Moving on...

I'm prematurely ending this blog.
Should you wish to find me, I'll be at Pathfinder52.blogspot.com
Please visit me there!

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Human behavior is a mystifying can of worms. Why do we do what we do? Why do we say what we say; react to stimuli in given ways or reach out to or shy away from opportunities that present themselves to us? “Human nature,” you say, well of course it is. But that doesn’t really get at the WHY of it all.

My take on all this is that we humans operate on a set of paradigms – not all of us on the same paradigms, I might add. And these paradigms (or belief systems) steer our actions and reactions in predictable, repetitive patterns.

Applying this to my own rationalizations, I suspect that my main paradigms are these:

1. Life is as rich an experience as I choose to make it – it is no one else’s job to craft for me the life I might want or expect.
2. People are genuinely interesting and the diversity we encounter should make us more curious than furious, especially when we are met with ways and behaviors that seem foreign or unfamiliar to us.
3. Friends want to be important and helpful in my life, but they don’t want me to wear them out with incessant expectations and demands – nothing kills a relationship quicker than a demanding individual.
4. Work is part brains, part brawn and part bargaining. No one really gets much work done alone. Being smart about your work, being long on endurance toward your work and being able to collaborate with others is where achievement is assured.

By now, while you may be intrigued, I’ve surely got you asking, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” and why this crazy title anyway?

Well love lies right at the core of these four paradigms: Love for life, Love for people, Love for friends and Love for work. These are the values that make my life tick. They are, I am sure, the belief systems that determine why I do what I do in life, in love and in work.

What are your paradigms? What beliefs drive your actions and reactions? What would you change about yourself if you could? And what new paradigm might you have to adopt in order to reshape yourself?

Too soon old, too late smart!

Today we had a chance to review our retirement plan allocations and I learned a number of things I either did not know or had totally forgotten in the two brief years I’ve worked here. There is a change on the horizon, due to be made August 1st which, in compliance with new government standards, places my fellow employees and me in a cohort system aimed at protecting our investments based on the decade in which we expect to retire.

I’ll be 65 in 2017 so I expect I’ll be lumped in with the 2020 cohort. I presume I’ll work until I’m 75 (assuming my health holds out) which means I’d probably do better (in investment terms) to put myself in the 2030 cohort, at least for now. Should I still be working here by the time I’m 65, I can always opt to change my grouping and my risk. Fortunately, that remains my personal choice and not fully left to the discretion of a plan manager.

All this made me begin to question the other assumptions I make about retirement. I don’t know for sure what all of them are or need to be, but here’s what I came up with as I listened to the 20-something fellow explaining options to a 50-something crowd. That alone made the presentation humorous. So what are those other assumptions?

Assuming I want to stay with my present employer, I should consider selling my home once I am widowed (a statistical given, hubby is 21 years my senior), and purchasing a condo near my workplace that I can buy outright – no mortgage needed. This will do two things, reduce my commute and thus, my commuting costs and time, and reduce my out-of-pocket monthly expenses since I would only have utilities and association dues to pay for in a considerably smaller home.

Assuming I want to stay working for the same employer until age 70 or 75, I should invest a larger percentage of my earnings every few years. Currently I am investing 4% to which my employer adds another 2% -- so that’s 6% already. Not shabby. On an increasing vesting scale, my employer will also add 20% (at two years) up to 100% (at five years) of an additional 2.39 % just to show how much they appreciate my growing tenure! So, by 2011, if I can remain with my current employer, I’ll have an annual investment of 8.39% (if I make no changes). But, if I increase my contribution just another 1.61%, I’ll be investing a full 10% of my earnings annually. Again, not shabby.

The real question, is it enough?

Let’s also assume I’d like at least $40K in annual withdrawals from this fund for another 30 years beyond age 70. The 20-something fellow told us we’d need $770K socked away in investments to do that! Of course who knows what $40K a year will feel like in 2022 given the growth of inflation? By then, a loaf of bread might easily cost $10.00.

Most of us boomers assume (rightly or wrongly) that Social Security will be there for us when we retire. We receive those annual prognostications from the feds each year showing us the predicted amount of our monthly Social Security check should we continue at the rate of our present earnings (another assumption). For me, it is a healthy $1500 per month or so. If that money is really still available by then, that would add another $18K to my annual income.

