So often I live my life like the guy in this video. Rushing around to get done all my to do’s while
not taking notice of those around me, not connecting, and not taking in all that is available in the moments.
This video reminds me to slow down and be mindful of those around me and to stop and take in each and every moment as if it were our last.
“All the tests are back, and their is nothing wrong with your daughter.” For years, I would step into a patients room and annouce the good news that there was “nothing wrong with you” thinking that the patient would be so releaved. I was reminded of the impact of such a statment at work recently. A physician had brought her daughter in to the Emergency Department for abdominal pain, and at the end of the visit, the nurse went into the room announcing to the physician that there was nothing wrong with her daugher. The physician became very upset stating, “I would never bring my daughter into the Emergency Room if there was nothing wrong with her!” With some ‘service recovery’, I was able to calm this physician mom. But I was reminded again of how the “there is nothing wrong with you” statement must land with my patients. For the last several years, I have changed my phrasing. I now acknowledge that clearly there is something wrong but that our technology can’t find out what exactly is causing the pain. This simple shift of phrase acknowledges and confirms our patients pain, suffering, and anxiety. It is not about working harder or even spending more time. It is working smarter and making the time really count by asking the right questions, saying the right things, and developing your presence (more to follow).
I am in the process of building my coaching practice. I LOVE coaching, but the marketing piece….not so much. When I ask around & share the incredible testimonials from those who I have coached, most people think or say, “I don’t need coaching…but I might know a guy who could use some coaching…”
I clearly will never be a ‘marketeer’ but coaching is not what someone else could ‘use’ or ‘need’. Coaching is the unique opportunity to learn how to flourish, to learn how to live a life of fulfillment. If we were to score on a 1 to 10 scale each segment of our lives (our marriage, relationships, work, play, parenting, etc.), what numbers would we see? Are we living life to the fullest? Coaching is a gift. It is the place to discover what a 10 looks, sounds, tastes, and feels like! Can you imagine that?
Coaching has transformed my life and the lives of my clients. It is an opportunity to learn & develop the know how to live your most fulfilling life, to live in the present (the land of the now here rather than the land of nowhere), to discover the power of choice, to laugh & live more…Now who doesn’t want some of that?!
So many times in life, we hesitate. We miss the opportunities before us because of that little voice inside our head that tells us: “we can’t do that” “you are not enough” “you are going to fail” What would our lives be if we ran past that little voice into the arms of our fears? or dreams?
“Love woke me up this morning…”-lyric from Dreamer by Bethany Dillon
Did love wake you up this morning?
When did love wake you up?
Does love wake me up every morning, but I am not aware of it?
How can we keep that love alive throughout our days?
What if love is the fabric of our everything, but we miss seeing it?
What if love was resurrected 2011 years ago?
What if love is resurrected every day?
What would it look like for us to experience this love every moment of every day?
Happy Easter!
Brooks Brothers created a coat for Lincoln. Lincoln asked that they embroider a large eagle and the wording: One Country, One Destiny so that that symbol and those words would be against his skin at all times. Seeing this coat with the visible blood stains across the embroidered eagle was the most powerful moment for me in my visit last week to Washington D.C. It was a reminder of my favorite president, his incredible convictions, his life, and his tragic death. It was also an amazing illustration of a structure. A structure is a tool used by someone as a reminder of something that is important, a goal, a vision, an action step (like tying a ribbon around a tree, or a string around a finger, or carrying a trinket in your pocket, or a sticky note on your mirror, etc). Leave it to Lincoln to have such a inspiring, moving, visionary structure.
In today’s excerpt – in 1630, John Winthrop, leader of the religious colonists who would establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered to them a sermon that is now considered one of the most important documents in setting forth a vision of America, “A Model of Christian Charity”. Anticipating the hardships they will encounter during the coming months and years, it centers on the impossible idea that we should love our neighbors as ourselves:
“It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.
“[It presages] Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the ‘loving your enemies’ sermon this way: ‘So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America , and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”
“Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’
“The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending ‘enhanced investigation techniques’ is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.
