I have been contemplating what it means to have a consequential
impact in my work. “Consequential impact”
is what Eisenhower Fellowships asks of its Fellows in return for the substantial
investment that the organization makes in them.
This contemplation has at times overwhelmed me. I completed my trips to Germany and Mexico
three months ago. What has changed? What have I been able to accomplish?
I dread that I will be that one Fellow who doesn’t deliver the
goods.
If it were just that I failed to live up to EF’s expectations,
that would be bad enough. What makes it
worse is that I dearly want to make a difference in people’s lives. I want to leverage the Eisenhower experience into
impact for the people I serve at Casa de Salud and through various other
organizations that I contribute time and effort. To fail at that, that’s the thought that
truly sends a tremor through me.
Last week, I sat down and talked with one of our patients,
something that, regrettably, doesn’t happen very often. He told me how he tells people that he wasn’t
born in Mexico, but at Casa de Salud, because that’s where he was “born again.” He’d had a heart attack, and my staff was
able to correctly diagnose it and get him the emergency attention he
needed. Then post-recovery, we have been
providing on-going follow up treatment for him.
It occurred to me that this was a pretty consequential
impact. A man’s life had been saved. A
family had been preserved. And no, it wasn’t
a direct result of my Fellowship – it was, in fact, a testament to the skills
of my staff – but this is what I signed up for when I took the job at Casa, and
it’s what I want to enhance through EF.
My wife reminds me that it’s ego and ambition that I have to
worry about. Consequential impacts take
many forms, and can take much time. If I
am hell-bent on hitting a home run right now, I might miss the opportunity to
do important but long-term and perhaps low-visibility work. That made me think
again of my blog
post about the talents, and that my job is to do the best I can with what I
have, and help others to do the same. So
I continue to use the EF experience to inspire my work now, and position myself
to do whatever tasks are placed before me in the future.
