Humility: The foundation of decision making

We have spoken much on the principle of humility.  We will briefly mention one more thing.  Your decision making process as a paramedic or first responder is essential to your success.  Decision making is a key principle of a first responder and you must understand or develop a process for yourself.  If you don't have a process or understand what that looks like the factors that impact your decision making as a first responder, I encourage you to grab a copy of "Life and Death Matters."  

I was recently having a conversation about the importance of decision making and what the foundation of your process should be.  Humility is the answer.  Your process should be founded in humility.  You should never be making decisions based off of some emotional response to the situation.  Likewise you shouldn't be making decisions founded in arrogance.  And lastly you shouldn't be forcing decisions based off of your subjective opinion about the situation.  These examples can quickly contribute to bad decisions.  However, the factor that will immediately contribute to good decisions is humility.

If you move forward with the principle of humility as your foundation for decision making it will greatly improve your decisions.  This is so for several reasons.  First, it allows for you to continually reassess your decisions and anticipate and evaluate.  Secondly, humility causes your decisions, to by default, be in your patients best interest instead of anything else.  This is called the pt advocate.  Thirdly, humility forces you to reevaluate your own understanding of the decisions made and will force you to better prepare for future situations or circumstances that you feel need further preparation.  Lastly, humility forces your leadership to be better.  You by default are making decisions based in your teams best interest rather than your now.

This is brief and simple, yet important.  Humility may single handedly be the most crucial principle as is relates to you as a paramedic, first responder, leader or team member.  And the great thing about humility is that it's infectious.  When you begin operating with humility your team members will follow, and additionally, your patient will recognize it.  

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