The art of helping...

byrocr7

2.6K followers

11 years ago

Many years ago I was involved in a nasty airplane crash. I was flying canyons and valleys looking for stray cows my brother had turned out in the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness area in Eastern Oregon. The airplane I was flying, a 1957 Piper Super Cub, had mechanical problems and crashed in the mountains amongst tall pine trees exploding on impact. I sustained significant injuries, including 3rd degree burns to 75% of my body. The story is a long and difficult one I will save for another time. Suffice to say, over the next 6 1/2 years, I endured 33 major surgeries, unending painful physical therapy and financial ruin. My wife left before I was out of the hospital. In all honesty, it was more pain than a person should have to deal with in life.

As the years went by, I started volunteering in burn units of various hospitals across the United States acting as a bit of a mentor to others who were in the process of negotiating traumas similar to my own. There were several people that helped me get through my ordeal including family, friends, therapists, surgeons, and volunteers. They challenged me, pushed on me, encouraged me, motivated me and the like. This was my way of repaying them... Paying it forward as they say. My adventure ultimately culminated into a 5 year stint as a volunteer at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio TX, where I served wounded soldiers and their families. The Iraq war was in full swing, leaving virtually no vacancies in BAMC's burn unit. Wounded soldiers arrived almost daily, and my patients were the worst of the worst. Traumatic amputations, severe burns and traumatic brain injuries were common place... mostly the result of IED's.

My job was to provide education and support to family members, and to act as a trauma consultant or coach to recovering military personnel. BAMC was a fantastic facility with top notch medical professionals who did a wonderful job of repairing the broken bodies that came to the hospital. I was able to bring an experiential component to the table, however, that the hospital was missing. A sever burn is something that's hard to relate to unless you've been through it. My patients would spend the rest of their lives with missing limbs, eyes, fingers and toes, as well as massive disfigurement. One of my most damaged patient lost all four limbs all the way to his body, the remainder of which was badly scarred from an 80% 3rd degree burn. It was the hospital staffs contention that learning to deal with the aftermath of a burn trauma is best taught by someone who's already been through it. So there I was.

When I first started as a volunteer, I went out of my way to be kind and gentle, and employed my definition of "help", especially with children. After all, everyone was in tremendous pain, and had been through so much. They deserved kind and gentle support. When I went to work at BAMC, my job got serious. The medical staff asked me to design a system that would benefit patients on the burn ward, resulting in a higher quality of life moving forward. As I drew on the experience I acquired over the years, it became clear to me that being a gentle, nice guy, who always encouraged patients, their families and friends, was not always the best thing for my patients. The truth is, in order to improve, and sometimes even to survive, many of them needed a heavy hand. They needed me to help them set goals, then push on them hard to achieve those goals. Physical therapy is extremely painful, and most of my patients had 12 to 24 months of it looking them squarely in the face. Mr nice guy just didn't work very well.

Within a couple of years, I'd developed a formula that created significant results in both quality of recovery as well as speed of recovery. I'd be happy to address the formula in a future blog post if anyone is interested. The point I want to make in this blog post however, evolves around the concept of helping others, what it means and how to go about it.

Encouragement can be a good thing, but when applied by itself, without the balance of honest criticism, it looses some of it's teeth. In my own situation, as it pertains to my volunteer efforts, being a nice guy wasn't really doing my patients a lot of good. I didn't start seeing significant gains until I pushed very hard on them, criticized their performance, and soundly employed the formula I developed. Being warm and fuzzy was not truly helping anyone.

So where am I going with this and what does it have to do with Wealthy Affiliate? As a community, I believe we should strive to "help" each other. To accomplish this however, one must define what "help" really means. I assume that everyone in this community is like minded in that we all desire to create an income via the Internet. Part of what we rely on is honest feedback and constructive criticism. We need to be challenged as well as encouraged, pushed on, as well as affirmed. If I develop and post content for my web site that doesn't read well, it does me no good at all for well meaning members of the community to tell me how well it reads. If the design of my web site is poor but I'm told it looks great, what value is there?

As you interact with the Wealthy Affiliate community, I encourage you to be genuine in your reviews, comments and feedback. I challenge you to provide constructive criticism with a critical eye, with the intent of truly helping others improve their chances at success. Don't be the person who blindly gives a thumbs up to something that does not deserve it, rather, be the person who genuinely cares enough to respond with thought and honesty. I am eternally grateful to the people who pushed on me, challenged me, motivated me and held me accountable during my recovery after my accident. The genuine help and dedication they showed me gave me a much better quality of life than I would have had without them, in spite of the pain and tears.

As a Wealthy Affiliate community member, you are in a unique position. You have the opportunity to contribute to the success of other community members through your genuine, honest, critical feedback, along with a healthy dose of encouragement. Be that person.

Thanks for your ear...

...R