Spark Plug Newsletter

Spark Plug is a unique e-publication that is filled with ideas, information, and inspiration on values-based life and leadership skills. Several times each week, Spark Plug readers receive cutting edge strategies for being more effective in their professional and personal lives. Click here for sample articles.

These are among the literally hundreds of unsolicited emails we have received from Spark Plug readers:

“I want to send you this quick little e-mail to say thank-you for the Spark Plug newsletter that you send out. It really gives a person food for thought and a list of some great resources for people to read to help them add 'Spark' to their life.”

“I really enjoy the Spark Plug newsletter – sometimes it saves my whole day!”

“I always enjoy opening up your emails- they're always uplifting and very motivating. Thank you.”

“Your Spark Plugs are so helpful! I'm forwarding them to the leadership staff of our hospital. Could you send me the Spark Plug edition with The Janitor in Your Attic exercise you mentioned in the last issue?”

“The information in Spark Plug  provide exceptional nuggets of transformational
leadership that we are incorporating into a leadership development module at our hospital… I credit Spark Plug with sparking my interest in wanting to help our leaders, our organizations, and our society be even better!”

“I thought the last Weekend Spark called ‘Deal With It’ was outstanding. I read it over several times.”

“Thanks for Spark Plug, it has gotten me through many days.”

“I have to tell you, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed the Spark Plug dated June 2 about Life and Leadership skills...  You share such GREAT words... Thank you for sharing these with me, I have enjoyed them GREATLY!!”

“After reading Spark Plug I just need to say ‘Thank you!’  It seems like there is always something in your e-mails that hits home.  I stop and think, and then must read it again so it can sink in!”

“Dear Joe, I am working as a medical doctor but I am also a ‘self-help fanatic.’ I have screened literally hundreds of websites [and] receive hundreds of self-improvement newsletters, but yours are the most impressive. Thanks so much for your Spark Plug series… which is such a valuable guide for true living. They are great and uplifting. I just wouldn't like to skip a single issue of it.”

Spark Plug Sample Articles

Take the Pickle Challenge™ !

WOW!! The response to the offer of my article outlining nine actions you (or anyone) can take to have a more positive attitude has been unprecedented! We’ve had more requests for this article than any that I’ve previously offered, and we’ve had more new readers sign up for Spark Plug as a result of seeing it.

That tells me that our work is just beginning. And that is not the “royal we.” I mean our work, all of us. We need to reclaim our rights. Such as:

• The right to enjoy our work, to be positive and enthusiastic and to get the job done, without being accused of being an overachiever, a Pollyanna, or a brown-noser.
• The right to not have our time wasted, or to have the energy (and energy is life!) sucked out of us by Pickle-Suckers who seem to only be happy when they are criticizing and complaining.
• The right to go home at the end of the day without being overloaded with negative emotional baggage (some of which ends up being dumped on the kids or the dog).

This will obviously take leadership from the top, but more important, it will require a general awareness of and intolerance for energy-depleting negativity in our workplace environments. What’s being done in your organization to create a more positive workplace?  Let me know, and I’ll share the strategies with other Spark Plug readers.

Today’s BookSpark

“Having a positive attitude is the foundation for successful relationships with your organization and coworkers. When people come to work complaining, avoiding coworkers, and making it apparent they can’t wait to get home, it hurts them and everyone around them.”
Mike Veek: Fun Is Good: How to Create Joy & Passion in Your Workplace & Career

Clear the (emotional) air – take 2

Remember the days back before in-flight cigarette smoking was banned? The moment the seatbelt light went off, the cigarettes lit up. Today, we’ve grown so fond of clean air on airplanes that a smoker wouldn’t get a second puff before being escorted to the emergency exit. Most of us didn’t appreciate just how noxious that smoke was until it was eliminated.

This is a great metaphor for emotional toxicity in our culture. We’ve grown so accustomed to it that we hardly recognize it for what it is. I am referring to the bitching, moaning, and whining that passes for casual conversation in company cafeterias, airports, and living rooms across America. We have become a nation of pickle-suckers.

This environmental negativity is (quite obviously) not consistent with outstanding customer service, patient care, or employee morale. Less obvious but equally harmful is the impact this gratuitous attitudinal negativity has on the quality of our personal, professional, and family lives.

Unfortunately, we’re so accustomed to this emotional toxicity that we hardly notice it, the way most people were once tolerant to cigarette smoke. If I could come into your organization, wave a magic wand, and clear out the 3-Cs of Negativity (Criticizing, Complaining, and Commiserating) for 30 days, the first person to foul the emotional air at the end of the period would receive roughly the same treatment as the would-be smoker on an airplane.

This is not just hypothetical. Whenever I give an organization the 30-Day Pickle Challenge™, two things happen. First, everyone (from the CEO on down) is appalled by the extent to which they personally engage in this emotionally-toxic behavior. Second, people realize that it is both possible and desirable to change – not for customers, patients, or the boss, but for their own emotional (and physical) health.

