6:21am in the apartment. Everyone is still asleep. I wish I was still asleep. I need more rest. I have been tired lately. Not sure what is causing it. Stress? Getting up too early? Distraction? I woke up an hour later than usual and still feel tired. I would have slept longer but the dog needed to go out. I took her for a walk, came home, made coffee, sat down and turned on the weather. Now I have time to gather my thoughts and write some things down. I am still examining what I consider my work/purpose. I am almost 50. As I approach middle age I know a job doesn’t define me. I am my own person. I set my own course. Like doing these posts. Writing down my thoughts. But these posts don’t fill my day. They don’t give me a battle, a game to win. I need an antagonist. Something to fight against and test my resolve. This job provides that. I wish it were going better. Being in business and not being successful sucks. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I took this job six months ago. I knew it was bad but it is even worse than I realized. This site is a mess. Our key referral source just sold us. No one wants to work. And half the people that show up don’t have the proper skill set. Some days I don’t know where to begin. everything I do to fix one problem uncovers more problems. Everyday is one step forward two steps back. No wonder I am exhausted. Tuesdays are the day I have one-on-one time with my supervisor. We have an hour phone call to go over key metrics. It isn’t too bad. My supervisor is nice. But she is frustrated like I am. We both want to be successful. We both want results. But we are struggling. I am not alone. other sites are struggling as well. I do not envy her job. We are part of a new company. We are under pressure to deliver. It is time to find our groove and get moving in the right direction. My call ends at noon. I will check in then and update how it goes.
Category: Work
Still on theme
6:39pm in the apartment. Picked up dinner for everyone, finished eating, now changing. I am still on the same theme today. My work history isn’t normal. No one should change jobs fourteen times in twelve years. No one should worry about being fired everyday. No one should have to give themselves a pep talk to get ready for work. I loved being a chaplain. I was empowered by the job. It wasn’t perfect but it was great as far as jobs go. It fit my personality. I hate operations and sales. I knew early I didn’t want to do operations. It wasn’t much longer I knew I hated sales. But work has a way of locking you in. Your resume shows experience in certain fields. Whether you like those fields is a different story. The immediacy of needing money and having a job override choice. Next thing you know you are depressed and stuck. I need to change.
Still play?
8:49am in my office. The referral from last night fell through. I am jaded. I knew something would go wrong. The patient had been put on palliative care with another hospice and the family chose to go with them. We went from an immediate need imminently dying patient to the admission being put off. Now it is gone altogether. Frustrating. Another set back in an already rough month. The question I have been pondering all morning is how long to still play the game? I think about the scenario of being a chaplain and my wife cutting hair. Find a small town, build a quiet life. Live simple. Her work is just as stressful. She does marketing for a pest control company. We both are beholden to numbers and financial results. Should we stop playing the game or keep going?
Journey man redux
5:47am in the apartment. Took the dog for a long walk this morning. We are both tired. I know I mentioned before that my post chaplain career has felt like being a “journeyman” professional athlete. I bounce from team to team. I seldom stay for more than a season. I am never settled, never at home. I have a particular set of skills that are valuable to a team. I fill a needed position. I show up, work hard and get paid. After a while the team management decides to go in a different direction or try something new. I update my resume, look for a new opportunity, get a new job and the cycle repeats. It hasn’t been terrible. I get to travel. I make decent money. But it is tiring not having a permanent job. I miss stability. I miss having peace of mind. I want to wake up and not feel like I am about to be fired every single day I go to work. How long can I continue to do this? Will I miss it when it is over? And most importantly, what is the alternative? What will I do if I am not doing this?
On call
10:52pm I’m in chandler. Sleeping in the couch. Girls are in my daughters bedroom. Wife and dog are in the master bedroom. I am administrator on call for work. We got a call around 8pm from a nurse practitioner for a STAT hospice admission. I spent the last two hours talking with my triage nurse and clinical director trying to get everything in place to take care of the patient. now the family wants to wait until morning. Frustrating from a care team perspective. Worrisome for the need of the patient. Luckily The patient appears to be comfortable and managed. We will do the admission in the morning. I appreciate the experience. I have to learn how to enter new referrals in the system and run eligibility. Skills I haven’t developed yet. This is a good life lesson. It is only when I am put in a moment of urgency do I realize what I don’t know but need to know. I will grow personally and professionally from this.
