Helping You Become a More Effective Pharmacist

Article

I'm devoting 8 weeks to helping you become a more effective pharmacist, based on my research and experience.

In my quest to make your life 10% better, I’ve teamed up with Jody Maberry to launch an ambitious series about the “7 Habits of Highly Effective Pharmacists.”

The idea for this series really came from my problems, but I also got the idea after talking to a lot of individuals about their problems. Here are some things they’ve said to me:

  • “I have a really successful career, but my family life has suffered.”
  • “I enjoy my job and my family, but my health has tanked.”
  • “No matter how hard I try, I can’t get things to change at work. My manager doesn’t understand me and my team doesn’t get me.”
  • “I feel like I’m disrespected every day at work and I feel like I can never get ahead.”
  • “I feel like I’m so busy on weekends that I’m rushing around just to get to Monday, where I’m back at work and getting drained all over again.”

My Story

My wife is a very laid-back, empathetic, people-pleaser kind of girl, while I’m more Type A. I admit I have somewhat of a control issue. For example, I like to be on time for everything, and when I’m not on time, it drives me insane.

When I was younger and newly married, the fights with my wife would be around issues that stem from our different personalities. One of the first steps I took toward fixing this issue was listening to a podcast about parenting and marriage.

Thanks to the podcast, I learned a lot of great tips and awesome things that helped me with my marriage, but didn’t really change the fights. It’s not even like we got better at fighting or we fought less. Really, the fights were just about the same.

Around the same time, I found a book that changed my life called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Truthfully, it was the first time I saw a self-help book and thought, “Maybe I should give this a read.”

After reading this book, I had an idea to create a series of similar lessons geared toward pharmacists. I adapted the book’s material to be pharmacy-specific and came up with 7 habits for pharmacists to adopt. If you go through each step, it’s going to help you get the things you want out of life—not only from your work life, but also your relationships, community, and neighborhood.

That’s why I’m devoting 8 weeks to helping you become a more effective pharmacist, based on my research and experience.

Not a Quick Fix

It may be a hard thing to accept, but everyone has problems. Some of them stem from deep issues Band-Aids can’t fix.

I was trying to use Band-Aids to fix the fighting in my marriage, but they just weren’t working. I was listening to a podcast talking about tips and tricks to make my marriage better, and even though I was focusing on changing these small habits, it wasn’t fixing the overall problem.

Everyone is looking for a quick fix. We wish we could just press the 30-second timer button on the microwave of life and fix them, but we can’t.

Here’s a little anecdote illustrating why quick fixes don’t work. When my wife and I first saw the house we live in now, we were shocked how nice it looked on the outside. It had brand-new siding, roof, and windows, and there was beautiful rock scaling up a column on the porch. For the town it’s in and the price, I thought it would be a sweet deal.

When I opened the front door, however, the wonder and excitement left. The house was a complete mess on the inside. The walls were half-painted, and the parts that were painted were an ugly nicotine yellow from the 1970s. There was mold in the bathroom wall and a poop-colored rug that was faded in places.

Then, after we bought the house, we pulled back the rug and found puke-colored tile. Underneath the tile on the beautiful wood flooring was awful tar.

Quick fixes in life are like putting new roofing and siding on the outside of a mess of a house. They may look good to everyone else, but eventually, they fade away.

More Than Surface Strategies

During this series, I will give you 2 approaches to life and how to improve it. First, there’s the surface strategy. A good example is waking up early, which has great benefits. But, using surface strategies alone is like putting up walls before you have a solid foundation, or cramming all the work on a farm into the month of August.

The same principle holds true for human behavior. Many of us focus on creating tips and tricks to change our lives, but what we are converses far more eloquently than anything we say or do, and what we say and do flow out of who we are.

Focus on Core Strategies

The second approach to life is the core strategy, which focuses on the way you view the world. Your core is the map that helps you understand and interpret everything around you. Without your core, you wouldn’t have any idea how to interact with the world.

Imagine you have a map of Berlin and want to get to the country’s capitol, but you’re actually in Paris. If you work on just surface strategies, you could change your attitude or think more positively to try to get there. Or, you could change your behavior by trying harder and doubling your efficiency. But, no matter what you change on the surface, you’re still in Paris.

In this example, the fundamental problem is you have the wrong map. When you’re given the right map, your attitude and behavior become important to improve.

We all have maps in our heads that we rarely question because we’re hardly aware of them. However, our attitudes and behavior morph from these maps. So, if you can change your map, you can change your attitude and behavior.

Our Mission

My point is to change the way you see the world and make it better for you. You can’t use quick tips to improve your journey without having the right map, and you can’t fix your life without putting the right principles in place.

This series is based on 7 principles that will change the way you see the world and make you a more effective pharmacist. The first 3 episodes will focus on how you interact with yourself. Then, we’ll look at how you interact with others and how to do so effectively. The last episode will bring it all together.

Each of the 7 episodes will focus on one life habit, so it’s important to listen to them in order. If you skip ahead, it’s not going to make sense because each habit builds on the one before it. In each episode, we’ll discuss the problem we all have, and then we’ll focus on why it’s important and end with how you can take action.

Taking Action

There are a couple of ways individuals deal with their problems. First, they pretend the problem doesn’t exist and do nothing. Second, they believe doing research like reading books or listening to podcasts is actually doing something to solve the problem.

With this series, I don’t want you to just do research. I want you to listen to the lessons in this series and actually start applying them.

This series is dedicated to helping your life become just a little bit better. All I can promise is if you apply its lessons to your life, you’re going to see great changes.

I can also tell you this isn’t a quick fix. It takes time because what you’re changing the way your brain is wired and how you think.

In 1983, Lorne Whitehead described how a single domino can bring down another domino 50% larger than itself. If you applied that idea to one domino 2 inches tall and increased its size by 50% with every domino, by the 57th domino, you’d have a domino that’s the distance between the Earth and moon.

The point is daily action over time brings results. So, if you follow the 7 habits described in this podcast series, it’s going to make a difference over time.

Here’s to making your life 10% better—and to making you a more effective pharmacist.

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