” ‘Man,’ Winthrop reminds his shipmates in ‘Christian Charity,’ is ‘commanded to love his neighbor as himself.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: ‘Love your enemies … do good to them that hate you.’
“He also cites Romans I 2:20: ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’
“The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christ-like Christian to know that he’s supposed to.
“Winthrop’s future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn’t cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent’s attack ad come the next election. John Winthrop: soft on crime.
“This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn’t just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: ‘justice and mercy.’
“For ‘a community of perils,’ writes Winthrop, ‘calls for extraordinary liberality.’ One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls ‘enlargement toward others,’ Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ’s excruciating mandate to share. If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”
Author: Sarah Vowell
Title: The Wordy Shipmates
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2008 by Sarah Vowell
Pages: 45-47
My friend and partner’s son died 2 weeks ago. He was 14 with severe cerebal palsy. At his funeral, it was mentioned that he only spoke 4 words. “Good” and “I love you.” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all only spoke those few words?!
My friend and partner spoke at the grave site and said that he has been angry and questioning God only 2 times in his life: The first when Robbie was born, and the now the second when God took Robbie from him. WOW! The powerful truth that so often the only way to the mountain tops is through the valleys of life.
As most of you know, I am a crazy reader. It is rare for me to come across such a powerful book. I place this one in my top 10 best books that I have every read! It is short and simple, and as the author states: “I’ve become absolutely convinced that remaining aware of God’s presence is the single most important task in the life of every follower of Jesus.” (location 143-156)
“…we must first seek to submit to God’s reign in each and every moment. When we do this, de Caussade proclaims, we transform ordinary moments into sacred moments, and our life becomes a living sacrament. He and millions of others have discovered that this continual submission is the key to experiencing the fullness of God’s love, joy, and peace.”” (location 169-183)
“All that matters is…to belong totally to God, to please him, making our sole happiness to look on the present moment as though nothing else in the world mattered.”-J.P. de Caussade
“I have found that we can establish ourselves in a sense of the presence of God by continually talking with Him.”-Brother Lawrence
Emergency Medicine News:
December 2010 – Volume 32 – Issue 12 – p 6, 7, 26
doi: 10.1097/01.EEM.0000391514.00570.85
Viewpoint
Viewpoint: Can’t Get No Satisfaction? The Real Truth Behind Patient Satisfaction Surveys
Welch, Shari J. MD; Hellstern, Ronald A. MD; Jensen, Kirk MD; Lyman, John L. MD; Mayer, Thom MD; Pilgrim, Randy MD; Seay, Timothy MD
Free Access
There is a lot of chatter lately within our specialty about patient satisfaction surveys. Many emergency physicians are affronted by the idea that patient perceptions of their practice style should come under such scrutiny.
Dr. Welch…
Image ToolsOthers say emergency medicine is different from other specialties because we have no continuity with our patients and see them under adverse circumstances: Illness, distress, and fear are inherent in the encounter. Still others focus on the possible statistical invalidity of survey methodologies like those of Press Ganey, Professional Research Consultants, and Gallup, or on their unsuitability for credentialing or as contract accountability measures.
While all of this is understandable in a era of crowding, rising expectations, and declining revenues and resources, we make a case for embracing these surveys, working to improve them, and using their results to improve your practice for the benefit of your patients, your ED staff, and your relationship with hospital administration.
The successful delivery of emergency medical care in a capitalist society is part science, part business, and part service industry. Emergency medicine has done a good job improving its scientific quality with residency training, board certification, and evidence-based approaches that decrease the variability of clinical care and improving outcomes. Many of us tend to forget, however, Peter Drucker’s advice, “Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.”
In other words, regardless of how great we think we are, the proof lies in how our care is perceived by our patients.
Patient satisfaction makes sense for clinical effectiveness. Patients satisfied with their care are more likely to be compliant, and respond better to treatment. (Psychosom Med 1995;57[3]:234.) Patient satisfaction also makes good sense for risk management. Caregivers who participate in a system of good customer satisfaction experience fewer malpractice suits than their counterparts. (The Quality Connection in Healthcare: Integrating Patient Satisfaction and Risk Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; 1991.)
