Sylvia's Journal

Yesterday was another long workday that started with my ride in at 6 AM and ended with my departure from MSH at 6 PM. Halfway home I stopped at Trader Joe’s and got myself a meal (Middle East Feast) that I ate while driving. Drips and drabs on the passenger seat shows what was in the meal (hummus and tabouleh and tahini sauce).

The long commute is made easy, even in bad weather, by the book I am listening to (Atul Gawande, Better). I am going through total immersion in healthcare between Groopman’s and Gawande’s books and I am glad I am not very sick. The stories are moving and scary. I am glad that all of us got out of the hospital without getting an infection. I am also a little anxious about how the ankle story will unfold after I see the ultra-specialized ankle doctors later in November at MGH and Faulkner Hospitals for opinion number 4 and 5.

Aside from our quarterly worldwide check in meeting with all our colleagues who work for and with us thousands of miles away, I spent the rest of the day continuing to sort out the status of the various teams that participated in the virtual program on contraceptive security and haven’t gotten their homework in. It is tedious beyond belief because it requires a type of mental functioning from me that does not come naturally: checking through lots of details contained in many different files written by several different people; all this without knowing all that much about the work environment and focus of people that do pharmaceutical supply management; and then there are the nag emails, please send your work or else; all this in French.

I was reminded of mental functioning and understood my difficulty with this particular piece of work after I taught a one hour private class on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to a colleague and his wife, after hours. It is an instrument that I love using because it helps people look at what they call ‘personality clashes’ in a more productive and positive way. It is especially gratifying when the concepts are new but resonate with people’s personal experience. The instrument and the theory from which it derives, provide a very specific language to describe the conflict (a different way of taking in and processing information) and remove its charged emotional load. They can also see that each type comes with advantages for their team and the work that needs to be done. They also understand better why they are irritated by some people’s styles (and, less easy to acknowledge, why they themselves irritate others). It is especially fun to do this with a couple that has been married for a very long time. I was introduced to the MBTI some 20 years ago and it had a direct and profound impact on my work life and work relationships. One particular tense relationship turned into a deep friendship simply because we stopped trying to change each other.

It is rare that I actually get to openly work as a psychologist in my work; many people don’t even know that I am. But it was the right profession for me and has served me well all those years. The choice to become a psychologist dates back to 1961 when I became friends with Edith (whose’ name just popped up in my mailbox after a 40 year separation). Her parents were both psychologists and practiced at home, dad as an organizational (industrial) psychologist upstairs in the left side of the house and mom as a child psychologist upstairs in the right side. Her workspace looked like a toy store, full of dolls and doll houses, puzzles and balls. As a 10 year old girl I decided that if that was called work, I’d like such a profession and have a work room like that. I never wavered after that and did become a child psychologist. But then I met a man and the road went to a place where I did not speak the language of the children and parents, and my work life diverged from the one I had imagined. Eventually I came back to psychology, but of the organizational kind. It has turned out to be rather similar to child and family psychology. I have found that, in our organizations, we tend to recreate the family systems that we grew up with.