Helping others is a great, rewarding experience. You learn something new both about yourself and about who you are helping. After you are done, you feel really great about yourself and have a feeling of accomplishment. I am speaking mostly for myself, but I'm sure other people feel a relatively similar way. Although assisting others is great, there are some obstacles I will face when doing this. I am tend to have a lot going on in my life so time management would be a big obstacle for me. Patience usually comes easy for me, but in helping others I don't know how this would play out, which is why I bring it up as another potential obstacle. Sometimes the people you serve feel either entitled to your help or don't show their appreciation. This last obstacle comes from this situation and feeling like I am not getting enough credit for what I am doing.
Obstacles are a part of life and will show up when I assist others. Time management is a tough thing for me to grasp. I tend to be a procrastinator, so finding the time to get my work done, be with friends or family, and help others might be hard to juggle for me. I think creating a schedule and laying out everything I need to do will help me with my time management. It was a good idea to create a Google calendar because I can see it helping me with the issue of time management. I am a relatively patient person and don't mind waiting for something to get done or working through something that might take up time. I worked with kids for the past two years at a daycare and have grown up taking care of my little brother. This, I believe, requires a lot of patience and has taught me so much more about the concept of patience. With this in mind, I hope that acquiring enough patience to assist people will not become a great obstacle. Offering assistance to people in need generates different responses from the people you help. Some are overly thankful and some don't say anything at all. Some let you do all the work and some join in to help get the work done together. In a selfish way, I am sometimes the type of person who will work and, in the back of my mind, think that I should be thanked for it. And if I don't, it makes me upset because I don't think they appreciate what I did for them. Through this journey of helping others I need to be able to overlook that point and keep doing the best work I can, not always looking for a response to it.
Kelly Behrend did a great job in addressing what goes on in the act of service. She has traveled to many places and helped others along the way, accomplishing so much. One thing that struck me as being a great challenge was Kelly's teaching of ESL. During the presentation, I was thinking that if I was put in that same situation, I would be very hesitant of actually completing it because of all the obstacles it presents in my mind. I give Kelly so much credit for what she has accomplished, not just with the class but with her entire career thus far.
The act of assisting people presents obstacles up front. Working through these obstacles, helping others is a really great thing. For myself, it makes me feel so good and full of life to know I helped in some way in a person's life. I think if people let it, assisting others can have the same affect on everyone else as well.
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