What can I learn from being a cancer patient?
People are Quirky and Life is Complicated: Living a full life with Introspection and Joy
What in the world could be the leadership impacts and benefits of being an active cancer patient? Why is this relevant? Normally personal traumas of this type are pretty close hold. A recurring theme when I teach leadership at the university level is that we grow from self-reflection. What is going right? What is going wrong? What can I do better for me, and for my team? How can I help them perform better? More collaboratively? More effectively?
So, before diving into the leadership lessons learned/reflected upon, a quick declaration that will counter most feelings on this: given my circumstances, this has largely been a positive experience. That’s not to say I WANTED to test positive and be treated for prostate cancer, but given my new life-journey reality, which I could not control, I decided to jump in and deal with it. I got lots of joy, support, and affirmation that there are more good people than bad people around when I interacted with all my care providers from INOVA Cancer Care in Alexandria, VA, and Fairfax, VA. I got incredible support and love from family and friends (who knew about it).
So, back to the leadership lesson learned: A self-reflection reality is that if we’re open to it, we can learn from many kinds of experiences and the stories that let those experiences influence us and motivate us. In the workplace leadership construct, most people naturally default to workplace experiences, engagements, successes…stories. But it turns out our life experiences and life stories matter too. A lot. Some of these stories are formal roles-based. Some of these stories are informal roles-based stories. Reflections come from both ends. That said, up to now, I’ve mostly thought about reflecting on leadership lessons learned in terms of the roles we chose in life.
So, … one overarching reality is we can reflect on lessons learned from the choices we make—whether or not we made the choices that got us in that situation. The application of the self-reflection gene can expand to all the things we are or the things we do in life, even if we have no choice in those roles.
There are three parts to my cancer topic: my experience, my ego, and my growth.
The last frame I put on myself to learn and grow: I am being very deliberate about capturing my reflections on my feelings and experiences being a current and curious cancer patient before my role shifts from cancer patient to cancer survivor…or worse. I want to exercise my self-reflection gene to make sure I do this well from these three perspectives:
(1) Experience: Be the best-performing cancer patient I can be (i.e., follow all the protocols consistently and effectively to assist the efficacy of my received treatment in any way I can, although surely my role is pretty minor compared to the support and care I get from the various urology and radiology care teams). This resonates with my technology and engineering life: follow the protocols.
(2) Ego: Be a cheerful outlook cancer patient as best I can because my worldview is to work hard, focus on solutions instead of problems, and keep moving. If I believe that about myself, I have to strive to live up to the belief.
(3) Growth: Remain as effective as possible in my day-in/day-out full-time and part-time roles (e.g., husband, father, aerospace tech project lead, author, adjunct university professor, photographer, dog whisperer, workout enthusiast, struggling dad-jokes comedian, and all-around goofy guy). This resonates with my “big picture” view.
If that sounds too structured (boring) and aspirational (yahoo), … sorry.
So, how is it going (taking a very intensive “present tense” view of this part of my story)? I think well. I imagine there are several dimensions to that assessment: my physical health in a focused way (i.e., cancer treatment), my physical health in a more targeted way (i.e., all the other general health and well-being issues to track and manage), and my mental health (i.e., dealing with the stress of being an ongoing cancer patient).
Finally getting to the Bottom line, what are the leadership lessons? Empathy, focus, support, clarity, gumption, grit, reality, challenges, life goes on, life is not fair.
#slaythedragons! #philosopher-warrior!
PS. My experience with the staff of the INOVA Cancer Institute was so impactful, that I am sending a thank you letter to the director. I’ll follow up on this essay with parts of that later, but what is relevant here is from my first lesson above: Empathy. At the different sites, as their treatment wound down, every staff member shared a big smile, either a firm handshake or a warm hug, and a visibly authentic feeling of caring about me; not just me as a patient, but me as a human worth saving.