Category: Personal

It isn’t as world-altering as the Reverend Martin Luther King’s, but I do have a dream.  My dream is to make a good kind of impact on our country and the military.  My dream more specifically involves VA hospitals and clinics. 

People can say (and do actually say), “There is no way to fix the VA.  You can’t possibly think that you would ever even be in a position to make that happen, much less be successful with it!”  The barrage of such comments have caused me a moment of pause and reflection to ascertain whether my dream is perhaps too lofty and ultimately unrealistic and unachievable…but only a moment.  Who created the Department of Veterans Affairs?  People did.  Who runs it?  People do.  Who can improve things?  People can.  My dream is not too lofty or unrealistic, and people make it achievable. 

I have struggled in my mind, partially due to the naysayers (I’ll admit it), how and where would I even begin?  In the world of electronics, where I lived for many years, when I wanted to fix something that was broken, I would troubleshoot.  The same questions that I asked are applicable to the VA:

-What is it supposed to do?
-What is it doing (or not doing) right now?
-Am I missing anything to make it work properly?
-If I need a part, what is it and where is the best place to get it from?
-Is the problem software or hardware related?
-Do I need to involve other qualified/certified/licensed people to help me fix it?
-Do the users need training on how to use it?

It sounds quite silly, but I literally had something come to me in a dream, like a vision.  In my dream, I was at work, in a quarry about how to know where to begin fixing a process at work and how to figure out what exactly needed fixing.  (How silly is it that I was dreaming about work process improvements??  Well, if you knew me, it wouldn’t seem so far-fetched!)  An individual I did not recognize walked up to me and said, “What happens to things if you do not change them?”  I said, “Well, they stay the way they are.”  The individual then said, “Exactly.  So, when you consider each thing, keeping it the way it is, and you feel calm and don’t feel concerned or panicked, don’t change it and move on to considering the next thing.”  I’m telling you, that is genius. 

Am I going to fix the VA?  I don’t know.  Am I going to try?  Yes.  After all, it is my dream.

I’m a certified expert.  I am the Queen.  I could write a book and tour the world giving seminars.  What is my craft, you may wonder?  It is the skill of starting over.

I have had to start over many times for many different reasons…failed relationships, falling off the exercise wagon, picking bad habits back up, allowing myself to get enticed by the promise of instant gratification only to hit a wall and end up having to, you guessed it, start over.

People who are really good at starting things are usually the same people lauded for coming up with great ideas, full of enthusiasm for getting started, but having no real plan for progress and certainly not sustainability.  Starting over people are good at starting over.  However, starting over people are worth having around.  How do you help them continue after starting over with the ever elusive follow-through?  Because I’ll be the first to tell you, this starting over diva is ready to get out of Groundhog Day and move on to day 2 and beyond.

I’ve been married going on 11 years.   I have a few college degrees.  One of my three children is an adult.  I have served in the military in some capacity for nearly 13 years.  I believe I have demonstrated follow-through in my life.  I think the key to getting the start-over types to move on to the follow-through is to ask them to share with you examples of things in their lives that they have done for a prolonged period of time.  Help them prove to themselves it is possible, specifically for them.

After that, hitch your wagon to their “start stuff enthusiasm” and navigate them toward the follow-through roadway.  Yes, there will be obstacles, detours, and traffic lights.  Yes, the direction may need to change altogether, taking the team to a completely different destination, but the course corrections will not constitute a starting over.  But if you need to begin again, give me a call…I’ll walk you through it.

Perfectionism was once a friend of mine…or so I thought.  Actually, it was more like the rich Uncle you pretend to love to stay in his good graces to garner that graduation card with the wad of cash tucked inside.  And, like that “perfect” relationship, it was a lot of work for virtually no payoff.  Perfection is such a joke. 

My wake up call was when, for the third time, I had a letter I was attempting to send up to the big boss’s office to get a signature, and it was sent back to me “for corrections”.  No, the corrections were not on the letter requiring the signature, but rather for the routing slip that I just couldn’t get the margins lined up and I forgot a period on a sentence and a slash or dash somewhere else.  Without getting into mundane detail, the consequences of the delay in signature had a profound effect on someone’s freedom to leave the base that weekend. 

