What awareness can teach us about handling difficult situations
Let’s just get it over with. On Friday, April 10th, 2020, we made the decision not to take extreme measures to prolong the life of our wonderful dog, Jersey.
All over America, and the world, people were having similar experiences. They were making decisions about whether to bring a loved one to the hospital, they were dropping their precious family member off at emergency room doors and then not being allowed inside.
In Paramus, NJ, I sat in my car and waited for the Vet to call me. We discussed Jersey’s symptoms, the evidence of cardiac distress, the decisions were made to the ringing of my cell phone as I bawled my eyes out in the virtual glass bubble of my minivan driver’s seat.
My husband was miles away, unable to leave home because of the health risk.
We had minutes to choose, try to take action or put her out of her suffering. I didn’t know if I’d get to hold her. We made the decision. The staff did me the great, great service of rolling my amazing Jersey out to the loading dock – and I was grateful. It was freezing cold, she was sedated but I held her, and then it was over. Papers were handed to me; the cart was wheeled away. A truck was waiting to unload supplies, the staff, waiting for this crying, messy and maybe dangerously infected woman to leave. I had to figure out how to get the car out of the fire lane, traffic was backing up and then I was on a major highway, literally in shock.
At one point, I wanted to know if I was going too slow for my lane. My husband was talking to me via cell phone, and I kept saying, “I don’t know how fast I’m going.” I was looking at the dashboard but nothing made sense. Finally, I recognized the speedometer. 74 in a 65. He stayed on the phone until I pulled in my driveway. The whole thing, including the hour ride each way, took only 4 hours.
I’m sharing this with you because I’m not alone. I’m not going to argue if a dog or a human has a greater value or the love is deeper. I’m just saying, I was lucky. There is no loading dock at any hospital for people to say goodbye to their loved ones. No looking into beloved eyes. No touch of a hand for comfort. I know how I feel, and I know I had just the barest scrape with what so many thousands have gone through.
Worse yet, I know what happened after I got home.
My brain got involved. I had suggestions for myself. I suggested I’d made the wrong decision, I questioned and tortured myself. But the truth is, there were many thoughts I could have engaged with, and what I was getting from my brain was the “fast track”.
Fast Track Thinking
Our brains are very tuned to negative events. We need to be. It’s important to remember what we were doing just before we fell over a cliff, cut our feet on rocks or got pounced on by a tiger. So our brains prioritize that. We don’t do a good job of differentiating these negative events, so a harsh word from a co-worker, a near-miss with a speeding bus and the pain of losing a beloved one are all lumped together. If we survive all of that, our brain decides our thoughts, actions, and feelings were successful. The next time we have that event, our brains are going to pull all those thoughts back out.
Good times.
Here’s another thing, our brain isn’t going to agonize over getting us just the right thought. It’s looking for fast and close enough. There’s nothing wrong or bad about that, but it’s important to understand.
Same Stuff, Different Day
Did you ever notice that you can have very different outlooks on the same situation, even one day apart? In my Reboot Your Day Job program we go through activities designed to help you see this up close and personal, but for now, let’s stick with some easy to recognize situations. Day 1 – you discover you’ve missed a critical appointment. The sky is falling and you imagine all the worst things. Day 2 – You decide to try and fix it, you call, apologize and then reschedule. Everything is fine.
Have you been there? Good.
That one’s easy to see. More subtle, when you journal every day about the same objective, you’ll notice that some days you are feeling positive and other days negative about your ability to achieve it. Same objective, same you, different thoughts.
What does this tell you? First of all, it tells you that nobody’s in charge inside there. Your brain is just dishing out whatever is on the fast track at the moment. If you want to learn more about this – read Your Brain At Work – by David Rock.
When I first really understood this, I took it like a punch to the gut. Click the link at the top for this blog’s recording to hear that story. What that means is that the sentences in my brain that I had believed were real, meaningful truths, were more like random chance, sort of like having a thousand Magic Eight Balls inside my mind. I was so angry.
I’m over that now. Now, I understand that what I think about most frequently will resurface more often than other thoughts. I also understand that what is surfacing is somewhat of a hack. I understand that thinking a thought, doesn’t make it true, or meaningful or useful, but it does make it more likely to come up again.
From a business perspective, you can see the effects of this when someone unfamiliar with a problem is invited in to assist. Often, they ask some question that is both simple but profoundly important to solving the issue. Everyone else in the room does a facepalm because the question is so obvious. Why does this happen? As we focus in on a situation, we start to fall victim to our own internal fast track as well as groupthink. Our brains stop offering alternatives, not because there are none, but because, well, we’re built that way.
I also understand that once a decision is made, the consequences of that decision or action are now just the situation we find ourselves in.
I’ll never know what might have happened if I made a different choice. It could have gone well or horribly. I’m not a bad person for choosing. I’m not a good person for choosing. I’m a person who made a choice. Right now, I feel like shit, because I’m grieving. I don’t need to try to control that by changing the topic to something else – like what-ifs, or my own failures. I could wallow in remorse, second guess myself and stay up there, in the world where maybe I can control this situation. But that painful path is just an escape from the real truth which is – I miss my dog. Just that. Nothing more and certainly nothing less.
If you are suffering in the aftermath of a situation, questioning your choices, or having vivid thoughts about a loved one suffering, please reach out. Click here: I’ll be happy to coach you for free. I will not try to sell you on coaching. Please reach out, – these thoughts don’t have to keep going. It’s OK to take a step toward feeling better.
The more I question myself or relive that day, the more likely those thoughts are to come up again. That is the way our brains are designed.
In business, we can protect against these limitations by inviting in more people to brainstorm, letting go of the need to be the one with the answers and investigating questions. Contrary to what we sometimes see on TV, a group of informed people, asking all the questions they can think of, is the best way to find a new thought, new hope, better outcomes.
I want to grieve, but I can also decide to focus on remembering her entire life in vivid detail, not just the last four hours. In her entire life, I’m very proud to say, Jersey Girl ran several 5Ks with me, spent hours and hours at the dog park, helping me make good friends, got featured in the local paper for her fashion sense, visited her nursing home patients, some of them, more than 70 times. Imagine that? She worked for over eight years at our local hospital, visiting twice a month. She competed in sports, earned ribbons and vacationed at Canine Camp Get Away.
It is the nature of our brains, that the more I times I think of those facts, the more often my brain will offer me them when I’m reminded of her.
And that? Is just good to know.