“Before You Heal Someone, Ask Him If He’s Willing To Give Up The Things That Make Him Sick”

What does this quote from Hippocrates mean? It means that for anyone to truly overcome their challenges, they have to be willing to change their ways. They have to be able to stop doing the things that caused their problem in the first place. Otherwise, change will not happen.

Help is good. So is the desire to remedy a problem one has. But those two things alone are not enough. At least, if we are talking about a serious enough struggle. I believe that many people, myself included, would like the knowledge of our problems and desire to change them, to be enough.

But obviously, those things alone are not enough. It takes sacrifice, as well as real change, to fix a problem you have. And this is not easy. We all have routines and general ways about us. These routines are comfortable. And we often get discouraged when we don’t see clear improvements after a decent amount of trying.

While it is difficult, with the right mentality, you can achieve positive change. To overcome the challenge of not seeing results, you have to find satisfaction in incremental improvements. What does that mean? It means that you should know your “why” and your goal, gather feedback, prioritize what is possible, and reward yourself for each small improvement that you achieve.

Healing or improvement can be physical, mental, or often, both. It requires a concerted effort at change, and time. And it often requires other people helping. It cannot happen unless the person who needs to fix something in their lives committees to doing something different.

Healing and improvement is also often not as straightforward as someone deciding they need to fix something. There are real world challenges that people face that require more than just changing behavior. People have to balance making personal changes with specific actions outside of it.

But, if you are enlisted to help heal someone, make sure that the person you are healing knows how critical they are to it. You can be critical to their improvement, but you cannot do it alone. And you have to make sure that they do not repeat what got them where they are in the first place.