Those who have been ED medical directors know from experience that patient complaints will tell you what isn’t working in your ED long before it becomes apparent any other way. And there is a connection between patient satisfaction and staff satisfaction. Results of Press Ganey surveys in which patient satisfaction and staff satisfaction were measured show a clear relationship between the two, and while customer satisfaction increased in one study, employee turnover decreased by 57 percent. What is good for the patients appears to be good for the caregivers as well. (Patient Satisfaction: Defining Measuring and Improving the Experience of Care. Chicago: Health Administration Press; 2002.)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the reason to embrace service quality as an integral part of the patient’s health care experience is that it makes your job easier. It is simply easier and more pleasant to work with A team members than B team members, a phenomenon every emergency physician understands. (JAMA 1999;282[13]:1281.)
Patient satisfaction surveys aim to capture the patient’s perceptions of the care received, and portray them in numerical terms for benchmarking and trending. Every successful service provider has a method for capturing these data, and it would never occur to a Starbuck’s barista or a Nissan salesman to dismiss customer service satisfaction data out of hand. It is true that the transition from customer service to patient satisfaction has some inherent challenges.
First, patients are not very good at evaluating the appropriateness of care or the technical skill with which it was performed. Clearly, some patients are very satisfied with “bad medicine.” Secondly, the patient perceives his health care for a particular problem as a series of episodes over a continuum of care. Take the acute coronary syndrome patient who goes quickly and tenderly from the ED to the cardiac cath lab only to have a subsequent bad encounter with a CCU nurse. The bad encounter may taint the answers the patient gives on an ED patient satisfaction survey. (Health Expect 2008;11[2]:160.) Finally, measuring patient satisfaction is not a simple task. While a restaurant may track patrons and profits, measuring patent satisfaction is not as straightforward as the survey companies would have us believe.
Despite these limitations, most highly successful medical organizations are increasingly focused on this. Indeed, for more than 100 years, one of the world’s most successful and respected institutions, the Mayo Clinic, has placed service excellence alongside clinical excellence as a fundamental value, as reflected in its “Patient First” motto. (Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic. New York: McGraw-Hill; 2008.) Medicare’s Value-Based Purchasing initiative requires it, and the best medical organizations recognize that it makes economic sense, too. “An ED visit is a significant encounter between patient and hospital, and one that affects ‘repurchase’ decisions for future healthcare,” noted J.V. Mack in an analysis of ED choices among Medicare patients. (J Ambul Care Mark 1995;6[1]:45.) Despite the elderly being disproportionate users of health care, surprisingly about half don’t have a regular physician and choose ED care. One study found that 97 percent had a choice of ED, and more than half had been referred on the advice of others. This verbal networking and relatively high utilization of ED services by the elderly has huge implications for the future importance of patient satisfaction.
It is the physicians who typically lag behind in accepting the important role of patient satisfaction who fare the worst, which has not gone unnoticed by the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS). March 16, ABMS, of which the American Board of Emergency Medicine is a member, approved the following in a Maintenance of Certification statement:
“By 2010, each Member Board will assess a diplomate’s communication skills with patients … using at least a ‘Communication Core’ physician CAHPS patient survey (or other equivalent survey that addresses communications …) at least every 5 years.” (http://bit.ly/ABMSmoc.)
While the earliest patient satisfaction surveys were not validated instruments, had built-in biases, and yielded low response rates, survey instruments designed specifically for the emergency department have emerged over the past several years. (Ann Emerg Med 2001;38[5]:527.) Certainly these instruments are not without their flaws, and will require continuous improvement, but they allow us to draw important correlations between patient satisfaction and the practice of emergency medicine, strongly suggesting that patient satisfaction surveys must be considered as one marker of quality care in the ED. A close review of the literature makes it clear that better patient perception of service satisfaction is correlated with:
* Better patient compliance.
* Better response to treatment.
* Better risk management profile.
* Better staff satisfaction.
* Lower staff turnover.
* Fewer malpractice claims.
* Better fiscal performance.