Then, there are the questions about taxes. What will my taxable income be? What portion of my Social Security income will be taxable? Also, if given the opportunity and should the funds be available to me, should I convert any or all of my retirement funds to a Roth account on which the taxes are paid in the year of the conversion rather than in the year of the disbursement?

Too many questions.

There’s no way to second guess this. What will it feel like to live on $58K in the years 2025 and beyond? I'll be at an advantage if. . .
• If I own the roof over my head.
• If I don’t need a car.
• If I continue to work and earn, even a little.
• If I develop an additional income stream (like writing).
So, these things need to be built into my planning, not just my assumptions.

One way to “try retirement on for size” would be to make the lifestyle adjustments noted above prior to retirement: to live near work, in a small condo, without a car and writing on the side. To do that and also invest whatever I earn above the needs that lifestyle presents, would certainly put me at an even greater advantage.

But how much money do you need anyway? Friends always joke that you want to die just as the money is running out. It would be tough to orchestrate things that precisely!

I’m guessing I won’t need much. I’m not a shopaholic and I feed hubby and myself on a mere 6.6% of our current income (the usual household expenditure is 10%). I already have too much stuff (which a smaller condo would help me curtail) and certainly all the furniture, dishes, and other durable goods I could ever need! Plus, when you’re old, nobody seems to care what you wear. I could easily adopt a uniform that requires little updating over time and wear essentially the same sort of outfit every day, especially the days I work! That would save tons and prevent a lot of useless shopping!

Time will tell. Life's all a big gamble anyway. We roll the dice every day, but it takes the "retirement talk" to remind us we live in a casino!

Summer Trips (with a 5 year-old!)

This summer, hubby and I have decided to take our 5 year-old grandson on two great adventures of his short, sweet lifetime.

He is absolutely in love with trains, addicted to Thomas the Train by age 3, he’s been filling the family room with wooden tracks since he opened his first boxed train set. Acknowledging that love, we decided that a BIG train ride was in order.

It has been a very long time since grandma and grandpa rode a train. For me, the most memorable train ride was in 1981 from Indianapolis to Minneapolis and back within 24 hours. This wasn’t a joy ride. I took this trip to catch up with the communications theorist I was relying upon for my doctoral dissertation. He happened to be addressing a conference in the Twin Cities and could offer me one hour of his time. I took him up on it and made the whirlwind trip without enjoying much of the scenery, happy to be given an audience with this world renowned writer.

We decided that a trip to Chicago would be a great way to spend a day with the grandson. But, as I ploughed through Amtrak’s website I became increasingly confused by the host of accommodations, prices and on-train options. What didn’t confuse me was the realization that spending eight hours on a train with a 5 year-old required more patience than grandpa and I could muster.

I searched for a date that would allow us a family sleeping room primarily so we could contain the chaos that was bound to ensue two hours in to an eight hour ride. Then, we would need a hotel room somewhere near the train station with the intention of turning around and heading back the very next day. This was clearly becoming our worst idea of the year!

Poking around the myriad of train options, I came across La Crosse, Wisconsin. This was a destination to be envied! Just a few hours from home, it offered a lovely opportunity for scenery without the endless hours of time on a train with a crazed child. It offered lunch and a few brief hours of strolling around town before we would need to return. It allowed the perfect balance of time on the train with time on the ground and hopefully, if we work it right, time for a nap!

So we settled on it -- La Crosse it would be. Now all we have to do is pick the dates, buy the tickets, pack up the kid and be on time for our St. Paul departure. Not as simple as it sounds, but surely it beats a 16 hour round-trip to Chicago even if the museums there are fabulous. We’ll do that when he’s eleven!

The other grand adventure we’re planning is to visit Duluth harbor when the Tall Ships are in port, August 1st - 4th. We of course decided this after seeing the write-up in the Sunday paper, by which time all the hotel rooms within a ten mile radius had already been filled. I was whining about my dilemma to a friend at work who said, “Why don’t you use our cabin? It is just 30 minutes outside of Duluth!” I couldn’t believe my ears. Such a deal, we would use her very rustic cabin, for free no less, and have a wonderful quiet retreat from the noise and excitement of the day spent with the madding crowds along the harbor. It will be splendid.

The down side is that the cabin has no running water and thus, only an out-house for life’s necessities. This will be good, we thought. We know how to manage with just an out-house and teaching our grandson how to rough it will be a great life lesson for him as well!

