April 18, 2025 • 39 mins
As a college freshman, Marcus Engel was blinded and nearly killed after being struck by a drunk driver. Through hundreds of hours of reconstructive surgery, months of rehab and adaptation to a completely new world, Marcus remained committed to his goals: return to college and recapture life.
Marcus accepted and embraced the challenge. The life lessons he learned on the unexpected journey are now the guiding forces that inspire hundreds of thousands every day.
In 2010, “The Drop”, a short film based on Marcus’ memoir was released and can be viewed for free at www.TheDropMovie.com. He is the co-founder of the I’m Here Movement, a 501(c)3, which is changing the culture of care with two simple words.
Marcus has authored four books.
He holds a B.S. in sociology from Missouri State University and a M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University in the city of New York.
In 2017, Marcus was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame where he teaches pre-meds the art of “being with.”
He lives in Orlando, Florida with his wife, Marvelyne, and his Seeing Eye dog, Winter.
Website: www.MarcusEngel.com
“Compassion & Courage” Podcast: www.MarcusEngel.com/Podcast
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusengel
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarcusEngelSpeaker
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcusengelspeaker/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:10):
Pioneer Knowledge Services welcomes you to the next
Because You Need to Know. I'm your host,
Edwin k Morris. I serve as president and
founder of this organization, and we are thrilled
to offer this educational program. These design conversations
bring you people's experiences and
(00:34):
I
and I am coming to you from my
home office in Orlando, Florida.
There's a couple of interesting things near me,
and near me is always a bit of
a subjective term.
(00:54):
I guess the most interesting things that are
near me right now, number one, there is
an unopened
bag of sage bundles
that are about a foot away from my
keyboard
for cleansing the house spiritually whenever I do
that. What I hope is the other interesting
thing that is close to me is one
of my books, which is called The Other
End of the Stethoscope.
(01:16):
It's a memoir, and it's about really traumatic
time in my life. It's also the most
recent book that I've read because
not that I'm narcissistic and have to go
read my own work,
but we are just putting out an audible
copy
of the other end of the stethoscope.
We're doing it with artificial intelligence and voice
(01:36):
cloning so that I don't have to actually
read the book into the microphone, but it
still comes out my voice. So tell me
who a mentor is for you. So a
mentor. The first thing that I think of
is my
official mentor.
Once I got out of college, I started
speaking
professionally.
One of my mentors was a customer service
(01:59):
speaker named Shep Hyken.
Shep was the one who really showed me
how to turn my personal
story
and
trauma
into
something that could help other people and I
could make a living
at at the same time.
So Shep was officially a mentor, but I've
(02:20):
had so many other ones.
Growing up in small town America, I was
involved in all types of high school activities.
So my football coaches, some of my teachers,
one of my advisors from college, I've just
had so many mentors
that have poured into me, and I, in
turn, been able to pour into other people.
(02:40):
And that's super rewarding to be able to
see somebody take your mentorship
and actually
put it to good use. Well, thanks for
bringing that all up. I totally agree. If
you were stuck on an island, what were
the three must have things you need?
Stuck on a deserted island, what are three
must things I must have?
Obviously, food and water and shelter.
(03:01):
But
beyond that,
I would certainly hope that I could still
have an iPhone and access to the Internet.
That's because,
I do all of my data consumption and
all of my reading
through an electronic device.
And so I'd I'd kinda need that still.
(03:23):
What's your biggest hope? My biggest hope is
to leave this world a more compassionate
place than I found it.
So your wealth of experience
in trauma
has
actually been a jumping off point into a
whole new world. Yeah.
You could say that.
My life
(03:44):
has taken some dramatic turns, some 80 degree
turns. Yeah. As a young man in Missouri,
I I don't know. I was just a
normal kid. Right? I only knew what I
knew, and I didn't have a whole lot
of experience outside of my small town world.
Whenever I started college, about six weeks into
my freshman year of college, I came home
for the weekend and
(04:06):
went to a St. Louis Blues hockey game
on a Saturday night with three friends that
I had met at church camp. On our
way home from that hockey game, my friends
and I got broadsided by a drunk driver.
That crash not only took 100%
of my sight instantaneously
and totally and permanently.
I also received what is called a LaForte
(04:29):
three fracture,
which LaForte three is a surgical term, and
it pretty much means that everything between the
hairline and the chin has been crushed.
Lots and lots of surgery. I've I've laid
on an Operating Room table for well over
three hundred hours,
months of hospitalization
and rehab.
(04:50):
It's led me into doing
what I do now because when you've had
as much experience
at the other end of the stethoscope as
I've had, you've seen the good, the bad,
and the profound
in patient care.
Those good stories and even the bad stories
we can learn from, and that's what my
(05:10):
work is, is to teach health care professionals
what are the little things that we can
do to help patients retain their their dignity,
their independence,
their holistic self while they are healing. Well,
trauma
do you think the word trauma gets kind
of overused
a little bit, you know, in just general
(05:31):
sense and socials you know? Oh, I'm wounded.
I'm I I have trauma.
Or is just the elevation of what trauma
is very self dependently defined? I think it
is self defined because, obviously,
what may be traumatic for me, and I'm
talking a small emotional trauma, say, that I
get in an argument with a family member
(05:53):
or something like that. Yeah. That hurts me
deeply, and I carry that trauma. Yeah. Whereas
somebody else can walk the other person can
walk away from that not feeling traumatized
at all. So it's a sensitivity.
Sure. Personal sensitivities
to things. Similar to, it's cold in here.
Well, I'm not cold. It's hot in here.
It's very subjective. Sure. I wanna pull up
(06:14):
a definition. Webster says trauma is an injury,
to living tissue caused by an extrinsic
force
or agent.
And this is the did you know, which
I love in Merriam. They're they add more
data to the word.
Trauma is the Greek word for wound. Although
the Greeks use the term only for physical
injuries,
(06:35):
nowadays, trauma is likely to refer to emotional
wounds. That gets into the realm of the
psychic or the psyche
of what's woundful or sensitive to you, and
everybody's different. Sure. So how do you think
organizations
and I'm gonna bring this back to communities
or organizations of people, either way.
(06:56):
How does an organization
one side, bring up it's good to be
sensitive, but then
kinda balance that out with we can't be
super sensitive to everything, or or is that
a even a thing to try to get
to? Well,
right. This brings up a a really interesting
question, and I work with those caregivers at
(07:17):
the bedside. Typically, my audiences,
my people are
any of those people who physically lay hands
on a patient.
And
they have to balance things. How do I
care about this patient
physically? How do I help them get all
their physical needs met while they're under my
care?
(07:38):
And then
emotionally, can I help them too? And what
I really try to
inspire in my audiences
is that the balance can come just from
being patient. Mhmm. The balance can come just
from taking an extra moment because there have
been studies that talk about how if
patient and the doctor sits down, that that
(08:00):
patient perceives that that doctor
was in their room for a lot longer
than they were. The doctor may have only
been in their room for a lot longer
than they were. The doctor may have only
been in their room for
a lot longer than they were. The doctor
may have only been in their room sitting
down for ninety seconds, but the patient perceived
it to be four or five minutes. When
we can take just a little bit of
(08:21):
time and step out of
the busyness of life
to be present in the moment with that
patient,
that's what I'm trying to get healthcare professionals
to do, to slow down a little bit,
to be able to take care of that
patient so you're not balancing
a hundred tasks that you have to do
in an hour. You can really focus on
(08:43):
the holistic healing of that patient. Well, that
takes a skill of personal control because you're
talking about a Zen master type of ability
that allows yourself to be present
and not frazzled by the 75 other things
going on that day. Sure. Well, it sounds
real easy, but how do you do it?
