Guest Post; 5 Ways Volunteering Can Change Your Life

5 Ways Volunteering Can Change Your Life

By: PJ Molan, who helped compile the list of the best social work schools and is working towards becoming a forensic scientist.

There are lots of persuasive reasons not to volunteer. It’s time consuming, often uncomfortable, and can force you to face facts about the state of the world and yourself that you’d perhaps rather leave alone. Once you take the plunge, however, you come to realize that all those excuses are far outweighed by the transformative ways volunteering can change your life, for the better.

1. Realize Your Ability to Change Lives

Throughout my college and young adult years, I’d cultivated a view of the world that went something like this: “It’s terribly screwed up, way beyond my ability to do anything about it.” This perspective left me with a general sense of anger, and powerlessness. A few years ago, I joined a group of writers that teaches the process of creative writing to inner city kids, and I realized that any skill you possess has the ability to change lives, and in the process, make a small but non-negligible impact on the world. It’s how you decide to use those skills that matters.

2. Get Catapulted Out of Your Comfort Zone

I grew up in a poor household, and although I harbored a lot of anger about the economic disparities in the U.S., once I got a decent job I didn’t want to think about the realities of being poor anymore. Seeing those inner city kids face the stress and anxiety that comes from growing up without security, I realized how selfish and ultimately comfortable I had been in my own apathy. Volunteering will take you out of your own apathetic zone, and reawaken the issues that matter to you.

3. Form Life-Long Relationships With Other Volunteers

Modern society is defined by a general sense of anonymity. It’s easy, if you don’t make the effort, to go through life with a series of superficial friendships that don’t go at all beneath the surface. As you’re volunteering and going through this personal transformation, there will be other volunteers going through it as well, people who you’re likely to form lasting, rich relationships with, due to your shared experiences.

4. Experience the Joy of Giving

Giving of yourself in a serious manner is exhausting, and that’s why most people don’t bother to do it. It’s easier and nicer in a lot of ways to put all your time and money into pampering yourself. When you volunteer and see the look of gratitude on the faces of the people you’re trying to help, however, you’ll experience a profound satisfaction at your ability to make someone else’s life a little easier. It’s a feeling of connectedness between people of very different cultures and backgrounds that few get to experience in their lifetime.

5. Gain Confidence In Yourself

Volunteering may be one of the hardest challenges you’ve faced to date. Your project may go incredibly off course, and you may be upset at your inability to enact the changes you had planned. If you’re working in the third world, you’ll probably be homesick, hot, and uncomfortable for a good chunk of the time. But once you’ve made it through you’ll know that you can do anything—a very empowering feeling that you will carry with you throughout your life.