Here’s my challenge to you: for the next 30 days, simply pay attention to criticizing, complaining, and commiserating (co-miserate = be miserable together) that you hear in your surroundings, and in your own thoughts and words. I guarantee – you will be appalled. But in your organization as in medicine, diagnosing the disease is the first step to a cure.

Clear the (emotional) air – take 3

Last week I asked Spark Plug readers to imagine an absolutely positive workplace environment. So the question was asked of me – is this really possible, or is it just a naïve fantasy? My answer: It takes commitment and leadership, of course, and a willingness on the part of individuals throughout the organization to objectively observe their own behavior. But it is possible. And everyone benefits – employees, customers and patients, even the “number crunchers” in finance ultimately benefit.

To share a real world example of how effective this challenge can be, I asked Kathleen Allman if I could share with Spark Plug readers an article she wrote for her professional journal, which is reprinted below. Notice what I consider to be the keywords in her article – she did not just try to change the culture of her organization, she tried to make positivity “a way of life every day.” Her success at achieving this goal not only provides a more pleasant and productive place for people to work, it also assures that people are less likely to go home at the end of the day with a heart full of emotional negativity to share with their families.

Make a No-Negativity Rule

By Kathleen Allman, RN, Administrator
Millennium Surgery Center, Bakersfield, California
(originally published in Outpatient Surgery Magazine, October 2004)

As a manager, I know the first and most important thing that you need to instill in employees is respect; mutual respect is the fundamental requirement for success in any business, especially one as serious as surgery. This starts during the interview process and selection of your staff. A professional can learn any aspect of his job, but personalities don’t change.

In our center, respect for our staff members, patients and their families, the physicians and their office staff, and our competition is mandatory – we do not tolerate bad comments, rumors or anything else that creates a negative environment, but support a positive, respectful environment. In short, expect respect. The easy-to-implement way to make this happen: ban negative talk so a negative environment is not created.

To emphasize this, we invited Joe Tye, the author of Never Fear, Never Quit, to come to our center for a one-day class on his Twelve Core Action Values. He posed this challenge to our center: to create what he calls a “positively positive environment.” For the next two weeks, we all carried 3-inch by 5-inch index cards in our pockets and documented any negative comments we overheard, which would then be addressed at a later time.

Because all staff members attended the conference, everyone knew the rules, and we ended up with a multitude of consecutive days during which not a single negative comment was made. It takes 20 days to form a habit, so we aimed for that many days with no negative comments (NNCs). Now, NNCs are a way of life for us every day.

Famous last words

On the 1-10 scale ranging from miserable to life-threatening, hernia surgery does not even rate as a rounding error. So when earlier this week I felt like I was going to die, it was just a (quite successful) ploy for self-pity (though I do appreciate all the sympathy notes many readers sent – thanks to all of you!).

While in that depressing frame of mind (thinking I was about to die, and wishing it would happen soon), I thought of some of the things I’d be unlikely to say on my deathbed, such as:

“I wish I’d spent more time watching television.”

“I wish I’d spent more money at Wal-Mart.”

“I wish I’d found more things to criticize and complain about.”

“I wish I’d made more enemies and fewer friends.”

“I wish I’d spent more time in Las Vegas, and taken more of those eat-your-way-across-the-ocean cruises.”

Then I thought about some of the things I would be likely to say, such as:

“I wish I’d spent more time walking hand-in-hand with my wife.”

“I wish I’d spent more productive time at the office, doing work that really mattered and that really made a difference.”

“I wish I’d spent more time writing bad poetry in the hopes that someday I would be writing good poetry.”

“I wish I’d spent more time exploring the Grand Canyon and other wilderness places, with God as my hiking companion.”

“I wish I’d accumulated fewer things and more experiences.”

Of course, when you’re on your deathbed, it’s a bit late to start thinking about what really matters in your life. But since none of us really know just when our own time will come, right now – today and this coming weekend – is a pretty good time to think about what you could spend more time (or money) doing, and what you’re willing to give up doing, in order to minimize your regrets at the end.

Today’s BookSpark

“[It] is each person’s responsibility to seek and find and create work that is meaningful and fulfilling.”
Laurie Beth Jones: The Four Elements of Success

Best of times or worst of times?

What do we have today? The best of times or the worst of times? The spring of hope or the winter of despair? The answer, of course, is “yes,” just as it was when Charles Dickens penned those lines of the most famous openings ever written (in A Tale of Two Cities).

In my travels over the past several weeks, I’ve met people who have transformed traumatic experiences (cancer, serious injury, family breakup, etc.) into the platform for incredible personal growth. Whether or not it is the best or the worst of times is ultimately a choice – and these individuals chose to make it the best.

