Helping Others Helps You
How’s your life going? Need to shake it up? Need to find more meaning and feel more connected and purposeful?
Volunteering is the cure for what ails you. Helping others is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your mental well-being. Yes, the point of volunteering is to help others, but the fact remains – a side effect of gearing your time and energy towards volunteering is that you feel pretty darn good by doing so. In addition to feeling good, there are a few other personal benefits of volunteering.
Broaden Your Social Circle
First, volunteering increases your social and relationship skills. Let’s think about this. Whether you’ve signed up to pick up trash at a local beach, or volunteered to help run a bake sale or community car wash, you’re going to be tasked with a few jobs that require you to mingle with others. But the spark to working side-by-side with potential strangers is that you are meeting regularly with a group of people with a common interest. And if you travel, you will meet fascinating people who want to travel too.
By jumping on board to help out with a project or an event, you will inevitably make new friends and connect with your community. Meaningful connection with others is exciting and rejuvenating. Many times individuals who travel on our Venture Within programs don’t know each other before they embark on our projects. Nor do they have any idea of the kind of people they will be working with in their day-to-day project activities. However, after just a few days, strong bonds begin to form. You connect over simple things, like working together to teach an after school English language workshop, or exchanging building techniques with local farmers and landowners. (Sometimes in Spanglish, but hey.. that adds to your experience and ability to connect with new people!)
Reduce Stress & Anxiety
It’s been scientifically proven – volunteering has a way of increasing your mental stimulation and boosting your confidence. This adds up to an experience that reduces your stress an anxiety levels. Helping others, even in the smallest way, will give you a boost of happiness that will last a long time, and you will re-experience this every time you remember your kind acts. It’s the little positive things we do for others that have a ripple affect far beyond the present moment.
According to Harvard Health Publications, “helping others kindles happiness”. Research has proven that the relationship between volunteering and happiness resulted with “the more people volunteered, the happier they were”. The stats don’t lie. When this study compared the happiness of volunteers with those who never volunteered, it was found that those who spend their time volunteering as little as once a week were 16% happier than those who did not volunteer. That’s a lot of “happy” you can give yourself, while giving towards to someone else’s happiness. It’s good karma all around.
Advance Your Career
We are not just talking ticking the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) box for your boss. Volunteering provides you an opportunity to practice key skills used in your profession and in the work place. Critical skills for success in the workplace – such as teamwork, communication, project planning or problem solving. These are skills you need to practice regularly in order to improve. By practicing these in a different context (outside of your workplace), you are able to apply these skills in a new dimension that allows room for growth and improvement.
You might believe you are already practicing these skills in the office every day. Maybe you are. But – by placing yourself in a new environment, in a new country, with a goal that is important to you (but is outside of work), you are given a blank canvas in which you can utilize and sharpen these skillsets.
In addition to honing these skills and increasing your value as a professional, you’ll also be gaining new experiences and learning something new from the foreign culture.
Why “Travel” to Volunteer?
Traveling is the best way to gain deeper connection with others and yourself. In order to truly learn a new skill, to shake things up, you need to leave your comfort zone behind. At least for a little while. Traveling gives you the opportunity to leave your routine behind, focus on your own personal goals, and immerse yourself in an experience that changes you. And if you travel with the intention of volunteering, then you will be part of an experience also that changes others.
Interested in traveling with us? Apply for one of our 2018 programs!
