Are You Serious?
Image via WikipediaThe healthcare industry is full of serious people. They should be serious, shouldn’t they? After all, health care is serious business. Life is at stake and life is sacred. But if you had to choose between two different kinds of providers, which one would you prefer: the serious one or the responsible one? The two kinds aren’t necessarily the same. Being serious is an emotion. Responsibility is a state of awareness. That difference could seriously influence the quality of your treatment.
THE COST OF BEING SERIOUS
Most of the people in health care are good, competent and emotionally secure human beings. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of angry people in the same industry. I know that I don’t want an angry surgeon or ticked off nurse giving me a medication. Do you? Could anger stem from being serious? I believe that it could.
Our culture teaches us to be serious. There’s nothing wrong with being serious per se. But it’s worth a peek at what grows beneath the word. The root word of serious is seryows, which sounds a bit like sorrows. Ours is a serious world. It’s also sorrowful. Perhaps there’s a connection. If language influences our perceptions and behaviors, then we need to re-think what we teach our children. Otherwise, they will grow up to confuse seriousness with responsibility. They will be depressed. Look around you if you think I’m exaggerating.
THE BENEFITS OF BEING RESPONSIBLE
Fortunately, our culture teaches us to be responsible too. Resonsible is rooted in respuns, or response. Responsibility by definition requires action, a reply. Being responsible, however, is not the same as being serious and yet our culture often equates and confuses the two words. That’s an error that might be costing us lives.
I understand the need for bearing a sacred sense of emotion when providing care to patients. I’m not arguing against the sacred. I am arguing for stripping away the assumptions we make which prevent us from being our most responsible. Experienced professionals have smashed medical equipment against walls because they were serious about saving their patients’ lives. That’s pretty serious. It’s not responsible, especially when the equipment is life-saving.
Many health care facilities still tolerate this madness. Why? I think it’s because some of the people who run those organizations are serious about healthcare and they’re afraid that by condemning the serious behavior they are violating the sacredness of life. Health care is an ancient business. It’s an historical confluence of religion, warfare, science, art, culture and just about everything else that makes a civilization. So it’s not much of a wonder why the healthcare industry is so serious about being serious. The industry can do better. It’s your health, so it’s your responsibility too.
If you want to find out for yourself, offer to volunteer at your local hospital. See if there’s anything you can do to lighten things up.
LESS SERIOUS. MORE RESPONSIBILITY.
I think it’s time we publicly recognize the difference between being serious and being responsible. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive; but the semantic relationship might just be too close for us to dismiss.
I know I want to be responsible. If that means I have to be less serious, so be it. Nursing might be a lot more fun. It should be. After all, life is a stake and life should be fun. Fun is a responsiblity of the living. Seriousness is for the dead. It’s our responsibility to save our sorrows for the dead. That’s how we rescue them.
If being serious leads to anger and anger leads to error, then we need to be less serious and more responsible. Life is at stake and life is sacred. Seriously.
If you have ideas on how to improve our health care responsibilities, please comment here. If you like what your reading, subscribe to my feed and we can continue the discussion.
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25 Words
It started
When I wrote my first lines.
I thought it was heaven
I was following.
Instead I found
a thread that led me home.
What was that all about? To find out what’s going on, go check out Liz Strauss’ remarkable blog.
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Four Steps to a Healthy Layoff
If you had to layoff your employees, how would you do it? We can blame big companies for being ruthless and uncaring. But for the people doing the actual layoffs, it can be a terrible experience. A layoff doesn’t have to be an evil, does it? Layoffs happen every day and people survive, don’t they? In fact, don’t layoffs give people the opportunity to find better ways to invest their time? Is there such a thing as a healthy layoff?
Layoffs are often botched by thoughtlessness or by fear of saying the wrong things. Some businesses do better in this department than others. For whatever reason, though, many businesses don’t really understand how to layoff. Layoffs aren’t supposed to happen. But they do. Almost everyday we hear about them. So why not outline a Layoff Action Plan that could help, not hurt, people?