Regardless of the limitations of current survey methodologies, better scores correlate with what every practicing emergency physician wants for himself, his patients, his group, and his hospital partner. There would seem to be no downside to having good scores or working to improve the ones you have. When tracked over time, patient satisfaction scores can provide practitioners feedback on the patient’s experience of care and guide quality improvement efforts.
It is time to treat these surveys for what they are: an integral part of our daily practice of emergency medicine. The surveys are in fact an open-book test; we know what the questions will be before they are asked. Why not use the surveys as a tool to help identify and accentuate A team behaviors and processes, instead of a club used to beat up people over their scores.
The train of consumerism in medical care delivery has left the station and isn’t coming back, but the caboose is still in sight. If we start running now, we can catch it and climb back on because, as noted author Tony Alessandra, PhD, said, “Being on a par in terms of price and quality only gets you in the game. Service wins the game.”
Dr. Welch is a fellow with Intermountain Institute for Health Care Delivery Research, an emergency physician with Utah Emergency Physicians, and a member of the board of the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance (EDBA). Dr. Hellstern is a founding faculty member with ACEP’s ED Director’s Academy and an independent emergency medicine practice management consultant. Dr. Jensen is the chief medical officer of BestPractices and the medical director for the Studer Group. Dr. Lyman is a regional medical officer and the director of emergency medicine residency relations for Premier Health Care Services, a past president of the Emergency Department Practice Management Association (EDPMA), and a member of the board of directors for EDBA. Dr. Mayer is the chairman of BestPractices and the chairman emeritus of the Board of Visitors of Duke Medicine. Dr. Pilgrim is the chief medical officer for the Schumacher Group and the chair of EDPMA. Dr. Seay is the CEO and medical director for Greater Houston Emergency Physicians, the CEO of Hospital Inpatient Group, and the vice president of the Emergency Medicine Risk Retention Group.
C.U.L.P. New Year’s Initiative
Conspiracy to overcome the Upper Limit Problem (concept from the book titled: The Big Leap)…
Conspiracy is from 2 latin words; and it literally means to breathe together. I think that is cool.
I definitely suffer from The Upper Limit Problem.
The Upper Limit Problem is the concept that we all live in our little box of excellence: we have acquired through experience a comfortable space of expertise.
The Upper Limit Problem is the human tendency to put the brakes on our positive “energy”/feelings when we’ve exceeded our unconscious thermostat setting for how good we can feel, how successful we can be, and how much love we can feel. The items to explore are:
1. What keeps us from going up? Getting beyond our upper limit…For me it is that I am not enough so I am not worthy, not deserving, and not willing to let go of staying in the box (ex. not truly embracing/accepting compliments/good moments that happen to me).
2. What can we do to stay above our upper limit? Or better yet, what can we do to eliminate our upper limit completely? What can we do to increase our tolerance for things going well in our lives in the now? What can we do to celebrate and embrace the space above and beyond our upper limit?
3. What does it feel like when we break through the top of our upper limit box?
I am not enough. This sentence echoes through the minds of most men (and many women) in our society. It is a burden we carry often from our dads (and sometimes our moms). We walk around doing all that we can to look good and feel like we are enough when in reality, we hear only a voice telling us that we are not enough.
My mom died this last summer, and a few months before she died, I was reminded once again of being enough. She was the voice that echoed to me that I was enough. I shared with her my newest adventure into becoming certified in professional coaching. She did what she did best with her kids. She looked straight into my eyes through into my soul, lightly wrapped her hand around my wrist, and said, “You will be great at that.”
I am reminded today, a day in which she would have turned 82, that she gave me the gift of being enough. She believed in me when I didn’t. This was her gift, and it is her legacy.
My youngest son is 8. He recently has gotten into learning how to throw a Frisbee. After every throw, he yells out, “Is that a good one?” The dutiful, worry wart, dad that I am thinks maybe he lacks self-esteem. As we are walking into the house after a Frisbee toss time, he looks at me and says, “Dad, do you think I am getting better?” Worried about his self-esteem, I ask him what he thinks. He immediately with a big smile says, “I think I am getting really great at throwing the Frisbee!” He is enough! And his Grandma’s legacy of being enough carries on in him and in all of us who she touched.
