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Today's Energizer: "Creeps got you down? from America's non-profit Nursing Recruiting and Services
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Listen to Mother Teresa!"
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As Mother Teresa sorta said, "Be nice ...and pass it on!" |
If your hospital is like many institutions I've worked in, you have your share of creeps, troublemakers, and just plain ol' grouchy people. In years past, I bemoaned the fact that the people above me on the management ladder didn't "do something" about all the grumps. Then, I got to be a CEO and people started complaining to me about "the situation" and expecting me to fix it. But how!? Ordering people to be nice didn't work. Coaching and Counseling them in "politeness skills" didn't do much, either. And, yelling at them to quit yelling at one another was a complete waste of time, too! So, I hunkered down in my comfy office, held all calls, locked the doors, and started reviewing all the cliches I could think of that addressed this issue. I came up with things like the old Chinese proverb (are there no new Chinese proverbs?) that says: "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Okay, but what step? Fiddling around with my stack of training books and pamphlets, I ran across this from Mother Teresa:
do it alone, person to person. It sounds so simple, right? Overly-simplistic, in fact! But, it actually works! The reason that my yelled instructions for people to be nice didn't work is this: you can't give away something you don't have. When I personally was agitaged and angry, all I had within me at the moment to share was...yes...agitation and anger! If I wanted an end to anger, I had to demonstrate just that. I had to demonstrate an absence of anger. And, so I tried the "Mother Teresa Method" and started "doing it alone," person-by-person. They say that "laughter is contagious," and I found that this was true. When I happened into an atmosphere charged with meanness, every time I responded with calmness and peacefulness, it tended to spread out, sort of like the ripples that spread out across a pond when just a single pebble is tossed into the waters. I'm not preaching some kind of religious doctrine here but, when I religiously practiced gentleness in the midst of grumpiness, even in the thick of shouting matches, I found that many of the people present tended to emulate me and to become more gentle themselves. Those who didn't modulate their voices in imitation mostly marched off shouting over their shoulders things like, "you haven't heard the last of this!" or some such. But, at least they were gone, the mood in the room changed, much for the better. And, those who witnessed the transformation then subconsciously took this "new technique" onto the units and, like our pebble in the pond, let it ripple outward. PS: I obviously didn't change the world this way, little Bosnias and Kosovos still erupted in our institution. But, on balance, things improved. Those who shouted and bullied out of some internal need to make others cringe lost the "reward" previously accorded them. They were no longer able to gain an audience of frightened -- or equally enraged -- co-workers. Some learned to behave more civilly in order to get anyone to pay any attention to them at all. Others stopped acting out at work but were probably still driven to abuse someone and took their acting-out behavior elsewhere. And, some still carried on like creeps, period. But, there was an overall improvement when I stopped responding to anger with anger, and those who "imitated" me passed this gentler way of being on to others. Thank you, Mother Teresa! |
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