Background Noise
Five years ago, we were beginning the first real big surge of COVID. The hospital chaplains who usually round on both patients and care teams were overwhelmed with patients. One of the psychologists and I started to round on staff in the hardest hit units to give them someone to talk to, a person to carry their experiences alongside them and relieve the burden on them if only for a little while. It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my career.
COVID was a stressful time in healthcare. It was incidentally also a stressful time in my regular job which was changing regularly and rapidly both in leadership structure and responsibilities. It was getting harder to do what mattered most to me.
The pandemic itself brought a lot of challenges to everyone around the world at that time, but it also brought an opportunity for personal growth. Times that force us to remember that life is short also have a way of helping us reflect on what in our life is most important, to drill down into the essentials of our own happiness and allow the rest to drift into background noise.
Identifying what is background noise doesn’t necessarily mean that noise becomes pleasant for us, but it does give the noise less emotional weight. The background noise was pretty loud in my life at that time, and I needed a little extra help.
One of the chaplains I regularly worked with recommended the book Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is in a caregiving profession. It gives several ideas of how to filter out the background noise and reduce the risk of burnout. I read it for ideas to help our team members through COVID, but I also used its helpful insights for myself.
One of the recommendations in the book was to identify a realistic dream scenario and create a simple plan with actionable steps to move slowly in the direction of that dream. This reminds us that our current situation is a choice that we are making, even if in the end we choose to stay in that situation. Knowing we have other options provides us with hope to help us through the most stressful of times.
I decided to create a plan for myself.
I started by imagining what I wanted the vibe of my life to be in 5 years. I wanted to be more present with the important people in my life by reducing my level of overwhelm and exhaustion, and I wanted the flexibility to have more adventures with Kim. My job was a source of overwhelm, but equally so was my reaction to those daily work stressors. I had to improve internally if I really wanted to reduce my level of overwhelm. I needed to become more comfortable with uncertainty and risk, and I needed to enhance my ability to be in the present moment by reducing my time spent ruminating. I kept a journal on the actions I took to improve and the times that I struggled. This step helped me both to track my growth and recognize a pattern in barriers to my progress.
Out of this plan eventually rose the idea for Two Birds, which would keep me engaged in meaningful work and use my unique gifts. As that idea became more concrete, I also better recognized the background noise that made it hard for me to be present for the truly important conversations in my life. That gave me clarity in the moment when I needed to make a career change, and it gave me the courage and strength to do it.
This is no guarantee that everything in my life will work out as planned. Every path has unforeseen challenges. But that was never the point. The point was to move toward hope to prevent me from drowning in overwhelm.
Is the background noise in your life becoming so loud that you are struggling to engage in your most important conversations? Let’s find your quiet place together where you can hear again. Sometimes all we need to lessen the impact of the noise and feel more hopeful is to remind ourselves that we have a choice.
