Transcriber: Made Pramana Reviewer: Hiroko Kawano
During the preparation of my talk, I had a powerful dream.
In my dream, I was given a priceless gift by an enlightened being
and she radiated love and wisdom.
The gift was a beautiful wooden bowl.
It was forged by master craftsmen from the timber of an ancient tree.
They couldn't see that the bowl was cracked and broken.
When she gave me this gift, she said,
"See, it is perfectly broken."
This image haunted me:
at the far edges of my consciousness was a sense that it held a profound truth.
Maybe it held the answer
to my 12-year mission to build a better world.
Maybe it could inspire all of us to become healers.
My quest began one very ordinary Monday morning in 2004.
I was at work at the hospital.
The phone rang, and my world collapsed.
I didn't recognize the voice of my wife on the phone -
it shook so much with fright.
Our daughter had crashed her car and was critically injured
and was being rushed to hospital with critical injuries.
I tore across the city to join Meredith in the waiting room of the trauma unit,
not knowing if Chloe was dead or alive.
I felt a profound sense of dislocation.
As a doctor, the hospital is a familiar and reassuring place.
On that day, it felt alien and horrible and threatening
because I had the different role,
a very frightened parent of a critically injured child.
Chloe was alive.
She had broken her neck and her back.
After three months of long treatment and hospital,
she made a good recovery from her physical injuries.
I'm happy to say the quality of clinical care was excellent.
And we are profoundly grateful
to the many health professionals who'd cared for her.
What made me angry
was how Chloe was treated as a human being.
She spent those hundred days in the hospital
tied down to a hospital bed in spinal traction
with her head completely immobilized.
This was her only view of the world.
It's the ceiling of a hospital room.
Can you imagine staring at this ceiling for a hundred days and nights?
You can't see a television or read a book or magazine
or see out the window
or even see the faces of nurses who come in and touch you.
You have no means to occupy yourself.
I had believed that the hospital would rapidly do a disability assessment
and provide Chloe with all the aid she needed
to help maintain her independence, her dignity,
and her emotional well-being
for those long months.
And I thought that a compassionate system
would ensure that she had tasty nutritious food every day
and prompt attention to pain and suffering.
But no, I was wrong.
It turns out those human elements of caring
are simply not a priority in our overbusy hospitals.
Healthcare is full of really kind and caring doctors and nurses,
but the system itself can be callous.
We do make efficient the treatment of disease,
but so often we forget the human needs of our patients.
With all our technology and frenetic pace of working,
hospitals have become more like an industrial production line
than a place of healing.
At the time of Chloe's accident,
I was a senior medical specialist and a healthcare leader.
Can you imagine how impotent you would feel
with all that power and authority
and yet helpless to prevent the suffering of your own daughter?
Out of my anger and frustration grew a radical commitment:
I began a long quest
to try to bring more humanity and compassion into healthcare.
As I deepened my commitment, I was joined by my wife, Meredith.
We both quit our jobs,
we sold our house,
and we founded a new organization called Hearts in Healthcare.
I wrote a book,
we built a website,
and we reached out to like-minded health professionals.
Over the years, we have done hundreds of presentations
all around the world in many different countries.
For the first 10 years of campaigning,
my own medical colleagues pretty much ignored our work.
I felt like a very small, lonely voice in the wilderness.
Meredith and I struggled to create change.
And our library of books on how to be a social activist
didn't help much at all.
(Laughter)
But through many trials and errors,
we gradually found ways to catalyze a movement
that's now inspiring health professionals all around the world.
At this point,
I'd like to share with you the five biggest mistakes we made
and the lessons we learned from those.
And I'm going to build up a picture,
and you might be able to spot the pattern that eluded us for so long.
In the beginning,
I mistook my cause for a moral crusade.
I felt very angry about uncaring managers and greedy doctors,
and I wanted to restore the right values in healthcare.
But every time I demonized those I was trying to influence,
I just created resistance.
We had to remind ourselves
that non-judgement is a critical part of compassion.
Eventually, I let go of my anger.
That's really hard for social activists
because we are driven by a sense of moral outrage.
But on the days I remember not to judge and criticize,
then more people start listening.
I also became an evangelist,
trying to persuade people
through impassioned argument backed up by research,
but people are deeply invested in their own worldviews,
and we found that logic and evidence didn't help our cause very much.
Could I give up the need to be right?
The day that Meredith and I chose non-persuasion,
we became dramatically more effective.
