Diagnostic

 

You can’t fix it if you don’t know what’s broken? 

There are some people who just love to serve others. They want to help other people as much as possible. I’m one of those people. I genuinely love when I can help. 

I like to help my neighbors do physical type tasks. I like to help my coworkers figure out ways to help our clients. Those are pretty easy ways to help. 

But what about emotionally? This gets harder. Emotions are often driven by experiences. Things that happened in someone’s past will trigger an emotional reaction to something. 

So when someone is upset and we try to offer advice, many times it is based on why WE think they are reacting that way, which may be completely different than their reason. 

When it comes to helping others on emotional issues, we have to walk in their shoes. We shouldn’t automatically just drop wisdom bombs when we don’t even know why something made them upset. 

You can’t fix a car that won’t start if you don’t know what is wrong with it. It takes diagnostics. The same is with humans. If you want to help, you run a diagnostic…aka listen. Be a shoulder for them and intently listen before giving advice.