Category Archives: culture

Tribe, Community, and Mission to Connect

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berries figs regina 9-2019

Fruit for Regina’s sweet galettes.  These are tiger figs, available at Trader Joe’s. 🙂

Friends, don’t you love those synthesis/cohesion moments when all of a sudden something important to you—a passion, a core value, a project—is validated from multiple angles?  That happened for me this weekend and I am positively giddy from it!

Tribe

My new group of medical students promises to be just as engaging and fun as every other I’ve had, yay!  They are only three rotations into their third year and already wise beyond their training.  This month we discussed tribalism.  They considered stereotypes, barriers to overcoming them, and how they might lead by example.  And they identified experiences in which such barriers are already breaking down.  “Finding your people” came up as both an aspirational as well as a potentially divisive ideal.  We discussed the benefits of ‘We’re Great!’ and the risks of ‘They Suck’ attitudes.  The conversation did not veer into political arenas, but it crossed my mind.  I tried to point out how the skills of professionalism we address in medical training apply well beyond the bedside and medical teams.  Our tribal memberships can save us and also keep us from living fully.  I’m so grateful to have these reminders on a regular basis.

Community

Some of you may notice I reference Ozan Varol increasingly this year (see coda below for why I think he’s so great).  I started following him in the winter after reading his post on why facts don’t change people’s minds.  This summer I joined his Inner Circle, a private forum of diverse and like-minded folks who subscribe to Ozan’s newsletter and wish to connect.  Yesterday Ozan generously hosted a conference call for three of us to get feedback on current projects.  At 2:00pm Central Daylight Time, I logged on from Chicago.  I met Ozan and his wife in Portland, OR.  J, a Canadian, called in from the Dominican Republic, where she has lived the past 24 years.  C, an organizational psychologist interested in humane-ness in the workplace, logged on from Germany.  And R, an education leader working on emotional intelligence workshops for schoolteachers, called in at 12:00am from India.  C, R, and I presented our projects and everybody gave generous, honest, and encouraging feedback to help us all do and be our best.  I could hardly contain my enthusiasm, gesticulating wildly and barely staying in the webcam frame sometimes.

I wrote to Ozan afterward:  “I’m still wrapping my brain around what you have done here–stimulated so many people to think more critically and also openly… Convened a community of us all and given us a forum to interact, at our own pace and in our own words, from around the world… and invited us to help one another, to contribute to lives that we would never otherwise touch…  What a privilege, a pleasure, and an absolutely ecstatic experience!!!”

Mission to Connect

I think it’s fair to say that part of Ozan’s mission is to connect people.  But not just for the sake of connection—to make us all more thoughtful, curious, and collaborative beings.  A man after my own heart!

Maybe my passion for such connection stems in part from my immigrant roots?  Today my daughter and I embarked on another food adventure at home:  Onigiri and chong you bing (but ours are much easier than the linked recipe!).  The former turned out to be less labor-intensive than I expected, so we made a bunch, both salmon and chicken versions.

onigiri chicken

Tonight’s teriyaki chicken onigiri selection

My Korean-American friend of 20 years, Regina, posted photos of her own culinary accomplishments today—savory and sweet galettes.  Mei and I may try those next!  Our ensuing text thread included my laments about the unhealthiness of onion pancakes (but oh, salt, fat, and starch—yummo!).  Her kind reply: “Making food together with your kids, carrying on food culture, bonding, it’s a win-win!!”  I knew I loved her for good reason.  And how lovely that we have stayed in touch all this time!  If not for that, I could never have recruited her to join my work team this year.  And holy cow, talk about a win-win!  Her kindness, generosity, curiosity, openness, and conscientiousness have elevated the team even higher than we could have dreamed—Thank you, Regina!  What a blessing our connection has been for so many.

My new German friend C is thinking of launching a blog to explore humane-ness and its effects and importance in the work environment.  She thinks maybe next year.  Yesterday Ozan and I both encouraged her to start now.  Asked whether I would follow, I said HELL YES.  Not only will writing about her topic develop her ideas and thesis faster; the interface with fellow readers and writers on a blog, the opportunity to join a community of thinkers, and the connection with folks from who knows where, doing who knows what amazing things, may very well yield untold treasures of relationship and development—as it has for me—so why wait?

Tonight my heart bursts with gratitude for membership in such thriving, complex, diverse and overlapping tribes.  I treasure the various communities that welcome me and give me a chance to contribute.  And my mission to make as many and meaningful connections as possible between all people stands validated and sustained once again.

Onward, my friends.  As Simon Sinek says, Together Is Better.

