Being Resilient Together

Below is my monthly message for the November 2020 edition of the MHRI newsletter, Focus. You can view Focus online at MedStarResearch.org/FOCUS.

---

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
 
Today is the first day of November 2020. It is also:

• The 9th month of a historic pandemic superimposed on the start of the flu season and rising COVID19 infections and deaths across the nation
• Two days before a historic election with concerns that, no matter the election results, there could be wide-scale protests
• The midst of a financial crisis with the worse week of the stock market since the pandemic began
• The continued, relentless, appalling acts of racial injustice across the nation, with the killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia last week

Taken together, it easily feels overwhelming. All of us want to use the upcoming holiday season to escape to the past where we travel and laugh with friends and family but for most of us, that just won’t be the case. All of the challenges of today will likely be with us for the foreseeable future. And it is for this reason that at the end of last week’s system COVID19 call, Dr. Evans shared a message on resilience, which is so important to us all.

A recent article from the Harvard Business Review, “What Really Makes Us Resilient?”, conducted a global study to better understand resilience and how to develop more of it. They found resilience is a state of mind created by being exposed to suffering and tangible threats. This strongly suggests that we discover our resilience only when “we are forced to meet unavoidable suffering full in the face.” The authors go on to show how these findings can be used to help us all create greater resilience in ourselves: 

 

1. 
   Accept the realities around us. Don’t rush back to normal to assuage our fears but rather face the real-world changes we will have to make to protect ourselves.
2. Trust ourselves to figure out how to live happily inside this new normal – we have an uncanny ability to improvise and adapt, so use it.
3. Our resilience is built upon our strongly held values, our deep conviction and our meaning, purpose and self-efficacy of our lives.

This is the time in our lives we all need resilience. I have been part of MedStar Health for over 20 years and am so proud of how we have built upon the work of the last decade to build new multi-disciplinary teams, improvise and be creative to stand up new functions, be resourceful in an unprecedented way, pull upon our deep-seated moral convictions and, in turn, help each other become more resilient. We are helping each other, as we take care of our community today and advance their health for tomorrow. Even our annual Power to Heal campaign is focusing on helping each other this year. It’s how we treat people and each other. It’s how we build resilience ourselves and together. It’s how we stay healthy and how we survive and thrive through adversity. It is the essence of advancing our health and those around us.

Thank you for all you do and stay well, healthy, and resilient.
 
Neil

Read Focus online at MedStarResearch.org/FOCUS.