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Blog
Is Your Help a Hand-up or a Hand-out?
Hand-up or Hand-out?
Or, to put it another way ”What you do for me without me, you do to me.” Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi had such a knack of saying a whole lot in very few words, and this is one example. It is a point that those of us in the self-help, personal growth and counseling fields need to take very seriously, but also applies to parents, teachers, and anyone who has skills that others need. It echoes, slightly more enigmatically, the old “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him to fish and you teach him for the rest of his life.” Apart from my occasional rebellious question as to whether anyone ever considers whether to teach a woman to fish, each statement echoes the other.
Whether we are working with children, with those who are in need, or with people who do not have skills that we have mastered, most of us want to help people. We want to help people so that they can grow and become self-sufficient. Yet, all too often, the help that is given is a temporary fix rather than something that encourages growth. In fact, helping someone while they stand helplessly back and watch may well convey the message that they are helpless and need someone else to look after them. It can be unempowering. We want to provide stepping stones, but instead the message that they are helpless to help themselves may become a stumbling block.
People do not learn from watching nearly as well – if at all – as from doing. Of course it takes longer, and more effort, to tell someone how to do something, to guide their actions and give them feedback, than it does to do the darn thing ourselves! So, unfortunately, we tend to do for, rather than do with.
My neighbor is a brilliant “fix-it” person, and always willing to help. I have noticed that he “does it right.” He does what I, at five foot two inches, cannot do either for matters of height or of strength. When that is out of the way he hands things back to me and, if needed, tells me how to do it, but I have to be active in the process. When I installed a motion detector light over my garage door, part of what was needed was out of my reach. He promptly did what I could not, but then handed the tools back to me to continue the task. I’m not sure if I felt more empowered because I learned something, or because I had been an active part of the project rather than a helpless bystander. I think it was the latter.
Of course we have to have a balance. While I am saying that taking over and fixing everything can be un-empowering, on the other hand standing back and saying that people must do something for themselves when they are incapable of doing so is not helpful. Leaving me to install my own light over the garage door would not have helped me to grow a few more inches. I believe the balance lies right there – where the help offered is for what the individual cannot do, but that they are expected to participate as well.
Habitat for Humanity has that down pat, truly living out their slogan “A hand up not a hand out.” The organization organizes and leads, but the anticipated owners of the house must contribute many hours of work, under supervision where necessary and learning many skills as they go, in order to earn the right to move in.
I suspect that those of us who “do for” rather than “do with” may get a quiet charge of virtuosity when we consider how much we do for others – but then… are we doing it for them or for ourselves?
I also suspect that the one thing that people really need is to be empowered by our acknowledgement that they are capable of “doing with,” even if it only involves tightening a couple of screws, as with my garage light.
Do you do for? Or do you do with? If the former… would you consider bring your “helpees” on board, just a little? You will not be giving them less, but more.
I hope you find this blog interesting, useful, or amusing, depending on its topic. One way to keep track of my posts is to subscribe to my newsletter (see form on the right), which will always contain a note of recent blogs. Or, of course, you could bookmark this page and keep checking back. Either way, I hope that my work makes your life easier and more balanced. To explore my offer of the gift of a 30 minute coaching session on whatever issue is a stumbling block for you, please see my Contact page.
Diana
Is “then” harmful to your “now”? Traditions, generation after generation
Is “then” harmful to your “now”?
“I am still breaking the chains of generations old dysfunctional family patterns,” a friend posted.
I replied: “That is one of our major evolutionary goals for each generation. I can see it in my offspring, as I can see it in myself. I believe that failure to break those chains is frequently the cause of much pain in life.”
Then I started thinking further. Time changes our perspective. What appears to us to be an undesirable family tradition may simply be what was necessary at that time.
Part of becoming an adult involves choosing how we want to be, as we separate from those who raised us. When we believe that our parents or others in our family line were dysfunctional, often in ways that were (or seemed) damaging to us, sometimes we are right, and then there is work to be done so that we do not continue the pattern. On the other hand, sometimes even those who we think must have been totally “over the edge” were simply living in line with the customs and constraints of the times in which they lived.
Generations in the kitchen
There’s the old story of a newly married couple… he questioned why she cut the ends off the meat before cooking pot-roast. He said it was wasteful. She explained that she did it because that is what her mother did. Later, she found that her mother did it because her mother did it, so, therefore, that must be the right way to cook pot-roast. Eventually, visiting her great grandmother, the bride observed that great grand-mom did NOT cut the ends off the pot-roast. Questioned, great grand-mom laughed, and said,
“Oh, yes, back then I had to cut the ends off. I didn’t have a big enough pot for the whole thing, but now I do.”
It was not a method chosen because it was right, but because it was necessary, yet it continued for generations.
There are people in my family tree who saw life through the eyes of Victorian England and colonial India because that was the world they lived in. Family separations, including children as young as six in English boarding school, were not signs of lack of love, but necessities due to lack of appropriate educational and medical facilities where the parents were “posted” by the government. Following that tradition and because my parents needed to be out of the country, I was in boarding school for a couple of years. A few years ago, when I mentioned that to a friend, her immediate reaction was “Child abuse.” Yet it was not abusive. Actually the education level was higher than when I was later sent to a local school, and, although firm (or possibly strict) the staff were kind and encouraging.
