I cannot believe the first month of 2025 is nearly over, then again I can never believe how time fast is going. My youngest pointed out to me that time inevitably feels like it is going faster when you get older. The longer time you spend alive the shorter the perception of what time is. When you are 20 years old a decade is half of your life. When you are in your 50s like me it is only a fifth of my life. Which is cruel when you think about it. I spent my youth wishing time would go faster, so I could get school over with then my Nurse training over with. Before you know it you are at the back end of your career wishing time would slow down so you can enjoy what is around you and take stock of the world around you. Sometimes I wish I was younger again, so I could pay more attention. When my kids were little I was busy chasing a career and rushing around, for stuff that didn’t really matter. I wish I had savoured the moment when my children were little more than I did chasing something that wasn’t for me.
Wishing isn’t going to make it happen, and in fact it does a disservice to my life and experience. In some ways I did chase a career, but a career that probably was not the right one for me and I did not throw myself completely into, because I relished spending time with my children. The relationship I have with Ben and Jack now is because I valued the time I spent with them. The challenges I faced at work and the impact that and the death of my father had on my mental health has had a direct impact on how I am now, and what my subsequent career choices have been. I love the job I do now, and because I love it I am quite good at it. Sometimes I think that I probably did not fully live up to my potential, that is probably right. I imagine most people would say that about themselves. I am however confident that I have always done my best, I have always tried to be better today than I was yesterday.
I ran a circle meeting with a clinical team yesterday. A circle meeting is where (yes you guessed it) everyone sits in a circle, for the purpose of the meeting there is no hierarchy and the purpose of the meeting is to unearth the challenges faced by the team from the perspective of those in the meeting. Everyone has an equal opportunity to speak, I encourage everyone to own what they have to say and resist the urge to defend their position. To make sure everyone has a fair hearing and everyone listens to what everyone has to say, I use a talking device, which in my case is a small toy basketball. You can only speak when you are holding the talking device. I ask 3-4 questions in turn. Each time I ask a question I ask who wants to speak first. Once we have a volunteer I hand them the talking device, they provide their answer then pass the ball to their left. This continues until the ball has gone round the circle. I then ask the next question and so on. So the first question I asked yesterday, was…”What is the most prominent challenge you face at work right now?” As you can expect it started off with people talking about workload and resources, but vey quickly people started talking about their personal stress level and mental health and how that is damaging their relationship with their work. I then asked them what were the thoughts and feeling about what they heard. This was very emotionally charged and covered all ranges of emotion from anger, distress to comfort, pride and optimism. I then asked them what they needed to overcome the challenges they face. This brought up discussions on what they can control and cannot. The overwhelming need was to show love and be loved by each other so they can care for their patients. There was also a clear request to be acknowledged by the organisation and love to be shown towards them. There was an evident willingness to improve processes in collaboration with other professions and departments.
It was an incredibly humbling moment for me. It reinforced for me the notion that we are all doing our best and want to do a good job, but sometimes the work and working environment can conspire with our personal circumstances to cause us harm and cause our best not to be good enough. That team yesterday decided to take some tangible actions in their team to show and be loved on a regular basis with a daily check in and check out on how everybody is arriving to leaving from work. To have regular circle meetings to tackle practical challenges they face and to embark on an improvement project to change a process that is harming everyone in the team as well as potentially harming patients.
It is so important to remember that we are all doing our best, sometimes our best is not good enough, so instead of condemning ourselves or others for not being good enough work out how you can help change things to make everyone best better.
I am not quite sure how I got to this but I have found it helpful to remind myself that the time I have spent at work and home has got me to where I am now, so it was not wasted. If it wasn’t for those times I would not have spent a wonderful afternoon yesterday working with an inspirational clinical team and helping them working through their relationship with work.
Connected Coaching 