How You Become a Better Caregiver Starts with Your Ethics

How do you become a better caregiver? At first glimpse this question seems rather simple to answer. However, in reality, there is much more depth to this question than meets the proverbial eye. Having said this, let’s ever so incrementally begin to answer this question with the premise that becoming better at anything involves more verbalizing that we want to “get better.” What do we mean?

When we say that we want to become better at something we have to realize that unless we really mean what we say then we aren’t going to get very far beyond our exhale of words. Now, the easy response to this statement is to deviate into the obvious, which is to simply respond with a canned answer, which is this: In order to “mean” what we say we have to [do] what we say. In other words, take action.  But, this is not what e are talking about.

Clearly, we need to do what we say. This goes without saying. Rather, what we are talking about is looking more inward; examining ourselves a bit closer to see [who] we are in terms of our morality, our values, and more broadly, our ethics. So then, what we ought to be asking ourselves first is where do we stand on our ethics? We really can’t begin to get get better at anything unless we first examine our ethics. Why?

Here’s the simple answer.

When we want say to ourselves that we want to get better at being a caregiver, and we wholeheartedly begin to pursue this goal, at what point are we starting from morally?  That is, if our morals are not grounded on a solid ethical system that is acted out in real time every day, then how does one get better at being a caregiver? Now, we don;t want to get too deep into the philosophical weeds here. What we are saying is that in the hierarchy of priorities your ethics provide the framework for you getting “better” as a caregiver.

If you are not an ethical person to begin with, then how would you presume to ‘be’, let alone get better at caregiving if you are an unethical person to begin with?  Lets put it this way. You first need to evaluate your ethics before you ever start to work on being a better caregiver, because to become a better caregiver means first becoming a more moral person.