I had a call yesterday with Life Coach. She and I talked about my reluctance to accept reality. "You keep trying to find reasons and excuses to not see ... could be reality some day". I remember when Mom was admitted to hospice care in February of 2002. (She passed in September of that year.) I was mortified. She was still walking and fighting the cancer when they were first engaged in her care ... why were we "giving up" so early? I hated hospice. To tell you the truth, I hated it even after she passed away - somehow they were responsible in my mind for her death. I went through the experience again with Dad and I've had a lot of friends and loved ones work with hospice over the years since Mom passed. It now is different - I see the value of hospice. Regardless of how I created the situation in my mind, hospice was not responsible for my mother's death. I just didn't want to accept reality.
Reality. I remember a year or two ago looking in the mirror and thinking "there's no way I weigh that... I don't look that heavy". Yes I did and yes I did. And regardless of how I thought I looked, my labs showed another view. I was heading down the wrong path and destined for a shorter life than I had hoped for. My insistence to talk myself into accepting the current situation as opposed to reality was literally killing me. Becoming conscious to the truth and doing something about it (losing weight through exercise and less food ... yes, the surgery helped but the bottom line weight loss and better health) pretty much insures a better quality of life.
So what is the purpose of my message today? I think the message is that we all tell ourselves stories to protect our fragile egos (... ok, my fragile ego). We don't want to accept the cold hard truth, so we justify and rationalize our current position. Ok, quick analogy. In business you can always make a short term profit, but usually at the expense of the long term. Like here, we could cut expenses to the bone and produce a great bottom line, but we will all be working like dogs and using less quality materials and our spaces would be colder and dirtier and on and on ... WE'RE NOT DOING THAT ... because long term we lose patient, employee, and provider satisfaction, and it is not the right thing to do. Telling ourselves our version of the truth ("Steve, you don't look that overweight and your high blood pressure is only nerves") will in the short run, calm us down, but in the end, it will kill us or at least produce a lower quality of life.
Open your eyes and heart to the absolute truth, in the long run, you'll thank me.
-Steve Simonin, President & CEO