Right. Right. And you're right. A Zen master
(09:05):
would do it perfectly, but,
unfortunately, none of us are
are Zen masters. As much as I try,
as much meditation as I can as I
do, I can't claim that title.
But what I can do is remind people
just the little ways that they can be
present. There is
a doctor at Vanderbilt University. She is also
(09:27):
a nun.
She has a process
of knocking on a patient's door, dipping her
head, saying the fastest,
hail Mary in the world before she steps
in to speak with every patient. And I
think that is a centering practice.
That's a centering practice. That's what we can
(09:48):
do. In the world of overreactions
and,
everything's an issue,
the practice
of humanity
takes some work. And when everybody is frazzled
by all things
personally,
it's hard to be outside of yourself in
order to be centered.
In my experience studying shamanism,
(10:09):
it is a practice that takes work. I
mean, it's just like going to the gym.
If you don't go, it's not gonna get
the results. And that mental model of your
example
with her
having the process probably starts before she touches
the handle or touches the door
to turn that on, to turn on that
rhythm and brings her to the focal point
(10:30):
of now. Yes. So in an organization
of or community and like with your nurses,
how do you build the practice? How do
you how do you train
people? And it's kind of a protect themselves.
Right? So it's a dual purpose. It protects
them as a human
and a soul on a planet, but it
also brings better
(10:51):
service to the client or the patient. So
there's a few ways of doing this, and
the way that I am most familiar with
comes out of my academic
background.
So I have a master's in a field
that's called narrative medicine.
If you're not familiar with narrative medicine, it's
not real surprising. There are only two narrative
medicine programs in the country.
(11:11):
The one that I went to is at
Columbia University. I graduated in 2011
and my class was only the third to
complete the master's level training program. And so
it's still a very new and emerging field,
and it's a conglomeration
of medicine and healthcare and philosophy
and social work and counseling and sociology
(11:35):
and psychology
and literature.
What the ultimate purpose of narrative medicine
was
originally was to help doctors
learn how to deeply listen
to their patients.
So when a patient is giving a report
about themselves,
the doctor is picking up on the subtleties
(11:57):
of what that patient is saying. And the
doctor is learning how to ask open ended
questions
so that they can most effectively treat that
patient.
That's
wonderful.
The thing of it is, I hang out
with nurses,
and I'm a businessman.
So
what I do with nurses
is reflective writing and therapeutic journaling.
(12:20):
And I based this all off of a
study.
It's a seminal study in therapeutic writing and
journaling. Can I do you do you wanna
hear about this? Because I think it's Yeah.
No. I I think it's a fast I've
never heard of the topic,
and that's how people learn new things. So
bring it on. So there is a social
psychologist in the state of Texas named James
Pennebaker.
(12:40):
Pennebaker did some of the original studies back
in the eighties of using writing and reflective
journaling
to overcome
trauma or to better process trauma.
And so what he did is he took
about 30 or 40 students, and all of
these students reported
that they had had some type of sexual
(13:03):
trauma in their background. Mhmm. They didn't have
to disclose what that was, but everybody
had some type of sexual trauma in their
background. Pennebaker brought these students together
for four days in a row,
twenty minutes at a time for four days.
On the first day, he tasked these students
to spend the next twenty minutes writing about
(13:24):
the most traumatic,
upsetting,
horrific
thing that you've ever been through. Okay. And
they wrote on that for twenty minutes, and
then everybody went home.
Day number two, they brought them back.
Second verse, same as the first. Write for
the next twenty minutes
on the most horrible traumatic upsetting thing that's
(13:44):
ever happened to you.
Now, on day number two, you could write
about that same event as you wrote about
on day number one, or you could choose
a totally different trial Okay. To write about.
Third day, same thing. Fourth day, same thing.
Write for twenty minutes
about your trauma. And at the end of
that study, they followed these students over the
(14:05):
next semester,
and the students
had better academic performance,
better interpersonal
relationships,
they had better health,
which was
how many times a student went to the
campus infirmary
over a semester, and these students who were
in the part of the study went less
(14:26):
often.
And so what Pennebaker and his colleagues discovered
is it's often not so much the traumas
that hold us back,
it's the secret keeping
about the traumas.
When we write our traumas, we get to
process them, and we get to tell tell
them, and they come out of our heart,
out of our brain, out of our psyche
(14:47):
onto the paper. And in the writing, this
the physical writing, long hand writing
of our stories,
we're working them out to where they don't
have as much control over us psychologically. Yes.
Yes. The impact of holding on to pains
of the past is a wound keeping element
that keeps that energy there.
(15:09):
And what you're speaking of is an exercise
I've seen in various ways. But if you're
an employee of an organization
and you got wounds, you're holding on to
these stories of, well, I I hate that
guy because he's a a jerk or whatever
the infraction is. Let's go back to what
we said. Trauma is your perception of a
wound.
That's what it is. So we're not to
(15:29):
over educate it. We don't have to over
complicate it. If you're able, in a holistic
way,
express
that wound
and express it outside of yourself, this works
in conversation also, and you get it out,
you're doing two things. You're telling the story
of the whole nut roll. Right? You're basically
(15:51):
representing that incident or wound,
and then it's expressed outside of you. So
you're witnessing
you're providing witness to that. So it's out
of the dark and somebody can see it.
That process in and of itself relieves
a lot of the internal
mechanisms that make it more
(16:12):
bad than it should be. Not the discounter,
but just to relieve the control it has
over your physical and emotional self. Sure. It
allows it to heal.
It allows it to
be less than, which is a positive. It
is. It is. I like the people that
I work with, the nurses, the doctors, the
(16:33):
emergency crews,
EMS, etcetera,
these people witness
so much
human suffering on a daily basis.
At certain points, it feels like it never
ends.
And when it feels like it never ends,
like you're not making a difference, that's when
compassion, fatigue, and burnout
set in.
(16:54):
Especially
in the helping professions,
I feel like this this reflection
and storytelling
is really, really necessary.
I'm not naive enough to think that every
nurse is going to go home at the
end of their shift and write for twenty
minutes. Right? That's probably not going to happen.
(17:15):
So what I do is I just encourage
nurses at the end of every shift, open
up the notes app on your phone and
write out the thing that was a win
today. What was a win for you today?
This patient gave me a heartfelt thank you.
Okay. Great. Write that down. One sentence.
And what is one thing that happened today
(17:35):
that if it were to happen again tomorrow,
you would do it differently?
And so you write down a learning experience.
Oh. And it doesn't take very long to
put together a pretty nice fat stack of
the good that you're doing. Right? You can
look back over those notes and see the
good that you're doing, see how much you're
learning,
(17:55):
keeps us engaged in the work. If you've
ever been a patient and you've had a
healthcare professional that was disengaged,
that was bored or going through the motions
or worse yet, even slightly cruel or what
you perceive to be cruel,
these are the kind of people that could
still benefit from
expressive and reflective writing. I wanna go back
(18:17):
to your
post accident.
You shared with me this concept that caused
the inspiration
for you to keep going.
Someone held your hand. Yeah. So can you
tell me the story that helped that shift
for you? So this really gets down to
okay. Well,
this is all nice and fine and good,
(18:37):
but but how do we use it in
a practical sense? How do I use this
on the job?
What I always come back to is the
essence of compassion
is what I received that first night in
the emergency department.
That first night that they hauled me into
the emergency room,
luckily,
the crash site was only about three miles
(18:58):
away from a level one trauma center.
