This week I attended a work conference on business fundamentals in healthcare. This slide came up and I thought to myself- “What the Devil?”
The speaker explained how when our cup is 75% full, it looks and feels pretty full. We can take that cup and walk around fairly comfortably. The water can slosh a bit without spilling over.
A totally full glass on the other hand not only feels full, but requires us to walk around on high alert with caution. The odds for even the most deft among us is to have a spill or two on the way from one destination to another.
The water glass slides it turns out is about how full a Primary Care Provider’s panel should be. My mind instantly drew the relation to life.
A few slides later is this one…
Why do we need an upper limit if we aren’t going to make that the gold standard?
It is for the same reason we don’t keep our heart at max capacity. The limit is there emergencies to keep us alive and afloat. It’s not an aim, it’s a safety measure.
So why do we routinely schedule the last possible flight home? Fill our week with an event every night? Or permeate our kid’s schedules with enriching activities every free possible minute?
At what point in history did we lose the knowledge that full to the brim is better than wiggle room or you are a slacker?
Another analogy I love is what we called the “Jiggle Jar”.
The first time I saw this jar demonstration was is when I began yoga teacher training. I’m sure I rolled my eyes with these fru fru yogis demonstrating visuals like business people do. The jar is filled with water and mud. The premise is that when you are still your mind is clear and we are able to see well. When you are running around or getting bumped from the outside it stirs up the muck and clarity cannot exist.
Of course it makes sense. But it wasn’t until a few weeks into teacher training when I felt a relaxed sense of mind on a regular basis that I was unable to tolerate being riled up any longer.
I had been the frog that was initially put in tepid water and the temp turned up so slowly that I didn’t realize that it was nearly boiling. Vacillating my mind between tepid and boiling made the anxiety disorder I didn’t know I already had unleash to where I was non-functional.
Just like the frog if you moved it from a near boiling state back to tepid water. That frog may have been quiet and happy while nearly boiling to death, but it would scream and fight once it was tossed back to immense heat from something comfortably warm.
While it was my home life that was out of control, without leaving my husband and kids in a lurch; the only control I had over my life at that time was leaving my job as a Strategic Planner and taking a part time lower GS pay level job.
It was the best decision I ever made.
It’s the wiggle room that makes the difference between life and death, tolerable and intolerable, sanity and insanity, and even a safe panel size for a patient and provider vs one that is at maximum capacity and bound to have accidents like water sloshing out of a cup. We don’t want those water droplets to be any patients or pieces of our provider’s state of mind.
In the jiggle jar analogy we need to see that it’s not possible to bump into anything or anyone when we create space in our schedule- and totally related- our mind.
Wiggle room is what saves us. It should be as important or dare I say even more important as our most important regularly scheduled appointment.
Like the temperature gauge only someone on the outside can read as the frog’s heat is being turned up, our schedule may be the only gauge we have. We can’t walk around forever with a full cup. One false move or someone else with no wiggle room or a full cup will bump into us and inevitably create undesirable results.
If you are feeling the heat, turn it down and create space. No matter how important everything else seems, it will all be figuratively dead in the water when you are no longer around to keep it all going.
Choose wisely! Namaste
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