When we arrive at wholeness, the essence of who we are survives the fires of pain that burn to non-existence the illusions of who we are not.

Today was a marathon of eight coaching sessions with health care leaders and teams in an interesting array of issues: improving on time surgeries, getting better patient histories in radiology, inventing bereavement services, decreasing emergency department wait times, assessing for high-risk employee turnover, cross-training technical staff, moving from a problem to strength based culture. What was evident across the spectrum was that people engage when we set a tone of optimism about outcomes. Just sparking people’s faith in themselves is magic and transformative. When people have faith in themselves, each other, and their leaders, there is no stopping their capacity for creativity and resiliency. What more can we ask?

Sat in a Wyoming bar tonight across from two size 48 hunters deep in a serious mouthwatering diatribe on the intricacies of bear preparations. Apparently the winner was the one where “you make a bear sausage and then cook down all kinds of Italian seasonings like oregano and then put it all together into an alfredo sauce.”

It’s good to know that bear still earns respect in these parts, if only as a foundation for gourmet innovations.

Spent time today interviewing patients and families to assess their requirements of good care and caring. The secret to productive probing is setting the tone with quick rapport, especially when as in one case, the family was on their death watch of their father. With skill, humor is very possible and often welcome as people pray for relief from the acuity of grief and exhaustion of the long hours.

What’s interesting is that people are very clear on what they translate as the requirements of care and caring. Number one on everyone’s list is information. Nothing is more important than people knowing what’s happening and why, who you are and what’s planned. Knowledge reduces the dark shadows of the unknown. Also at the top of the list is the presence of joy that care-givers bring to reduce the cold shadows of aloneness that accompanies people’s fears.

A gratifying day of conversations with department health care managers in Wyoming where I’ve been working all year. They’ve grown much this year, dedicated as all good leaders should be, to the continuance of their craft as leader. We still wonder if good leadership makes a difference, which is equivalent to the question of whether people can learn or are they doomed to the destiny of their past.

The good news is that they’ve all earned progress and achievements with their people, demonstrating that good leadership works.

According to the nice people at LinkedIn, I have effortlessly accumulated a social network of 1,849,500 people. I signed up when the site was young enough to lack adequate professional designations. The closest to what I do was “Independent Ranching Professional”, which still stands as my official designation. When I finally get around to actually inviting people to be in my network, I imagine there will only be a small group of Himalayan isolates who will elude my fame.

How much of the gender difference conversations are excuses for behaviors and attitudes, excuses given, taken, or shared? How many of these named differences do we use to justify what we are uninterested in changing? How many do we use as tools to put others at arms length, to compete for power, or even to give up our power? What are we doing to each next generation when we infer or insist on gender based excuses to be less than whole?

When did Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Devil Ray’s drop the Devil in their name? Since I don’t read sports pages with biblical religiosity, I miss details here and there. More importantly, why? Maybe it was prescient given their current improbable role in Whirled Series drama. In some theologies, it is believed that God created the Devil as the necessary prerequisite to free will that could not exist without an evil choice alongside saintly choices. Is the whole name change an archetypal metaphor for our culture’s growing ambivalence about freedom? Just wonderin’.

It was a touching moment today when a nurse manager in my leadership workshop tearfully confessed to me that she’s lost her passion for nursing leadership. She was encouraged by my suggestion that it is OK to wake up one day to find that you no longer belong to the tribe you once knew as home. She just needed permission to follow her heart. She was apparently ready consider that sacrifice is not the measure of authenticity; following the joy of your passion is.

Everyone will gain from her courage to listen to the emerging voices of passions otherwise welling up inside her.

When we experience what we call a loss, what is it that we have and what does having mean in a universe where impermanence is intrinsic, where all being is becoming? Certainly suffering requires having in order for losing to be possible. but joy, on the other hand, requires no having.