Even with a distance that close,
EMS
still had to perform a cricothyrotomy
in my throat in the field.
Those are rarely,
rarely done. Most paramedics will go their entire
career and never have to do one. I
was hanging by a string when they rolled
(19:18):
me into the emergency room.
There was a 20 year old patient care
tech
named Jennifer.
Jennifer's assignment
when I wasn't in surgery, Jennifer's assignment
was that she had to stay by my
bed and hold my hand. Wow. Yeah.
That was her assignment.
(19:40):
Maybe that was also to just make sure
I was still breathing,
but her assignment was to stay by my
bed and hold my hand. I was in
and out of consciousness
so much
that whenever I would come back into consciousness,
it was just this bludgeoning of pain and
darkness and fear and terror.
Jennifer held my hand, and every time she
(20:00):
could tell that I was awake,
she would say what I say are the
two most comforting words any human being can
say to another. Yeah. And those words are,
I'm here. Yeah. I'm here. When we can
truly be here, be there, be present for
another person
in their time of suffering
(20:21):
Yeah. That's That's power right there. One of
the other things that makes us human. And
it walks us right into this friendly term
you introduced me to called personalism.
Personalism,
the definition,
a system of thought which maintains the primacy
of the human or that reality has meaning
only through
(20:41):
the conscious mind.
Personalism must be a bit of a ethos
that you're working with.
Yeah. Ethos and pathos.
So I've been adjunct faculty at University of
Notre Dame now for seven or eight years,
I guess. And I have the
the good fortune to teach pre meds, a
course that's called introduction
(21:03):
to personalism
and medicine.
Now personalism
is a term that's a little dated
these days.
We probably wouldn't even use that term so
much. We would use the term human experience.
What is the human experience
in medicine?
I also bring that out of my patient
experience work in hospitals. But the whole idea
(21:25):
is if you've ever been to a doctor
or a hospital and you felt like it
was an assembly line, that's what we're working
against.
This is the opposite of that assembly line.
This is when a doctor
has a moment to be able to connect
with you on a personal humanistic
level.
What can they glean during that short interaction
(21:49):
that helps the care team, the doctors, the
nurses, etcetera,
see that patient in the bed as a
person,
not just a patient.
That doesn't seem like we would have to
teach that. Two hundred years ago, would we
have to teach that? Is is the culture
and society changed?
Or and better yet, is there a society
(22:09):
that that doesn't need to be taught? Is
western
medicine the only ones that have to learn
that? I doubt it.
Okay. I because I think if we look
at if we look at eastern thought and
religion, we go back thousands of years. There
was still the anxious mind. There was still
the monkey mind that everybody has that's bouncing
(22:29):
all over.
And when our monkey mind is bouncing all
over, that means we're not in the moment
present with what's going on right here, right
now.
I do feel like that this is somewhat
a human
trait that we all need to work on.
Yeah. There's a Psychology Today article called the
paradox of empathy
(22:50):
dated 06/02/2024.
The first paragraph, I'm just gonna read. It's
a short one.
The more we care about someone,
the more difficult
it is to help them.
Oh. Despite our intentions of relieving their pain
or suffering alongside them interferes with our capacity
to be helpful.
I guess I've seen that, maybe a little
bit, or maybe we're just not good at
(23:12):
being empathetic as a human on the planet.
Yeah. That's a good question. And where I'm
thinking about that, whenever you're reading that, I'm
thinking about professional distance
between nurses. Right? We want the nurse to
see that person in the bed as a
person, not just a patient.
But on the other hand, I think this
goes back to the balance that we were
talking about in the beginning and probably what
(23:34):
the rest of this article talks about. Can
we care too deeply? Well, to a certain
extent for hospital nurses,
you're doing a lot of work, and it's
not the only patient you have.
To to pack as much of that care
and compassion as you can in during the
health care interaction,
That is key.
(23:56):
But how do we do that and still
keep professional distance?
Well, we humans are pretty good at forgetting
things.
If you ask a nurse, hey. Do you
remember this patient that you had in here
last week? There's a good chance that no,
they're not gonna remember that patient because been
a week ago, they've seen 40 other patients
since that time. But how do we then
(24:16):
balance
our empathy and our caring
without it going overboard?
I think professional caregivers
do that
pretty well.
And probably if they don't, that's where you
get the burnout. Right? The frustration and the
burnout because they're they're taking on more than
they need to or don't have the barriers
(24:37):
of self protection
set up to just keep that at a
distance. Mhmm. Because some people adopt other people's
pain and suffering. Certainly. And then it becomes
their burden or it becomes a symptom in
them. And I sit there thinking too, you
know, this is not a moral failing of
people to get burnt out or have compassion
fatigue
or just be wrung out from their job.
(24:57):
I mean, that happens
in every profession. Right? Everybody is prone to
burnout. Yeah.
But it's super important that we keep coming
back every day so that they can take
care of people like me. Yeah. I would
say probably in the medical field not knowing
this, but just knowing I've been to a
few emergency rooms. The people in emergency management
(25:18):
or emergency response stuff has probably got a
higher impact than the normal
come into the office at five, and we'll
fix that. Little bit different. Yeah. Right. The
chaos itself, I know, creates a whole level
of
energy and but, gee whiz, I can't imagine
somebody working in that environment for decades. Oh,
yeah. Yeah.
In my most popular book, which is called
(25:40):
I'm Here, Compassionate Communication and Patient Care, I
write a lot about my favorite nurse, Barb,
who worked
ICU
and plastics floor for forty two years. Wow.
That's a lot of years. The same floor,
same hospital for forty two years. That's something
you don't find much these days. Right?
(26:01):
That's amazing.
No. Her story is she is just absolutely
a nurse at at heart. She is a
compassionate human being.
She is a caregiver
at heart. The way she connected with me
when I first came under her care, I've
been in the hospital for a week or
two. I was just coming off of a
twenty five hour facial reconstruction.
(26:23):
One of the first things she did to
me was ask me,
do you want me to call you Marcus
or Mark?
Now keep in mind, at this point in
time, my head is swollen up to the
size of a basketball. I've got a trach
in my throat. I've got my jaws wired
shut and my eyes sewn shut.
I am a horror show in front of
her, but she took the time
(26:45):
to be personal and ask me,
what do you want me to call you?
And that spoke volumes to me. I just
feel like that's one of the best ways
that a health care professional can get on
the good side of a patient Yes. Is
simply by asking, what do you prefer to
be called? Yes. That is a person to
person
initial contact that helps build trust. Exactly.
(27:08):
Exactly. Alright. Well, before we get into the
compassionate communication skills that you teach,
what would be your definition
of the term
knowledge management?
Wow. So I I learned this term from
you
recently.
I learned the term from you. However, this
idea of dissemination
(27:28):
of knowledge throughout a large and complex
organization,
That's what I've been doing for
ten, twenty years now,
is really trying to get this information
into the hearts and minds and practices
of those caregivers that are on the front
lines. And I keep referring back to health
(27:49):
care professionals,
and 90% of the work that I do
is with health care professionals, but really, this
kind of stuff is just human. We're all
going to have someone in our life who
has suffered, and we get to be
that Jennifer or that nurse Barb
to be able to be there for somebody.
That's a that's a privilege that we get.
(28:09):
That's a privilege. You bring up a point
that I wanna stress here is that they
may not get the recognition for the effort
they put forward.
They are not doing it to be reciprocal.
They are doing it because they're genuine.
Right. I wanna make that case because some
people think, well, I treated them nice. Why
are they treating you know, or or whatever.
