I have helped people work through some of the deepest crises, identity loss, grief, that one can imagine. While holding this sacred space for others, I have had the privilege of learning things about true service that I want to share with you.
This applies to everyone. We are all in service somehow to the people around us, and we can all step into deeper service.
1. Make It About Them
The biggest mistake people make when someone comes to them with a challenge, or in need of advice, is to make it about themselves. This is normal. The ego is quick to talk about itself, eager to prove it understands, eager to be seen as wise. Real service asks for something different: full attention on the person in front of you, on their journey, not yours.
Someone comes to you with sadness, grief, or loss, and you start talking about how you yourself worked through the same in the past. It may feel natural to you in the moment, but to them it comes across as tone deaf and pulls the focus away from them and onto you.
So when someone opens up to you, make it about them: listen deeply, become a participant in their experience, and let them feel you are right there with them, figuring things out together, meeting obstacles side by side.
I have worked through deep grief myself, but when someone is in front of me needing guidance, it isn’t about my grief. We go into the depths of theirs together.
Why? Because your insight about your own journey matters less here than theirs does. Insight is embodied knowledge, a direct experience of understanding something at a deeper level. And true service means the other person gets to gather that insight themselves, in their own time, through their own process.
2. Don’t Try to Get Rid of Anything
Many people feel deeply uncomfortable when someone else is processing strong emotion, and it leads to a common mistake that leaves the other person feeling unmet. Someone is crying, and the response is: “No need to cry, all is well.” It comes from good intentions, but it makes the need to bypass our own discomfort the priority, instead of their experience.
Great space holders know that nothing is too much and everything is welcome. When you embody that (within respectful limits, this obviously excludes abusive behavior) the other person feels deeply safe with you and at peace.
Any urge to get rid of an emotion, to make the discomfort of experiencing it go away, is fear dressed up as helping. Projecting our own discomfort onto the other person serves us. Sitting with our own discomfort and letting them move through their experience at their own pace serves them.
3. Serve From a Deeper Place
Service is not a script. Service is the art of becoming so present that for a moment all sense of time and space dissolves, and that presence alone creates a space that allows for deep insights and inner breakthroughs.
It’s not about what we say or how we say it. It’s about where we are coming from, whether we are truly rooted in the present, in our body, and in our heart.
When you serve from that place, magic happens. Something occurs that is difficult to describe in words. The closest one I can use is ‘alignment’: everything flows, everything aligns, and synchronicities start to arise.
Somehow the heart knows, and the soul knows, before the mind does.
Serve from your soul, and not from your mind.
These are three ways you can show up deeper for the people around you:
- Make it about them
- Don’t try to get rid of any emotions, embody an “all is welcome” energy
- Serve from a deeper place, serve from your soul
If you’re ready to go deeper, click here to see my upcoming training courses or click here to access past recordings.
A woman with a father wound