Hey, hope everybody’s doing okay today. I want to talk to you all about something that’s been kind of weighing on my mind the last few weeks. And, that is if you know or don’t know, I have a daughter that just turned five, and we have been going to a lot of kids parties. So we’ve been to various places in the last few weeks. If you are familiar with Urban Air, that is the indoor trampoline place where you go with the kids, eat pizza, eat a lot of cake, get hyped up on sugar and run around, and hop up and down. There’s little jungle gym type things. There’s ball pits. There’s little adventure things for them to do. Some are ninja-like skills tests. So it’s kind of a fun place to go. After she did the original jumping on trampolines, she wanted to go indoor rock climbing. This is where they put a harness on the kids and attach them to safety gear and the kids get to climb up on their own.
You don’t have to belay them. The safety gear automatically slows them down if the dissent is too fast. I love that this is what she wanted do while the other kids just wanted to hop up and down. But she’s in gymnastics and they do that already all the time. While we’re waiting our turn to get in, because they can only have four or five kids in at the time. I start paying attention to the other kids and what they’re doing. I’m trying to watch what Viola is doing. And so the first thing she does, she wants to go and climb this one wall thing. I’m like cool. Once I figured out how to adjust the harness and attach the D-ring, then we were good to go. She climbed the first one and I was kind of looking around and figuring out what’s the next one going to be?
I noticed there was a kid that was climbing what looks like telephone poles. They were spaced a few feet apart. And they would get a few feet higher every time they went. And I’m looking around thinking when Viola gets bored with this, where am I going to take her next? She conquered that first wall. She’s working on the next one. She’s like two stories high. I’m a proud dad at the moment. Like just inspired by how adventurous she is at this young age. And as she’s coming back down, I look over and I see a kid crying and he’s kind of stuck on the top of those telephone poles and he isn’t moving. I went over to the attendee. I said, “Hey is that kid okay?” The attendee replied, “Yeah, he’s stuck. He won’t come down. We’ll handle it.”
And I thought, okay, not a big deal. I go back to my daughter. Now she’s climbing three stories. I post a picture of her, “my little daredevil“. She gets down. And as we’re looking around to figure out what next to do, I see the kid on the pole is still there. I noticed this time there’s an adult that walked over. This guy is taller than me, I thought, maybe that’s the kid’s dad. Okay we’re good, I’ll just go back to paying attention to Viola again. She climbs for a few more minutes and she gets done. I look and the kid is still up there. This is like 30 minutes later. I looked at Viola and I said, “I’m really proud of you for climbing everything. Can you give me a minute? Can I go check on that kid?“
She said, yes. I walked over and there were two ladies with him now. I assume one was the mom and said, “Hey, can I help you guys?” And one of them said, “You’re not allowed to climb up there. You’re not allowed to get him down.” I said, “I wasn’t planning on doing that, are you cool if I step in?” They said, yeah. So I walked up to the bottom of the pole and looked up and I saw the kid. He’s got tears in his eyes. He’s balling. He’s scared. He’s shaking. And he’s looking down. Even though he is harnessed in, and he’s been climbing everything else, he’s scared because he’s afraid he’s going to fall.
And from what I know, based on… eyebrows, eye contact and eye contact is huge in this day and age.
I walked up to where the kid could see me and I said, “Look at me right here. Don’t look at anything else. Don’t look anywhere else. Look at me right here. I will catch you.” I didn’t need to catch him. But he doesn’t know that. He’s like, “no, no, no, no, no.” I said, “You don’t have to jump, sit down, just scoot off the edge. I will catch you.“
I didn’t break eye contact with him. So even though there was hundreds of screaming kids around everywhere, for that short period of time, it was just two people. And he just scooted off the pole and we caught him. He was crying. He was embarrassed. I walked over and I sat down with him. I got on his level. If you know anything about body language height is important.
I sat down to be at his same height. I said, “Hey man, that’s awesome that you climbed up there. You gave it a shot. I know we get scared at times, but don’t be afraid to go back up there now that you know how to get down.” And he went from crying to smiling a little bit and that was it. I just got up and I went back over and watched Viola climb more.
So here we are many weeks later. The day this event happened, I was on a high. Like when you make a difference in somebody’s life and it makes you feel alive and you just felt you made a difference. That’s where I was that day.
It’s something that I remember. I can’t tell you what I did this week at work, but I can tell you what happened with that kid. And I can almost describe every moment from that day.
There’s a few takeaways I’d like to share…
Number one… is I saw that he was struggling and I assume somebody else was going to help him. I even asked the kid that works there, “Hey, that kid doesn’t look good up there.” I saw other adults walk over and I assume they would handle it.
Number two… I learned that you have to pay attention. And what I mean by that is, we all know people who are struggling and we just assume somebody else will take care of it. But what if we have the power that we can make a difference that much faster?
If you see somebody struggling, don’t just assume that somebody else is going to help them with it. If you have the power to make a difference, walk over and do it. It wasn’t about me. The mom walked up later and said, “Hey, thank you very much.” They walked off. I walked off. There wasn’t anything about it. Other than helping out someone who’s been stuck and we’ve all been there. But that makes a difference, if you have the power to do that and help somebody through a tough time, why don’t you just walk over and give it a shot? There’s other people that might be trying, you may just be another person who can’t help them get past that road bump or what they’re scared of. But what if you are that person? What if you just take two minutes out of your time and can help that person move on? They benefit, you benefit. There’s no reason to not give it a shot. Worst case scenario, you attempted, you tried. What if you make a difference in that person’s life?
About The Author:
Brian Galke’s niche is in teaching Facial Feature Analysis, a proactive skill that helps you understand people in a whole new way!
Taking the time to read someone’s face gives them the time and attention we deserve. This is a skill that’s dissipated with the distractions of modern technology. Learning how to Analyze Faces will help you make stronger connections.
Once we learn to read faces, we learned how to speak other people’s language. Taking that extra second to think “How would we best receive this?” makes it about connection, instead of thinking about what you want to say.
Contact Brian through his company Subtle Skills to arrange speaking, consulting or online virtual training.