I found my greatest pair was actually vulnerability:
when I dared to expose my own wounds and fears and mistakes,
then we started to open hearts and minds.
Our third mistake was to cast ourselves as, ha, experts on compassion.
We vividly remember being confronted by a group of nurses,
who asked us cynically,
"I suppose you're just here
to teach us what we've only been doing for the last 30 years."
We had to remind ourselves
that actually every human being has the capacity for compassion.
The nurses and doctors chose their careers because they care.
Our job wasn't to teach compassion;
it was to draw out the wisdom that was already present in the room.
Health professionals told us stories
about how they managed to reconnect to the heart of their practice
and provide care and compassion and love to their patients.
These stories shared among peers
were far more powerful than any expert advice we could give.
Our fourth mistake - there are a lot of them -
our fourth mistake was to apply business rules to our work.
In the beginning,
we offered a range of programs, courses, and workshops in return for money.
But you know what?
Compassion and healing
don't live in a transactional world of products and fees.
And the way we were doing our work and the values we were trying to promote
felt as if they were kind of in conflict.
So now we do our work in a different way.
We give away all of our materials.
We no longer quote a fee.
We simply promise to serve our clients to the best of our ability,
and then we ask for a donation in support of our work.
The day we took that scary leap of faith,
we found ourselves truly humbled by the generosity of the world.
My fifth mistake was to be like a doctor,
seeking the pathology in the sick system.
As a result, I saw so many things that were wrong.
But Meredith and I found out that when we focused on problems,
people would just blame each other,
and pretty soon they feel powerless to change anything at all.
We wondered,
"Could we ask better questions?"
So now we invite health professionals and patients
to share their very best stories of healing connection.
And we were inspired by what emerged:
powerful narratives of courage, compassion, and healing.
These new strategies have made us much more successful in our work.
My own medical colleagues now invite me to speak at their scientific meetings.
My book is being translated by volunteers into different foreign languages,
igniting movements in those countries.
There's an entire city in the USA that has embraced our work.
I have beautiful messages of support from that city today.
There's even now
a new scientific, peer-reviewed journal of compassionate healthcare,
and I'm really honored to be on the editorial board.
As we reflected deeply on our new success,
we finally spotted a profound pattern.
We noticed that all of the strategies that didn't work involved separation.
And all of the strategies that do work involve connection.
When we declare the moral righteousness of our position and judge others,
we stand apart.
When we try to persuade, we create resistance.
When we proclaim ourselves to be the experts,
we call others ignorant.
When we turn our gifts and talents into business products,
we separate buyer from seller.
When we always fight against what is wrong,
we draw up the battle lines.
Every action that separates us
defeats our purpose of building a better world.
But every action that connects us has the power to transform.
I began to see meaningful parallels
between my role leading change in healthcare
and my role as a doctor, forging healing relationships with my patients.
I uncovered amazing research that actually proved
that if I made a compassionate human connection to my patients,
they actually boosted their immune system.
It enhance tissue healing
and dampened down dangerous stress responses
and eased their pain
and recovered more quickly.
And the research tells us
that compassionate caring is as powerful as many of the drugs we use.
I had always conceived of patients
as an overwhelming burden of demand on our overstretched services.
Now I realized
they could be the most abundant source of health, healing, and well-being.
In our work in healthcare together, we found the exact same thing:
a wealth of knowledge, skills, courage, compassion, and wisdom.
The new world we are trying to build was already in the room,
just waiting to be uncovered.
You know, I think many of the problems in the world are just like that.
Whatever your cause,
whether you're fighting against climate change
or poverty
or violence in our communities,
I have come to believe that our protests, fights, and campaigns
are ultimately counterproductive
because
they serve only to separate us even more.
So what do we do now?
Do we just give up?
My patients have taught me the answer.
As a doctor,
I'm sometimes confronted by patients
who are broken, who have no hope.
Then my medicines are useless.
Compassion calls me to sit with those patients sometimes
in their darkest places
and not turn away.
When I dare to hold that sacred space with my patient,
I see them crack open and begin a journey of healing.
I witness miracles.
If we can learn to take this gift of brokenness into our hearts,
we hear the calling of compassion.
And we soften ourselves to be more vulnerable
and humble and generous.
And then we no longer need to battle
to fight all, to fix all the problems of the world out there
because everything we need is already present right here.
When we let go of our battles,
we open a space for healing that's full of ease and light.
Will you receive this gift?
It's perfectly broken.
Thank you.
(Applause)