Best health builds on trust. Trust in yourself, trust in your health team, trust among your team, and trust among the leadership of your health organization. Health is possible without trust, but best health is not. Trust is like the golden rule: simple, obvious, painstaking to attain. Trust contains self love, an open heart, self-confidence, vulnerability, fairness, humility, single-minded purpose, communication, risk. Best health is part genes, part environment, part right living, part luck. Much that can’t be controlled. Trust is somewhat controllable. Trust in yourself is marginally controllable. I’m fortunate that I mostly trust myself. I feel like I’m trusting myself when in doubt about my choices I default to accepting my decisions and actions as right and good. I’m happy with 75% success. Doubt and regret take its toll. With MS I have to budget my energy carefully. Doubt and regret sap my energy. Trust in your health team is also somewhat controllable. I’m fortunate that I can select my health team members. Selecting some means rejecting others. I remember when I was grieving the loss of my son, Mike. I went through 3 grief counselors before I found one that I trusted and worked well for me. I felt lucky that I could find three. Many can’t. Although its been years since Mike’s death, my grief counselor is a member of my health team and will always be. I trust him. I’m open to using his counsel when I need it. Trust among your health team can be elusive. Fortunately, a team you choose is predisposed to trusting each other on your behalf-single-minded purpose. But when your team is a surgical team, a multi-disciplinary team, an inpatient team, a nursing home team, a rehab team, you have far less control of that team. They may or may not trust each other. Your advocate can be helpful in communication and single-minded purpose. A team that trusts each other will be more likely to focus on your best health, communicate with each other about you, be open to your uniqueness, and practice safely and kindly. As a leader, the most rewarding activity for me was building a team that trusted me and trusted each other. Once built, those teams did amazing work for you. The most distant trust is the trust among the leadership of the health organizations that care for you. Those organizations include clinics, hospitals, diagnostic centers, rehab facilities, home care … any organization serving you. Frankly, in my experience few health organizations are themselves healthy. The bedrock of a healthy organization is a leadership team that trusts each other. Trust within the leadership team is the same as trust for yourself: open heart, confidence, vulnerability, fairness, mission, communication, risk. Patrick Lencioni writes eloquently about organizational health. Read more in his book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. I have spent most of the last 20 years of my career as a change agent and choreographer. The heights attainable are directly related to organizational health, especially the trust within the leadership team. Sustainable best health of an organization is hard work and elusive, but hugely rewarding for customers, staff, professionals, and leaders. More about organizational health in future posts.
