I Could Be Completely Wrong about This.
There’s a comedian named Bill Engvall who had a routine around the slogan, ‘Here’s Your Sign’. It was based on the idea that people who were displaying a remarkable lack of common sense should come with a sign to warn those around them.
I’ve always remembered that, and loved the idea that each of us should come with a warning sign. I know what mine would be.
“I could be completely wrong about this”.
Because I am sometimes wrong. I think that’s why I hold back a lot in my coaching practice. After losing 140lbs in 18 months, and having a Doctorate in a healthcare discipline, you’d have thought that I would have gone into weight loss coaching.
I intended to, I wanted to. I even have a coaching program laid out. I’ve helped people lose weight before, and yet I held back from charging from coaching.
Instead, I get to watch people who have never done what I’ve done, and with no experience or training in healthcare, sell useless pills to desperate people, when I know that there is a much higher chance that I could help them. Yet I hold back for the fear that I could be wrong.
Because when you are wrong about things that affect people’s lives, it’s a heavy burden to bear.
Twice in my Chiropractic practice I’ve been able to catch the mistakes of others, and save a life that otherwise might well have ended. Once when a woman came to me after leaving the E.R.
She had been diagnosed with a migraine and sent home. Her mother and sister who were with her brought her to my office, and after examining her, I sent her back to the E.R.
Her medical doctor told me that had I sent her home, the infection in her brain, heart and lungs would have killed her that very night.
The other was an elderly man who came after seeking treatment for leg pain. He was told by someone in the healthcare field that his pain was not due to a clot, despite his previous history.
After examination, I sent him to the E.R. Ultrasound revealed it was a clot, and skilled surgeons operated to save his leg, and possibly his life. They were the heroes – I was just the person who found the problem.
But someone else’s error could have severely changed, or ended, his life.
Which is why I am sometimes reluctant to reach out and help others. I’ve never had someone come back and tell me that something I have written or said to them had negatively impacted them, but still I worry.
Yesterday I made a good friend, someone who I look up to and admire greatly, doubt herself for a minute over something I said to her that was in retrospect my misunderstanding of a situation.
Which was the very last thing I wanted to do.
So I guess here’s my sign, and the sign for this work, whatever it is. “I could be completely wrong about this”. I try not to be, but as I am human, so will I err. All I can tell you is that nothing written here is done without being thought about, and often rather deeply.
There are times I agonize over these pieces, out of a desire to serve you in the way I feel you deserve to be served.
If I’ve ever written something that you disagree with, feel free to lay aside my thoughts and listen to your own. If I’ve ever upset you, please know that that has never been my intention.
And most of all, if I’ve ever written something that makes you think about changing your life, always remember the sign that should hang above everything I write.
“I could be completely wrong about this”.
But I really hope I’m not.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings