S2E11: Leadership Hack – The Power of Daily Gratitude (feat. Tracy Van Oss DHSc, MPH, OTR/L)
Rahul
Welcome to Learning to Lead, a podcast about leadership, teamwork, and reimagining healthcare. This podcast is for learners, educators, and healthcare professionals interested in building leadership skills in a supportive community.
We are your hosts Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas, and Brooklynn Weber.
Together we bring you conversations with emerging and established leaders, deep dives and hacks to help you become the best leader you can be.
Pete
Hello everyone and welcome to Learning to Lead. This is Peter Longley with the School of Nursing at Quinnipiac University. And today with me I have Dr. Tracy Van Oss, DHSc, MPH, OTR/L.
Tracy
Hello everyone. Thank you for having me.
Pete
Tracy, what one leadership hack would you provide all of our listeners with?
Tracy
Thank you, Pete. I work in the healthcare field and I see patients and families every day that have challenges due to many complicated medical issues. I know for myself, I'm very fortunate that I'm healthy and that keeps me happy every day. But one of the hacks that I'd like to share with you is practicing gratitude. Each morning I get up and I have a very special rock that is meaningful to me and I have time for myself where I'm just grateful and I share my gratitude with each member of my family to myself. But that just kind of grounds me for the day and gets me ready for going out into the world and being able to go out to work with my students as well as to help patients and their families. So if there's something that is symbolic for you or if there's something that you can just think about each morning or include as part of your everyday routine, I think it's really important for you to decide that there's something to be grateful for because each and every one of us has something that's going well for us.
Pete
All right, well, thank you very much because I'm grateful for you and Rahul in this Learning to Lead podcast, so thank you very much.
Tracy
Of course.
Rahul
I echo that. Tracy, this is Rahul. First of all, I love both your hack as well as the example you gave of having an anchor and a time of the day, which always brings you back and remind you to do it. My follow-up question is, when did you begin this habit and the story behind that?
Tracy
Great question. So actually the Rock is from a very special place in Aspen, Colorado. My parents were married there back so many years ago, and when my dad passed away, we actually brought his ashes out to Aspen and sprinkled him in the Colorado River. So the rock is actually from that very special place. So it's a very meaningful rock, if you will, that kind of grounds me every day knowing that my dad is kind of getting me ready for the day as well as me being grateful for all the things that I have.
Rahul
Wow, what a story. God bless his soul. So you started this habit as grownup adult. It wasn't there early on. Was there something that prompted you to start it?
Tracy
In passing, I think it was knowing that he had moved on at 88 years old. He had a beautiful life. We were all okay with him passing at the time that he did. It happened in his sleep, which is a blessing in itself. He wasn't sick, he just passed one night. And from that moment forward, I realized that he was always with me, and so I knew I wanted to talk with him every day. And I know he's with me all of the time now. He and his angel friends are always here with me, and I do believe that and I know that if I can share a little bit of him with my family, my husband, my son, and my daughter, I've got pictures of them in my room and I just really look to that each and every morning and just wish them all a good day.
Rahul
I can totally relate to that somehow the birth of a child and the passing of the parent, those are events that completely change us. They bring a big transition to who we are. So what's the impact of this gratitude habit then on your life, on good days or bad days? How does it change anything?
Tracy
I think it allows me to, again, just be grounded each and every morning of recognizing all of the good things that are happening in my life. We all have problems and I believe that all problems are solvable, but I think if I wake up each morning and say, today's going to be a good day, I put on that spirit already that no matter what problems arise or conflicts that come up, life is good and I'm going to have a good day no matter what.
Rahul
I appreciate that there's both an intention that you're setting to begin with and then your attitude to how events unfold, and it's clear how that's adding a sense of agency to the vast majority of events that are out of our control. But you're deciding to have some agency for your attitude and how you respond to what happens to you.
