You’re likely familiar with the catchy axiom related to the subject of this article: “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

What is it about being picky whilst receiving favors from others that is so bad? Since the ones who are helping us out have already made their desire known, it makes sense for us to optimize their help with some direction. Perhaps the sandwich someone offers you after leaving your lunch at home would be better with mustard and cheese. Perhaps the friend who has offered to give you a ride to work should stop playing music you don’t enjoy on the car ride there. Maybe you’d rather the person who picks up your tasks while you’re off sick complete them in a certain way.

This article hopes to discourage you from being picky whilst receiving favors from others. The topics at hand deal with people’s desire to help you further down the line, their perceived feeling of importance, and you being a good actor in others’ attempts to be useful. Rather than taking the approach of how bad being picky makes you look in these situations, we’re going to take the approach of exploring how not being picky makes the ones helping you feel good. In taking this approach, the chances of you benefiting from others doing you favors increase. You’d serve to propagate people’s willingness to help you out, as they’d see it as being worth it from their own perspective.

The Feeling of Being Useful and Getting It Right

With each adjustment or correction that you make to others’ attempt to help you out, you propagate the feeling that they didn’t get it right. Firstly, you should abide by the fact that they’re not required to follow any rules in their attempts to help you out. People help others voluntarily, and even if they serve to gain something from helping you, you’re not authorized to personalize their efforts. As much as possible, encourage them feeling useful whilst helping you out. Thank them for every voluntary gesture that they perform toward you, and give them a sense that they’ve guessed exactly what you needed, even if they missed the mark by a little bit.

We like those who make us feel useful. While helping someone out, their genuine appreciation for what we do for them gives us a feeling of altruistic importance. Our day feels brightened once we know that we’ve brightened someone else’s day. With each comment or remark you make to adjust someone’s helpful deeds, their sense of getting it right diminishes. They’ll begin to feel as if they’re working for you and are not in control of their decision to help you out. They’ll begin to feel inadequate in their attempts to brighten someone’s day, and those who are prone to criticizing themselves may leave their interaction with you feeling inadequate.

By not being picky with the favors which others do for you, you serve to trade a minor inconvenience for a lasting impression on those who’ve served to help you out. Attempt to make those who help you feel that they’ve done everything right in their attempts to do so. Allow them to feel needed and appreciated by those they’ve served to help. Try not to diminish these feelings by correcting their methodology or tweaking their attempts at helping you out.

Good Recipients for Our Favors Are Difficult to Find

As mentioned earlier, people use their acts of helping others to feel better about themselves. Whatever someone’s reason for being helpful is presented publicly to be, they’ll likely feel better about themselves after fulfilling those desires. As the person who is the recipient of these favors, you have a role to play in the transaction. Though you may be labelled as a helpless entity who requires others’ help, consider yourself as an important actor in the altruistic story that those who help you want to paint about themselves. This article is not suggesting that everyone who serves to help you is acting under selfish motives. However, denying the plausibility that helping others makes us feel better about ourselves is unrealistic.

By not being picky about the favors you receive, you send the message to those who watch that you’re a capable actor for this specific scene. You’d be seen as capable of making somebody seem altruistic and giving. Your act of not being picky with others’ favors will make you seem as a good subject to be favorable toward. You’d be playing your role exactly how you should be, and will be more likely to receive favors from others.

In knowing and playing your role in the transaction, you encourage people to want to be helpful toward you. Think back to a time when you’ve found it difficult to help somebody. There are those who go out of their way (knowingly or not) to make it difficult for us to seem genuine and kind. They serve to play a role of being a difficult person to help by refusing, not being content, or simply not knowing what they need help in. You shouldn’t be picky whilst receiving favors as you should strive to be a polar opposite of those who are difficult to help. When people notice that someone is difficult to help, they are hesitant to want to help them down the line. People who are difficult to help don’t serve to make us feel important, and don’t help us portray an image of altruism in return for the favors that we give. They make us look bad at helping people.

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