Warning for North Carolina Workers’ Compensation Beneficiaries: The Hidden Dangers of Complacency

August 11, 2011, by Michael A. DeMayo

You may be in a hard fight right now to win North Carolina workers’ compensation benefits to pay for medical and surgical bills, therapies and medications, and your family’s day-do-day expenses. The fight could be consuming a significant portion of your life, particularly if your employer has refused to cooperate or if your insurance company is giving you a hard time.

But your battle goes well beyond the struggle for North Carolina workers’ compensation benefits. It grades into struggle to rebuild your life after an accident or injury. And that means taking responsibility for your current reality, setting up a strategic course for a better direction for you and your family, and finding helpful resources.

Turning to adept resources, like an experienced North Carolina workers’ compensation law firm, is a good start. There is so much about workers’ comp law that you likely don’t know. Would be beneficiaries often make critical strategic mistakes that reduce their chances for collecting fair and just payments.

However, the battle is internal as well as external. Your struggle is not simply to collect the maximum amount of money. It’s to rebuild your life – ideally, rebuild it better than it was before the accident or illness. To that end, you will need to face down a key boogeyman: complacency. Human beings are creatures of habit. When we get into a groove – or regular routine – that routine becomes comfortable because our brains’ neuro pathways are strengthened by following that routine. In other words, you don’t have to spend time thinking about how to brush your teeth everyday because that pattern or behavior is now been hardwired into your neuropsychiatry. Likewise, when you are on benefits, the experience may seem novel and surprisingly exciting at first, but over time, as more and more benefits checks comes, you will grow somewhat accustomed to receiving your checks and – if you are not careful – you will become dependent on them.

Of course you should fight for all the money that you are owed. However, it’s never healthy to become too dependent on outside forces, particularly when the rules that govern those forces are outside of your control. As we have seen with the recent reforms to the NC workers’ comp laws, even “tried and true” realities about the system can be dismantled and reformed in the blink of any eye, and it’s out of control of any one beneficiary or even the best NC workers’ comp lawyer.

The challenge then is to protect yourself from this kind of complacency. One powerful strategic weapon to battle complacency is creating plan for your life. Spend some time reflecting on your life’s purpose and your vision for a better future. Keeping your focus there – instead of on conserving what you have now or what you might lose – will motivate you and give you the power to find resources and tools that can help you.

More Web Resources:

Resilence

Self-reliance