There's a lot of judgment involved with that
(28:29):
exchange. They don't need
that reciprocation. It just it's just the way
they are. That's their nature. I guess one
of the things that I often work with
is the culture of an organization.
I'd have to go find you this exact
stat and quote.
It's thought that if you you don't have
to get the knowledge to
everybody
in the organization.
(28:50):
You just have to get it to a
percentage of them who will then disseminate it
for you. It seemed like in health care,
at least with the idea of culture change,
that could be as little as 10%
of the organization.
So when I go and work with organizations,
I want to get at least 10% of
the working staff
in to see me in hopes that that
(29:12):
will start to
shift some culture in more positive direction. So
you talk about medical cultures.
I will say in my learnings of knowledge
management and
prominent
organizations in The United States that did it
in the medical field was the Mayo brothers.
(29:33):
Mhmm. Mhmm. The Mayo brothers brought in this
holistic concept of communicating and developing knowledge based
you know, they didn't
just
developing
knowledge based you know, they didn't just have
one doc go, well, you you need to
do this. They actually reversed it and created
a knowledge management
sharing methodology
that made them as super distinct in the
field. Yeah. And
(29:55):
there's many organizations that have tried to build
something
similar. It works for Mayo. Oh. The the
Mayo model works for Mayo. I I don't
know of too many other organizations
that do it like Mayo,
but you're also
getting out of my realms of expertise here
a little bit. That's good. That's good. We're
pushing each other in new directions. Mhmm. So
(30:17):
the Mayo Clinic, if you all don't know,
I mean, just just search knowledge management in
Mayo Clinic, and they're still producing a fair
amount of content. So it's just as an
FYI.
So now that we've discussed what knowledge management
is or what your perception is, let's hear
about what you teach in compassionate
communication skills.
We talked about the compassionate communication like Jennifer
(30:40):
gave to me with I'm here. I say
the three most compassionate things that you can
say to another human being, first, I'm here.
Second,
me too. And third,
I got you. I've got you. And I
think whenever we
communicate
in that way,
we are showing solidarity,
(31:00):
we are showing
understanding,
and
we're showing awareness
of another person's suffering. And so by those
three responses, I'm here, me too, and I've
got you,
that's that's where the compassionate communication
That's the goal.
That's the foundation. Yeah. The foundation. If we
translated that into any other community or organizational
(31:21):
structure
with human to human
contact and workflows
and how the business process was work.
If you remembered those three things,
in order to practice
just like your example of the sister nurse
that would come in the door and do
her mantra before she walked in to set
the stage for her psychologically and emotionally,
(31:44):
and it provides
a intentful
design. It's an intentful
design.
Where you worked, instead of doing the quippy,
and I'm I'm using myself an example,
my retort or my witty
response to something to keep it light or
laugh or to be jovial
(32:04):
instead of being empathetic.
If I just said,
I'm with you. I'm here.
And just leave it that short, concise,
and let it lay. It is such a
humanistic
effort
that it
becomes, I think, too simple
to not do anything like that because those
are bridge makers. Those are ways that strengthen
(32:26):
a culture. Right. And I think there's a
certain level of sarcasm
that comes through on so many different channels
that people
use sarcasm in order to keep away from
feelings or empathy.
Yeah. I go with what with what you
said at first there. This ain't rocket surgery.
Right? This is just human beings being human
(32:48):
being to one another.
But because we often get so caught up
in our own heads and in our own
tasks and our own lives and our own
thoughts,
we can forget about that patient that's at
the other end of the stethoscope.
When you talk about cynicism or sarcasm,
yeah, I get it. Because I tend to
have a typical a bit of a sarcastic
(33:09):
sense of humor, a bit of a cynical,
dark sense of humor as well.
But as a caregiver,
when you're taking care of a patient,
it may be a normal Tuesday for the
caregiver.
But it could be
one of the most significant days of that
patient's life. That's something to keep in mind.
(33:30):
When it's one of the most significant days
of another person's life,
do we need to go in
well, we definitely wanna go in with appropriate
humor, but we also wanna go in there
with the knowledge that they are suffering in
some way. I'll share a story that was
shared with me. I was a volunteer
with a hospice in Western New York for
a couple years, and I worked exclusively
(33:52):
with combat veterans because I was one. And,
I was able to sit with a man
that had served in World War two in
the Korean War.
Now this goes to exactly what you're saying,
and I'm glad I remembered it. He had
told me that he
was so angry
at this age, still in his deathbed
(34:13):
holding on to that wound. So this is
a good example of holding on to a
wound. So he told me he'd gotten brutally
messed up physically.
Head injury with a big piece of equipment
and just he was racked.
And all I can remember was this nurse
that said, oh, you poor thing.
Oh, you poor and he he reacted with
(34:34):
such a visceral response to that language.
And I was like, really? I can hear
my grandmother saying that. But he found it
so
negative in putting him into a class or
I don't know. I he he threw a
lot of attachment around it. I I wanna
think. In the process that I spent hours
(34:55):
with this man,
but he took it so painfully
and woundingly
that he kept that by him sharing that
story. But sharing the story with me, maybe
that helped to dissipate that energy.
I feel like there's healing
in the telling of our stories,
and I know that
(35:15):
all too well anecdotally from personal experience and
having been a professional speaker for the last
twenty five years that by me being able
to tell my story
the way I want to tell it with
the elements that I want to tell it
is,
it takes it from something that's tragic to
something that's triumphant. We can build off of
(35:37):
our stories. We can take our stories and
let them hold us back as your case
with this veteran,
or we can take something horrible that's happened
to us and learn from it and grow
from it and evolve from it. I think
that's a great note to land on. Let's
all work on
taking something
that was tragic,
and let's look at the triumphant
(35:59):
side of things if we allow ourselves
to go there. I think there's a certain
level of humanity that just wants to hold
on to that because that wound defined them.
Oh, I can't do that. I had this
happen in order. And it becomes a barrier
in a in a protective way that's not
really helpful. Yeah. And, you know, through a
lot of counseling, I've learned that too. A
(36:21):
lot of self inquiry. I've learned that, you
know, you can hold on to these stories.
And and people have asked me, well, you
know, you got hit by a drunk driver.
It was somebody else's choice that is the
reason that you broke all the bones in
your face. You had three hundred hours of
surgery, permanently blind.
Yes.
But if I spend all of my time
(36:43):
angry and pissed off at this guy, does
that
hurt him? No. It hurts who?
Me.
I figured that this guy took my sight.
I'm not gonna let him have my happiness.
I'm not gonna let him have my outlook.
I'm not gonna let him have my perspective.
I'm going to
keep living and
(37:04):
realize that this was an incident that happened,
terribly horrible incident that needed to be worked
through.
At this point, I've come out on the
opposite end of it
a stronger, hopefully wiser
person
that has the privilege of being able to
be able to share that information with other
people. And hopefully, they can become wiser and
grow from it too. The challenge is going
(37:26):
back to our Zen master kind of
everything's good
and om and I'm peaceful and everything is
calm,
is that we have to
endorse our ability
or
improve our ability
to respond
instead of react.
React. Yes. Exactly.
(37:46):
And that is something that I've worked on
for years, how to respond instead of react.
I go back to Viktor Frankl in Man's
Search for Meaning
when he talked about
that in between the stimulus
and the response,
there is a power
or there is a space, and in that
space is where your power lies.
(38:08):
I love that. I love that because I
I want to respond and not react. Exactly.
That's a great concept, and I'm glad we
landed on that. And thank you for sharing
your time and expertise.
And I want everybody to go work on
that space
in between.