We’ll see how this goes. Both trips are coming up in August and grandma and grandpa are clearly more excited than the 5 year-old who barely understands the implications of travel with extended family. This could be wonderful, this could be terrible!

I am hopeful about these trips because I believe that time spent with grandparents teaches (or can teach) kids things that are not as easily learned when in the presence of their parents alone. Some of these lessons include:

• Gaining the perspective of another generation
• Seeing places that may not appeal to mom and dad
• Trying new foods that would usually not be on the family’s menu at home
• Stretching to learn new things and experience fresh ideas
• Experiencing the history of a place through the eyes of older people
  

I am confident these summer excursions will test the metal of both my husband and I but the gifts they will give us will out-weigh any discomfort or distress a 5 year-old can impose on his loving and proud grandparents.

Hateful Work Can Be Fun?

In my current role at work, one of the jobs I like least is policy writing and revision. And, that’s not because I’m not any good at it. It is simply that I hate doing it. As a chore, it doesn’t bring me the kind of job satisfaction that other elements of my work consistently do.

Well, the other day, I proved myself wrong. I pulled together a policy that had been chewed on by at least six nurses and probably three physicians for a period of roughly five months and still hadn’t been brought to conclusion or completion.

Now for those of you who don’t work in healthcare, you’re probably thinking, “What is she talking about? You mean all these professionals can’t get their heads together and figure out how to write a policy any more efficiently than that? And we’re trusting our lives to these people?”

And, you might be justified in thinking that but, in their defense, in this particular matter, they were working against 50 years of practice history (the way we’ve always done it) and at least a one-inch-thick stack of literature offering somewhat contradictory evidence on how we need to change our practices. In addition, there had been an “incident” one that required the attention of the hospital’s liability lawyers which, in and of itself, puts everyone on edge.

So, now we get to my part in all this.

First, I took the work document everyone else had been mulling over and re-wrote it. In doing this I made the language throughout the document consistent and removed all the abbreviations that would certainly have confused someone relying on this document for guidance.

Then, I circulated my draft to the top four or five folks who I knew had a vested interest in seeing this project finished. They gave me feedback and offered constructive criticism.

Finally, I built an algorithm for the new practice (a flow chart of the preferred process steps we want clinicians to now follow) for the interested parties to review.

Right away I got a piece of feedback from someone I didn’t expect I’d even show it to – our new DNP (Doctor of Nursing Practice) who saw that the new protocol asked for a daily abdominal x-ray. She indicated that while the radiation dose from such an x-ray was quite minimal, it would be even better if we could eliminate that step. Her wisdom was to investigate whether the ultrasound imaging machinery we use for bladder scanning might afford us the safe, effective verification we wanted without the need for x-rays.

Now, I’m not sure yet if we can incorporate what she has recommended, but I certainly am going to find out. This would be splendid for several reasons:

• The patient avoids the radiation
• The nurse doesn’t have to chase down a physician order for x-rays
• The physician can simply count on the nurse to use the ultrasound machine to accomplish the work without involving the cost or complication of the imaging (x-ray) department.

Even more importantly, it occurred to me that personally showing this document – still in draft form, mind you – so rapidly to so many clinicians, and especially the DNP, gave me very rich input in just a day or two. Far more information than we had been able to pull together in the previous five months.

Now, are we done yet? No.

We’ll get the key players to sign off on the new process next week. We’ll run a pilot for at least two weeks or maybe a month, to see if we’ve got all the details down with sufficient clarity that even a novice would know what to do. THEN, we can publish it as a policy and roll out the instructions to the various departments who will need to change their behavior in order to accommodate the new practice.

“So what?” you ask.

The so what is this. . .

• I got to do something I really dread AND found I could enjoy it!
• I found highly engaged colleagues who, when I asked them to focus on and review the work, did so willingly and with insight.
• I got feedback that was targeted, innovative and highly helpful.
• I found clinicians eager to map out a better way to get the intervention accomplished and with the least possible danger to the patient (there’s always some danger, especially when the patient’s care is highly complex).

So I went home at the end of the day totally amazed that the one chore I simply hate doing, brought me, on this day, the kind of job satisfaction that many other elements of my work consistently do. Who knew that is policy writing and revision could actually be fun?

Managing Stress. . .

