When I was 17, the car I was driving was struck almost head on by a drunk driver. I was terrified! One, I knew my girlfriend and I were both hurt. Two, it was her mother’s car!
We both sustained serious injuries and, as a result, were in the hospital for about six weeks. During part of my recovery in the pediatric unit at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, I shared a room with a kid who had a chronic illness. Because I was in traction, I had lots of time to read, visit with my new roomie, nap, and watch TV. I also had plenty of time to observe the people around me, and this is where my story intersects with your family owned business.
The doctors treated my roommate and I pretty much equally; they were clinical and somewhat aloof as you might expect at a teaching hospital where the senior physicians were educating young residents. The nurses and other staff, however, treated us quite differently. With him, they were perfunctory and even, at times, short. With me, they were kind, caring, and attentive; it seemed at times as if they couldn’t do enough.
He had spent a good bit of time in hospitals, was pretty bright, and had all kinds of horror stories about the kind of complications bedridden hospital patients might encounter. One time a nurse roundly chastised him for just telling a story about how a relative of his who had a wound like mine got a nasty staph infection. She was really ticked off! He was right about the possibility of infection, and God knows if you actually wanted a staph infection there is probably no better place to get one than at a hospital! Nonetheless, even the mention of a potential complication was enough to get him chewed out.
Once the other young man got better and moved out, I asked one of the nurses, Jane, why I had observed such a difference in the treatment between the two of us. She said it came down to one simple thing: attitude. The nurses thought my roommate was negative and dour in his worldview. He was demanding and treated the nurses and other staff like hired help. She credited me with having a positive mental attitude, appreciation for the staff, and patience. I didn’t know I was doing anything special, and I also didn’t realize my roommate was so off-putting to some people.
Being credited by an impartial, objective observer with having a “good attitude” was a revelation. At that time in my life I had never heard of Zig Ziglar, Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy, or Dennis Waitley. I didn’t know that having a positive mental attitude was the stuff about which countless books had been written and speeches delivered. I thought I was just being realistic given the fact that there wasn’t much I could do about the situation and I wasn’t going anywhere for a few weeks. I then began to think about the dramatic difference in the way I was treated by staff relative to how I saw other patients in the ward treated. Could a positive mental attitude make that kind of a difference? Apparently it could!
The experience of having life-threatening injuries at the tender age of 17 taught me many things the most important of which was the value of a sunny, positive disposition and its effect on the people around me. A positive mental attitude won’t necessarily work miracles, and it won’t allow you do the things that you are patently not capable of doing. For example, no matter how positive I was and how hard I tried, it still took 12 weeks to be able to walk again. What having a sunny attitude will do is make things more pleasant and tolerable for you and the people around you in your family business, and it will attract people to you versus repelling them with negativity, cynicism and gloom.
Follow Us
Recent Comments