Consequential Impact

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.