Today’s BookSpark

“Which is more important, good or bad? Regardless of which you consider to be the right answer, bad is often the bigger part of our thoughts. The traffic jam that bogs down our day stays in our thoughts longer than the open road that sped us on our way. The rude clerk is memorable long after the nice clerk is forgotten. Remind yourself to see the good, to think about the good, to remember the good. The good is out there just as much as the bad, but we are often prone to miss it.”
David Niven: The 100 Simple Secrets of The Better Half of Life

Eight Lessons from Florence Nightingale

National Nurses Week is a wonderful time to reflect upon the life and work of the woman who more than anyone else can be credited with starting it all. Whether you are in healthcare or any other field, the lessons of Florence Nightingale can help you be more successful and fulfilled in your work.

Lesson 1: Florence Nightingale had a mission, not a job. She did not inquire about pay and benefits before leading her team of young nurses off to the Crimea, and endured working conditions that would be considered intolerable in today’s world. Yet she never experienced “burnout,” and through devotion to her calling she changed the world of healthcare forever. Many problems of today’s healthcare system stem from the fact that hospitals focus on their business plans rather than their missions, and that healthcare professionals have jobs rather than callings. Nightingale would encourage a re-commitment to the things that really matter, those things that hopefully attracted our idealistic younger selves into healthcare in the first place.

Lesson 2: She was courageous and she was unstoppable. She did not allow opposition from the British aristocracy or the antiquated views of military leaders to prevent her from doing her work. When she ran into a brick wall, she found a way around or over, even to the extent of going directly to the English public for funding support and to the Queen for political backing. Nightingale’s commitment to putting patients first could be a powerful antidote to cultures of “learned helplessness” in which far too many patients today find that they have no real advocate during their hospital stays.

Lesson 3: Nightingale was disciplined. Less well-known than her contributions to hospital and nursing practice was her pioneering work in medical statistics; her painstaking efforts to chart infection and death rates among soldiers at Scutari gave weight to her demands for improved sanitary conditions first at military hospitals, and later in civilian institutions. She demonstrated that if you want to be effective, it’s not enough to know that you’re right – you must be able to demonstrate that you’re right with the facts.

Lesson 4: Long before Daniel Goleman coined the phrase “social radar” in his book Emotional Intelligence, Nightingale appreciated that awareness and empathy are central to quality patient care (and to effective leadership). In Notes on Nursing she wrote: “The most important practical lessons that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe – how to observe… If you cannot get the habit of observation one way or another you had better give up being a nurse, for it is not your calling, however kind and anxious you may be.” In today’s fast-paced hospital environment, it’s important that the nurse stop for a moment outside each patient’s doorway for a quick mental reminder to really be in that room with the patient, and not mentally off on the next chore.

Lesson 5: Nightingale had an intuitive appreciation for the impact of the hospital environment on patient outcomes that was well ahead of its time. Today, thanks largely to the pioneering work of Planetree, we are re-discovering that quiet and pleasant surroundings are as important for healing as direct therapeutic intervention. Planetree’s Laura Gilpin once told me that when she was a practicing nurse, she believed her top priorities were protecting the sleep of her patients at night, and making sure that their days were made more pleasant by encouraging family visitations and the smell of freshly-baked muffins wafting down from the nursing unit kitchen. Nightingale would have approved.

Lesson 6: Nightingale was a team-builder who cared passionately about the nurses under her wing and the soldiers under her care, to whom she was known as “the lady with the lamp.” Many of the specific techniques in her ground-breaking work Notes on Nursing are now outdated, but her absolute respect for patient dignity still rings out with crystal clarity. One thing is certain: she would never have tolerated, much less condoned, the gossip and the complaining that is so prevalent in hospital hallways today.

Lesson 7: In her quiet and dignified manner, Nightingale was a cheerleader devoted to encouraging qualified young women to enter her profession – even though the work was hard and the pay was low. One suspects that she would have had harsh words indeed for doctors and nurses of our era who are telling the next generation to stay out of healthcare because (fill in the blank – budget cuts, managed care, malpractice woes, staffing shortages, etc.) have taken all the fun out of the healing professions.

Lesson 8: Nightingale never rested on her laurels, but rather continuously raised the bar. After proving that a more professional approach to nursing care would improve clinical outcomes, she helped found the first visiting nurses association, chartered the first modern school of professional nursing, and through her writing helped establish professional standards for hospital management. She remained active virtually until the end of her life at the age of 90. Given the predicted dramatic shortages of healthcare professionals, it would be a good thing for patients of tomorrow if healthcare professionals of today would reflect upon how Nightingale maintained her enthusiasm and her stamina, and then apply those principles in their own lives and work.

A concluding thought: Charles Dickens was a contemporary of Florence Nightingale; the opening line he penned for his classic novel A Tale of Two Cities certainly applies to healthcare today – it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Were she alive in our era, Nightingale no doubt would have focused on the best-of-times side of the ledger, and implored us to remember that taking care of the sick and injured is a mission, not a business; that being a nurse is a calling, not a job.