Thursday, April 14, 2016

The Spectrum of External Assistance (or Support)

This is the development from a conversation with my parents about motivation and how they created a culture of support for my sister and I that has been a launching pad for all of the things that we do now.
The Spectrum of External Assistance, maybe External Motivation?, maybe just Support?
I wasn’t sure what to title this, the Spectrum of External Assistance seems appropriate, but pretty vague. I would say simply Spectrum of Support, but really that’s not the best because support is a subset of the spectrum.

This started in the conversation because I told my parents that they did a great job of supporting me and not encouraging me too much and never really pushing me. To give one of the specific examples we talked about, at age 16 when I decided to hike Mt. Massive and Mt. Elbert in one day, with no prior experience above 12,500 feet, they supported me, and helped facilitate the effort. Yet my parents never forced me go to Boy Scout camp or track practice.

This is a work in progress. it really just came up in about the last two weeks and I wanted to try and flesh out my thoughts a little bit. To be honest I hope that someone else can build off of it and develop it a little further. I have not done any research into this so there are probably already books out there about this exact spectrum. This is just my parents and my idea. 

What really got me interested in this two weeks ago was the concept of support versus encourage. Having spent some amount of time around youth sports I can easily say that many parents do not do a good job of allowing their children to develop their own interests, or allowing the simple concept of fun drive the child’s involvement in activities. 

This is important because people respond differently to different levels of support. Some people need to be pushed, others just need a little support, and in other cases sabotaging someone’s effort only makes them work harder, although that’s a rare one. So thinking of how we fall along this spectrum of assistance to others might help us be more aware of our impact on others, both positive and negative.

Here are some examples of a “friend” providing some mental and physical assistance to a person.

Sabotage:
Person: “I just bought a new bicycle!”
Friend: “Yeah I noticed a flat tire on the way in.” (Because the “friend” let the air out of a tire.)

Belittle:
Person: “I just bought a new bicycle!”
Friend: “Yeah and you’re going to look good in spandex too.” (Because almost no one actually looks good in spandex.)

Bargain:
Person: “I just bought a new bicycle!”
Friend: “I suppose that means you are going to spend less time hanging out with your non-cycling friends like me?”

Support:
Person: “I just bought a new bicycle!”
Friend: “That’s great! You might even be able to commute to work sometimes and save some gas money.”

Encourage:
Person: “I just bought a new bicycle!”
Friend: “Good for you! Have you signed up to ride any centuries or a triathlon yet?”

Push:
Friend: “Have you been gaining weight? You need to get a bicycle and ride an hour a day, seriously.”

Force:
Friend: “I bought you a bicycle, and you are going to ride it, regardless of the weather and I am going to make sure that you do.”

What sticks out to me as I tried to make these examples is that at either end of the spectrum it’s not a very positive experience. Maybe this needs to be a two dimensional graph, kind of like my political circle I made a few years ago.

Really, this graph is about how someone like you or I assist and support other people, and not about the other person, it’s how each one of us is supportive towards that person and that activity. In other words, support is directly in the middle, either you support the person and activity or not. However, at either end of the spectrum you think you know better than that person what is good for him or her. To go back to parenting, yeah, I suppose sometimes you have to force your kids to get in the car or sabotage their ability to get access to alcohol. Frankly, parents do know best much of the time, but I would say not all the time. For example, despite not even having a girlfriend, I worry that I will push my kids to run and mountaineer and they will hate it, despite the fact I can’t imagine them being bad at those two things. It would be easy for me to encourage so hard I push them to do it, and even force the family to do this kind of stuff on vacations. Of course, the fact I am worried about it probably eliminates the chance that it would ever get to that point, but still I worry.

As I return to Mt. Everest right now I remember the past two years, and I have had every response from belittling me for doing this, to pushing me to go back, although most people fall into the middle, mostly supportive, some encouraging, and a handful bargaining. 

Food for thought. My opinion is we need more support and encouragement in this world.

5 comments:

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