Are you enough? You are more enough than you could ever imagine. God said that you are His beloved. Can you feel His warm embrace? Can you hear His whisper in your ear, “You are my beloved. I adore you.” Even though my mom gave me the gift, I continue to live with the wound of feeling that I am not enough. It has only been recently that I have begun to embrace my enoughness. Don’t settle for the dial tone of not enough. Listen to the gentle voice that KNOWS that you are enough and so much more.
Mom is finally in a place where “I am not enough” doesn’t even exist. I am so grateful today, her birthday, for her gift. I am enough, Mom. I will always be enough. I am beloved, embraced, and delighted in. Thanks Mom. I miss you.
My college advisor was an expert on studying stress hormones. He always taught us that stress response/fear response is a healthy adaptive response when you are being chased down by a tiger, but when you get bad news from your boss, your stress response/fear response fires off but your body just sits there firing off all that stress while you sit at your desk.
I see stress, anxiety, and fear EVERY day at work. Most of my patients deny that they are stressed when most of their symptoms are from stress.
This excerpt about fear and anxiety is VERY telling and interesting.
“The average high schooler today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s:
“When you think about it, it’s one of the great ironies of our time: we now inhabit a modernized, industrialized, high-tech world that presents us with fewer and fewer legitimate threats to our survival, yet we appear to find more and more things to be anxious about with each passing year. Unlike our pelt-wearing prehistoric ancestors, our survival is almost never jeopardized in daily life. When was the last time you felt in danger of being attacked by a lion, for example, or of starving to death? Between our sustenance-packed superstores, our state-of-the-art hospitals, our quadruplecrash-tested cars, our historically low crime rates, and our squadrons of consumer-protection watchdogs, Americans are safer and more secure today than at any other point in human history.
“But just try telling that to our brains, because they seem to believe that precisely the opposite is true. At the turn of the millennium, as the nation stood atop an unprecedented summit of peace and prosperity, anxiety surged past depression as the most prominent mental health issue in the United States. America now ranks as the most anxious nation on the planet, with more than 18 percent of adults suffering from a full-blown anxiety disorder in any given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. (On the other hand, in Mexico – a place where one assumes there’s plenty to fret about – only 6.6 percent of adults have ever met the criteria for significant anxiety issues.) Stress related ailments cost the United States an estimated $300 billion per year in medical bills and lost productivity, and our usage of sedative drugs has shot off the charts: between 1997 and 2004, Americans more than doubled their yearly spending on antianxiety medications like Xanax and Valium, from $900 million to $2.1 billion. And as the psychologist and anxiety specialist Robert Leahy has pointed out, the seeds of modern worry get planted early. ‘The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s,’ he writes. Security and modernity haven’t brought us calm; they’ve somehow put us out of touch with how to handle our fears.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. After all, fear is truly our most essential emotion, a finely tuned protective gift from Mother Nature. Think of fear as the body’s onboard security system: when it detects a threat – say, a snarling, hungry tiger – it instantly sends the body into a state of high alert, and before we even comprehend what’s going on, we’ve already leapt to the safety of a fortified Range Rover. In this context, fear is our best friend; it makes all of the major decisions for us, keeps the personage as freed from tiger claws as possible, and then dissipates once the threat has subsided. …
“What makes a person capable of keeping cool and doing their duty in terrifying situations like [these]? …
“Fortunately – and not a moment too soon – a flood of cuttingedge research from psychologists, neuroscientists, and scholars from all disciplines is now coming together to show us what fear and stress really are, how they work in our brains, and why so much of what we thought we knew about dealing with them was dead wrong. Picking a painstaking trail through the labyrinth of the brain, a neuroscientist from the bayou traces our mind’s fear center to two tiny clusters of neurons, uncovering the subconscious roots of fear. Using a simple thought experiment, a Harvard psychologist discerns why our efforts to control our minds backfire, and why a directive like ‘just relax’ can actually make you more anxious. Employing one minor verbal suggestion, a group of Stanford researchers find they can make young test takers’ scores plummet in a spiral of worry – or hoist them right back up. Across the nation, intrepid scientists are discovering why athletes choke under pressure, how the human mind transforms in an emergency, why unflappable experts make good decisions under stress, and how fear can warp our ability to think.”
