Several years ago I conducted a training session with newly hired disaster case managers in Houston, Texas. There were probably 70 trainees, and their backgrounds and experience was highly diverse. Several of the participants held advanced degrees of one type or another, while many were new college graduates or were still working on completing their courses of study. One of the points of emphasis of the training session was the development of a disaster recovery partnership plan, and the steps that are involved in completing this crucial step in the relationship between the case manager and the client. My message, over and over again, was and still is that the recovery plan is NOT simply a “to do” list for the case manager. Rather, it is designed to be a tool that the case manager uses to guide the client in his/her own recovery, and the bulk of the tasks or action items must be the responsibility of the client to complete along their journey, as opposed to simply becoming a checklist of the things for the case manager to do FOR the client.

Most of you who read this message have probably heard me talk about this process in various settings over the life of the MCMC project. What I have not told you is the story of this particular training and why I am still convinced that we must continually review this concept. At one point during the training session I divided the class into workgroups and they began to work on the development of recovery plans, as I moved around the room observing each group’s progress. I came upon one group which had a young man sitting off to one side diligently working to complete his recovery plan form. As I watched him work, I noticed that almost every action item was phrased something like this “Case manager will…….”; in other words, this young man was doing EXACTLY what I was trying to teach the class NOT to do. He was making himself a checklist of things that he needed to do in order that the client might successfully complete the recovery plan. The problem with this route, of course, is that the client bore no responsibility within the recovery plan at all. I asked the young man why he was not including the responsibilities of the client in the development of the plan and his answer to me was “it’s just easier if I do it myself.” Remarkable!  And so I continue to teach, when given the opportunity, that teaching “someone to fish feeds them for a lifetime.” You have undoubtedly heard that phrase before, right? I have thought for several years about different ways to convey the message that this type of approach, while it may be easier in the short term, is certainly not beneficial in long run. I am convinced that the problem is not how the message is conveyed so much as how the message is heard.  I believe the problem lies at the core of many of our personalities. We are, in many senses, rescuers. We find that problem solving is something we are very good at, and it comes naturally for many of us to work through solutions that many of our clients “just don’t understand.”

So, how do we change our thinking so that we become experts at empowering and resist the urge we often have to enable? I heard a phrase over the weekend that may help. “We are tempted at our points of strength, not at our points of weakness.” When I first heard this phrase, I was a little taken aback. I had always thought of being attacked by temptation at my weak points, not at my strong points. The more I thought about it, though, the more it made sense. For example, I am NOT a strong swimmer! I swim like a brick, sinking to the bottom and struggling to stay afloat. As a consequence, I am not tempted very often to go swimming, and this is one of the several reasons that I do not like water parks. On the flip side, however, I do putt pretty well and am very often tempted to go play golf. When the weather is nice, playing golf is one of the things I find myself obsessing over. And if I am not careful, I will focus on playing golf and practicing my putting and realize that I have not taken care of the many other things that are on my plate. So, in a sense, I am tempted more to do something at which I am pretty good  than I am to do something that is not one of my strengths. In the same way, as helpers, we are good at solving problems, but if we are not careful the temptation to “just do it” will cripple our ability to empower our clients to do for themselves. This thought process can be applied to every facet of our lives, not just our relationships with our clients, and I hope that you will join me in making a greater effort to empower those around me to do more for themselves than being tempted to take over their responsibilities. This is the design of our project: to support and empower our affiliates to work on behalf of their clients, and to invest in relationships that will last much longer than our tenure as an MCMC project. Use this same approach with your clients, your agencies, and maybe even within your own family, and see if the resulting success feels better than if you just simply did everything yourself. I have a strong feeling that it just might. Bless you for all of your continued hard work. Have a great rest of the week.


Stephen P. Carr II, MA, MFT
Program Director
Mississippi Case Management Consortium
www.mc-mc.org