“People Don’t Care How Much You Know,
Until they Know How Much You Care”
“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care” is a quote by John Maxwell, a great influential leadership instructor and trainer. You should take some time to check him out and consider reading some of his bestselling books.
This quote makes a lot of sense, because in a crisis prevention situation, nobody’s really interested in how successful they been in the past in de-escalating people, or calming past situations, a police resume, or Marine Corp resume or accomplishments, none of it. None of it matters. It is important for all professional care workers, social workers, and health practitioners to acquire cpi training certification in crisis prevention intervention in order to effectively and gracefully handle challenging situations with individuals and cpi.
In that moment, if a care worker for children or other vulnerable types of individuals is useless and uncaring, and they escalate the situation, making it make it worse than it was, nobody cares about their qualifications. They don’t care what the crisis workers background is or their education. None of that applies. All that matters is that they have made things worse. People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.
Be honest with yourself. Are you presenting in such a way that the other individual believes you care about the situation and want a successful resolution? Critical to any crisis is convincing the other individual that you’re there to help. If you don’t care and you are unable to psychologically get to a place where you genuinely care about the situation being resolved, you will not likely be successful.
Get to a place of understanding. Empathize with the individual and what they are going through. Focus on what you have to gain from successful resolution of this crisis. Care about your own safety and security enough to care about this situation deescalating smoothly.
When you get experience teaching, after many years, you realize that through the act of teaching you gain so much value. You face fears of getting up in front of a group. You are stretched both mentally and physically. You ability to deal with frustration, challenges, disagreements, are tested regularly. You are pushed to understand your material far beyond what anyone in the course currently understands. These things are some of the gifts of teaching. Not even mentioning the pride and sense of accomplishment you get when you see someone learn something that you taught them, and see them grow and succeed.
Think think of a crisis prevention situation in that same way. Try to think about what it is that you stand to gain from that experience. Look for something you can take away from the experience that will improve your ability to deal with it more effectively the next time. Did a young person hurl a bunch of insults at you, and you just stepped aside? Was it a situation where they opened your mind to a new perspective that you hadn’t thought of previously? Or was it that you intervened and said something in such a way that you now, after the fact, say, “Man, I’ve got to use that again next time! That worked really well.” Think of that crisis encounter as something from which to learn. If you go into your intervention thinking to yourself, I’m looking for opportunities to pick up something that will help me. It, very often, will increase your odds of de-escalating the individual.
If you have the opportunity to teach other people some skills, do it. Do it with so much passion that you get to the point where you’re looking at the crowd, and that group that you’re teaching is teaching you. Get to a point where you can see that you are gaining from that teaching process. Get to the point where, in fact, you’re often going to end up gaining as much, if not more, than they’re getting from you.
We teach to be taught.
I would like to thank the Child Abuse Prevention Center for all of the services they have provided for me in the last year. Their services are wonderful and have taught me so much. Things like how to be a better parent, to believe in myself, they have helped me get back in school and a lot more. Having a case worker means a lot to me because my case worker treats me like family and works with my schedule. She tries to meet my needs as much as possible and that is why I love the CAP Center.