In Boundaries, Henry Cloud and John Townsend talk a lot about consequences as a way to learn. Much of what they explore in the book has to do with the negative effects that arise when people don’t experience the consequences of their actions, usually because someone else steps in and prevents that from happening. This has been in the back of my head ever since I read the book and it’s caused me to rethink a lot of things in my life.
When it comes to helping people, I’ve long supported the idea of showing kindness by doing for them what I’d want them to do for me if our roles were reversed. I’ve appreciated the people in my life who have done that for me and I like to pay it forward. However, my ultimate goal is to get as many people as possible to the point that they can support themselves so they don’t have to rely on anyone else, and that requires a great deal of personal responsibility. If someone never has to focus on making good decisions because someone else is always going around behind them and cleaning up their messes, then that sense of responsibility is lost. If they continually make bad choices and don’t experience the consequences, what will motivate them to make good choices? Sometimes the best thing to do for someone’s personal growth is to let them reap what they’ve sown so that they’ll learn to make better decisions in the future.
This has been a difficult concept for me to accept. I have a strong desire to help people succeed and I find it hard to step back and let them do things on their own. Something that’s helped me be able to step back is thinking about the things I’ve accomplished because other people gave me enough space to do them on my own. This includes learning how to avoid trouble and pursue beneficial things instead by experiencing the consequences of my actions, both good and bad. Learning something on my own feels different than having someone teach it to me. I’ve benefited a lot by learning from other people, but I feel a sense of personal accomplishment after I’ve figured something out for myself; that sense of accomplishment is much weaker when I’ve learned from someone else. That’s why, when I’m teaching someone, I try to give them just enough of a foundation that they can figure out the rest of it for themselves. I love seeing the look in their eyes when they get a feel for it and know that they accomplished something cool through their own efforts.
I plan to continue refining this balance between helping people and letting them experience the consequences of their actions. As with many other things, I had to go through this myself before I could even begin to understand it. My experience has done a lot to make me more comfortable with this and it’ll only get easier over time as I acquire more experience with it and figure out what works best for myself as well as other people in any given situation.