You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals. – George Patton

Don’t you just love that quote? It seems so appropriate to our lives and also to our profession. We’re in such a time of transition and it’s so easy to get sidetracked!

I don’t think it matters what you do in life, there will always be those who tug against you. In this past week, our own industry has been full of those kind of things. One thing I saw in the last week was an MT who is very excited about new opportunities in the electronic health record setting. She’s doing a webinar this week on that topic, well really about job search skills, but she plans to share how those very job search skills led to an awesome opportunity that she wouldn’t have otherwise even recognized. What followed on the social media sites both amazed and amused me.

She received a message calling her a traitor (although the actual language isn’t something I’d put here). Seriously? A traitor for seeking and finding an awesome opportunity for a career path? The message went on to say that the person was glad she had time to get dressed in the morning because that person sure didn’t. Now I’m not sure how that really even connected to the topic, but for that person it was a point. All because one MT chose to step out and share something that was really great for her and she thought that information might benefit someone else.

I think our profession is in an identity crisis, and just had that discussion this past week with someone. The changes that are coming at us are creating so much doubt and fear. We sadly see that in our profession, in the industry as a whole, and even within our own professional organizations. Still, do we have to draw sides? I certainly hope not. There’s so much to be done and so many things to explore that it would seem to me to be a better path to find ways to work together to get it figured out!

For some of us, it will be about exploring new roles with the electronic record. For some of us, we will choose to remain in traditional medical transcription (because, yes, I think there will still be some of that around for quite awhile). Others will prefer to do all SRT editing. Some will move on to education. Some of you may even decide to do something like we have here and find ways to offer educational workshops for others to share the knowledge you’ve gleaned over the years. Some MTs may write books. In the end, there’s so much to be done that there’s plenty of opportunities out there for everyone.

One of my favorite authors is Stephen Covey. I love his writings about values and integrity and have learned a lot from him. As I was browsing things this week, I found a great quote from him that perhaps gives us some insight into some of these kind of behaviors:

People with a scarcity mentality think there is only so much in the world to go around. It’s as if they see life as a pie. When another person gets a big piece, then they get less. Such people are always trying to get even, to pull others down to their level so they can get an equal or even bigger piece of the pie. – Stephen Covey

Is it really about what piece of the pie we get? Perhaps. I’d much prefer to look at it this way: There are all kinds of pie out there, some I like and some I don’t. So how about changing our outlook and thinking there’s plenty of pie to go around? Then, perhaps, we can all sit at the same table and enjoy that pie together.

And now over to you? Let’s chat about how we work together to build things instead of always trying to tear them down!