Taking Care of Ourselves Sets Us Up to Assist Others
We need to be taking good care of ourselves—sleeping, eating, taking time for our own recharging—if we expect to have any reserve to help others. We can’t draw from a dry well.
This time of the year always makes me move into emergency management mode. Not so much because I deal with a lot of daily crises in my own life, but since I work for the U.S. Forest Service in a wildfire prone area, I have to relearn the lingo and get used to more daily briefings of daily operations and evacuations and the like. And this focus on emergency management reminds me of a couple of experiences in my life that have underlining life lessons.
The first experience was training to be a community emergency response team members. Or CERT for short. About a decade or so ago there was a big push nationally to train up civilian volunteer groups to act as first responders in the case of local emergencies like fires, earthquakes, floods, etc. The program I connected with was a 6 week training regime culminating in a simulated emergency scenario where we got to triage patients, put out fires with extinguishers, and setup an incident command structure that more trained emergency management teams could built upon.
One thing that we were taught early on was to not exaggerate our own qualifications. If we didn’t have our EMT training, then we shouldn’t expect to ride with ambulances or perform more complex procedures other than stopping bleeding or perform CPR. And when someone more qualified showed up on the scene, we were expected to follow their lead. We could certainly still offer to assist, but there was a clear expectation of none of us developing a lot of long-term ownership over any of the command structures. In fact, our job was specifically to just tide things over until more qualified people can get on scene.
The other experience was several years before my CERT training. I took swimming lessons as a kid but my technique was sloppy at best, so when my Mom offered for me to take swimming lessons again with my younger brother I took advantage of the opportunity. Swimming is tough. Let me just say, I really admire anybody who is proficient at it. At certain points in my life I’ve thought it might be fun to compete in triathlons and though I think I could do the running and biking parts pretty effectively, the swimming part deters me every time.
But I did my best during the lessons and one of the final segments in the course was connected to water safety and water rescue. The instructor told us about the fact that saving someone who is drowning is a much more difficult thing than movies would have you believe. If the person drowning is panicking, they could drag you down with them and if they are unconscious than you have to be a pretty strong swimmer to be able to swim your own weight as well as the body weight of the person you’re transporting. That’s why it’s generally much preferred to toss a life line to the person rather than swimming out to them to save them.
In both experiences there’s a common thread of:
1) Not doing more than we can reasonably do,
2) Knowing our limits and our qualifications, and
3) Be willing to let go of ownership so that the greater underlining purpose can be achieved.
We all celebrate the miraculous rescues that heroic individuals perform all over the world. And we should honor and respect their sacrifices. But just like with my swimming instructor’s wise admonition: if we swim out to rescue someone drowning, we might make the rescue effort more difficult for trained emergency management folks if both we and the person we are trying to rescue end up need saving.
Bottom line, let’s put on our own flotation devices first before we try to do so for others. So many people in my life are so incredibly selfless and so eager to help others. But we need to remember too, that we can’t draw from a dry well. We need to be taking good care of ourselves—sleeping, eating, taking time for our own recharging—if we expect to have any reserve to help others.