Make It Your Own
We all know the feeling of being asked to help and having that mini-cringe “oh shoot” reaction. This is often made worse when the request is perfectly reasonable and the cause is a good one. So if helping feels good, what’s going on here?
A lot of the time, it comes down to fit, and whether what you’re being asked to do uses what you’re good at (and like to do) in a way that makes sense to you. When helping matches your strengths and interests, it generates energy; when it doesn’t, it drains it. The core idea of this article is simple: helping works better when people can make it their own. It may sound obvious or like a small detail, but it is often overlooked. In practice, it changes everything, and we’ve been slow to treat it as the essential ingredient it is.
What Fitness Can Teach Us
A helpful analogy is how the world of fitness has changed in the last fifty years. Back then, physical exercise was reserved for a select group of people, and the options were limited: organized sports, boxing, the occasional jogger who was often looked at oddly.
Today the landscape is almost unrecognizable: yoga, dance, hiking, swimming, Pilates, community leagues, strength training. People didn’t suddenly develop more desire to exercise. They simply gained more ways to do it in forms that suited their strengths and interests. Once fitness became personalized, it became more rewarding and more accessible to more people.
Contribution is still where fitness was decades ago. The natural inclination is there, but it often stays dormant because the standard formats are fairly limited. We can volunteer, donate money, choose certain professions. These are all wonderful, of course, but they capture only a small slice of what people can offer. There is far more potential once helping becomes more personalized.
A Small Example with Big Implications
For example, look at Mina, a young woman who notices kids hanging around in her apartment complex after school. She likes music and enjoys being around the kids, so she starts a small hip-hop session in the courtyard. Not only does it not feel like a chore, it’s a source of energy, because she chose it according to her strengths and interests. If Mina had been asked to do something generic (stuff envelopes, donate money, join a charity run) she might have agreed, but the experience would have been less energizing.
Mina’s example shows four key benefits of personalized helping.
The Benefits of Making It Your Own
It feels more rewarding
When helping aligns with who you are, it naturally becomes more enjoyable. There’s less of the “pushing yourself to be good” feeling and more of the “I’m glad I get to do this” feeling. People want to keep showing up when the task itself gives something back.It reveals hidden pockets of concern
Personalized helping draws on what you notice because of where you live, work, or spend time. Mina saw a timing gap in her courtyard that no formal program would have identified. The same is true for the bus driver who redistributes forgotten scarves and umbrellas, or the librarian who creates a discreet book display for teens who don’t want to ask for help. These are needs only insiders see.It’s more effective
When helping comes from within the environment, it uses local knowledge automatically. A single hour of Mina’s time reaches the kids who actually need it. She knows the setting, the rhythms, the people. An outsider trying to fill the same need would spend five hours just figuring out the basics. Personalized helping fits the problem instead of being imposed onto it.It strengthens the social fabric
When Mina runs her hip-hop sessions, she isn’t only supporting the kids. She’s strengthening her own sense of agency and also shifting the norms of her building. People begin to recognize that helping doesn’t have to come from an organization or a formal role. When different people start noticing different needs and responding in their own ways, the effect compounds. Communities become more attentive and more connected through dozens of these small acts rooted in who people already are.
The changes may be small, but they add up. When people act from their own strengths, their efforts land better, last longer, and encourage others to do the same. This is what social change is about.