Transcriber: Mai Hưng Reviewer: 한솜 이
Theresa lived every day the best she could.
She never knocked on wood.
She loved her family to pieces Almost as much as she loved Reese`s.
When I was teaching business management leadership at Central College in Pella,
Iowa, my students started calling me Dr. Death.
Now, what does that have to do with leadership?
I probably talked about death, dying and grief too much.
I started a research project where I interviewed more than one hundred of
the top thought leaders, experts, gurus in the field of leadership.
These were people, authors, experts, practitioners, professors,
people really at the top of the field.
And what I wanted to know is how can I prepare my students to be
the best leaders possible.
Now, there were several themes that emerged,
but one in particular was a big surprise,
and that was I should be teaching my students about death, dying and grief.
Now, again, what does that have to do with leadership?
Well, this was about 2007-2008
during the financial crisis. And they explained to me that industries are dying,
companies are disappearing and jobs are evaporating and people are experiencing
a lot of loss and a lot of grief. And all of these losses are like many deaths.
Now, fast forward to the pandemic and all of this is magnified again,
the industries are dying and companies are disappearing
and people are losing jobs again.
We're also experiencing physical death when we were getting death counts daily
by country, by state by city.
And again, the research says that one out of five of us have lost someone we
love to covid. So how do I learn, you know,
what do I do with all this information?
Well, there is evidence that people want to know about this.
These topics, such as on The New York Times bestseller list,
the last couple of years, books such as
Being Mortal and When Breath Becomes Air,
both of those written by doctors about death and dying and
the quality of life at the end of life.
Then we have Joan Didion's book, A Year of Magical Thinking.
Joe, did Joan Didion, a well known writer, it was also made into a Broadway play.
And that book is about the year after her husband who died so suddenly
and how she was processing that grief.
I also discovered in my research Ellen Goodman, former New York Times columnist,
she created a not for profit called The Conversation Project when her parents
were dying. She realized that there really she didn't have any resources,
that she wanted to have conversations. She didn't know how to start it.
No one wanted to talk about it.
So therefore, she created this called The Conversation Project, and on her website,
you can even download a conversation starter for free.
I discovered Jon Underwood in the U.K. , he created what he calls death cafes,
and I encourage all of you to Google death cafes, dotcom,
because now they're all over the world. They're not a therapy group.
It's not a support group, but it's people who gather just to learn about death
and dying and grief from each other. I've even attended a death cafe in Des Moines.
Now, the past year, they've been on Zoome.
But as I said, they're all over the world.
She also loved
her cats, if only they didn't lie around like big furry mats,
one of her best friends was her mother.
Theresa loved her and would never ask for another.
So most people don't want to talk about death.
They don't even want to think about it. How am I going to teach about it?
David Brooks in his book A Road to Character,
he talks about resuming virtues versus eulogy virtues. resume virtues
are those things that you would put on a resume.
They focus on doing what have you done? What have you accomplished?
What awards have you received? What boards are you on?
Eulogy virtues are those things that someone might talk about at your funeral
or a celebration of life? They focus on being your character,
what kind of person you were.
So I want to teach my students about eulogy virtues.
so one of the things that I did is
I have them read some of my favorite eulogies. Now I have a collection.
I collect eulogies. I mean, doesn't everybody?
But again, I'm known as Dr. Death, so I have a collection.
If I go to a funeral and I like the eulogy I asked for a copy.
I also have students watch Tim Russert memorial service. now Tim Russert was
the face of NBC's Meet the Press for years and he was beloved.
In fact, people described him
as we invited him into our living room every Sunday
because he was that familiar with them.
Tim Russert died suddenly in two thousand eight.
And at that time, NBC had four days of coverage of remembering Tim Russert.
And over these four days, people were talking about Tim, what Tim was like.
They mentioned something about what he did,
but they were really talking about who Tim was as a person, his eulogy virtues
What was he like? What was his character?
And at the time, there was criticism like who really gets four days of coverage
when they die on television? Unless maybe you're president?
But Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal wrote an article and said,
“I don’t think it’s excessive, young people need role models.
And Tim Russert was beloved and he was a perfect role model of a life well lived.”
I also have my students read the book Tuesdays with Morrie.
Now, that's a classic and professors love that book because it's based on
a true story where Mitch Albom discovers that his favorite professor Morrie is
dying of ALS. So he goes to reconnect and goes to talk with them.