Where the danger grows, so does the saving grace.
A layoff can be an opportunity for a company to redeem itself from the tactical and strategic blunders it made that may have led to the layoff. For the people who actually do the layoff, a creative Layoff Action Plan can be the difference between another drink and the happiness derived from helping others overcome adversity.
HOW WOULD YOU SLICE THE KNIFE?
So, how would you do it? How could you make the most of it and turn bad news into a reason to hope?
Would you stealthily order your lawyers to structure the layoff so you don’t have to call it a layoff? After all, that would save the PR fees which qualm your fears of how the word layoff will make you look to the general public. Whatever would Wall Street do with your stock if they discover your secret? Heaven forbid!
Or would you consider these completely different approches?
1. INTRODUCE YOUR EMPLOYEES TO YOUR COMPETITORS
Introduce your employees to your competition and say:
Here are one hundred remarkable employees. We know they’re remarkable because we hired them. We’re having a tough time right now and we don’t quite know what to do with them. Maybe you or your connections do. Please do what you can because we want our industry to thrive and these people are our industry’s future.
2. INTRODUCE YOUR EMPLOYEES TO THE WORLD
Introduce your employees to your vendors, your suppliers, your alumni, you neighbors, your minister, your rabbi, your monk, and your therapist {the risks of depression and suicide increase after layoffs}. Introduce them to your friends or relatives who own businesses thirsty for the remarkable talent that you’re pouring away.
If nothing else, your employees will feel appreciated. They could be energized to find a beautiful land beyond your crumbling empire.
3. INVITE THEM TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE
Invite them to your LinkedIn profile and write them recommendations that will last in their profile for the rest of their careers? Would fewer calls for reference checks lighten your newly weighted workload?
Use the Answers and other features to promote your former employees in creative ways. You should do this selflessly, of course, but could you think of any beneficial side-effects from this approach?
4. PROCLAIM YOUR LAYOFF ACTION PLAN
Instead of playing legal word-games, call a spade a spade and proudly proclaim your layoff to the world. Let the whole world know that you’re liberating enormous talent for hire into the community. Issue a press release on your own terms that outlines that you’re doing #1, #2 and #3. Let the world know how much you sincerely care about the social consequences of your economic misfortune.
Now is the time to invoke the genius of your PR folk. Get them to market your employees to the community. This is a radical departure from the status quo; this isn’t your boiler plate PR. It would be unique and remarkable PR for PR. Imagine how your employees and the community would feel about you now.
What would happen to your company’s wealth if you simply explained what happened and how you intend for your company to thrive in a time of adversity?
Do you think that your customers and the public would LOVE that story? Do you think that Wall Street would entrust your long-term leadership with more of their investing dollars because NOW you look like you know what you’re doing? After all, it’s clear now that you’re not afraid of acclaiming your status as a remarkable leader in your industry. You’re in it for the long-run now, not the short-term speculative nonsense that’s puling our Republic into mindless consumerism.
This post is a Capitalist Manifesto.
WOULD YOU LAYOFF YOUR TALENT USING THIS APPROACH?
So, what do you think? Do think these steps are worth a try? How much psychological and economic depression could our contry avoid if we did things in steps 1 through 4? Since it’s my goal to improve the health care of every child, woman and man in the world, this would advance my cause.
Perhaps some would say: This is too much work! To that I’d say: No wonder you have to layoff your employees! If a business can’t do the hard work needed to get through its Dips, then it should responsibly close up shop and leave it to competitors who know how to work hard and creatively.
Is it possible that so many companies botch layoffs because it’s culturally expected that layoffs are a bad thing, a terminal curse? What would happen to our world if we shook up the bowl, thought and did things in ways we never did before? Sometime we are more programmed for certain responses than we realize.
We are more than the product of our assumptions.
The world’s changing, whether you’re in denial about it or not. Why not make your next layoff remarkable?
If you have ideas to add to this list, feel free to add. Who knows, a brokenhearted CEO might stumble upon this blog. Maybe she’ll change the world and found a novel way to network talent for the 21st Century.
