July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
Listen to the voice in your head (1/5/03)
As I See It
This time she listened to the voice in her head. Something told her to check the patient’s blood sugar even though all the other hospital personnel insisted that the patient wasn’t diabetic.
As a result of her persistence she saved the person’s life and received a gold star as a reward. The compliment raised her spirits as much as saving the person’s life did.
She took her star to the supervisor who trained her when she first joined the emergency room staff and told the supervisor that the award really belonged to the one who had mentored her.
Yes, I’m taking the chance to brag on my kid, but the larger issue is that she listened to her intuition. I have fielded calls before when she trusted the judgment of those more educated and/or experienced than she and regretted it.
Why is it that we trust the “experts” more than we trust ourselves? We are so certain that everybody else has the correct answers that we seldom heed the voices in our heads. We have become a nation of insecure people willing to trust everyone but ourselves.
The self-help sections of the bookstores and libraries are chock-full of experts telling us how to have the perfect child, marriage, body, life, afterlife, you name it. What most of them are expert in is in taking people’s money.
There is no such thing as perfection except what we define perfection to be. That definition is constantly changing.
Think about all the fertility goddess statues you’ve ever seen in magazines. They usually depict women we now consider to be grossly overweight to be the ideal mother figure.
For that matter, look at anyone half your age. You will likely discover that their idea of what is attractive is vastly different than your own.
When it comes down to it, we all know exactly how to improve the things in our lives that we think need to be improved. We know what our vices are and how to change them. The problem is we think change won’t bring us the same rewards or pleasures as our vices will. Sometimes we are right.
We seek out the opinions of others hoping to find they agree with us and thereby validate our own beliefs. We value education and experience and think that those with the most education are somehow smarter than the rest of us.
While education teaches many valuable things it doesn’t teach common sense.
Education doesn’t teach us to pay attention to the voice in our head that says we should say or do the one thing that everyone else says is unnecessary.
We ignore the feeling that we should flee a dangerous situation because it could be perceived as being impolite. We fight the urge to interfere when we see a child being mistreated because it isn’t our job to get involved. Besides, anyone who has ever had a child knows that they are prone to meltdowns in public places. What if we are wrong and it is really is nothing after all?
We ignore that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right with our health because we don’t want to be thought of as hypochondriacs. We avoid questioning a superior because we don’t want to be seen as impertinent.
As a result we are stuck with the feeling of “I should have listened to my intuition.” So next time the voice in your head tells you something – listen! Unless it is telling you to participate in the annual polar bear swim on New Year’s Day. In that case just tell the voice to shut-up.[[In-content Ad]]
As a result of her persistence she saved the person’s life and received a gold star as a reward. The compliment raised her spirits as much as saving the person’s life did.
She took her star to the supervisor who trained her when she first joined the emergency room staff and told the supervisor that the award really belonged to the one who had mentored her.
Yes, I’m taking the chance to brag on my kid, but the larger issue is that she listened to her intuition. I have fielded calls before when she trusted the judgment of those more educated and/or experienced than she and regretted it.
Why is it that we trust the “experts” more than we trust ourselves? We are so certain that everybody else has the correct answers that we seldom heed the voices in our heads. We have become a nation of insecure people willing to trust everyone but ourselves.
The self-help sections of the bookstores and libraries are chock-full of experts telling us how to have the perfect child, marriage, body, life, afterlife, you name it. What most of them are expert in is in taking people’s money.
There is no such thing as perfection except what we define perfection to be. That definition is constantly changing.
Think about all the fertility goddess statues you’ve ever seen in magazines. They usually depict women we now consider to be grossly overweight to be the ideal mother figure.
For that matter, look at anyone half your age. You will likely discover that their idea of what is attractive is vastly different than your own.
When it comes down to it, we all know exactly how to improve the things in our lives that we think need to be improved. We know what our vices are and how to change them. The problem is we think change won’t bring us the same rewards or pleasures as our vices will. Sometimes we are right.
We seek out the opinions of others hoping to find they agree with us and thereby validate our own beliefs. We value education and experience and think that those with the most education are somehow smarter than the rest of us.
While education teaches many valuable things it doesn’t teach common sense.
Education doesn’t teach us to pay attention to the voice in our head that says we should say or do the one thing that everyone else says is unnecessary.
We ignore the feeling that we should flee a dangerous situation because it could be perceived as being impolite. We fight the urge to interfere when we see a child being mistreated because it isn’t our job to get involved. Besides, anyone who has ever had a child knows that they are prone to meltdowns in public places. What if we are wrong and it is really is nothing after all?
We ignore that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right with our health because we don’t want to be thought of as hypochondriacs. We avoid questioning a superior because we don’t want to be seen as impertinent.
As a result we are stuck with the feeling of “I should have listened to my intuition.” So next time the voice in your head tells you something – listen! Unless it is telling you to participate in the annual polar bear swim on New Year’s Day. In that case just tell the voice to shut-up.[[In-content Ad]]
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