 

Ozan about

Why Ozan’s So Great:

  1. Humility.  So many bloggers and podcasters are so full of themselves.  It’s obnoxious.  They may have expertise and knowledge, maybe even wisdom.  But I cannot get past my aversion to their ego.  I have no such issue with Ozan. đŸ™‚
  2. Goldilocks content.  The blogs are the perfect length!  Enough words to make his point eloquently, and not so many that I lose interest before the end.  He contacts subscribers at just the right frequency–weekly emails and biweekly podcasts.  And the newsletters are also the perfect blend of blog, quote, and other interesting material.  So many other authors inundate the inbox that I first ignore and then unsubscribe.  Ozan has really found the perfect touch.
  3. Resonance.  Though Ozan’s podcast topic is failure, what he really addresses is humanity in all of our complexity and fascinating ironies.  I LOVE that!  And he does it nonjudgmentally, always from the perspective of curiosity and learning.  I really respect that–the generosity of spirit and growth, exploratory mindset.
  4. Consistency and reliability.  Ozan is clearly disciplined and intentional when it comes to this work (and so I imagine he is also this way in life).  His podcast script has a reassuring cadence and authenticity to it.  When he says he’ll reply to all messages, he actually replies (that is what most impresses me about him–his responsiveness and how he makes me feel like I matter).  He says he will update us on something and then he does.  All in all a truly stand up and stand out guy among so many!

 

We Are Really Bad At This

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turkey human car tracks

Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch, Loveland, Colorado, March 2019

How many truly meaningful and fulfilling conversations do you have in a day?

How many such relationships do you have?

Though I wrote my Pit Crew post almost a year ago, its ideas recur regularly.  I have linked to it on multiple subsequent posts.  I share it with patients and reference it in conversations often.  My patients are leaders of large corporations and organizations.  My colleagues and I lead teams in the hospital, the medical group, and the medical school.  My friends lead their families and communities.  When I think about our health and its consequences, it’s about taking care of those for whom we are responsible, ourselves included.

Are you generally the one who always takes care of others?  How does this affect your style and effectiveness as a leader?

Who Takes Care of You?

I estimate that about 20% of the time when I ask this question, my patients say that nobody takes care of them; they do it themselves.  They don’t mean that nobody cares about them.  It’s that they don’t really depend on anyone for counsel and/or support.  They hold everything together themselves.  I always have mixed feelings when the conversation takes this turn.  On one hand I feel admiration and respect, especially when they seem generally healthy—apparently unaffected by physical, mental, and emotional dysfunction.  On the other, I get curious.  How do they sustain this Lone Ranger method?  And what does it cost them?  I believe we all need tight, vulnerable, and safe connections through which we can get raw and real, and work through life’s ultimately messy sh*t.  We need others, even if it’s only one or two, to help us truly hold it all together.  My default assumption is that if we don’t have such connections, we are not living into our full potential.

And today I feel cynical.  I think we are getting really, really bad at taking care of each other.

Driving to work this week I wondered to myself, why do we feel the dearth of mental health services so acutely these days?  Is it that more of us are living on the psychological razor’s edge of mental health and illness?  Are we not diagnosably mentally ill but simply, profoundly, stressed to our limits of sanity and function?  Is that why none of my patients can get in to see a psychiatrist or therapist for weeks to months?  Is that why physicians are increasingly leaving the profession and killing ourselves?  Why do we feel so hopeless?

It’s easy to blame social media.  And I do, partially.  The cruelest irony lives here.  My non-evidence based impression is that cyberbullying bears equally life-threatening consequences as face to face bullying.  If you know of evidence to support or refute this premise, please share.  Negative interactions on social media, which rage so easily like wildfires, are now understood to contribute significantly to the rise in loneliness across the country.  Worse, cultivating truly positive relationships via social media is much harder and more complex, even deceptive.   So on balance the risks and harms of social media may far outweigh the benefits.  There simply is no substitute for personal, physical contact, for sharing the same space, breathing the same air, experiencing another’s full presence.

Worse yet, too often we can’t even get that right!  Ozan Varol wrote about this in his last post, “3 Ways to Be Insufferable In Coversation.”  They are:  1. Always turn the conversation back to yourself; 2. Pretend to listen; and 3. Ask no questions.  How many people have you already met today who do this on the regular?  If you’re honest, how many times today have you committed these relational sins?  It’s okay, we all do it sometimes.  As GI Joe says, knowing is half the battle.  The other half is doing something about it!

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Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, July 2019

So what do we do?

First, Attend.  Pay attention.  How much time do I spend on social media?  What do I get out of it?  When does Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) drive my scrolling?  Am I really connecting?  Or am I stalking, comparing, judging, flaming, agitating the echo chamber, and otherwise wasting time and energy?  How can I set alerts and redirect my routine?

Second, Intend.  What is the best use of my time?  If I want to see how my friends are doing, rather than check my Facebook feed, why not call them up?  Send a text, photo, or—gasp—a handwritten note just to say hi, I’m thinking of you?  It may cost you time, energy, and $0.55 in postage.  But aren’t your real friends worth the investment?  You can do it on social media too—if you slow down and think about it first.  Consider the return—brightening someone’s day, feeling that personal connection.  Dopamine drives FOMO, and is also associated with addictive behaviors.  Bonding behaviors elevate oxytocin, the hormone that mediates empathy, safety, and connection.  There is even evidence that higher levels of oxytocin correlate with increased longevity of romantic relationships, or even a person’s own life span (could not find a reliable, peer-reviewed source for this claim—I just believe it intuitively).

