Off to a great start...

Coming home

Up at 4:30 to catch a plane. It's Saturday morning February 9, Delarc Speech Pathologist Marcia Maxwell Brown and I are flying over one of the Carolinas as we head home from a week of exhausting yet exhilarating work. We spent Monday and Tuesday with one organization and Thursday and Friday with a second. The beginning of a year long project of mentoring six such organizations. We'll be back in two weeks to begin with numbers 3 & 4 and two weeks later with agencies 5 & 6.

They were so different; yet in so many ways the same. One rural; one more urban. One somewhat larger; one a little smaller. One serving certain individuals with developmental disabilities and the other specializing in a somewhat different mix. We followed the same training agenda but found ourselves varying from it to meet each organization's particular needs.

Preparation, preparation, preparation

During this trip I relearned a lesson I first learned many years ago. Preparation is oh so important. It enables you to think beyond the material you want to cover and they agreed to receive. It enables you to listen to the audience without losing confidence that you will get them where they want and need to go even if not by the same path..

In both cases they told us we left them in a better state than when we arrived. We brought them a renewed consumer-centered focus and left them with the energy that focus generates. They'll need it because we also left them with some very ambitious objectives to achieve before we return in six seeks. We also left them with a firm belief that the objectives are worthy and with the confidence they will need to see them through.

A gift from a good friend

Art Dykstra, a personal hero and good friend once gave an auditorium full of people the book, How Full is Your Bucket? How fortunate I was to be in that group. And how fortunate for the hundreds, maybe thousands of people, these most recent folks included, I've talked to about the book since then. In addition to the other objectives, they left with a commitment to fill the emotional buckets of the people they serve, the people with whom they work and their families. There will be an awful lot of bucket filling going on and the thought of that, in turn, fills ours.

Caring without restraint...

So important with everyone and especially with the children and adults we serve. Yet taken for granted to such a degree that everyone believes they do it well. Yet after a couple of days with us they realize how much better they can be and need to be.

A remarkable exercise

At one point, early in the first day, we ask our audiences if they care about the people they support. Of course, just like all our prior audiences, everyone present raises their hand. We then ask them on a scale of 1 to 10 to jot down the average caring of their particular work group.

We then ask how many of them had a teacher in school that genuinely cared about them. How many had a teacher that made them feel special, that bent over backwards for them. A teacher that could help them turn around during a bad day and who could get them to work hard even with subjects they really didn't like.

Over the last few years we have conducted this exercise with hundreds, if not thousands, of people and the responses are always similar. About 80% of the audience raise their hands. We ask them to look around and notice how many people don't raise their hand. How many people can't remember even one teacher who really cared about them. This, I believe is the real problem, the real shame of our educational system.

We then ask how many had two such teachers and are amazed that rather consistently about 50% of the people raise their hands. That number reduces to about 10 % when we ask, how many had three such teachers.

We then ask them what would happen if we had all those teachers that everyone had throughout elementary, middle, high school and college in one room and asked them if they cared about their students. To no one's surprise, everyone is quick to respond that all those teachers would surely raise their hands.

We then ask how many folks have had to struggle with the decision of seeking nursing home care for a parent or grandparent and a fair number of hands go up. We ask those folks what the source of the struggle was and inevitably the majority respond they were afraid their family member would not receive the care, the very basic care, they required.

We then ask them what would happen if we had all the employees of all those nursing homes in the room and asked them if they cared about their patients. "Everyone would raise their hand", comes the unanimous response.

This exercise hits people very close to home and makes it very easy for them to see that caring is determined by the response of the person receiving the care, not the person being paid to care.

After this exercise and further discussion we conclude the exercise by asking them to once again rate the average caring of their particular work group. It probably comes as no surprise, yet is still striking that no one has ever said their rating was higher the second time around. As individuals, families and organizations we have a long way to go if we are to care without restraint!