A nurse-colleague asked what she should do when, much to her dismay, her husband got angry and distant because she talked too much each evening about her trials at work. She is employed on a high-stress unit, where death of a patient is a frequent reality. She works hard, loves her job but acknowledges, the stress can suck her down by the end of the day.

What follows is what I told her as a nurse who has also worked in high-stress, high-death jobs with patients who had AIDS or ovarian cancer (both very deadly in the day I worked those kinds of cases).

Also, I explained, I speak as a nurse who is on my second marriage. My first one ended amicably enough, but I was married very young and hardly understood the kind of maturity I needed to bring both to my job and my relationship at the time – how could I? There was no one to teach or advise me.

I still haven’t heard back from her to know if she appreciated or hated my response to her question.

Here’s what I said – you tell me, was it a fair and balanced response?


As nurses, we work in a field where so much is at stake.
Two things to take into consideration --
A. We're not the only profession in this predicament.
B. We certainly have job choices within a wide range of high-to-low stress.

When you choose a high-stress job (even when it is a position you love) you owe it to yourself and to others in your family to develop effective strategies to deal with your job-stress. I think it is unrealistic to expect your spouse to grasp, appreciate and help you manage your own distress, especially when s/he is not working in the same sort of capacity. And, even if your spouse were also a nurse, it probably isn't fair to "dump" your day on the other person, just because you need a compassionate ear.

What can you do to manage your stress and remain in the marriage and the job you love?
You might try:
-- A support group (sometimes a grief group is useful, especially if you work in an area where death is a prominent feature).

-- A "girls-night-out" where your friends from work gather to get the stressors of the job out of their systems without taking it all home to the family who also needs their full attention.

-- A threapist. Yep, someone you PAY just to talk to! Sometimes a therapist can help you reframe the situation that stresses you out and help you re-establish a sense of control and equilibrium in your life and relationships.

-- A self-care technique like exercise, meditation, guided imagery, music, a power-nap, etc. that you can rely on to dissipate the effects of stress and return to a "normal state" before you try to interact with a loved one who may also have had a trying day!

You might also want to re-examine your belief-system about marriage. Since when did we come to believe that one's spouse can meet every need we might enounter? We need lots of people in our lives to meet the many needs that we as humans experience. Your spouse is only ONE of those supportive-persons and should not be asked to bear the brunt of every negative emotion you carry around with you, whether the result of your job or your personality.

Take good care of yourself AND your marriage. A good marriage is hard to come by and requires a serious investment of time, energy, effort and understanding on each participant's part. That's the only way to sustain the relationship, grow it through a life-time and build a solid foundation that can withstand the hardships that will naturally come your way!

Cherish the love you have.

--p

PS -- Don't talk casually about your marriage challenges at work. It is an easy, lazy thing to do. It can cause greater harm than any other choice you make. If you have a good friend, with whom you can speak in confidence, that's one thing. But do not risk your marriage becoming a topic of idle gossip at the workplace -- there is nothing more disrespectful to your spouse than that.

Oldies but goodies. . .

My car-pool buddy asked me what I might suggest she do on behalf of one of our growing departments at work. She explained the situation she was facing...

She’d been asked by the department head to participate in a retreat day he was planning in order to build teamwork among department members. He had packed the day's agenda rather full with day-to-day business of the deparmtnet and invited her to speak for 45 minutes, and make a presentation that would pull the group together, get them focused and motivated to work together. In other words, cure world hunger in an hour. Lovely assignment.

My buddy didn’t want to say no, but she also didn’t want to attempt the impossible which was, after all, what this department head was asking – absolutely the impossible! Hence, her question to me, “What would you do with 45 minutes?”

This particular department has been growing by leaps and bounds. It has probably tripled in size over the last 5 years. The age range in the department runs from 26 to 62 and, as you could bet, the 62 year-old is the department head! What’s more, the newcomers to the department have their own ideas, their own styles of creativity which, apparently, run perpendicular to “the way we’ve always done things” according to the department head.

The behaviors in the department, according to the manager, were leading to major upsets among the staff. People all wanting their own way had begun to act out like children, sabotaging department achievement in order to satisfy individual agendas. This is no way to run a department!

My friend summed up the problems noting there were several dichotomies: There’s 1) the new employees vs. seasoned employees dichotomy, 2) the younger-worker vs. nearing-retirement dichotomy and 3) the fresh-ideas vs. the way-we’ve-always-done-it dichotomy – a formidable triumvirate of troubles, and the manager wants the problems addressed (and resolved) in 45 minutes!