My friend saw through eyes that were adjusted to the present times, and the culture in which she lives. Back then my mother’s eyes saw something different.
Language changes through generations
A second spur to writing this piece came – on the same day as my friend’s post – from an article in the magazine The Sun (which I strongly recommend). In it the mother of a child with Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome writes about the way in which language to describe what are now called “intellectual disabilities” has changed over the years. With today’s eyes, as she comments, we are trying to move away from “the r word” and toward “intellectual disabilities.” However, she notes, “in the 1950s the word retarded was progressive, an improvement over feebleminded, imbecile, moron.”
Back then we did not have the medical knowledge to distinguish between many forms and causes of intellectual disability, so they were lumped together, often under the labels used to describe the most extreme forms. We look back and, sometimes we shudder. Perhaps it would help if we were to remember that much of what we condemn from the past came from lack of information, not from evil intent. So is often the case with our forebears.
I still believe what I wrote in response to my friend’s post. We need to recognize that not all family traditions are healthy for us, and we owe it to future generations to break away from those that need breaking.
However, there is a second reason for this post. I believe that in the process of breaking, we need not condemn either our families or ourselves for behaviors that may, in their time, have been what was taught by their ancestors’ examples, or may have been the very best that could be done at that time. Perhaps we need to accept without condemnation that some of the things we now need to change did not, in their time, seem so much “dysfunctional” as “necessary” (pot-roast included).
That was then, and this is now. Let’s choose to live in the now.
Diana
Stumbling and Stepping is a blog written weekly – or thereabouts – and I hope you will visit often. If you are a follower on Twitter (where I am choicecoach) or my Face Book The Balanced Coach page, you will get an alert when I post anew. My newsletter, “Work in Progress – because we all are”, is available by subscription, at no cost. It focuses on life balance as the basis for enjoying life – in a very broad view and NOT just in the sense of “work-life balance.” If you would like to subscribe, please complete the form on the right of this page. Your information will never be shared or sold, and you will be able to unsubscribe with the click of your keyboard – although I hope you won’t decide to.
Handling the Frustration of Waiting
So it’s 9:30 a.m. and I’m sitting here, waiting to know when they’ll arrive… I have several other things to do today, but I have to be here. I’ll bet you’ve had that kind of experience, the frustration of waiting for an unknown length of time, and I suspect that I am not alone in beginning to fret about it.
Will they get the work done this morning? This afternoon? Is there time for me to run errands before they arrive? Should I wait until they come even if they don’t show up until late afternoon? They called me several weeks ago to say they’d install today but I did not ask them what time. Because the store does not open until 10 a.m. I can’t reach anyone right now. And, of course, I would like to know… RIGHT NOW! Not happy.
That’s a stumbling block. “Time to stop the blame game and do a reframe.”
Of course it’s partly my fault. I could have called them yesterday to check on the time but, quite frankly, I forgot. So maybe rather than getting into a snit I should be thinking of how I can best spend the time usefully without getting involved in anything lengthy, like re-vamping this website, because “they” might arrive at any minute.
This is where a “Five minute to-do” list comes in handy. I used to keep one, and at this moment I wish I still did. There are all those little tasks that I pass by because of their relative unimportance when compared with my “real” projects. Yet they mount up, they are irritators – “tolerations” as we used to call them in the coaching world from way-back.
I’ll take a hint from “get things done” guru David Allan and walk the house, clip-board in hand, to make my lists… a 5-minute list and a project list. If “they” have still not arrived after that I’ll catch up on my reading. Those are stepping stones.
My time will not be wasted.
How about you? What do you do when you have to sit and wait? Do you take a book or a “reader” to appointments where you may have to wait? (I prefer a “real” book because some places ask that one turn of electronic gadgets in the waiting room.)
What do you do when you start to get irritated? I hope you don’t sit and fume, because fuming can ruin one’s day and sometimes other people’s as well. The stumbling blocks can seem to grow ever larger as we fume… On the other hand, lemons do make great lemonade – and that is a positive that can be shared with others – another stepping stone.
Hoping that you have – or will find – your own processes so that you use your wating moments in ways that make you feel fabulous!
Diana
Postscript – after I had written this they responded to my call, they arrived at 11: a.m. and were done by noon!
Stumbling and Stepping is a blog written weekly – or thereabouts – and I hope you will visit often. If you are a follower on Twitter (where I am choicecoach) or my Face Book The Balanced Coach page, you will get an alert when I post anew. My newsletter, “Work in Progress – because we all are”, is available by subscription, at no cost. It focuses on life balance as the basis for enjoying life – in a very broad view and NOT just in the sense of “work-life balance.” If you would like to subscribe, please complete the form on the right of this page. Your information will never be shared or sold, and you will be able to unsubscribe with the click of your keyboard – although I hope you won’t decide to.
