Tag: business

The Opportunity to Help Heroes

I just work HR. It’s not very glamorous. All day long I help the company process paperwork. Today, I did 3 leave forms, payroll, helped with tuition reimbursement for 2 nurses, put in schedules for traveler nurses, and filled out lots of forms for helping medical staff with work comp in case of Covid quarantining. I help to ensure they get paid and get their benefits to support their families. Sometimes I screw up. But sometimes I am glad I am there to help.

All across America and the world, the medical staff are getting hit hard by the pandemic. It is not just the disease. It is the long hours, the double shifts, the struggles between work and family. It’s working extra to make sure the patients are okay. It’s holding hands. It’s not just meeting medical needs but psychological needs and basic needs like feeding and hygiene for the people they care for. It is wearisome to say the least.

I see it everyday. I see the exhaustion. I see the burnout and frustration. But I also see how hard they are working. I see how much extra they do with no thanks. I see the risks they take every day. I see them gowning up and getting N95 masks on that are really uncomfortable to wear. I see them working together to keep patients safe and bringing food trays to rooms and locking down facilities and screening visitors endlessly to try to keep the covid out. I see them getting through the winter snow to work. I see them playing music for the patients to cheer them up or doing all sorts of activities to keep the patients happy.

It’s not the big things. It’s the little things. It’s the little choices they make every day that make the medical personnel and medical admin heroes. It is getting up in the dark in the morning and getting scrubs on even though you want to call in. It’s showing up and clocking in and going through all the testing requirements from upper management. It’s showing care and compassion when they could easily turn a blind eye because they are overwhelmed. It’s a thousand little decisions made over and over day after day after day after endless day to stick it out for better or in this case, worse and worse and far worse.

It is an endless battle with an invisible enemy that keeps morphing over and over again and again. It would be easy to give up hope….and so many have. But I see in my own workplace, folks that just keep going and keep hoping and keep scheduling and keep administering and keep nursing and keep feeding patients and keep watching over them at night.

In Batman, the Dawn of Justice, there is a scene when Batman runs towards trouble while everyone around him is fleeing. You can watch it here if you want. I think medical people are like that but on a grander scale, a longer time scale. There is no fantastic explosion. Instead, it is decision after decision after decision to treat and maintain and prevent.

The choice to be a medical hero is not that simple. Watching it from the sidelines, it’s way harder than I had any idea of.

It’s countless endless decisions to not give up even through Delta, even through Omicron, even through this new Florina. It’s the internal decision to soldier on. It’s the decision to stay positive amidst adversity, as one of my colleagues said to simply, “Take one day at a time.” He said the key is to not look at the big picture but just focus on the day, getting through the day. That is the best advice I’ve gotten since working this job.

I’m honored to help them. I know I make mistakes sometimes with the paperwork and sometimes the procedures and processes can frustrate or seeing the medical staff burdened can make you feel god awful. But overall, I am glad I took this job.

I work with heroes. Real heroes. Not the kind that wear spandex and capes. And that’s not just rhetoric. It’s true. These are the real kind. I wonder what stories we will tell of them many years from now if we all make it through this pandemic.

Tonight, if you just google hospitals, you will read countless articles about the hospitals and other nursing facilities under siege. My own cousin came down with Covid in Kansas. All the hospitals were full up and they were considering life-flighting him all the way to New Mexico to a hospital there. That is how bad it is for the medical facilities right now.

If there was any time the medical staff in America could use your thoughts and prayers, it’s now.

Heroes run towards trouble even when others run the opposite direction. It’s a gut decision, a split second decision. They just do it. That’s how you know someone is a hero.

As they say in the St. Jude’s hospital commercial, “Hope is when you never give up.”

Remember, the stars shine brightest only on the darkest of nights.

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A Motivational Group

Since June 2021, a new online business has been helping men and women to excel. It is a regular weekly Zoom meeting with folks from all over the country. It is Wednesday nights at 8:00 pm Central Time. It is $20 a month through this link here:

https://possibilityjunction.org/ampy

Every week, the group members encourage each other in our various projects or life issues to tackle. The instructor is a psychologist as well and teaches things like how to identify and replace negative thoughts, how to focus on contentment and gratitude, and how to build confidence in yourself. It is the best and most affordable group therapy as well as group encouragement you will find out there.

There are members from Washington and Alaska and Kansas and Vermont so far. It is beginning to grow as well as there are plans for a retreat focused on meditation, yoga, and writing. This is a fairly new group focused on progress, self-love, self-motivation.

I encourage you to join. It is worth 20 bucks a month in the friendships you make and the communal advice you receive. It also comes with a daily Facebook Messenger group with daily aspirations and positive duscussion. The class welcomes people from around the world too through the use of Zoom. If you are from Germany or India or Israel or Nigeria, you are welcome. The instruction language is in English, however, but the group is very welcoming.

Give it a try. I am glad I did.

After my class last Wednesday, I felt better so I wrote a story on climate change and a little boy. I submitted it to a publishing group and they agreed to publish it. Sometimes the little push of group encouragement is all you need for personal growth and to keep an optimistic perspective. As Mel Robbins says, we have a prehistoric conditioning in our brains to be seen, heard, and celebrated by the herd or group. This is a group that makes you feel visible and part of a team.

The Pig Farmer Who Became Rich

I was born in 1978. In the early 80s, I remember being a little girl and going out to western Kansas to visit my uncle and his family on the farm. It was a small farm. I’m not sure what kind of farm it was. I think he might have been a pig farmer. A year or so later, we learned that my uncle had sold the farm. He had cashed in everything to start a business. He said it was a “water filtration business.” He called it the wave of the future.

