Day 2784 - Put your hand up ... or shut up.

Day 2784 - Put your hand up ... or shut up.

A little bit annoyed challenges charity

Let's choose solutions instead, ey? 

I'm not much into whining.  Well sometimes I am ... but mostly I'm not.

Which is why I find it hard to deal with people who are constantly pointing out the problems and not much into helping find the solutions.

I recently came across a man who was having a bit of a whinge about how volunteers were handling the processes within one of our local community organisations. An organisation for which I volunteer. 

Key words here: volunteers and community.

In fact, he reduced one of the volunteers to tears as he loudly and firmly made suggestions on how the organisation should be run.

I wasn't privy to the entire conversation otherwise I would have stepped in in person and taken the conversation down a different path.  It wasn't until he'd left that she started to cry and made me aware of the direction the discussion took.

So once he'd gone and I'd discovered the extent to which he'd reprimanded our volunteer I decided to phone him.

Yes, I had his contact details as the family is registered with the club.

He didn't answer so I left a voice message. I kindly thanked him for his feedback and suggested he might like to send a solutions based email to me so that I could take it to the executive for review.  I also suggested that perhaps in future it was best not to take out his frustrations on our volunteers but to use that energy to value add via the appropriate channels.  Then I suggested that when he emailed me it would be great if he could leave his contact information because we'd love to add him to our volunteer list for next year and would welcome him on board as a project manager.

The bottom line is we have two choices in life. We can whine about the problems or we can find ways to be part of the solutions.  

One wastes energy and fuels negativity and the other changes that energy into knowledge, which in turn switches to power,which then creates unlimited possibilities.  

Yes, we're all busy and most of us don't have time to put up our hand to help out.  But one of the biggest problems we have in this world is that we believe that it's somebody else's job to fix it.

So today I simply want to say put your hand up, or shut up.

Thanks for listening.