Yeah. Edwin, thanks for having me on the
program today. It's been great spending some time
(38:29):
with you. Hopefully, we've disseminated
a little more knowledge, and I really appreciate
the time.
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast and knowledge management.
My name is Sonny Tonemi. As an art
administrator,
Because You Need to Know has been my
go to podcast and has helped me hone
(38:49):
my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the podcast
with your business.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
See you next time at Because You Need
to Know. If you'd like to contact us,
(39:10):
please email
byntk@pioneer-ks.org
or find us on LinkedIn.
Pioneer Knowledge Services welcomes you to the next
Because You Need to Know. I'm your host,
Edwin k Morris. I serve as president and
founder of this organization, and we are thrilled
to offer this educational program. These design conversations
bring you people's experiences and
(00:34):
I
and I am coming to you from my
home office in Orlando, Florida.
There's a couple of interesting things near me,
and near me is always a bit of
a subjective term.
(00:54):
I guess the most interesting things that are
near me right now, number one, there is
an unopened
bag of sage bundles
that are about a foot away from my
keyboard
for cleansing the house spiritually whenever I do
that. What I hope is the other interesting
thing that is close to me is one
of my books, which is called The Other
End of the Stethoscope.
(01:16):
It's a memoir, and it's about really traumatic
time in my life. It's also the most
recent book that I've read because
not that I'm narcissistic and have to go
read my own work,
but we are just putting out an audible
copy
of the other end of the stethoscope.
We're doing it with artificial intelligence and voice
(01:36):
cloning so that I don't have to actually
read the book into the microphone, but it
still comes out my voice. So tell me
who a mentor is for you. So a
mentor. The first thing that I think of
is my
official mentor.
Once I got out of college, I started
speaking
professionally.
One of my mentors was a customer service
(01:59):
speaker named Shep Hyken.
Shep was the one who really showed me
how to turn my personal
story
and
trauma
into
something that could help other people and I
could make a living
at at the same time.
So Shep was officially a mentor, but I've
(02:20):
had so many other ones.
Growing up in small town America, I was
involved in all types of high school activities.
So my football coaches, some of my teachers,
one of my advisors from college, I've just
had so many mentors
that have poured into me, and I, in
turn, been able to pour into other people.
(02:40):
And that's super rewarding to be able to
see somebody take your mentorship
and actually
put it to good use. Well, thanks for
bringing that all up. I totally agree. If
you were stuck on an island, what were
the three must have things you need?
Stuck on a deserted island, what are three
must things I must have?
Obviously, food and water and shelter.
(03:01):
But
beyond that,
I would certainly hope that I could still
have an iPhone and access to the Internet.
That's because,
I do all of my data consumption and
all of my reading
through an electronic device.
And so I'd I'd kinda need that still.
(03:23):
What's your biggest hope? My biggest hope is
to leave this world a more compassionate
place than I found it.
So your wealth of experience
in trauma
has
actually been a jumping off point into a
whole new world. Yeah.
You could say that.
My life
(03:44):
has taken some dramatic turns, some 80 degree
turns. Yeah. As a young man in Missouri,
I I don't know. I was just a
normal kid. Right? I only knew what I
knew, and I didn't have a whole lot
of experience outside of my small town world.
Whenever I started college, about six weeks into
my freshman year of college, I came home
for the weekend and
(04:06):
went to a St. Louis Blues hockey game
on a Saturday night with three friends that
I had met at church camp. On our
way home from that hockey game, my friends
and I got broadsided by a drunk driver.
That crash not only took 100%
of my sight instantaneously
and totally and permanently.
I also received what is called a LaForte
(04:29):
three fracture,
which LaForte three is a surgical term, and
it pretty much means that everything between the
hairline and the chin has been crushed.
Lots and lots of surgery. I've I've laid
on an Operating Room table for well over
three hundred hours,
months of hospitalization
and rehab.
(04:50):
It's led me into doing
what I do now because when you've had
as much experience
at the other end of the stethoscope as
I've had, you've seen the good, the bad,
and the profound
in patient care.
Those good stories and even the bad stories
we can learn from, and that's what my
(05:10):
work is, is to teach health care professionals
what are the little things that we can
do to help patients retain their their dignity,
their independence,
their holistic self while they are healing. Well,
trauma
do you think the word trauma gets kind
of overused
a little bit, you know, in just general
(05:31):
sense and socials you know? Oh, I'm wounded.
I'm I I have trauma.
Or is just the elevation of what trauma
is very self dependently defined? I think it
is self defined because, obviously,
what may be traumatic for me, and I'm
talking a small emotional trauma, say, that I
get in an argument with a family member
(05:53):
or something like that. Yeah. That hurts me
deeply, and I carry that trauma. Yeah. Whereas
somebody else can walk the other person can
walk away from that not feeling traumatized
at all. So it's a sensitivity.
Sure. Personal sensitivities
to things. Similar to, it's cold in here.
Well, I'm not cold. It's hot in here.
It's very subjective. Sure. I wanna pull up
(06:14):
a definition. Webster says trauma is an injury,
to living tissue caused by an extrinsic
force
or agent.
And this is the did you know, which
I love in Merriam. They're they add more
data to the word.
Trauma is the Greek word for wound. Although
the Greeks use the term only for physical
injuries,
(06:35):
nowadays, trauma is likely to refer to emotional
wounds. That gets into the realm of the
psychic or the psyche
of what's woundful or sensitive to you, and
everybody's different. Sure. So how do you think
organizations
and I'm gonna bring this back to communities
or organizations of people, either way.
(06:56):
How does an organization
one side, bring up it's good to be
sensitive, but then
kinda balance that out with we can't be
super sensitive to everything, or or is that
a even a thing to try to get
to? Well,
right. This brings up a a really interesting
question, and I work with those caregivers at
(07:17):
the bedside. Typically, my audiences,
my people are
any of those people who physically lay hands
on a patient.
And
they have to balance things. How do I
care about this patient
physically? How do I help them get all
their physical needs met while they're under my
care?
(07:38):
And then
emotionally, can I help them too? And what
I really try to
inspire in my audiences
is that the balance can come just from
being patient. Mhmm. The balance can come just
from taking an extra moment because there have
been studies that talk about how if
patient and the doctor sits down, that that
(08:00):
patient perceives that that doctor
was in their room for a lot longer
than they were. The doctor may have only
been in their room for a lot longer
than they were. The doctor may have only
been in their room for
a lot longer than they were. The doctor
may have only been in their room sitting
down for ninety seconds, but the patient perceived
it to be four or five minutes. When
we can take just a little bit of
(08:21):
time and step out of
the busyness of life
to be present in the moment with that
patient,
that's what I'm trying to get healthcare professionals
to do, to slow down a little bit,
to be able to take care of that
patient so you're not balancing
a hundred tasks that you have to do
in an hour. You can really focus on
(08:43):
the holistic healing of that patient. Well, that
takes a skill of personal control because you're
talking about a Zen master type of ability
that allows yourself to be present
and not frazzled by the 75 other things
going on that day. Sure. Well, it sounds
real easy, but how do you do it?
Right. Right. And you're right. A Zen master
(09:05):
would do it perfectly, but,
unfortunately, none of us are
are Zen masters. As much as I try,
as much meditation as I can as I
do, I can't claim that title.
But what I can do is remind people
just the little ways that they can be
present. There is
a doctor at Vanderbilt University. She is also
(09:27):
a nun.
She has a process
of knocking on a patient's door, dipping her
head, saying the fastest,
hail Mary in the world before she steps
in to speak with every patient. And I
think that is a centering practice.
