How do we shift a culture through education?
Simple answer- by shifting our education
Difficult answer- by empowering those being educated to be in control of their education.
Almost all things in life are based upon value-adds:
the value added by utilizing the tool
the value added in the individual, group, organization, etc. using that tool
the value added in monetary gains
the value added within the services rendered
The list continues with the understanding that the value is two-fold: real value and perceived value. Real or true value is easily measured, thereby seems to be our focus. This hammer decreases our work time by 25%, which increases our profits by 23%. Spreadsheet friendly.
Perceived value, on the other hand, is difficult to measure, so we tend to leave it out of the equation. However, perception drives future behaviors and is directly related to the client-facing portion of company interactions. In health care, this is the care in which the patient receives. Perceived value is that "feeling" our clients have when we provided services through empathy. It's also the feeling they have when we treated them like a number, instead of a person. It's humanistic in nature.
So, if this our value, then how can we ensure our goal of value-add is created in our patients/clients? Competency. True competency, or the ability to do a task so well that the thought is no longer needed on the task because our muscle memory takes over. This allows us to focus on other value-add aspects, such as emotionally supporting a family, distracting a pediatric patient while performing an uncomfortable procedure, delegating while prioritizing specific needs within an emergent situation, and most importantly, responding instead of reacting. This offers the ability to create a calm within ourselves which drastically decreases the emotional response, also known as fight or flight, or fight, flight, freeze, which takes away our ability to analyze because we are in survival mode. So, competency, true competency, leads to analyze the situation and respond appropriately, while bypassing our reactionary brain.
If we are to reach becoming on the "thinking to doing to being" scale, we must shift our objectives from our industrial-revolutionary mindset (i.e. factory worker style) to one that is holistic in nature. Think about it, what fun would bike riding be if we never reach true competency (becoming a cyclist) and have the ability to take in the sites, clear our minds, etc.? Likewise, we will never reach our full value-add potential until we see the world differently and begin to offer an Edu-cultural shift.
Need help shifting your edu-culture? Check out my eBook to get you started.
Be well, be love!