And the conversation is so rich that he decides to go back every Tuesday
and it becomes Tuesdays with Morrie the book.
But their conversation, without using the words resume virtues
and eulogy virtues, the conversation really is all about life. moreas teaching
them about how to have a meaningful life. They talk about death, dying,
They talk about marriage, love, success, competition.
But in the end, it's really about the meaning of life,
and that's really what I'm trying to teach my students, not about death,
but about the meaning of life.
Teresa seemed to always be hungry when she didn’t get fed, she would get cranky.
her favorite wine was edelweiss. She was always a good person to go to for advice.
So in the process of teaching my students about the meaning of life, Victor Frankl,
a Holocaust survivor and author of a classic book, Man's Search for Meaning,
talks about that the last freedom to really be taken from us is our freedom of
choice, our attitude, how we respond to a situation.
And so I'm trying to teach the students that life is really about decisions
and decisions have consequences.
And all of these decisions and consequences add up to be your life.
So I created a eulogy assignment and I introduce it at the beginning of class.
But the students know they're not going to do it until the end of class.
And they’re really only two rules, one, that it’s mandatory and two
that they know they know they're going to share it.
Now, I introduce it early, and when I do introduce it, they're like, I you know,
I understand this. What’s the whole point?
But by the time we've done the eulogies and the Tuesdays with Morrie,
they are connecting the dots.
And I relate it back to there's a lot of grief going on in the world
and particularly in the workplace.
And if leaders don't understand our own coping mechanisms,
how can we help others through these kinds of stressful situations?
Again, I said there are no rules, it's just mandatory,
they have to share it because I want to I want to create a sacred space.
a safe space for them to share something so intimate.
There's no right or wrong, no good or bad. There's no link.
There’s no word count. it’s not a graded.
It's very creative, it's been very meaningful, some put it to music,
some put it to poetry, but it’s usually very
a touching and a very good exercise
One student came in and he had his guitar and he started singing his eulogy to
the class. Another student, she played basketball.
So she used basketball as her metaphor
And she talked about the four quarters of her life and
the office that she had had along the way.
People had helped her and the points that she had made.
Another student loved shoes. So she talked about shoes. That was her lens.
And she talked about where she'd been,
where she was going and where she had hoped to go.
But the one that really sticks in my mind that I want to share with you is
It was a football player, probably two hundred and forty pounds, six four.
The room was full and it Central College, a classroom of 30 is full.
We were sitting in a big circle.
He stands up to give his eulogy and he was so choked up he could not do it.
The student next to him leaned over and said, you know,
are you OK if I would read this for you? And he said, “that would be great.”
And she read it and you could hear a pin drop.
I was so proud of the class, everybody was so respectful,
but it was also a good example of compassion and empathy
and those are also leadership skills that I'm trying to teach.
Now, I have presented this research at academic conferences over the years as
a research evolved and I always have faculty members ask me now you do this
exercise with twenty to twenty two year olds. How does that go over?
And my response is always it goes over really well,
millennials are the purpose generation.
They want to live a life of purpose and meaning
and I'm trying to help them find that.
And I also say the real purpose of
the exercise is if that's how they want to be remembered.
They need to start living their life like that right now
and the sooner they understand that, the better.
Teresa took a nap almost every day, but she didn't waste her life away.
She believed naps could cure anything, or if they didn't,
she would just dance and sing.
She stood up for what she believed in
and knew that who she was came from within.
You've just been listening to Theresa give her own eulogy.
That she wrote in my class when she was twenty one,
now she's thirty two and she has three little kids.
So when I called her to ask if I could share her eulogy with you, she said, Oh,
absolutely. And then when I called her again to say,
would you actually record that so that I can share your voice with my audience?
She said, Oh, sure. And she said, you know, naps are still important.
And she said, we if we have a bad day, we dance the day away.
Now, as I said, my students call me Dr. Death.
I plan my funeral the way others plan weddings and parties.
In fact, my husband has even said, “don’t worry, it will be a nice funeral.
You can stop planning it. OK,”
but the whole idea is if we think about how we want to be remembered,
I think it can be a daily guide for how we live our life now.
I encourage all of you to think about your eulogy virtues
and even go write your eulogy and share it with someone and ask yourself,
is that how I'm living my life?
Am I living my life in a way that I want to be remembered?
Because when we do when we embrace death, we see life through a different lens.
Thank you.