Helping others

It seems like helping others is not as easy as I thought it ought to be. Being in the people-helping industry, which includes teachers and instructors, it is definitely not easy to help others be interdependent. Rather, it is far easier to have your students/clients be dependent on you.

It is far easier to give instructions and have people follow them to churn out the best results/outcomes for everyone to see. The idea of focusing on the process becomes tedious and difficult, and the outcomes/results might not reach the requirements.

Yet, it is absolutely necessary for workers in the helping profession to empower individuals for their growth. Here’s a summary of what I thought was useful to think about:

Simply stated, empowered individuals are aware of, and act on, the right to make their own choices and decisions. To empower a client is to raise their awareness about personal rights and entitlement.

Strategies to empower aim to transform client feelings of helplessness and powerlessness into greater self-assuredness and confidence. Minor shifts in the way a counsellor conducts casework can serve as a great starting point for empowering clients.

This sounds good in theory, but difficult in reality. But we have to try, don’t we?

Expanding the metaphor

If there is one thing I like about stories and one-liners, it would be the metaphors that they can generate. From Seth Godin’s blog,  he wrote these:

• A big car on a wet frozen lake goes nowhere. No traction, no motion.
• A small bug working its way across a gravel driveway takes forever. Too much friction, too little motion.
• If you’re stuck, it’s probably because one of these two challenges.

Which is interesting, because he writes it from the context of marketing. I am thinking of the metaphor on how people get stuck in their situations, and how did they get there. And how these metaphors can allow them to see the action they need to take to get out of it.

Leadership management

Got this from William Glasser, MD’s book, The Quality School Teacher. One thing about Dr. Glasser is that I like the way he sees the situation, and his leadership model is really a lead-by-example type of model, very close to Seth Godin’s Tribes-type model.

He says:

… and that you will work with them to solve all problems because, if it is their school, the problems are their problems. You will have to work hard to prevent them from turning their problems over to you, as they are used to doing (Glasser, 1993, p. 3).

… If you can’t reach them, the students will never accept that this is their school (Glasser, 1993, p. 3).

Wow, I can’t hardly argue against that. The only thing that I will try to argue against is the fact that it is so difficult to do. He also prefers that the leaders (i.e. the heads) of the system/organization takes charge of the situation, which sort of means that the heads have to see the need for change, and implement them from top to down. He says this

When the failure to achieve quality is in industry  or education, nothing will be improved until the leaders change the system itself. It is never the fault of the people who work in the system (Glasser, 1993, p. 5).

These are the things that grab me in his book. I really like his ideas, I am just wondering how I will embody it and express it out at my own workplace.

I also really like it that he points out that people who work for the bosses are usually ‘working in the system’ and may not recognize the need to change… unless one of the workers is a renegade-type character, who would push for changes… via the union or by himself (which would be almost unwise).

But… it might be worth a fight if the need to change is obvious, and will be beneficial throughout the board.

References:
Glasser, W. (1993). The Quality School Teacher (Rev. Ed.) HarperPerennial:New York.

SO that’s what it is!

I’ve been thinking about how to progress a relationship. I know that communication is the life of the relationship. Which does sum it very nicely doesn’t it, however, that makes the word, ‘communication’ a very loaded word. What does ‘communication’ mean?

Well, here’s a quote from a blog post that I read, that might help a bit.

Research has shown that openly expressed anger is not a factor in the deterioration of relationships. Instead it is contempt, belligerence, and defensiveness that bring about the deterioration. Where feelings and opinions are not openly and clearly expressed things go downhill.

Anyway, that helps clear what communication should be, doesn’t it?

Leadership

I just came back from a supposedly 3-day 2-night camp. It was a camp to see if one had leadership skills, knowledge, application of skills, and one more criteria, to which I cannot remember now.

After the camp, I was tired, but relentlessly clear headed. I do acknowledge that there has been a limitation of viewpoints (or I would more accurately say, limitation of perspective) because of the tiredness.

Still, the camp left me thinking about leadership. If their leadership model is based on the camp, then the next generation of leaders are so going downhill. I was reading Gary Chapman’s piece on leadership in a relationship, and even though it comes from a Christian perspective, there is practical wisdom in it. Check it:

As the head, does the Father ever force the Son to do anything?  No.  Does the Son ever act independently of the Father?  No.  There is perfect unity.  That is the design for Christian marriage: husbands and wives working together as a team, with the husband as the recognized leader. 