After this incident, I started looking at times in my own life where I had expected perfection, only to be sorely disappointed.  There were lots of times to choose from, times where I expected perfection from my coworkers, my friends, myself…even my own children.  I confess to you now that the revelation of how ridiculous perfection is for any mortal to expect is humbling.  And I will tell you something amazing…humility is a warm, cozy blanket compared to the cold harshness of perfectionism.

I’ve come to believe that the expectation of perfection is a veil that cowards hide behind to disguise their insecurities and ignorance.  They boast this impossibly high standard to appear as if they are convinced that anything less is unacceptable.  Interestingly enough, they grovel in misery over their own perceived inadequacies because they themselves cannot achieve the perfection they impose on everyone else.  What a sorrowful existence is theirs.  I should know.

Why is “good enough” construed as “barely enough”?  I think it’s because too many people are caught up in this ideal that perfection is an acceptable standard.  Well, I, for one, am quitting perfectionism cold turkey.  It doesn’t mean I will quit having standards altogether, but the best that I or anyone else can do is going to be good enough, and a standard I can accept.

I had a scare last week.  I was ambulanced to the hospital with chest pressure and sky-rocketed blood pressure.  It was a bit of a wake up call.

I have often wondered, usually while watching Biggest Loser, ‘why is it exactly that people wait until it is a life or death situation before they finally start thinking about doing something about their weight??’  I think I figured it out today.

It’s like this: My body is kind of like my military dress shoes.  They are super shiny on the upper.  The laces are in excellent shape…have never let me down.  I have solid footing on them and they serve their purpose of covering my feet and getting me around.  But, as you can see by the picture, the sole is completely cracked in half.  When I stand or walk around, no one notices…not even me.  I am not in a hurry to replace them.  But some day soon, I’m going to step in a puddle and get soaked or the shoes will completely break in two at that crack.  They will then become useless and I will have no choice but to replace them.  At that point, it won’t matter the cost or the inconvenience.  At that point, it is more inconvenient to not get a new pair. 

The difference is that my body cannot be replaced by a new one I purchase when I wear this one out or it breaks down.  I’m pretty sure the vast majority of health issues that I have encountered in recent months has everything to do with my weight.  I was also told at the hospital that although my issue was not related to my ticker, I do have a fatty liver.  It is a condition, if left unchecked, can kill.  So how do I deal with this?  I have a few options.  I could choose to ignore this warning, as I have done with every warning up to this point and just wait to read my obituary in the paper one day.  I could insist to my doctor that I get put on a pharmacy full of meds to “manage”.  Or, I could take the most difficult road to recovery…the one that has the most satisfying payoffs, like an extended life and feeling pretty good about myself inside and out…I could exercise and eat better and lose weight. 

Let’s not fool ourselves.  Motivating oneself to lose weight is just as difficult as motivating someone else to do it.  It is possibly even more difficult, at least I believe this to be true for me.  What is will power?  No, seriously, what is it?  It is a force of proportions that both intrigue and terrify me.  It terrifies me because the only thing that can really motivate people to better themselves physically is vanity.  Those of you who are successful in having a noteworthy physique cannot argue against that.  Unfortunately, those who lack the motivation cannot be labeled as “humble”, but rather lacking a healthy sense of self-worth.  I want to be able to get my results right now and do the work later.  I want there to be an option D…maybe just getting credit for the million times I have said, “I really need to lose weight!” 

I’m getting older and I’m feeling age wearing me out.  But, I will look at some positives: I have a lot of things going for me, and I can recover from this setback.  The main reason that I know this is because I have value to a Friend who sticks closer than a brother.  I have value to my Heavenly Father.  I have value to the Great Physician.  I have value to the One who will never leave me nor forsake me.  And the best thing of all is that I’m really not alone in this.  Thank God, I don’t have to rely on my own ability to motivate myself.

We will see what the next few months bring about.  It is time for several cool changes in my life. I am hopeful for every one of them.  I’m starting with a new pair of low quarters.