Third, Get Curious.  This was the first skill I (re)learned in life coaching, ‘way back in 2005, and it serves me well every single day.  If we let go of the competitive, scarcity-based thinking that surrounds us, what more could we learn?  What novel and inspiring stories could we hear from anyone we meet, or even our closest friends?  If we listen to understand rather than to reload and refute or one-up, what vexing problems could we solve, together?  Just wondering about it makes me feel lighter and more optimistic, what about you?

Subscribe to Ozan’s newsletter, the Weekly Contrarian, to get his list of solutions to conversation insufferability this Thursday, 9am Central Time (I have no financial interests in Ozan’s site; I just really admire his work and the community of critical thinkers he has convened).  And today, I challenge us all:  Monitor our attitudes and facial expressions.  Manage our self-absorption for a few minutes at a time.  Look strangers in the eye and smile as if they’re already our friends.  Ask a Facebook friend what they did this weekend that really made them feel alive and well.  Let’s all get our caring on, shall we?

 

Friends Take You Further

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KT St Elmo hummingbirds 8-17

Holy cow, friends!

This weekend marked the most ambitious cooking endeavor ever attempted in my kitchen!  I don’t know how I agreed to it, really…  I sat at our usual brunch with one of my oldest church friends, a fellow Chinese-American, and suddenly we had a plan to get a bunch of people together at my house to make potstickers, sticky rice bombs (zhong zi), ma tai soo, and stir fried bok choy—at the same time.  [Insert Home Alone face here.]

My kids have severe seafood and egg allergies, and our fun new church friends don’t eat mammals, so we had to modify the recipes, each in different ways, and vigilantly avoid cross-contamination, all in an acutely crowded space.  We ended up doing ga li jiao (curry beef pastry) filling, but with chicken, in the ma tai soo instead of shrimp and pork.  I made separate chicken and pork potsticker fillings with dong gu mushrooms, napa cabbage, fresh ginger and garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil.  And for the rice bombs, the wrapping staff segregated pork-chicken-salted duck egg, egg-free, and pork-free versions, put to boil in separate pots for 3-4 hours.  We invited my sister and brother-in-law, and at the last minute my daughter’s preschool classmate and his mom, our dear friends for the past decade.  It was joyfully rè nào, as we say in Mandarin.

food prep crop 8-3-19

My church friend did all of the grocery shopping and overnight prep of soaking glutinous rice, dried mushrooms and bamboo leaves, and meat marinating—both bird and mammal.  She brought her food scale, rolling pin, steaming pot, chef’s knife—basically most of her own kitchen—and drove an hour across town to my house.  Sister and BIL came bearing chocolate cake and soft drinks, and school friend mom brought her knife-wielding and rolling pin skills.  Husband weaved between us all, cleaning and washing—we ran the dishwasher twice.  Because that’s the thing about Chinese food—everything had to be rinsed, washed, soaked, seasoned, chopped, shredded, minced, mixed, kneaded, rolled, wrapped, arranged, fried, boiled, steamed, and baked!

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Is it any wonder that I experienced more than a little anxiety and possibly moderate panic at the prospect?  Not only am I the queen of shortcut cooking (I use store bought potsticker wrappers and pie crust rather than make my own dough—and most of the time I just buy ready-to-cook dumplings), but for some time now I have dubbed my house The Pigsty of Entropy for good reason…  One whole segment of counter space had not seen the light of day in over a year, buried under more and more Idon’tevenknowwhat.  Two nights ago I simply moved that pile to a paper box, to be organized later, and wiped the well-preserved Corian surface.  I had to leave the rest of the place as-is, counting on guests to focus their attention on the food more than their ridiculously cluttered surroundings.  My primary reassurance was that if the project failed, we could always order pizza.

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In the end, though, the gathering was a raging success.  A bright summer sun shone through the big windows from the west.  Everyone arrived happy and ready to participate.  And we had very reasonable expectations for the outcome—namely that taste and company mattered ‘way more than presentation (but it all looked pretty good!).  Conversation topics ranged widely and laughter punctuated questions about ingredients and procedures.  I found the vegetable chopping rhythmic and satisfying, and I even developed a double-fisted-chopstick mixing method that could rival any Kitchen Aid—someone just had to hold the bowl for me.  We planned the order of activities such that the three main courses would be ready to eat at the same time—and then we feasted with “Crazy Rich Asians” playing in the background.

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The oblong ma tai soo were made in a pig mold, but bloated beyond recognition in the oven.

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What would you never have done if your friend had not invited (instigated) you?  How do your friends’ confidence and experience hold you up when you try something new?  How can we nudge and support our own friends to step out of their comfort zones?  Besides cooking, what other skills can we love our friends into acquiring?

I already anticipate our next audacious culinary event—menu suggestions, please?

As I look around at all the people in my life, my myriad meaningful and thick connections, I am overwhelmed with gratitude and humility.  This weekend filled my belly and my heart.  Thank you, my dear friends and family.