I am a firm believer in teaching. The ‘teach a man to fish and he’ll never go hungry’ mentality. I am not a big enabler. If you continually do things FOR people instead of teaching them how to do things, then they become dependent upon you or the system. Dependency is very difficult to break. If you teach them and let them make mistakes, helping them along the way, they will develop their own muscles and get stronger eventually they become able to fly solo, so to speak.
I apply this philosophy to just about everything in life. My parenting, my friendships, my team…everything. You teach people how to treat you. If you always rescue them, they will always come to you for rescuing. I do my best to NOT be judgmental of people however, I base my decisions on experience. In an attempt to soften a blow or smooth a situation, if someone repeatedly makes bad choices in a certain area then asks me to explain things to someone that has been hurt in this process, I am inclined not to comply with the request even tho I may be able to reduce some of the hurt. Does that make sense?
I don’t say no because I want the hurting person to continue in pain. I may say no because the person making the bad choices needs to be held accountable for those repeatedly bad choices and learn from them in hopes that they will stop making them. They need to handle the situation that they created. I may speak to the harmed person and offer empathy but I probably won’t smooth things over because the person doing the hurting needs to do that themselves.
We all have folks in our lives who do this. We have to evaluate situations and help them correct bad behaviors. I’m not saying that if someone makes a mistake that you turn away and let them flounder. I am talking about patterns of behaviors here. People need to wake up and realize that all actions and choices have real consequences to themselves or to others. So if you have someone in your circle of influence who is doing things like this, you might want to put on your teacher’s hat and do what you can to help them learn from these repeated mistakes. You may just turn them around and improve the rest of their life.
PEACE
Pamtastic