CLOSING WORDS
If you’re in a cog job, find out why. Go bookmark Seth Godin’s blog (he’s not just for Marketing types; in fact I think he’d appreciate it more if cog-jobbers read him as if he were our Poet Laureate). Also, download A Brief Guide to World Domination, print it out and read it. It will expose that lie you were told years ago.
For those of you who have been laid off, or who might one day end up at the end of the layoff riffle, here’s a little secret I’d like you to keep:
You must change your life.
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Nursing Finally Gets On Alltop
Nursing has finally made onto Alltop, developers of Truemors. Yours truly is linked there too. 
Pixel RN, who developed an Alltop-like aggregator Orientedx3, succeeding in convincing founder Guy Kawasaki to add Nursing to its many categories. Go ahead, check it out and bookmark it. We have Twitter to thank for this development. How to change the world indeed.
It’s exciting to finally see nursing get its Alltop page. My hope now is that quality content all of kinds within nursing can now be displayed for use by the nursing community and the public at large.
Congratulations to Elizabeth Anderson for getting nursing finally to the top of the web on Alltop!
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Social Media Will Own Your Mind If You…
Do you own or rent your mind? How much equity do you have in your peace of mind? If you’re not careful, social media will own [your] mind and then rent out the space to people you’ll never even meet. If you mindlessly engage in social media, it’s easy to lose track of time, and time is life. Offered here: four pillars to maintain equity in your own mind.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
1. ASK: WILL ANYBODY DIE IF I DON’T SIGN UP?
It’s OK to ignore these tools. Perhaps your income depends on them. Well that’s fine, don’t listen to me then. Keep on signing up for as long as your bank account grows. It’s good for the economy.
But if you want peace of mind, you’re going to have to know what to ignore. Not every social media tool is necessary. Besides, as long as guys like Robert Scoble are around, you can be pretty sure that someone else is performing reliable testing.
Claim your name on the latest social medium before someone else does if you wish, just to be safe. But don’t go nuts thinking that the world’s fate rests on the next biggest thing. The Titanic was the next biggest thing.
2. KNOW THAT 3.2 HOURS PER DAY IS YOUR MAXIMUM 20%
Assuming that you sleep 8 hours everyday, that leaves 16 hours of potential productivity. 20% of that is 3.2 hours.
But if you consider your productive time to be closer to 8 hours, then your 20% is just 1.6 hours. So if you work between 8 and 16 hours, you have a maximum of 3.2 hours to get your best in. If that time is spent the wrong way, then 80% of your day is that much more wasted.
According to my rough calculations, then, most of us have about one and a half hours to focus on how to achieve 80% of our work. If you believe 80% of your productivity comes from social media, break your time up into three half-hour sessions. Try it for a week and evaluate your results. Refine accordingly.
3. MINDFULNESS IN ACTION
For your 20% to really pay off, you are going to need to be as mindfully engaged in your activity as possible.
- Take note of your breathing
- Be aware of what exactly you’re accomplishing with every online social transaction
- Use an alarm clock to stop what you’re doing and meditate on your 20%
If you find yourself overwhelmed by it all, admit that you have a problem. It’s OK; you’re not alone. Talk to your closest friends, go for a walk, get a milkshake or schedule a session with a competent therapist. Forget stigma; think oil change. Your mental health is the most profitable asset you’ll ever have.
4. PERSONAL INTERACTION
Take time to know who are the most important one to three people in your network. They don’t need to be A-listers. In fact, they aught to be people you’ve met, people whom you know and trust.
Engage these contacts. Meet them at least once a week. Tweet up if it makes you happy. Do something old-school: hand-write them thank-you notes for being there for you or buy something cheap but fun.
Questions for Commenters:
- What do you do to ensure you’re not renting your mind to the social media Borg?
- How do you measure the effect of social media on your own peace of mind?
- Are these four pillars useful?
Image: Etringita’s Photostream
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