many beliefs have some kind of logic or rationality behind them. So if you repeat an affirmation like, “I’m happy,” but deep-down you hold other beliefs like, “No one likes me” or “I’m not good at anything,” your critical mind is going to reject that affirmation – because it’s irrational in the context of your other core beliefs.

  No matter how many times you repeat that belief, your mind will rationalize it as untrue, because it doesn’t align with the deeper structure of your belief system.

  Solution: Ask deeper questions and uncover the core beliefs that contribute to your thinking. Only until you challenge your deepest assumptions can you really begin to make significant changes to your perspective and attitude.

• Emotional experience: Our beliefs are also greatly influenced by our emotional experience. For example, if we suffer from something taumatic, it is very unlikely that affirmations or reason alone can reverse our negative state of mind. This is because our beliefs resonate so strongly at an emotional level, that emotional experience triumphs logic reason. We may rationally understand that our beliefs don’t make sense, but we can’t let go of them because we have such a strong emotional attachment to them.

  Solution: Healthy emotional processing can be tricky. But as a general theory, I think we need to learn how to accept and express/”let go” of our emotions in healthy ways. Being more aware and attuned to our emotions is the first step, and the second step is learning how to channel this emotional energy in transformative ways (such as through open dialogue, creativity, meditation, prayer, etc.)

• Knowledge and facts: Beliefs should ultimately reflect how reality actually works. The better our beliefs model the world, the more effective they will be in helping us navigate throughout life. Therefore, it’s incredibly important to pay attention to the facts. Reciting affirmations that aren’t congruent with reality can be unhealthy and dangerous.

  Solution: Pay attention to the facts of reality, don’t dismiss science and empirical evidence, and be willing to let go of old assumptions if you find information that contradicts them.

• Social influence: Our culture and social traditions can also play a massive role in our belief system, especially during early stages of our development. We grow up learning certain beliefs and values from our parents, teachers, priests, and other role models throughout our life.

  Some of these beliefs may be useful, but some of it can also be out-dated and wrong.

  Solution: We have to at least be mindful of where our beliefs come from. If we merely choose a belief because it is popular and socially acceptable – but it doesn’t match up with our own reason, emotional experience, and knowledge – then it is very unlikely that belief will help guide your life in a positive direction.

These are important aspects of our beliefs that I think make the practice of affirmations a little more complex than some would like to believe.

The truth is that simply repeating an affirmation over and over again, without any context or meaning behind that affirmation, probably won’t be sufficient enough to implant that belief in our heads.

You should really only repeat affirmations if they hold some kind of truth or significance to you. An affirmation that is supported by your knowledge, experience, and reason is going to be vastly more powerful than an affirmation you just read about in a book or learned at church.

Ultimately, you should create affirmations that resonate with you, not something that someone told you is the correct affirmation to follow.

Questions.

• Do you use affirmations to aid your personal development?
• What affirmations work best for you?
• What tips have you found effective in making your affirmations stronger?

Feel free to answer these questions in the comment section below!

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Those who we typically perceive as high value (like CEOs, celebrities, athletes, politicians, good-looking people, etc.) we place at the top of our social hierarchy, while those we typically perceive as low value fall to the bottom of our social hierarchy.

While sometimes it may be useful to distinguish between valuable relationships vs. not-so-valuable relationships, this kind of thinking can also hurt our ability to connect with some people in productive and meaningful ways.

This is because often when we pass judgment on others, we are simultaneously comparing ourselves (and our own perceived value, or self-worth) to that other person.

For example, if we perceive someone as having extraordinarily high value, then we must automatically see ourselves as somehow inferior when compared to this other person. And this perceived difference in value can then cause us to act and think in desperate and anti-social ways.

For instance, in order to build a relationship with this “high value” person, we may feel the need to pretend to be more valuable than we actually think we are, or even somehow lessen that person’s value by picking on them or bringing them down.

One example of this flawed paradigm in action: The Pick-up Community

In fact, there are many concepts within the Pick-Up/seduction community, popularized by guys like Neil Strauss (“Style”) and Mystery, which rely on this flawed paradigm.

First, you have to understand the Pick-up Artist’s social hierarchy. This is known as the “Hot Babe” scale. Pick-up Artists feel the need to rate women on a scale of 1-10 based on their perceived value (usually it is based on good looks). They then treat women differently based on this perceived value.

For example, there are certain social tactics a Pick-up Artist needs to do in order to get an “HB10″ (Hot Babe 10 – a really good-looking, high value woman). These two main tactics include:

Negging: A “back-handed compliment” often intended to lower a woman’s perceived value. Pick-up Artists believe that HB10s need to be negged more so that they don’t think too highly of themselves (because that would presumably mean they wouldn’t want to be with you, duh!).

Demonstrating Higher Value (DHV) DHVs often include canned stories and “games” so that a woman perceives you as higher value (than you actually are). In other words, you have to essentially “prove your value” to the woman in order to win her over.

The irony is that the whole reason a Pick-Up Artist needs to use these tactics is because deep down they feel inadequate. They don’t believe they deserve “high value” women, so they have to tease and play games so that the women essentially gets “tricked” to believe they are worthy.

Throw out the social hierarchy mentality: People are just people.

I think it would do many people good (not just Pick-up Artists) if we put less emphasis on these social hierarchies that we’ve constructed in our minds.

All it does is put artificial boundaries around our relationships, which in the end only inhibits us from connecting with others in a healthy way – a way based on mutual respect and understanding.

As Sean Cooper eloquently explains in the Shyness and Social Anxiety System (a great guide for overcoming social anxiety and living a richer social life), all social value is a product of our subjective minds:

“The first thing to understand is that value is all in your mind. In reality, there are no ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ people. The only reason why you see some people as more valuable than you is because you have some rules in your mind that determine whether someone is valuable to you or not. If someone passes all these rules and criteria you have, then you see them as valuable.

If you have low self-esteem, it means that you do not think you meet other people’s rules for being a valuable person.“

By being less judgmental of others (and ourselves), we begin to see and treat everyone as equals.

In other words, it doesn’t matter whether you are talking to someone who is really rich vs. someone who is really poor, or someone who is really good-looking vs. someone who is really ugly, or someone who is really popular vs. someone who isn’t well known at all. Every individual deserves your attention and respect, and there’s no real reason to be more nervous or anxious around one person over someone else.

(In fact, I truly believe we can find something good in everyone.)

And the great thing is: when you begin to see and treat everyone as equals (insofar as everyone has something valuable to offer), it’s much easier to start building relationships left and right. Your social circle grows and grows, because you no longer discriminate or worry about these fictional boundaries anymore. And once these silly social hierarchies are ignored, everyone becomes a potential friend.

Questions.

• Do you notice your perceived social hierarchies hurting how you communicate and relate to others?
• What types of people do you tend to perceive as “higher value” than yourself?
• How do you treat people of “higher value” differently than you treat those of “lower value?” How can you change this so that you treat people more as equals?

Leave answers in the comment section below!