The first business I reshaped was myself.

Having been highly successful in directing customer relations for a national residential home builder, I learned mediation skills over years of meeting customer needs.

Then I had an on-the-job accident which left me surviving on insurance income for nearly two years. I am still unsure of how I financially made it through that challenge. I had gone from $60K in annual income in 1987 (about $166K annual in today’s dollars) to $780 per month from workman’s compensation insurance. That is when I learned to manage finances based on percentages and not on amounts, and that is also where I had to get creative with finding additional sources of income.

In negotiations with workmen’s compensation and employment services, I was allowed to retrain into behavioral health care, since my injury left me with a 39% full-body disability. My master’s degree in counseling was fully funded and wonderfully providential was my introduction to motivational interviewing and solution-focused brief therapy at the same time. I had four different supervisors who were my coaches/trainers. Having lost my income, my house, and about everything else, it struck a chord in me and I learned quickly.

I had grown up in a home where our obsession was our problem to the level that we never even enjoyed a picnic until it was over and everything had turned out fairly OK. I was in a corner and had come to understand that focusing on my losses, my difficulties, and my problems would get me nowhere. I was in a hole and that would not get me out. Rather, focusing on solutions was right in front of me and I felt I had no choice but to learn and apply these skills everywhere I could. Solutions would be my path out of that hole.

My first position in healthcare, while I was in my master’s program, was managing swing shifts in a crisis unit, and with my business background, it was a good transitional fit. I approached everything, including training my swing shift team, with a focus on outcomes and how we would get there.

We learned to scale everything as a team.

I would say, for example, “On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being “Let’s do it” and 1 being “Are you out of your mind?” where would you put yourself on ordering pizza as a team tonight?” If someone said “5” I would first ask “Why a five and not a four?” to learn their motivation. I would then ask “What would it take for you to get to a six?” to find out the next step.

Practicing this with my team was a way to bring solution thinking into how we operated and into what we did as a team to create our culture. I also learned by practicing this with myself as I approached every roadblock on my journey into a new career with a focus on what next and how I get there.

When I scale, those scales always go from a low number on the undesirable outcome to the highest number as the goal so that gain is foundational to meeting the goal rather than needing to lose something to get there. Gaining to choke out the problem is always easier than trying to leave something behind.

Working in Denver, Colorado, my swing shift team set a record for a team of four in a crisis unit completing 28 intakes on one shift with a winter storm coming in. We had learned to look for solutions, first in exceptions to the problems, as we went from thinking “outside the box” to looking at one another and going “What box?” And we celebrated every week as a team on Thursday’s shift.

This framework for business processes and a related counseling practice provided the foundation for my rise from swing shift manager to board president of a related trade association in 6 years. It was a rocket ride, and at the same time, I grew from that program manager to a deputy director eventually overseeing a $15M annual budget.

With that in mind, you can call my ability to coach in bringing your teams to focus on solutions rather than problems - street smarts. I do have a master’s degree in counseling (a trade name for someone who is skilled at communicating) and a doctorate in transcultural communication. However, these educational challenges provided an opportunity for research into best practices that support what I do. I grew in my curiosity and that became research into answering this question: “Why does this work so powerfully for individuals and organizations?”

How I now live and work focused on solutions rather than problems was learned in the day-to-day challenges of being successful in healthcare with a consistently changing market. I want to share those successful strategies with you and give you the street smarts and research to not only succeed but also set yourself apart as a wonderfully and effectively different person or team, rather than merely a little bit better than your competition. My goal is to share my experiences and successes wherever someone is willing to reshape their approach so they too may become wildly successful.