Author: Taylor Clark
Title: Nerve
Publisher: Little, Brown
Date: Copyright 2011 by Taylor Clark
Pages: 10-12, 15
Does “constructive” criticism work? Answer: NO! Dale Carnegie’s #1 rule: Don’t Criticize, Condemn, or Complain is founded on the reality that we DO NOT respond to criticism.
Why? Because he writes: “ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticize themselves for anything, no matter how wrong it may be.” He goes on to say that “criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”
In fact, the father of behavioral psychology, B.F. Skinner, “proved through his experiments that an animal rewarded for good behavior will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behavior. Later studies showed that the same applies to humans. By criticizing, we do not make lasting changes and often incur resentment.”
So when will we “get this”? Constructive criticism DOES NOT WORK. We must turn to the positive. Wouldn’t it be exciting to try it! What if the next round of evaluations at the office were filled with all things positive? How might the climate change?
“Consider the annual performance planning process…a process dreaded by leader and subordinate alike!…What is possible when we focus on unleashing potential by giving direction, position, and conditions to individuals rather than assessing potential as under-performance or failure to perform?…focusing on what we want rather than what we don’t want activates the inherent strengths, gifts, and creativity of each person…”-Janet Harvey, MA, MCC
A brief article by Dr. George Spaeth challenges all of us to ask and act on one simple question. The question: What are you doing to make the world better?
Part of Dr. Spaeth’s routine is to ask his elderly patients: What are you doing with your time now? It was disconcerting to him that the vast majority answered: “Nothing.”
This generated his follow up question to 30 of his elderly patients: What are you doing to make the world better? 2 of 30 took up the challenge and began to do something to make the world better. A great change from their prior answer: “Nothing.”
Dr. Spaeth lists many websites that we can go to help change the world; here are a few of those sites:
American Red Cross (www.redcross.org)
Habitat for Humanity (www.habitat.org)
Mentor (www.mentoring.org)
Volunteers in Medicine (www.vimi.org)
Robert Sapolsky was my faculty advisor for my biology major in college. He is a phenomenal teacher and lecturer. He told all his classes not to be doctors, but to consider being a bench researcher because if you are able to create a vaccine, you will immediately cure more people than any doctor could help in their lifetime. He is a world famous specialist on stress hormones. This is an article about his research. An article that reminds us that stress is a source of much of our physical, emotional, and mental hardships.
I have mentioned the concept of Appreciative Inquiry, the power of appreciation, and the effectiveness of positive psychology in prior posts with plenty of supporting scientific and empiric evidence to support their efficacy. But the sad truth is that our world is convinced that these things either don’t work or they are too hard to impliment. These concepts are so foreign to us that they can be very hard to break old habits.
The typical Inquiry remains the dreaded yearly or quarterly employee evaluation. This is the place where the boss critiques the employee. We have all been ‘evaluated’, and we have all been found wanting. Even if you receive a glowing evaluation, it takes only one ‘but’ to ruin it. “You continue to do an amazing job, BUT you could improve in this or that…” We are convinced that this negative feedback is essential and productive. BUT if you are at all like me, I only hear the negative, and it burns into my heart. I go sleepless for days stewing over my critique. In fact, the negative causes me often to be counterproductive, frustrated, sad, depressed, discouraged, etc.
now in a parallel universe:
Your boss calls you into a room and gives you a list of sincere appreciation. A list of blessings. A list of all the great things that you do. Would your productivity go up? Would you work harder? Would you sleep well that night? Would you wake up excited to go to work the following day? Would you appreciate and encourage my co-workers and boss more? Would we all be more likely to smile, laugh, encourage, and bless those around us???
Now What?