Do leaders force their followers to do anything? I think that if the leader has to force/coerce any follower to do anything, then in my regard, I do not consider a good leader. Period.

Differentiation

There is so many things that we have to learn to differentiate from.

Maybe, I shall make it more personal, and say that I need to learn a lot.

There is a huge difference between ‘obedience’ and ’submission’. I normally associate both together, that is, if I obey, it means that I am submissive, and vice versa. Often it has been articulated to me that you can obey unsubmissively, and disobey submissively.

So as I begin to differentiate the two, I also differentiate the beliefs that are held by the definitions of these two different words.

looking at persons vs. peoples

I notice myself looking at things through a different lens, shifting from the person as an individual, to the person identified in the group that he/she belongs to.

When I see the distinction, there is a likelihood that I put my prejudices if I see them in the systems/groups that they belong to, yet it helps explain the behaviours that the person presents.

And still, the person is a unique individual, that he/she will have his/her personality, attitudes, beliefs that varies in degrees with the group of belonging. The person has his/her own personal issues, virtues, and low points, that makes him/her interesting to know and curiously magnificent.

I get so emotional with you…

Yes, we get emotional with a lot of things, most of the time these ‘things’ are words. We react to words, we react to the context behind the words in our own world/lives/narratives. The words “Shut up” comes across as rude and challenging to me. The context is that my teachers use them when they get frustrated.By the time they get to use that word, it means that we will be getting punished, whether we were culprits to the noise making or not.

Here’s another example of linking emotionality with words.

“You shouldn’t stereotype, it is wrong for you to do that!”

The word “stereotype” becomes a bad word. It becomes bad behaviour, something a nasty person would do. While many have indeed stereotype and have decided to stick to their assessment of the stereotype, stereotyping is not necessarily wrong.

What I realize now is, stereotyping occurs when I do not have enough information about whatever I am stereotyping. So I can either be curious and find out more, or keep my stereotype ideas to myself. If people are involved, things get trickier.

In any case, I think that being curious is healthy and I would go on that path, when I stereotype.

Words… words are loaded with emotionality. The word “bed” could mean rest and enjoyment to one, but fear and pain to another (who might be tortured in bed).

Be careful when you use words… they are loaded.

simple wisdom

Coming from the point of Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, wisdom is sometimes something so simple and fundamental that we fail to follow her guidance.

I met up a old friend from JC days, and my, I am pleasantly delighted to see how far he has come. To come from a neighbourhood secondary school, and then to not do extremely well for his degree (but then neither did I), he has managed to secure himself a banking job.

Naturally, my inclination to think that a banking is very stressful came up in the conversation. He poignantly pointed that while the stress is always there, there are some rules and principles that he follows that would take off undue stress.

He explained to me that his principle of working was simply always to be honest and hardworking. To be honest is to present clearly options available, his opinions, market trends, and most importantly not to over-promise investments. He said that he learned these over the years from observing his managers, fellow peers, and juniors. He explained that when he did not over-promise, expectations of this customers were sufficiently managed. This makes sense!

The other principle which he holds closely to is being hardworking. He narrowed down that being hardworking was about being conscientious in the work. To do and finish as much as possible, and to remain focus on the main issues. He confessed that some procedures really bored the heck out fo him, but he just pursued at getting the job done, and not get distracted by the side projects that avail themselves when he was feeling heat of the boredom.

Simple wisdom? Absolutely.

I must add that this friend always had an air of confidence about him. His confidence is matched with his sincerity as well as ability to change the tone of his voice when required.

My friend would add that he always had been ‘lucky’ to have understanding customers. But, I refuse to accept that, I just begin to realize that his rapport building skills are really efficient to the extent that he does not realize it.

Kudos to you, Cougar! All the best in your banking career!

changing agendas

I have a problem of always wanting to change others. Last night, I sat with a good brother of mine, and I exacted him one of my ‘judgments’ on him. He graciously forgave me of the offence of ‘forcing him into my way of seeing things’.

This is a occuring pattern that has been around since as long as I can remember.

Honestly, I am sick of my idiocy and foolishness in doing something like this.

So, I started thinking of what sort of paradigm shift I would need to change my world view. Then voila, I read this:

When (a) you accept that you have NO power to make someone else change and (b) accept that you do have power in how you will respond to such things, you receive two benefits

• You stop distressing over how to fix another person
• You use different criteria to evaluate yourself and your life (and thus may find that your own irritation is adding to the vicious cycle and your negative evaluations of your life)

Interestingly, many friends have indicated that I also am quite hard on myself.