I remember folks being a little doubtful about this new business idea. After all, it was the 1980s and everyone drank water out of the tap. We reasoned why would someone pay extra money for more expensive water when they could get it practically free out of the tap?

He started the business operation anyway. As the years went by, we would go to visit their family from time to time and I remember seeing his business offices and setup. He had these bizarre looking things he called “water coolers.” He would fill them with blue jugs of water he filtered. He sold them to area businesses for their employees to drink out of. I was a kid. I didn’t pay much more attention to the business other than that.

There were quite a few naysayers as the years progressed and people that thought his business would fail. He kept at it though, year after year, and the small business slowly grew. He added another side to the business of setting up water softeners in people’s homes too. I remember my mom and dad got one he installed. I remember the first shower I had with the softened water and realizing it made my hair so soft.

It was about 1990 when the first bottles of filtered water started showing up at the local convenient stores. I remember looking at them with my friends when I was a kid. We all said, “Nobody is going to buy that!” Why would you buy that when you can just drink out of the tap!”

Fast forward now to 2020 and practically everyone around the world drinks filtered water and the convenient stores are stocked high with filtered water bottles. And my uncle, the one that a lot of people doubted and said wouldn’t make it…….

Well, he’s the wealthiest man I know.

Morale of the story: If you got a vision or idea…don’t listen to the naysayers or doubters. Keep trying. Maybe you got an invention, or a business idea, or a piece of art, or music, or writing……maybe you got a film idea, etc. Keep trying.

Who knows…..your idea might change the world.

You might succeed or you might fall flat on your face and fail miserably. But, at least you were brave enough to dare. Brave enough to try. And there are a whole lot of people out there that cannot say they even tried. People who live with regrets.

Try. Just try.

Gung Ho!

I’ve been reading Gung Ho! By Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. Gung Ho is Chinese and means “work together.”

I was pleasantly surprised by the book. It was a good read.

The book is about a plant manager that only has 6 months to turn around the company and get it more productive or corporate will shut it down. The plant manager goes to the best department manager and is guided by his advice on how to Gung Ho his team, his co-workers in his department. There are three main components of his philosophy which are based on observations of creatures in nature:

1. The Spirit of the Squirrel – create a sense that the work being done is worthwhile. “First the work has to be understood as important. Second, it has to lead to a well-understood and shared goal. Third, values have to guide all plans, decisions, and actions.” Show the workers in your department how what they do helps others. For example, a dishwasher job may not seem glamorous but it is essential worthwhile work. One load of unclean, bacteria-infected dishes could wipe out a whole group of people. Always look at your job in terms of human impact. What this is really getting at is a powerful human emotion: self-esteem. View your work not as units produced but as impacting human lives and it will build your self-esteem. Another important aspect is to place values at the forefront. Values, not managers, should guide each worker’s behavior. Managers are leaders and they should not have to act like police. Each worker should demonstrate these shared values in the way they act and insist others to behave.

2. The Way of the Beaver – Look at the way beavers build a dam together. “Each beaver has a large measure of control over its own destiny. They decide how the work is going to be done. They operate like independent contractors…It’s up to each of them how the dam gets repaired. If they want to work at one end, fine. If they want to bring small branches, that’s great. They exercise their own best judgment.” Basically the message for managers in this one is to let the people who really do the work do the work. Set the goals and values, define the playing field and rules of the game, decide who plays what position. Then you have to get off the field and let the players move the ball. It’s tough to be boss without being bossy. It requires a high level of self-esteem. Another key aspect of this concept is respect for all the people in your department along with their thoughts, feelings, needs, and aspirations. Value individuals as persons and as a manager, keep in mind, that you should not give people work beyond their capacity. People want a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay so let them contribute up to their capacity. Let them feel challenged but not overwhelmed.

3. The Gift of the Goose – The department manager describes it like this, “Twenty of us have this work area and we run it like our own business. We’re responsible for quality, on-time delivery, and looking after our customers.” One important aspect of that attitude is to cheer each other on with words of encouragement much like geese honk to each other continuously while flying in V formation. Employee engagement is explained as E=mc2 or rather, enthusiasm equals mission times cash and congratulations. People need sincere, truthful recognition. This can be done with active affirmations such as telling people what a great job they do or presenting awards. Yet, it is done even better with passive affirmations. What is a passive affirmation? “A classic example is sitting on your hands, biting your tongue, and looking unconcerned and confident when a team member carries forward a tricky, complicated, and important project. Just the kind of project you excel at and every fiber of your body is crying out to take control or at least issue a couple of warnings about trouble spots. But you don’t. Your silence sends a very clear message – I trust you.” Recognition should be spontaneous and individualized. It is also important to cheer on progress not just results. At a football game the crowd doesn’t cheer only at touchdowns and neither should businesses operate that way. Cheer progress.

Well, it’s an entertaining book and a short read. I recommend it.

Making Teaching Fun

I spoke to the 7th grade English classes this morning. Two classes and each presentation was thirty minutes long. I was nervous but didn’t need to be. The kids were an awesome audience. It was so fun! The kids engaged in the interactive portions and they had great questions. My son was in one of the classes and I tried not to embarrass him too much. He walked me out to the car afterwards, put my box in the car, and we hugged each other briefly. He said, “Thanks, Mom.” That warmed my heart. I ended up donating a book of Searching for Fire to the school library.

I made a short video of an interactive portion of the speeches. I got this idea from Michael Scott on the show, “The Office.” Michael Scott goes to a college seminar to speak to business students about selling paper and he brings candy bars along to demonstrate what he means. Just watch below.