That's a centering practice. That's what we can
(09:48):
do. In the world of overreactions
and,
everything's an issue,
the practice
of humanity
takes some work. And when everybody is frazzled
by all things
personally,
it's hard to be outside of yourself in
order to be centered.
In my experience studying shamanism,
(10:09):
it is a practice that takes work. I
mean, it's just like going to the gym.
If you don't go, it's not gonna get
the results. And that mental model of your
example
with her
having the process probably starts before she touches
the handle or touches the door
to turn that on, to turn on that
rhythm and brings her to the focal point
(10:30):
of now. Yes. So in an organization
of or community and like with your nurses,
how do you build the practice? How do
you how do you train
people? And it's kind of a protect themselves.
Right? So it's a dual purpose. It protects
them as a human
and a soul on a planet, but it
also brings better
(10:51):
service to the client or the patient. So
there's a few ways of doing this, and
the way that I am most familiar with
comes out of my academic
background.
So I have a master's in a field
that's called narrative medicine.
If you're not familiar with narrative medicine, it's
not real surprising. There are only two narrative
medicine programs in the country.
(11:11):
The one that I went to is at
Columbia University. I graduated in 2011
and my class was only the third to
complete the master's level training program. And so
it's still a very new and emerging field,
and it's a conglomeration
of medicine and healthcare and philosophy
and social work and counseling and sociology
(11:35):
and psychology
and literature.
What the ultimate purpose of narrative medicine
was
originally was to help doctors
learn how to deeply listen
to their patients.
So when a patient is giving a report
about themselves,
the doctor is picking up on the subtleties
(11:57):
of what that patient is saying. And the
doctor is learning how to ask open ended
questions
so that they can most effectively treat that
patient.
That's
wonderful.
The thing of it is, I hang out
with nurses,
and I'm a businessman.
So
what I do with nurses
is reflective writing and therapeutic journaling.
(12:20):
And I based this all off of a
study.
It's a seminal study in therapeutic writing and
journaling. Can I do you do you wanna
hear about this? Because I think it's Yeah.
No. I I think it's a fast I've
never heard of the topic,
and that's how people learn new things. So
bring it on. So there is a social
psychologist in the state of Texas named James
Pennebaker.
(12:40):
Pennebaker did some of the original studies back
in the eighties of using writing and reflective
journaling
to overcome
trauma or to better process trauma.
And so what he did is he took
about 30 or 40 students, and all of
these students reported
that they had had some type of sexual
(13:03):
trauma in their background. Mhmm. They didn't have
to disclose what that was, but everybody
had some type of sexual trauma in their
background. Pennebaker brought these students together
for four days in a row,
twenty minutes at a time for four days.
On the first day, he tasked these students
to spend the next twenty minutes writing about
(13:24):
the most traumatic,
upsetting,
horrific
thing that you've ever been through. Okay. And
they wrote on that for twenty minutes, and
then everybody went home.
Day number two, they brought them back.
Second verse, same as the first. Write for
the next twenty minutes
on the most horrible traumatic upsetting thing that's
(13:44):
ever happened to you.
Now, on day number two, you could write
about that same event as you wrote about
on day number one, or you could choose
a totally different trial Okay. To write about.
Third day, same thing. Fourth day, same thing.
Write for twenty minutes
about your trauma. And at the end of
that study, they followed these students over the
(14:05):
next semester,
and the students
had better academic performance,
better interpersonal
relationships,
they had better health,
which was
how many times a student went to the
campus infirmary
over a semester, and these students who were
in the part of the study went less
(14:26):
often.
And so what Pennebaker and his colleagues discovered
is it's often not so much the traumas
that hold us back,
it's the secret keeping
about the traumas.
When we write our traumas, we get to
process them, and we get to tell tell
them, and they come out of our heart,
out of our brain, out of our psyche
(14:47):
onto the paper. And in the writing, this
the physical writing, long hand writing
of our stories,
we're working them out to where they don't
have as much control over us psychologically. Yes.
Yes. The impact of holding on to pains
of the past is a wound keeping element
that keeps that energy there.
(15:09):
And what you're speaking of is an exercise
I've seen in various ways. But if you're
an employee of an organization
and you got wounds, you're holding on to
these stories of, well, I I hate that
guy because he's a a jerk or whatever
the infraction is. Let's go back to what
we said. Trauma is your perception of a
wound.
That's what it is. So we're not to
(15:29):
over educate it. We don't have to over
complicate it. If you're able, in a holistic
way,
express
that wound
and express it outside of yourself, this works
in conversation also, and you get it out,
you're doing two things. You're telling the story
of the whole nut roll. Right? You're basically
(15:51):
representing that incident or wound,
and then it's expressed outside of you. So
you're witnessing
you're providing witness to that. So it's out
of the dark and somebody can see it.
That process in and of itself relieves
a lot of the internal
mechanisms that make it more
(16:12):
bad than it should be. Not the discounter,
but just to relieve the control it has
over your physical and emotional self. Sure. It
allows it to heal.
It allows it to
be less than, which is a positive. It
is. It is. I like the people that
I work with, the nurses, the doctors, the
(16:33):
emergency crews,
EMS, etcetera,
these people witness
so much
human suffering on a daily basis.
At certain points, it feels like it never
ends.
And when it feels like it never ends,
like you're not making a difference, that's when
compassion, fatigue, and burnout
set in.
(16:54):
Especially
in the helping professions,
I feel like this this reflection
and storytelling
is really, really necessary.
I'm not naive enough to think that every
nurse is going to go home at the
end of their shift and write for twenty
minutes. Right? That's probably not going to happen.
(17:15):
So what I do is I just encourage
nurses at the end of every shift, open
up the notes app on your phone and
write out the thing that was a win
today. What was a win for you today?
This patient gave me a heartfelt thank you.
Okay. Great. Write that down. One sentence.
And what is one thing that happened today
(17:35):
that if it were to happen again tomorrow,
you would do it differently?
And so you write down a learning experience.
Oh. And it doesn't take very long to
put together a pretty nice fat stack of
the good that you're doing. Right? You can
look back over those notes and see the
good that you're doing, see how much you're
learning,
(17:55):
keeps us engaged in the work. If you've
ever been a patient and you've had a
healthcare professional that was disengaged,
that was bored or going through the motions
or worse yet, even slightly cruel or what
you perceive to be cruel,
these are the kind of people that could
still benefit from
expressive and reflective writing. I wanna go back
(18:17):
to your
post accident.
You shared with me this concept that caused
the inspiration
for you to keep going.
Someone held your hand. Yeah. So can you
tell me the story that helped that shift
for you? So this really gets down to
okay. Well,
this is all nice and fine and good,
(18:37):
but but how do we use it in
a practical sense? How do I use this
on the job?
What I always come back to is the
essence of compassion
is what I received that first night in
the emergency department.
That first night that they hauled me into
the emergency room,
luckily,
the crash site was only about three miles
(18:58):
away from a level one trauma center.
Even with a distance that close,
EMS
still had to perform a cricothyrotomy
in my throat in the field.
Those are rarely,
rarely done. Most paramedics will go their entire
career and never have to do one. I
was hanging by a string when they rolled
(19:18):
me into the emergency room.
There was a 20 year old patient care
tech
named Jennifer.
Jennifer's assignment
when I wasn't in surgery, Jennifer's assignment
was that she had to stay by my
bed and hold my hand. Wow. Yeah.
That was her assignment.
