Category Archives: Inspiration

November 21:  Cardio Catch-Ups Make Me Better

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Ummm, this may not be my photo!  It was on my phone from 2017 and I can’t remember where it came from–I usually ask friends for permission to use… If it’s yours please claim it!

NaBloPoMo 2019

Is there something you should do but you don’t always want to?

Exercise perhaps, or laundry?  Dishes?  Cleaning and decluttering?

Last year I listened to Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin.  It was a fun, relatable, well-researched and –reasoned book on habit formation and change.  I have recommended it to many patients for its myriad practical strategies.  One that particularly resonated with me was the idea of pairing.  Basically if we combine the thing we should-but-don’t-want-to-do with something we like or do-want-to-do, we are more likely to form and strengthen the habit of the ‘sbdwtd’.

In one of those Eureka! moments of instant understanding and integration, I started saving my favorite TV show to watch while doing the interval program on my elliptical.  Thanks to the hubs for positioning the cardio machine right in front of the TV in the basement!  Sadly, The Big Bang Theory has concluded and there are no other 30 minute shows quite so compelling to get me moving.  Thankfully I have my favorite podcast and Liked Songs list on Spotify, so I’m not totally sedentary.  On days when I’m really motivated, I still do the 7 minute workout or a TRX program.

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Do you wish you could connect more often with friends?

Years ago I remember talking on the phone while unloading and putting away groceries or folding laundry.  My friend was in San Francisco, I in Chicago.  We knew each other’s days off and would just call when we had a moment, and talk if we were free.  Farther back, in college and med school, we could all just hang out at each other’s apartments, pretending to study, but really just eating and talking.  Now we text, which is nice, but it’s not the same.  Somehow it feels harder to get folks on the phone anymore, and even harder to meet in person…  I miss my friends.

I’m getting a little better, though.  Sometimes I make phone dates with people for my commute.  It can be challenging across time zones, but we make it work.  It’s finite and somewhat reliable—I have to spend 30-40 minutes in the car at some point on any given morning and evening on workdays.  I even managed to connect with two Counsel members for pep talks before important meetings recently.

This month my new friend Alex and I started a new connection method, the Cardio Catch-Up.  She lives in DC and has to walk her dog.  I still need to work out, which I usually do in the evenings.  So we arranged a call over exercise tonight.  It was perfect!  I had to commit to a certain time, and my friend held me accountable.  I got on the machine and didn’t even notice the time going by (okay it just went by a lot faster), while we bonded over our LOH learnings, musings on human behavior and tribal dynamics, and our shared progressive values and aspirations for the planet.  I got my workout in, check.  And we both alighted on themes for future blog posts.  Tonight’s nascent idea:  Is the contagion of urgency the best vehicle for motivation?  Who knows where it will lead, into what it will grow, with what it will merge?  Regardless, it was born of an optimal pairing.

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The Cardio Catch-Up is the perfect multi-win:  Move the body, release stress and tension, connect with another beautiful human, exercise the mind, and inspire the spirit.  Who wants to do it with me next week?

November 18:  Relentless Curiosity Makes Me Better

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NaBloPoMo 2019

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Tonight, in the month of gratitude, I feel deeply thankful for Coach Christine.  I might have been a curious person all along, but it was not until I got a life coach that I learned the vast and profound value of curiosity in every realm.  As I wrote earlier this month, standing always in curiosity liberates my mind.  It relieves me of unnecessary urgency for an answer.  I can exercise professional creativity in forming better and better questions, and the answers (often multiple, intertwined, and intriguing) emerge more easily and artfully than if I chase them demandingly.

The business of medicine is to solve problems, to heal, to cure.  So we assume that the faster we get to answers, the better.  And they had better be the right ones, because lives are at stake here!  It’s always interesting to me when patients talk about my work as ‘saving lives.’  I can’t remember a time when I could actually make that claim, at least at all directly.  But to my colleagues—emergency medicine and critical care docs, trauma surgeons, suicide hotline counselors—thank you, you really do save lives every day!

I love primary care because I usually have the luxury of ‘(living) the question.’  When patients present with new problems, as soon as I know they are stable, I get really excited.  I’m liberated to get deeply curious, ask as many questions as they will tolerate, paint the big picture together.  I follow the standard physiologic and diagnostic process initially, which often yields a straight forward answer and plan of care.  But life and work would be pretty boring if that were always the case.  When the usual suspects are all acquitted and the mystery persists, that’s when things get fascinating.  This is when I really get to know a person.  When I ask truly open, honest questions—the questions I don’t know the answers to and that are not meant to lead anywhere—I never know where the conversation will go.  And I always learn something new and relevant, something that helps me connect.  This is the information that makes a person memorable, because it is truly unique to them.

One of my favorite moments in a patient encounter is when I have to pause a few seconds to form a really good question.  What do I really want to know, what am I after, what will really break open this conversation?  It happens regularly, and wow, what a rush.  OH, I just never know what I will learn!  You’d think people would get impatient and grumpy with such prolonged, sometimes meandering interrogation.  But I find that they often lean in, look me in the eye.  They get on the train with me and look as eagerly as I around the next bend.  What will we find?  Let’s explore together!

Relentless Curiosity.  It’s the funnest part of my work.  I love it.  And as we all know, loving our work makes us better.

November 16:  Loving Subversion Makes Me Better

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NaBloPoMo 2019

Friends, do you already follow Seth Godin’s blog?  His post from Thursday stirred something a little irreverent in me.  It was about ‘allies and accomplices’:

To be an ally means that you won’t get in the way, and, if you are able to, you’ll try to help.

To become an accomplice, though, means that you’ve risked something, sacrificed something and put yourself on the hook as well.

We need more allies, in all the work we do. Allies can open doors and help us feel a lot less alone.

But finding an accomplice–that’s an extraordinary leap forward.

I thought immediately about my fellow Better Angels volunteers.  We have all committed time, talent, and treasure to the depolarizing of America.  We do it in public, in front of audiences and cameras, to reporters and members of our communities.  We openly challenge the prevailing culture of ad hominem, oversimplification, and overgeneralization.  We all come to it from our own internal optimism and hope.  But in the face of entrenched polarization and a culture of self-protection above all, we could never make any headway as individuals.  It is only together—as mutual accomplices—that we can truly claim and exercise our collective agency.

I feel even more buoyed by Ozan’s latest post.  He describes a series of well-known studies showing that people will organize themselves into in-groups and out-groups with remarkable loyalty, even around random and arbitrary distinctions like taste in abstract art.  This, of course, carries grave and important implications for prejudice and discrimination.  Ozan then points to two exemplars of the opposite, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama.  In their most famous orations (see links), these remarkable leaders speak directly to what unites us as the foundation for solving our problems, rather than what divides us.

MLK:  The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

Obama:  The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.  We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

I get goosebumps just reading the words.

It really feels like a loving subversion—of cynicism, scarcity, antagonism, and fear.

Who’s not better for that?