One might suspect there is also the imaginary-world vs. real-world dichotomy going on inside the department manager’s head based on his ludicrous request he'd made of my friend!

So, my friend is stuck. Say “No” because she recognizes the task is an impossible one, or say “Yes” because she realizes the problems will persist unless someone tries to intervene. But what is the reasonable organizational development intervention she can provide within a 45 minute window jammed up in a full day of a department “retreat”?

I could totally appreciate her dilemma.
My advice came from deep inside my memory bank and involved a technique I’d used dozens of time – often with children. Since this department’s difficulties reminded me of those that emerge among children, I figured I’d offer the exercise to her and let her decide if it might work. Here’s what I advised her to try:

Ahead of the event (a week or so in advance) ask that each member of the department respond to TWO questions about every other department member. Those questions are:

• What is one contribution that this person makes in the department that you genuinely appreciate?
• What is one request you might make of this person that would improve your relationship with him/her in the department?

Gather those responses and generate a sheet for each member of the department that has on it ALL the accumulated responses. Use these sheets on the day of the retreat to illustrate the kind of feedback that is possible when co-workers behave honestly and openly toward each other.

Contrast that, to the typical “childish” behaviors we exhibit when we are being passive aggressive, sullen and sulking from not getting our own way, or pouting and whining about other people in the department – all behaviors evident in this department, all disruptive to any sort of departmental success!

On the day of the event I suggested she teach about the JoHari Window, a two-by-two grid that was developed in the 1950’s (an oldie, but goodie) to explain that OPENNESS in any relationship is a choice. The JoHari Window offers two tools, Self-disclosure and Invited-feedback, to enable anyone of us to enlarge or shrink our own openness and thus change the dynamic of the relationship. It is a choice. How you use these two tools determines not only how you will interact with others but how they are likely to respond to you as well.

The pre-retreat feedback sheet is not “Invited-feedback” in the JoHari sense of the term, since the comments on that sheet will have been solicited by the facilitator, not the individual. However, since we humans are not very good at inviting feedback, having someone else get the ball rolling on our behalf can be a very helpful strategy.

Also, whether the people involved are children or adults, we all (ego-centric creatures that we are) like to see in writing a bunch of compliments about ourselves. With this exercise, in a department of 25 people, that’s 24 nice things that co-workers have said about you – a pretty good deal for almost anyone!

The “requests” side of the sheet may be a little harder to take, but, realistically, the reader has to ask, “Don’t I already know this about myself? Do I really need my co-workers to tell me that if I was more polite, more considerate, less intrusive, interrupted others less, etc., etc. that I’d be a much easier person with whom to work?”

My friend thought about it. She said, thinking back over her own years of work in the field, that she probably already had a file on the JoHari Window (most of us in organizational development have used it at one time or another). Combining it with the “Strengths Sheet” as we call it seemed like a good way to demonstrate the value of inviting feedback regularly.

I don’t know if she’ll take my advice and use these tools, but I was happy to offer them given her request for help.

After I got home, I thought of a number of ways a facilitator could address the problems my buddy was facing. Each strategy I considered was, I realized, something I had learned decades ago.

• One could teach a model like Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs and elicit needs each member of the department experiences, demonstrating what contributions we all need in order to reach toward “self actualization”.
• One might take the approach of doing a “Survival” game and noticing whose opinions were most trusted in the group, whose assessments of survival strategies were most effective, who surprised you with his or her resourcefulness.
• Or, one might explore the communications within the group, looking at how members spoke to each other using a Transactional Analysis approach.

Then, I realized that ALL of these strategies were ancient history! Hence, I have to admit that much of my wisdom (if you can call it that) comes from a period of history most folks can’t remember – the mid-20th century writers and proponents of what was called the Human Potential Movement. I was fortunate that my professors in the 1970’s relied heavily on these writers and taught me most of what I know about human development, interaction and personal growth. I still use (as you can tell) many of the tools they taught me in my early graduate-school studies. And, surprisingly, they still work! Oldies, but goodies. . .

It will be interesting to see what my friend, my car-pool buddy, decides to do with the 45 minutes in which she’s been asked to work a miracle. I’m glad she asked for my assistance because it made me muse on where my own techniques and tools come from and how long I’ve relied on models I learned in my youth!