Category: Personal

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain. 

I have been in Turkey for two years now.  This has been an experience I could neither compare to anything else I have ever experienced, nor amply describe to anyone who has never been here.  Even those who have come before (and those who will come after) will have a different experience to draw from.  My experience is unique in location and time.

I can tell you of all the things I look forward to in returning to the states in a few weeks…mostly those first world luxuries that everyone in the U.S. take for granted.  But I will miss many things here.  Primarily, I will miss the people I work with, both Turkish and American.  My colleagues have truly been my family here.  I have appreciated every second of support and encouragement they have all offered. 

It is no secret that my first year here was a nail-biter.  I came here already burned out and struggled with finding my way right out of the gate.  It is also no secret that the recovery road was long.  Everyone who was here then is gone now, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone here now who would believe it was that bad.  Thank the Lord for healing my mind.

Although I am no longer as emotional as I used to be, I still care very deeply for my coworkers, the military medical mission, and I am very passionate about my contribution.  My hope for the future is that I will not get complacent while in the U.S. and that I will continue to build on what my experience here in Turkey has taught me.  When my husband and I were talking about going overseas, we both said, “anywhere but Turkey!”  But God knew what He was doing to bring me here, and I wouldn’t change having this assignment for anything!

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.