When Sir Keir Starmer was elected to a romping victory in the July 2024 UK elections, his opening speeches pledged his government to “service”. In his first speech outside No. 10 Downing Street, having just won the election, Sir Starmer said, “When the gap between sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation.” Then, in his first speech to parliament, Sir Starmer returned to his service theme saying, “Whatever our political differences, it is now time to turn the page, unite in a common endeavour of national renewal and make this parliament a parliament of service.”
Sir Starmer is a politician, so whether he lives up to his words remains to be seen. It meets his political needs to differentiate himself from his political predecessors in this way but nevertheless he chose those words, and he chose the topic of service. He could easily have said something to the effect of, “We have been elected and we have a mandate to implement our policies while maintaining a sense of decency.” By referring to service, though, he is implying that those who benefit from his government will be the people, not just the politicians. In doing so, he is deliberately standing against a political and social trend of looking after your own needs, aggrandising the self and making the individual paramount.
Clearly, government should be about public service, but it does raise the question of whether as individuals we might be better off if we also served others rather than always seeking our own betterment? In a culture that encourages you to foster independence and think of your own needs, let’s pause for a moment and think about what “service” is and what are its implications?
What is service?
When you say the term “service” in modern society, it probably conjures images of how quickly your coffee is delivered and how warmly your waiter/waitress smiles at you. What we are talking about goes way beyond the parameters of the service economy; we are talking about a kind of service that builds societies and transforms souls.
Altruism is not identical to service, but it shares many elements. In its chapter on altruism, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a definition that serves as a clear outline of both service and altruism sating that it is: “behaviour undertaken deliberately to help someone other than the agent (the person doing the serving) for that other individual’s sake”. You could also define service by considering what is not, which is to say that it is behaviour that is the opposite of self-interest or egotism.
Some years ago, I interviewed Olympic swimmer Elka Whalan and somehow our conversation turned to the idea of service, and Whalan gave a definition that adds warm flesh to the cold academic bones already provided. Whalan observed, “Service is being compassionate and kind. It is listening to people, being there for support, being there for love and meeting people where they are.”
As Whalan says, you need to meet people where they are if you are to serve them, but to do that you need to know where they are and also where you are. In other words, if you want to make service part of your life, then you need to be deliberate about it, which means giving some thought to how you can do it.
The craft of service
Like anything worthwhile, service requires crafting. Serving does not come without effort and there are some skills and attitudes that you need to build to enable you to effectively serve others.
Listening
If you can’t hear what another person is saying, how will you know what their needs are? Without the ability to listen, you will simply be imposing your perceptions of what they need on another person. Practise listening to people on podcasts or your favourite shows. Empty your mind of your preconceptions, hear the words of others and interpret them without prejudice. Then you will know wat they need and can serve them.
Give your time
To truly serve another person, you need to be willing to give your time. First, you need to spend time to establish what the other person genuinely needs and then you need to spend whatever time it takes to meet those needs. If you skimp on time, you minimise understanding and jeopardise quality of your service.
Identify your skills
There is no point trying to offer service if you can’t do what someone needs. There is no point offering to unclog someone’s drains if you can’t tell a wrench from a poodle. Know your strengths and if you can’t directly offer someone what they need, then find someone who can.
Be proactive
When you wait to be asked to help someone, then a whole range of mitigating factors come into play. When you serve to avoid humiliation or recrimination, then the benefits of service are lost, and it’s not true service in any case. Identify who needs your support, establish what you can do, and do it with full spirit before any request needs to be made.
Check your motivation and know yourself
If you are serving just because it makes you feel good about yourself, then that is not service. Engage in whatever practices you need to so that you can know your own mind and recognise your motivations. Be sure that your aim is to provide what the other person needs for wherever they are.
If you do engage in service in a genuine way, then a raft of wonderful things flow.
In the service flow
There is plenty of evidence from scientific literature that shows that being of service helps you, the server. Remember, of course, that motivation matters. If you are doing something for someone in expectation of the benefits you will receive, then that, by definition, is not genuine service. With that important caveat out of the way, let’s consider the effects of giving on the giver.
If you have ever helped a friend or stranger, then you will know the warm glow that follows. In psychological terms, this feeling emanates from reinforcing your sense of relatedness to others, and that sense of connection is deeply rooted in human evolution. In 1988, a seminal paper was published in the journal Science that showed there is a strong association between social connections and physical health. It is no surprise that since serving necessitates connection, it will have healthy implications. Over the last three decades, much work has been done that details these benefits, which are both physical and mental.
In 2022, the journal Frontiers in Psychology published a study that showed prosocial behaviour (academia speak for “service”) enhances satisfaction with life and decreases the impact of negative emotions such as pessimism, indecisiveness and irritability. In 2013, another paper published in the American Journal of Public Health found that stressful life events have less of an impact on people who engage in serving others, while in 2018, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that high school students who helped other students with their work did better in their grades than other high-achieving students who did not help others.
When it comes to the brain, there are real and measurable effects that arise from “service”. For example, research has shown that donating money to charities activates the mesolimbic regions of the brain, the same regions that respond to monetary rewards and sex. Given all of the other benefits that service confers, we might say that as far as your brain is concerned, service is better than sex. On top of that, research published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications (2017) showed that generosity modulates connectivity between the temporo-parietal junction and the ventral striatum in the brain. That control of activity in the ventral striatum is directly linked to increased levels of happiness.
There is just no doubt that service offers psychological benefits that have roots in your brain and lead on to positive physical results. Sufi psychologist Fleur Bonnin, however, takes it a step further, and a quantum leap deeper, saying that the effects of service on the server operate at the soul level.
According to Bonnin, “Every time you are totally focused on the self, interacting with others, or responding to events, you are placing yourself on the surface of the ocean of life, trapped on the top of the waves. On the surface, you experience being in a constant state of flux and repetition. Up and down, side to side, sometimes floating along, other times thrashing against the shore.”
“If your focus and awareness is expanded beyond the self, then rather than being on top of the water, you can experience being within and therefore a part of the ocean,” Bonnin says “Here, you become both the observer and the participant of the depth and calmness that exists under the waves as well as the activity of the waves. From this place, you need not react with fight or flight, or fear, or wallowing etc. There is no reason to react in an effort to ease pain because one is no longer being thrown around since one is also connected with the depth of the ocean. From here, one can respond to events with the appropriateness that they deserve, no more and no less – through the eye of the observer, in a state of balance and peace.”
As well as helping the person you are serving, service makes your life better on a psychological and even soul level.
Changing the culture
To serve someone, you need to recognise the sameness between you and set aside your ego. This approach is antithetical to the culture of our time which is in favour of forever pumping air into the balloon of your ego and indulging in the illusion, largely driven by social media, that everyone can be famous. Martin Luther King Jr once said, “Not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service.” Everybody is capable of service but that does not diminish it, rather it elevates it. Service is an act of radical transformation for the person who is served and the person who serves. When you serve another person, you support that person, you enhance your own life and you elevate our society.
