Melanie Thomas put this show together. She has some tremendous photos that I just saw for the first time today. Mel was a wonderful member of the Medical Teams International team that was on the ground in the early response to the earthquake. She spent a bunch of time at King's Hospital sorting out the supplies and organizing the supplies that came in. She is one of the type of people that doesn't scramble to get in the limelight. She just gets busy doing the tasks at hand. Wow, did she work hard! She was such a blessing to the team! The show that she put together will move you and bless you. After watching it, please consider the questions that I've posted for you by clicking "read more" below.

Here are a couple of questions to get the discussion going:

During my senior year at Washington State University I did research on chickens at the Veterinary school. You know, it was just one of those things. In the process of it, I learned how to hypnotize (mesmorize) chickens. It really is something that everyone should know how to do. After all, you never know when it might come in handy. At WSU we did it so we could put them on their side and give them medication to relax them before we operated on them. So I just couldn't resist teaching my Haitian friends how to do. Besides, the team was eager to learn as well.

A couple of months ago I received a call from the folks at Apple because they wanted to do a profile vignette about how I use the iPhone in my practice. I had a great day with their team. They met me at my house at 6:30 AM and followed me at my practice all day long. My patients and staff were gracious and willing to pitch in. We finished the day at about 10:30 PM. I'm impressed with Apple's commitment to excellence and willingness to go the extra mile.  If you would like to meet some of my patients and see our clinic, CLICK HERE.

Just wait 'till you've watched the video embedded in this blog entry. I've watched it a couple of times now and the more I ponder it, the more significant I think it is. At first, it made me laugh. I had to. I couldn't help it. But, carry it around in your noggin for a couple of days and you might start to think differently about the impact you could have at work if you were fully engaged.

(Thanks to Futurilla for the photo.)

Peter Bregman, on his blog at Harvard Publishing, wrote an interesting article entitled "Why You Need to Fail".  I encourage you to read it. He quotes Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, on her research into why people give up VS why some folks press on and overcome.

"If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence."

In 1933, during his inaugural address, Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

He went on to say, "Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men."

" A key rite of passage for the hard-nosed “Neutron Jack” came in 1963, just a few years into his career with GE. Leading a team that was experimenting with a volatile chemical solution, Welch caused an explosion that blew the roof off a building. Luckily there were no serious injuries. 'My confidence was shaken almost as much as the building I had destroyed,' Welch wrote in his autobiography. But rather than scold or punish him, Welch’s manager taught him an important lesson by helping him focus on what he could learn from the event. 'When people make mistakes, the last thing they need is discipline,' he said. 'The job at this point is to restore self-confidence.' When he became CEO 10 years later, Welch encouraged his subordinates to build upon their failures rather than wallow in doubt."

One of the biggest keys to resiliency is learning from the things that don’t go the way you planned. In his research on resiliency, Dr. Salvatore Maddi found that one of the things that separates victims from survivors is the survivor’s determination to look at the event as a challenge to learn something. Victims, on the other hand, find that adverse events chisel away at their self-esteem. If you look at this as a time line graph what you see is victims heading downward over time because as they experience tough times they beat themselves up. Survivors (thrivers) do the opposite. They learn and grow from the ugly times. They “chalk it up” to another lesson in the school of life. They keep their eyes on the goal and press on. They are that much better because they survived and learned something that they didn’t know before.