(19:40):
Maybe that was also to just make sure
I was still breathing,
but her assignment was to stay by my
bed and hold my hand. I was in
and out of consciousness
so much
that whenever I would come back into consciousness,
it was just this bludgeoning of pain and
darkness and fear and terror.
Jennifer held my hand, and every time she
(20:00):
could tell that I was awake,
she would say what I say are the
two most comforting words any human being can
say to another. Yeah. And those words are,
I'm here. Yeah. I'm here. When we can
truly be here, be there, be present for
another person
in their time of suffering
(20:21):
Yeah. That's That's power right there. One of
the other things that makes us human. And
it walks us right into this friendly term
you introduced me to called personalism.
Personalism,
the definition,
a system of thought which maintains the primacy
of the human or that reality has meaning
only through
(20:41):
the conscious mind.
Personalism must be a bit of a ethos
that you're working with.
Yeah. Ethos and pathos.
So I've been adjunct faculty at University of
Notre Dame now for seven or eight years,
I guess. And I have the
the good fortune to teach pre meds, a
course that's called introduction
(21:03):
to personalism
and medicine.
Now personalism
is a term that's a little dated
these days.
We probably wouldn't even use that term so
much. We would use the term human experience.
What is the human experience
in medicine?
I also bring that out of my patient
experience work in hospitals. But the whole idea
(21:25):
is if you've ever been to a doctor
or a hospital and you felt like it
was an assembly line, that's what we're working
against.
This is the opposite of that assembly line.
This is when a doctor
has a moment to be able to connect
with you on a personal humanistic
level.
What can they glean during that short interaction
(21:49):
that helps the care team, the doctors, the
nurses, etcetera,
see that patient in the bed as a
person,
not just a patient.
That doesn't seem like we would have to
teach that. Two hundred years ago, would we
have to teach that? Is is the culture
and society changed?
Or and better yet, is there a society
(22:09):
that that doesn't need to be taught? Is
western
medicine the only ones that have to learn
that? I doubt it.
Okay. I because I think if we look
at if we look at eastern thought and
religion, we go back thousands of years. There
was still the anxious mind. There was still
the monkey mind that everybody has that's bouncing
(22:29):
all over.
And when our monkey mind is bouncing all
over, that means we're not in the moment
present with what's going on right here, right
now.
I do feel like that this is somewhat
a human
trait that we all need to work on.
Yeah. There's a Psychology Today article called the
paradox of empathy
(22:50):
dated 06/02/2024.
The first paragraph, I'm just gonna read. It's
a short one.
The more we care about someone,
the more difficult
it is to help them.
Oh. Despite our intentions of relieving their pain
or suffering alongside them interferes with our capacity
to be helpful.
I guess I've seen that, maybe a little
bit, or maybe we're just not good at
(23:12):
being empathetic as a human on the planet.
Yeah. That's a good question. And where I'm
thinking about that, whenever you're reading that, I'm
thinking about professional distance
between nurses. Right? We want the nurse to
see that person in the bed as a
person, not just a patient.
But on the other hand, I think this
goes back to the balance that we were
talking about in the beginning and probably what
(23:34):
the rest of this article talks about. Can
we care too deeply? Well, to a certain
extent for hospital nurses,
you're doing a lot of work, and it's
not the only patient you have.
To to pack as much of that care
and compassion as you can in during the
health care interaction,
That is key.
(23:56):
But how do we do that and still
keep professional distance?
Well, we humans are pretty good at forgetting
things.
If you ask a nurse, hey. Do you
remember this patient that you had in here
last week? There's a good chance that no,
they're not gonna remember that patient because been
a week ago, they've seen 40 other patients
since that time. But how do we then
(24:16):
balance
our empathy and our caring
without it going overboard?
I think professional caregivers
do that
pretty well.
And probably if they don't, that's where you
get the burnout. Right? The frustration and the
burnout because they're they're taking on more than
they need to or don't have the barriers
(24:37):
of self protection
set up to just keep that at a
distance. Mhmm. Because some people adopt other people's
pain and suffering. Certainly. And then it becomes
their burden or it becomes a symptom in
them. And I sit there thinking too, you
know, this is not a moral failing of
people to get burnt out or have compassion
fatigue
or just be wrung out from their job.
(24:57):
I mean, that happens
in every profession. Right? Everybody is prone to
burnout. Yeah.
But it's super important that we keep coming
back every day so that they can take
care of people like me. Yeah. I would
say probably in the medical field not knowing
this, but just knowing I've been to a
few emergency rooms. The people in emergency management
(25:18):
or emergency response stuff has probably got a
higher impact than the normal
come into the office at five, and we'll
fix that. Little bit different. Yeah. Right. The
chaos itself, I know, creates a whole level
of
energy and but, gee whiz, I can't imagine
somebody working in that environment for decades. Oh,
yeah. Yeah.
In my most popular book, which is called
(25:40):
I'm Here, Compassionate Communication and Patient Care, I
write a lot about my favorite nurse, Barb,
who worked
ICU
and plastics floor for forty two years. Wow.
That's a lot of years. The same floor,
same hospital for forty two years. That's something
you don't find much these days. Right?
(26:01):
That's amazing.
No. Her story is she is just absolutely
a nurse at at heart. She is a
compassionate human being.
She is a caregiver
at heart. The way she connected with me
when I first came under her care, I've
been in the hospital for a week or
two. I was just coming off of a
twenty five hour facial reconstruction.
(26:23):
One of the first things she did to
me was ask me,
do you want me to call you Marcus
or Mark?
Now keep in mind, at this point in
time, my head is swollen up to the
size of a basketball. I've got a trach
in my throat. I've got my jaws wired
shut and my eyes sewn shut.
I am a horror show in front of
her, but she took the time
(26:45):
to be personal and ask me,
what do you want me to call you?
And that spoke volumes to me. I just
feel like that's one of the best ways
that a health care professional can get on
the good side of a patient Yes. Is
simply by asking, what do you prefer to
be called? Yes. That is a person to
person
initial contact that helps build trust. Exactly.
(27:08):
Exactly. Alright. Well, before we get into the
compassionate communication skills that you teach,
what would be your definition
of the term
knowledge management?
Wow. So I I learned this term from
you
recently.
I learned the term from you. However, this
idea of dissemination
(27:28):
of knowledge throughout a large and complex
organization,
That's what I've been doing for
ten, twenty years now,
is really trying to get this information
into the hearts and minds and practices
of those caregivers that are on the front
lines. And I keep referring back to health
(27:49):
care professionals,
and 90% of the work that I do
is with health care professionals, but really, this
kind of stuff is just human. We're all
going to have someone in our life who
has suffered, and we get to be
that Jennifer or that nurse Barb
to be able to be there for somebody.
That's a that's a privilege that we get.
(28:09):
That's a privilege. You bring up a point
that I wanna stress here is that they
may not get the recognition for the effort
they put forward.
They are not doing it to be reciprocal.
They are doing it because they're genuine.
Right. I wanna make that case because some
people think, well, I treated them nice. Why
are they treating you know, or or whatever.
There's a lot of judgment involved with that
(28:29):
exchange. They don't need
that reciprocation. It just it's just the way
they are. That's their nature. I guess one
of the things that I often work with
is the culture of an organization.
I'd have to go find you this exact
stat and quote.
It's thought that if you you don't have
to get the knowledge to
everybody
in the organization.
(28:50):
You just have to get it to a
percentage of them who will then disseminate it
for you. It seemed like in health care,
at least with the idea of culture change,
that could be as little as 10%
of the organization.
So when I go and work with organizations,
I want to get at least 10% of
the working staff
in to see me in hopes that that
(29:12):
will start to
shift some culture in more positive direction. So
you talk about medical cultures.
