HELPING OTHERS LEARN HOW TO HELP OTHERS

Helping others seems like the shortened version of the Golden Rule. Boomers remember the Golden Rule after the Grandma squad drilled it in.

Millennials might be a little foggy on it since their parents didn’t take them to church, quote Bible verses, or give them the gift of spending a week with a great-Grandma.

Here it is:  “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matt. 7:12).

Does that sound like helping others to you? It does to me. But how is it done properly?

Like this:

Helping others learn anything is going out on a thin limb. If you haven’t been asked to help, what makes you think someone needs any help, your’s in particular?

If you receive an email with demands and accusations and personal attacks, do you respond in kind, or chock it up as a consistent SNAFU, or ‘situation normal, all fucked up.’

Instead of hitting back, or side-sliding in a practiced passive-aggressive two step, why not help someone learn to be helpful?

Helping Others Learn

Let’s agree that the point of learning anything has self-preservation at its roots. From medical research to structural engineering, we’ve come a long way from catastrophic death traps.

That’s the story in the forward march of civilization, the goal. The best of mankind also has empathy, and a need to show it off. We all know the over-empathizer. They are my favorites. I call them teachers since they know more about it than me.

The world of manners, and expectations of the same, has taken a turn over the last few years. From the sound and the fury, it’s not a turn anyone likes.

Manners and civil decency has somehow become the pansy village of ‘lib-tards’ who need to be owned. While crudeness and belligerent behavior lives in the swamp where they couldn’t spell cat if you spotted them a ‘c’ and an ‘a.’

You’ve got to believe we’re collectively better than that, which I’m saying with a flare-up of empathy. It’s okay to apologize. It’s okay to agree to disagree instead of making disagreement the centerpiece.

This was a saying popular with the kids who got caught doing the wrong things in my school: “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” It was usually directed toward the teacher who caught them.

The elephant in the room of adult understanding is in that saying. How? Because we’ve learned that we also get splattered when we sling the shit. Even if we don’t get splattered, it lands on people who weren’t a part of the shit sling.

For a better future, let’s commit to not splattering innocent bystanders with old shit.

The Fish Fresh Enough?

Get past the elephant, now a fish?

A man supervised research students who used a museum collection. It was part of his job as collection manager. Directors and curators did the same thing to grow the industry. People came in as museum studies grads, or preservation grads, or early career jumpers.

One came in with a case of body odor so bad that no one would work with him. Since the man made it through his part, he got nominated for the duty of telling the student. He wasn’t as bad as a Coos Bay mudflat roasting in the sun, but close.

He was a good guy, a future leader, but he stunk so bad he couldn’t be around the textiles for fear of smelly quilts and dresses.

Curator: You used to wrestle. You know how to talk about bad smells.

Me: You lived in L.A.. You know how to talk to him about pollution.

Director: He’s setting up in general storage and walked through exhibits. They talked to me. You talk to him.

I gave him the ‘Coos Bay mudflats on a hot day’ talk. Asked him if he’d ever smelled anything like it. He said no. I told him he smelled worse. He said, “Really?”

The next day he was bright and shiny with a hint of Old Spice.

Unfurl The Hurl

This is from a business and futurist site, so trust is assured:

In my newest book, The Employee Experience Advantage, Airbnb was ranked one of the best organizations for employee experience and there is a rather odd practice they implement that may be helping them create such a successful corporate culture.

During every one of their regular company-wide meetings they bring up elephants, dead fish and vomit.

Elephants are the big things inside of most organizations that no one dares to bring up, dead fish are the things that are in the past but the employees just can’t seem to forget about them and let them go, and the vomit is the things we need to just get out into the open, the things we want to vent about.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to clean shit up, do it. And when in the course of human events it becomes time to remind other that the shit has been cleaned up, so stop making a mess?

Tread carefully on that one, but take the step.

One such step is voting for Joe Biden in 2020. Joe knows the difference between clean-up people and cleaning people.