Thursday night
It is 7:38pm. I came home from work, ate dinner and watched the weather and streamed some shows. It is still 100 degrees outside. Storms are starting to blow in. The temperature is supposed to drop below 90 for the next couple of days. There are multiple thunderstorms forecast. Thunderstorms are a mixed blessing. The cool down feels nice. But the rain creates flash flooding hazards. work continues to be draining. The job is fine. I don’t mind the stress. But we are not getting admissions. That should be the payoff for all the bullshit. Instead it is all crap and no roses. Thankfully Things are picking up with referrals. Now We need to admit some patients.
Thursday morning check in
I am in my office South Phoenix at 8:48am. I have an office meeting at 9am so not much time to write. After the meeting I am going to head north to meet with a provider that could refer patients. Sometimes I dread meetings but this one doesn’t bother me. I am happy to get out of the office and meet someone new. I consider this morning to have gone well. I was happy to have written the post earlier. After that I showered, made the bed, fed Tiki the fish and headed to work. My car was filthy and has been bugging me. I couldn’t take it any more so i got gas and put my car through the wash for a quick rinse. After i got to work i did the morning stand up call and went through paperwork. Now I am sipping coffee and writing this post.
Not taking blame
It is 6:01am on Thursday morning. I am writing from my apartment in Chandler, Arizona. I am usually writing from my apartment in Chandler first thing in the morning. There is not much variation in my life. For the last couple of months I am either writing in Chandler, Phoenix, Palm Desert or Dana Point. It can be monotonous always doing the same thing. But then again it can be comforting to not deal with constant variation. Things are a little different today. I am sitting at my computer instead of using my phone on the couch. I had a scare this morning. I brought up the blog site and I wasn’t logged in. I worried I was shut out because I didn’t renew my other site. But I was able to reset the password and get in. Tragedy averted. Now I need to make sure my phone is working. I thought about place and life on my walk this morning. I want to stay in Arizona a little longer. I don’t want to move until the beginning of March, 2022. I don’t want to break my lease and I don’t want to deal with movers. Today is the five month “anniversary” of starting work in Phoenix. It has been an experience. The site I took over has been in turmoil. A lot of changes in leadership. Inappropriate admissions leading to paying back past payments. I thought I could come in and turn things around. I felt good about my abilities. But our census never went up. In fact it continues to go down. Revenue continues to go down as well. So much so that the business is in bad shape. If things weren’t bad enough the company announced on my third day of work they were selling the hospice and home health division. The sale just went through at the beginning of the month. The hospice was owned by a senior living company. We have the same name as the senior living company. We got over 90% of our business from the senior living company. The senior living company sold us. We are now owned by a hospital system that does not have a presence in the market. Many of the senior living communities in the area didn’t like using us when we were the same company. Now that we have been sold they have completely iced us out. We have only had three referrals in a month and a half. We are budgeted for 20. I have disassociated from the situation though. I am not going to take the blame. Normally I take all the blame. When something goes bad I say that the failure is mine. But I won’t this time. I refuse to own the sins of other people because I am not some magical savior. The deck has been stacked against success from the moment I walked in the door. I am not giving up. I am working hard. We have marketing plans. We can get business other ways. I am not giving up but I am not taking blame.
Wednesday night wrap up
7:18pm Wednesday evening. Chandler. Apartment. Today wasn’t bad. I had a meeting with my night staff about changes. Some of them are going to have to move to weekends and days. They took it well. Not great. But they were understanding. That made me feel better. Then we got some leads on referrals. We can start growing our census again.
Consistent and persistent
6:05am I know this sounds like motivational material but it is not. It is an observation. Having been in sales and operations for 12 years I can tell you what I think is the key to success. The key to “success”-no matter how you define it-is consistency and persistence. I do not mean a talent worked on. You can’t get better at them. You can’t develop them. If you have to try to be more consistent or persistent you have already lost. Consistency and persistence come from within. They exist on a base level. They are mindless drivers of action. Consistency and persistence are the elusive traits so many sales leaders look for when hiring talent. But you don’t know if someone truly has consistency and persistence until they are in a situation when they are needed to persevere.
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