Tracy
Well, and as a healthcare provider, I need to bring that positivity into a person's home. I can't come in saying, oh, I'm having a bad day. It's raining out and explain that to my students all the time. You need to leave your problems or your happenings at the door. You're there full force for your patients and their families. So in order to go in there and bring my best self, I need to be in a good place. So again, that self-care is so important, making sure that I'm taking care of myself and doing the things that I enjoy throughout the day and sprinkle them in. I bring my 14-year-old Labradoodle out for a walk every day because that brings him joy. It brings me joy with his face out the window, and it brings me my physical activity, a little bit of movement just to get him and I to walk. So I feel like just again, sprinkling some self-care for that health management that we talked about is so important versus later needing that healthcare that we so desperately need to help.
Rahul
I'm reminded of a quote that Beth Freddy said to me once, she's a Lifestyle Medicine expert at Harvard, thinking we are grateful to someone and not expressing it is like wrapping a gift and not giving it to the person who you got it for. So my follow-up question would be what are some of your practices to express gratitude to others?
Tracy
I think the gift of time. There's not enough of it. So not everyone in my family lives in my house. So when they do come home, they know that the hair loved sometimes too much. My son's like, okay, mom, I get it right. But making those connections, whether it's via text, my daughter likes to hang out with me. I'm on the same college campus as her, and she's like, where are you? I want to hang out. I will drop everything and go find her and to go hang out with her because whatever I was doing or the work that needs to get done, I can do it later. My husband is home and he likes to cook, thank goodness, and I like to clean up. So we have those connections of time with each other that I think you make the short amount of time that you have available meaningful.
There's one thing I did forget to add is my husband loves boating and I was always like, why do we sit on this boat? There's nothing to do. We just sit here. But that has taught me how to just sit and I don't have to be on my computer and I don't have to be on my phone. I can just sit and be, and that is such a gift because I never knew how to do that before. So I thank him for that. So when he's like, do you want to go on the boat? I'm like, ah. It's that time to just chill. And that's good for the soul too.
Rahul
Yeah. So the gift of time, the gift of your presence, the gift of love, I'm hearing all of that and I'm reminded of a couple of guests who've been on our show. One, Josh Hartzell, MD from Uniform Services University. He shared the story of a medical student who would go around on the floor or office unit he was rotating on and before the day ended, he would make sure to express gratitude to someone on the floor who had helped him in some way.
Tracy
I love that.
Rahul
And then Lisa Coplit, MD, who's also been in our show, our Dean at the Medical School at Netter shared this with me once. She said one of the things one of our mentors taught her was before the day ends to express gratitude to someone who has been kind to you or helped you during the day in some way. So I think it's not only a practice that makes one happier, it's also a practice that helps give instant feedback that's positive and behavior-based and build connection with others as well.
Tracy
And speaking of connections, I do have all of my colleagues from Quinnipiac on speed dial, and I do call at least one a day to tell them that they did a good job or I'm thankful for something that they did. So we're either texting or I'm calling them because some days are harder than others where there's just more issues going on and things and more problems to solve. And I always do take that time on my drive home to call someone or text someone, not while I'm driving to say thank you.
Rahul
I've seen healthcare professionals appreciate this a lot as well. If you go into anyone's office, you cannot miss their thank you card that a learner or a patient has given them. And so it's very obvious that the vast majority of healthcare professionals hold gratitude very close to their heart.
Tracy
True, true. I have a box that I plan to open when I am a little bit older and have time to read through them all. But when I do get those thank you cards, I have a very large box in my office.
Rahul
Yeah, good old-fashioned cards I think are brilliant because they are not going to be thrown away. They're going to be kept.
Pete
Wow. That's great. Well, thank you Tracy. These were some great hacks and Rahul for expanding on them to get the nuance out there. Thank you very much.
Brooke
Thank you for listening to our show. Learning to Lead is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio, in partnership with the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences.
Creators of this show are Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas and Brooklynn Weber.
The student producer is Brooklynn Weber, and the executive producer is David DesRoches.
Connect with us on social media @LearningToLeadPod or email us at LearningToLeadPod@quinnipiac.edu.