I will say in my learnings of knowledge
management and
prominent
organizations in The United States that did it
in the medical field was the Mayo brothers.
(29:33):
Mhmm. Mhmm. The Mayo brothers brought in this
holistic concept of communicating and developing knowledge based
you know, they didn't
just
developing
knowledge based you know, they didn't just have
one doc go, well, you you need to
do this. They actually reversed it and created
a knowledge management
sharing methodology
that made them as super distinct in the
field. Yeah. And
(29:55):
there's many organizations that have tried to build
something
similar. It works for Mayo. Oh. The the
Mayo model works for Mayo. I I don't
know of too many other organizations
that do it like Mayo,
but you're also
getting out of my realms of expertise here
a little bit. That's good. That's good. We're
pushing each other in new directions. Mhmm. So
(30:17):
the Mayo Clinic, if you all don't know,
I mean, just just search knowledge management in
Mayo Clinic, and they're still producing a fair
amount of content. So it's just as an
FYI.
So now that we've discussed what knowledge management
is or what your perception is, let's hear
about what you teach in compassionate
communication skills.
We talked about the compassionate communication like Jennifer
(30:40):
gave to me with I'm here. I say
the three most compassionate things that you can
say to another human being, first, I'm here.
Second,
me too. And third,
I got you. I've got you. And I
think whenever we
communicate
in that way,
we are showing solidarity,
(31:00):
we are showing
understanding,
and
we're showing awareness
of another person's suffering. And so by those
three responses, I'm here, me too, and I've
got you,
that's that's where the compassionate communication
That's the goal.
That's the foundation. Yeah. The foundation. If we
translated that into any other community or organizational
(31:21):
structure
with human to human
contact and workflows
and how the business process was work.
If you remembered those three things,
in order to practice
just like your example of the sister nurse
that would come in the door and do
her mantra before she walked in to set
the stage for her psychologically and emotionally,
(31:44):
and it provides
a intentful
design. It's an intentful
design.
Where you worked, instead of doing the quippy,
and I'm I'm using myself an example,
my retort or my witty
response to something to keep it light or
laugh or to be jovial
(32:04):
instead of being empathetic.
If I just said,
I'm with you. I'm here.
And just leave it that short, concise,
and let it lay. It is such a
humanistic
effort
that it
becomes, I think, too simple
to not do anything like that because those
are bridge makers. Those are ways that strengthen
(32:26):
a culture. Right. And I think there's a
certain level of sarcasm
that comes through on so many different channels
that people
use sarcasm in order to keep away from
feelings or empathy.
Yeah. I go with what with what you
said at first there. This ain't rocket surgery.
Right? This is just human beings being human
(32:48):
being to one another.
But because we often get so caught up
in our own heads and in our own
tasks and our own lives and our own
thoughts,
we can forget about that patient that's at
the other end of the stethoscope.
When you talk about cynicism or sarcasm,
yeah, I get it. Because I tend to
have a typical a bit of a sarcastic
(33:09):
sense of humor, a bit of a cynical,
dark sense of humor as well.
But as a caregiver,
when you're taking care of a patient,
it may be a normal Tuesday for the
caregiver.
But it could be
one of the most significant days of that
patient's life. That's something to keep in mind.
(33:30):
When it's one of the most significant days
of another person's life,
do we need to go in
well, we definitely wanna go in with appropriate
humor, but we also wanna go in there
with the knowledge that they are suffering in
some way. I'll share a story that was
shared with me. I was a volunteer
with a hospice in Western New York for
a couple years, and I worked exclusively
(33:52):
with combat veterans because I was one. And,
I was able to sit with a man
that had served in World War two in
the Korean War.
Now this goes to exactly what you're saying,
and I'm glad I remembered it. He had
told me that he
was so angry
at this age, still in his deathbed
(34:13):
holding on to that wound. So this is
a good example of holding on to a
wound. So he told me he'd gotten brutally
messed up physically.
Head injury with a big piece of equipment
and just he was racked.
And all I can remember was this nurse
that said, oh, you poor thing.
Oh, you poor and he he reacted with
(34:34):
such a visceral response to that language.
And I was like, really? I can hear
my grandmother saying that. But he found it
so
negative in putting him into a class or
I don't know. I he he threw a
lot of attachment around it. I I wanna
think. In the process that I spent hours
(34:55):
with this man,
but he took it so painfully
and woundingly
that he kept that by him sharing that
story. But sharing the story with me, maybe
that helped to dissipate that energy.
I feel like there's healing
in the telling of our stories,
and I know that
(35:15):
all too well anecdotally from personal experience and
having been a professional speaker for the last
twenty five years that by me being able
to tell my story
the way I want to tell it with
the elements that I want to tell it
is,
it takes it from something that's tragic to
something that's triumphant. We can build off of
(35:37):
our stories. We can take our stories and
let them hold us back as your case
with this veteran,
or we can take something horrible that's happened
to us and learn from it and grow
from it and evolve from it. I think
that's a great note to land on. Let's
all work on
taking something
that was tragic,
and let's look at the triumphant
(35:59):
side of things if we allow ourselves
to go there. I think there's a certain
level of humanity that just wants to hold
on to that because that wound defined them.
Oh, I can't do that. I had this
happen in order. And it becomes a barrier
in a in a protective way that's not
really helpful. Yeah. And, you know, through a
lot of counseling, I've learned that too. A
(36:21):
lot of self inquiry. I've learned that, you
know, you can hold on to these stories.
And and people have asked me, well, you
know, you got hit by a drunk driver.
It was somebody else's choice that is the
reason that you broke all the bones in
your face. You had three hundred hours of
surgery, permanently blind.
Yes.
But if I spend all of my time
(36:43):
angry and pissed off at this guy, does
that
hurt him? No. It hurts who?
Me.
I figured that this guy took my sight.
I'm not gonna let him have my happiness.
I'm not gonna let him have my outlook.
I'm not gonna let him have my perspective.
I'm going to
keep living and
(37:04):
realize that this was an incident that happened,
terribly horrible incident that needed to be worked
through.
At this point, I've come out on the
opposite end of it
a stronger, hopefully wiser
person
that has the privilege of being able to
be able to share that information with other
people. And hopefully, they can become wiser and
grow from it too. The challenge is going
(37:26):
back to our Zen master kind of
everything's good
and om and I'm peaceful and everything is
calm,
is that we have to
endorse our ability
or
improve our ability
to respond
instead of react.
React. Yes. Exactly.
(37:46):
And that is something that I've worked on
for years, how to respond instead of react.
I go back to Viktor Frankl in Man's
Search for Meaning
when he talked about
that in between the stimulus
and the response,
there is a power
or there is a space, and in that
space is where your power lies.
(38:08):
I love that. I love that because I
I want to respond and not react. Exactly.
That's a great concept, and I'm glad we
landed on that. And thank you for sharing
your time and expertise.
And I want everybody to go work on
that space
in between.
Yeah. Edwin, thanks for having me on the
program today. It's been great spending some time
(38:29):
with you. Hopefully, we've disseminated
a little more knowledge, and I really appreciate
the time.
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast and knowledge management.
My name is Sonny Tonemi. As an art
administrator,
Because You Need to Know has been my
go to podcast and has helped me hone
(38:49):
my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the podcast
with your business.
Thank you for joining this extraordinary journey, and
we hope the experiences gained add value to
you and yours.
See you next time at Because You Need
to Know. If you'd like to contact us,
(39:10):
please email
byntk@pioneer-ks.org
or find us on LinkedIn.
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