Cheryl D. Lovell, Ph.D.
President, Rocky Vista University
Graduation May 18, 2013
It is such a pleasure to have an opportunity to talk with the Graduating Class of 2013 from Rocky Vista University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. Please allow me to add my congratulations and to say how proud I am of you and how very pleased our entire RVU campus is of your honor and achievement today to be receiving your Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree. As your President, I firmly believe you are our greatest legacy, and we are committed to your successes. I believe your successes are our successes. I also am honored to know we now have a connection for life as you become a member of the RVU alumni association today and will forever be a member of our RVU family.
I’m tasked with delivering the President’s message to the Class of 2013. To provide some words of wisdom and advice to you I talked with several seasoned higher education leaders, veteran medical educators, a few members of last year’s graduating class, and even some of you to ask what a new DO would want to hear at his/her graduation. As you can imagine I got several interesting suggestions, among them included: don’t forget to pay your malpractice insurance, keep studying and stay disciplined with your time like you did when you were taking classes, stay current with your student loan repayment schedule, be an active member of the RVU Alumni Association, be a leader in your community, and live a balanced life. From their advice and from years of participating in many college commencement ceremonies, I have decided to share advice I have learned early in my life about listening.
Many famous people have spoken about the value of listening. Carly Fiorina, former HP CEO, says “You have to master not only the art of listening to your head, you must also master listening to your heart and listening to your gut.” Jane Goodall, accomplished anthropologist, takes a more active view of listening when she notes “Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.” These quotes present thoughtful insights on the value of listening. I on the other hand want to talk about listening on a more personal level and tell you about another influential woman in my life who taught me the most about listening, my mother.
My mother was a strong southern woman with fortitude and discipline of character and integrity who was central in my life. Raising four children by herself was no easy task as she had to juggle each of us with demands of work and home. My mother taught me the value of listening and as with any strong dignified southern woman would, she had an expression to aptly captured her point. She always told me “You have two ears and one mouth so use them proportionally.” That was a value she admired and introduced to me: I should be still, be watching and learning by viewing, hearing, and listening to things going on around me. I quickly learned I could use her lesson of listening to get things I wanted. For example, I always wanted to be at the “adult table” at family gatherings and I learned I could sneak into to table by being quiet and listening. Watching and hearing the conversations allowed me to learn so much about those around the table and it allowed me to feel like I was genuinely supposed to be there. It often worked for a while until I got so caught up in listening to their conversations and thought about the topics intently so I could eventually jump in to add my own comments. I should add a six-year old’s version of the conversation was not always on target.
Listening and watching have become habits to me over my life. I have been known as someone who is relatively a quick study and I credit her for my abilities to see and hear what are around me. Another profound experience about listening came much more recently when I was on a bike trip across the Amish Country in Pennsylvania. A four-day road bike trip of 50-60 miles each day took me on the most peaceful, quiet, and relaxing bicycle riding I have ever experienced. If you know anything about the Amish you know generally they are not inclined to use mechanical conveniences. To be riding a bicycle mile after mile without cars, without the sounds of too many farm machines like tractors and other loud farm equipment made it a very enjoyable ride.
The experience was magnificent. Hour after hour and mile after mile was spent listening to the wind, listening to the laughter of kids playing in the fields, and watching the rise of the road in the distance. The Amish landscape is filled with miles of agriculture and acres upon acres of corn. If you have not been to this area you need to imagine the most bucolic landscape you could ever find (for a city girl this was rural!). The corn was in full bloom and the corn tassels swayed in the wind. Stalks were about 7 to 9 feet high, and the weight of the corn was pulling down the stalk. Clearly the farmers were working hard to harvest the corn before it was too late and from what I tasted each day they had perfected the right moment to pick it. Miles and miles of corn fields were all I passed every day. With every rise of the road, I would see nothing but another valley and another hill of road and corn fields. It appears every turn of the crank of my bike led me to undulating fields of corn swelling all over the countryside.
One of the days on an especially hot, humid afternoon, I found myself completely separated from my riding group who had taken the approach the first one back to the bed n breakfast got to sit in the hot tub longer and the last one back had to buy the drinks for the evening. I unfortunately was the slowest one in the group. The slowness, I had concluded, allowed me the chance to really absorb and listen to what was going on in the fields. At one moment I was totally lost in thought and then totally lost looking at the corn fields and watching the swaying of the stalks. I was stretched out on my road bike, forearms over the handlebars, feeling the up stroke and then the down stroke of my pedals. I found myself listening to the clicking of my bike as I changed gears and hearing my tire on the road with a thump, thump, thump bike tires can make when traveling over uneven surfaces. Then, suddenly, my listening was heightened a great deal when I heard a noise coming from the corn fields. At first, I was not sure what it was but then I quickly realized it was the corn. I actually heard the corn….the chattering of the corn stalks to be more precise. The movement of the corn created a very vocal noise. I even got off my bike once to walk into the field to see if it was someone in there talking. My listening was so focused in the movement the sound of the corn stalks was audible to me on my bike. The noise was like voices coming from the fields.
This level of listening demonstrated, to me, I was in the moment, and I was experiencing the sounds of the earth. It was so quiet in my time on the road I had the space to take in the sounds of the corn. The chattering of the corn I heard was symbolic as it represented to me if I could be still, could be focused in the moment, I could hear something as abstract as the movement of the corn stalks.
What does this advice on listening have to do with you? Simple, you must listen. Listen to yourself, listen to others, listen to your elders, listen to your colleagues, your kids, your partner, and listen especially, in your case, to your patients. This kind of listening requires you to be still, to watch, to grasp what is going on around you. As you leave to embark on your residency you will need to listen to the physicians leading and teaching you. You will need to listen to the entire team you are working with, the nurse, the custodian, and others who might look to you for guidance. You can never stop listening. Being a great physician requires you are a great listener.
You are going to be making decisions in time frames most of us will not experience….those split second decisions result in saving a life. The pressures on you will not always come with calmness and the luxury of time to reflect before acting may not always be available. I encourage you to find a metaphor, a visual of some sorts you can use to center yourself. For me clearly the bike ride comes to mind where I was so focused in the moment I could hear the movement of the corn. I think about that experience often. When I’m under pressure I try to imagine my focus on the ride and try to recreate those moments in my head that are quiet so I can hone in on the things going on I need to hear, even the small things.
Whatever your metaphor, I want you to be the best listener and be the best at sorting out the details of the situations confronting you so you make the best decision humanly possible. Listening with your head and especially your heart will serve you well. Dr. Joyce Brothers noted “Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery.” And finally, author Rachel Naomi Remen gives us a deep appreciation for listening when she said “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”
Rocky Vista University Class of 2013 you have a wonderful future ahead of you and I look forward to hearing about the journey you are embarking upon today and I cannot wait to listen to your stories and hear how well RVU prepared you for your successes.
Tags and Key Words:
Listening
Small sounds matter
Listening is power
Change happens by listening