What if we started to sincerely appreciate those around us? What if we took the time each day to choose someone to bless with words of affirmation? Can we all try this? I did. WOW! It almost brought the person to tears…it is THAT powerful. If we all got into a rhythm of daily blessing those around us with words of encouragement, what might happen?? Please share with us your experience in trying this…
I just heard of yet another divorce at work that unraveled by infidelity. Marriage is tough, but the studies support that if you are in trouble, the worst thing to do is divorce. Those couples who divorce are individually statistically doomed for loneliness, depression, anxiety, etc. The marriages on the rocks that decide to make a run at staying together often do, and these married couples when asked 5 years down the line if they are happy usually say yes. And they are very happy that they stuck it out.
What does an intimate, eternal, beautiful marriage look like? How is it done?
A friend of mine’s wife wrote him a special praise message on her breast cancer blog, and it is a beautiful example of love for a lifetime and beyond.
“This entry is dedicated to my wonderful husband… In the words of my mom this past week ” Te ganaste la loteria con este hombre!” translation– ” You have won the lottery with this man” Not only did he sleep in the hospital with me both nights, waking up every hr and a half when the nurses came in to check on me, he came up with my medication schedule ( which I still don’t understand) , makes sure I’m taking them as directed, brought a little picnic table in our master bedroom so we can still eat as a family since I was bedridden for several days, he wakes the kids and gets them breakfast and ready for school everyday, drives them to school, missed his mens bible study because our daughter wanted to walk to school on “Walk to school day”, works from home because I asked him to, answers the phone for me, still works his insane hrs, helps get the kids ready for bed, took our daughter to the drs for a strange bump behind her ear, only to find out she had a fever, has been taking care of our daughter and her medication schedule for the last 3 1/2 days because I can’t risk getting whatever she has, slept in her room to get her whatever she needed throughout 2 nights and coached our son’s 3 flag football games today! Oh, and he had to bathe me twice because I couldn’t lift my arms! The guy is exhausted! I gave him 2 Tylenol pm’s, sent him to sleep alone in the office and pray he gets a full night’s sleep! He has been my knight in shining armor and I love him to death! God has blessed me with this amazing man!”
YES!
I am re-reading Dale Carnegie’s great book in which he points out that rule #1 in dealing with people is–never condemn, complain, or criticize. Why? Because humans, no matter who they are or what they have done, believe that they are good and with equal confidence are convinced that whatever the issue is it isn’t their fault.
I also just finished Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. He points out that it is not our responsibility to change anybody (and as Carnegie has pointed out, you can’t so stop trying!). We can, however, try and see them as God does (as a beloved son or daughter) and love them as God does (unconditionally). By putting away our ‘judgmentalism and pride and loathing of other people’ and instead treat everybody ‘as though they were [your] best friend’, they will change for the better.
When organizations discover that they are having a problem, they get a team together to look at the problems and try to find a solution better known as problem solving. About 10 years ago, a team of expert problem solvers were hired by a large corporation to come in to ‘fix’ their problems in hopes of increasing their production rates. They found that after their problem solving their production rates actually went down instead of up. Puzzled, they tried a different method. Instead of looking at the problem and filling everyone with negative thoughts about each other and the organization, they looked at the positive. They looked at all the things that worked well, and they focused on making them work even better. The production rate soared. This method is known as Appreciative Inquiry.
It has been thought that allowing and encouraging people to air their grievances about other people in the organization and list their complaints about others and the organization is the path to improvement. This has been shown time and time again to have the opposite effects. It produces negativity, discourages others from working harder to make things better (why bother if you are only going to hear the negative from a select few?!), and it creates a work environment that is defeatist, negative, counter productive, and filled with cattiness and pettiness. So next time your organization decides to send out questionnaires to critique, or wants to create a work group to problem solve, I would hope we all can consider Appreciative Inquiry and the wisdom of Carnegie, Miller, and Christ.
I recently picked up Carnegie’s book AGAIN to reread AGAIN! It is definitely in my top 10 books of all time. It has amazing Christian principles. His 5th principle is simple but powerful: Smile. Smiling has shown to program and produce in the smiler a happier disposition through brain chemistry; smiling is also beneficial for the smilee as well…
This is principle #5 in Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Lowndes book, How to Talk to Anyone also points out the importance of smiling.