Smooth Sailing, YAC, and Dreams

When you get down to the last five cents of toothpaste in the tube, do you work and press and squeeze until you get all the paste out? Or do you just toss it and get a new tube? In this post, I’m not going to try to squeeze everything out of the tube of insights I have on helper traits. But in continuation of my last two posts, I want to note a few more characteristics of people I’m calling helpers before I move on to describing people with leader traits.

 

Frictionless is one of the words I’ve settled on that is often characteristic of helpers. Helpers would love a world that has no friction in it. And what would that look like? Few responsibilities. Simple decisions. No hard conversations. Do one thing at a time. No stress at work or home. Helpers want to live in a world where things run predictably and it’s smooth sailing. Think island life.

 

This is one of the reasons helpers can have a hard time staying in healthy physical condition—because to stay in shape requires that you voluntarily stress your body. It’s also why helpers tend to be conflict avoidant since conflict equals stress. Decisions also equal stress. Multi-tasking equals stress.  

 

Which leads me to two related ideas.

 

First, helpers tend to have low YAC. For those who are not into football, YAC is a statistic applied to running backs and receivers. Once those offensive players have the ball and begin to run, they are quickly going to get hit. Some players have a reputation for being one-hit players, meaning they get hit once and fall down. But the players who are more determined and have stronger resilience get hit multiple times and keep going. That’s called Yards After Contact (YAC).

 

Helpers don’t like getting hit. If a true helper was handed the football and saw conflict running at them, a helper would prefer to just run out of bounds. Meaning, avoid the hard conversation. For example, if a small business is owned and operated by a helper, these people will often undercharge for their service, or let the customer deny payment, because the helper is willing to be cheated if it means there’s no conflict.

 

This same phenomenon happens in parenting scenarios where a helper parent will not want to upset the child. In which case the child can become entitled and learns to flout authority. I’ve seen plenty of family dynamics where a leader parent is overruled and controlled by a helper parent allied with helper children. In these cases, a parent is just a noun. Forget the verb of parenting.

 

There are, to be sure, times when helpers do not need to keep taking hits. As in domestic situations that involve either repeated or patterned physical or emotional abuse. These cases are particularly troublesome, partly because it’s the instinct of a helper to want to please. What often happens is the helper spouse takes the mistreatment too long for fear of incurring the other’s displeasure. I don’t want to unpack the Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic here, but I’ll at least note that when the Slave (in this case, a helper) finally decides to self-advocate for equal value and respect, the Master (in this case, a person with leader traits) will predictably pitch a fit. Which is exactly the power play leaders use to stay in the Master seat.    

 

Second, people with helper traits are, by definition, not leaders. Leaders tend to think strategically and are goal setters. That can entail something as small as making a to-do list or as long-range as a multi-year outlook. But people with helper traits operate on a day-to-day basis.

 

When helper people consider the future, they dream about it. Helpers are not strategic and not sure of next steps. In reality, then, helper’s most important day is today (while leader people’s most important day is the end date of their goal). Because helper people are not natural goal-setters, they operate instead on motivations.

 

And now we’re back to helper people being emotional processors. Since motivations are essentially feelings, and since feelings come and go, this is why helper people have a hard time sustaining disciplines. A helper might get motivated for a day, a week, or three months. But eventually they lose that lovin’ feeling and there goes the motivation.

 

This is also why helpers are not visionaries. If, in fact, a vision is a series of goals laid out in succession, but helpers are not goal-setters, you can see why a wife with leader traits is very frustrated by her husband with helper traits who cannot come up with a vision for their marriage and family.  

 

Now, to squeeze the tube of helper traits just a bit, here are a two more characteristics among others that are sometimes true of helpers:

 

Helpers can have a hard time delegating. At the emotional level, this is often due to the fact that people with helper traits don’t like to be put upon. And as a result, they assume others wouldn’t like that either. So helpers end up just doing the task themselves. Then privately aren’t happy about all the work they’re doing.

 

Helpers also have a problem with lying. Not bald-faced lies but lies that are half-truths or what I call passive lies. Rather than risking upsetting someone by telling the truth, the whole, truth, and nothing but the truth, helpers will compromise the truth to keep the status quo.

 

What’s a helper to do with all of this? For now, I’ll at least suggest two things. My theological understanding of persons is a dichotomist position—meaning I believe we have a body and a soul. There’s the physical you and the metaphysical you. Both domains have equal value (meaning Jesus died and rose to provide for both your soul and your body), are interconnected, and both should be cared for.

 

I’m also of the belief that much of the life’s work of helpers is learning to manage their anxiety. At the physical level, much can be said about nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Managing anxiety can also take the form of learning how to breath before, during, and after stressful moments. People who have leader traits or who tend to over-spiritualize things will mock this idea. Except there’s simply too much solid research literature on how stress releasing it is to slow down one’s inner processing (anxiety for helpers is often physically experienced as racing or overwhelming processing) through deep breathing.

 

For the more spiritually minded, I’ll offer that after God creates a body for the first human, God then breaths into the man’s nostrils—not his mouth—the breath of life (Gen. 2:7). Now look up some deep breathing exercises and see how they instruct you to do it—mostly in through your nose and out via your mouth. I just think that’s a bit interesting.

 

Then on the spiritual side, as I’ve noted in the past two month’s posts, growing in trusting God by stepping courageously into the fiery furnace—like hard conversations, for example—is a real practice. Yes, any fiery furnace looks intimidating, but as Daniel’s three friends found out, Jesus shows up in those times to sustain, encourage, and enable you. True, there are valuable communication skills to learn for such times, but at the emotional level it’s the very real presence of Christ who keeps us steady and grounded.

 

“Because God is my helper, I sing for joy in the shadow of His wings. We cling to God; His strong right hand holds me securely” (Psalm 63:7-8).