A Bit of Optimism - How To Be An Optimist with Pat Berges

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Don’t you hate it when you’re coasting along -- not a care in the world -- and then it feels like life comes out of nowhere and hits you like a car, almost paralyzing you? Well, for Pat Berges, that wasn’t just a feeling…that actually happened.  Like many of us, Pat is not a natural optimist. He had to learn how to find optimism during this dark period. Not only did it help him recover, but what he learned continues to help him be, well, optimistic.  This is… A Bit of Optimism.For more on Pat and his work, check out:https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-bergeshttps://twitter.com/BergesPathttps://www.aarc.org/ventilator-training-alliance/ 

I started this podcast with the hope of spreading a little optimism. And then I met Pat Burgess, who admitted to me that he is actually not a natural optimist, that he actually has to do work to be optimistic. And I kind of love that. He had a really bad bicycle accident a few months ago that left him with a broken spine in the hospital. It's very easy to be depressed and down on himself. And he had to really learn how to be an optimist. He figured out ways to lift his spirits and it worked. And it turns out the things he learned can be used by any of us every day.

This is a bit of optimism. Pat, how are you? Nice to see you, Simon. We met because in the middle of the pandemic, you reached out to me. Your company was making ventilators because people were in hospital and dying of COVID. And the problem was these ventilators were being churned out so quickly that people didn in hospital and dying of COVID. And the problem was these ventilators were being churned out so quickly that people didn't know how to use them. The nurses didn't know how to properly use them. And so you produced an app that basically gave

step-by-step instructions how to use not just your company's ventilators, but all the company's ventilators. It was like a one-stop shop simplified instruction manual. This was a problem that was bigger than just my company. This was bigger than just us. It involved all of our competitors. And we had a long history of having a very, I'd say, intense competitive relationship. So it was hard to get partnerships there, frankly. What was it that motivated you to come up with an app to teach hospitals how to use your competitors' products as well. We just recognized that us approaching the problem in our own silo wasn't going to solve anything. We needed partnerships. The first competitor I called, they actually hung up on me.

They said, why would we do that? This is what I find so upsetting. We're living in this pandemic where it was right at the beginning when there was panic and lots of death. What is going on in a company that they thought that selling their product was more important than partnering with a competitor to save lives? What is wrong with American business that in the middle of a pandemic, the first notion was you're insane and hung up on you? You talk about why, right? Whether it's a mission statement or purpose statement, companies need to understand why they exist and what their purpose is. And if everyone within that organization, everyone within that team understands the purpose and is working toward that same purpose, then I think you can move with more meaning and intention

and decisions like that come more naturally. And so I just one by one started calling each of my counterparts at competitive companies. And eventually, about eight hours before the press release was going out, we got our first partner. After we got the first partner, the second partner came pretty easily. And after we got the second partner, the third came real easily. And after we got the third, everyone wanted in. The reason I wanted to have you on the show is you are one of those executives that is so cause driven.

It's so inspiring to me that you do have this sense of purpose and this desire to serve the greater good. Tell me about your accident. Yeah, that wasn't fun. So five months ago, I got on the bike, started hauling around my neighborhood and didn't get very far. What exactly happened still remains blurry to me to this day, but I distinctly remember my face hitting a windshield. The impact was something I won't forget for a while. And from there, you know, everything changed.

We went to the hospital. I was sure my arms were broken from my, from my elbows down, all my fingers, everything in my arms and hands. I was certain everything was shattered. It was like I had plugged my hands into an electrical socket and just excruciating pain by that point. Resilience is never fun to learn, but it sure is helpful when you have it. I was a hairline away from being a quadriplegic. So my spinal cord took some abuse and just barely held on and avoided that. The nerve pain when something like that happens is beyond what I have words to be able to tell you. It's a pain that I did not think was humanly possible. I had to sit in that pain for a while. Unfortunately, the swelling was so intense that they would not operate for 10 days. So for those 10 days, I was stuck in pain.

And, you know, there's a, there's a lot we could talk about here with what you do when you're in a very, very dark place like that, because I had to figure that out on my own. And there were some things that worked incredibly well and other things that did nothing. What worked well? What didn't work? Well, in the spirit of your podcast theme, let's talk about optimism first. Well, in the spirit of your podcast theme, let's talk about optimism first. I was not in an optimistic state, to say the least, right? You know, I think a big part of this for me was self-talk and the words I use when I speak to myself. I was in such pain that the only words I was really using were curse words.

I would wake up every day and the first word out of my mouth would be the F-bomb. I just couldn't get away from it. And so I knew that wasn't helping the cause. I knew I was stuck in this cycle of negativity. The self-talk was something I had to fix. So I incentivized myself. I said, okay, tomorrow, Pat, when you wake up, if you don't say that as the first word out of your mouth, you get a donut. Well, I did that for six weeks or so. A friend of mine, I was talking to her and she said, you know, that's a great incentive program, but you got to be careful. You're going to develop diabetes or something. I said, oh, don't worry. I've only had two donuts in six weeks. So that wasn't working incredibly well.

You get in that cycle to where you're kind of stuck in your head, just like addiction. People who are trying to overcome addiction, they say, take it, take it one day at a time. Well, it's kind of the same when you have a severe pain that you're living with is you kind of have to take it one day at a time. And in fact, there were days where I had to take that down even further. I had to take it, you know, 10 minutes at a time, five minutes at a time. Breaking things down into smaller increments just to make it more manageable was one of the strategies that worked for me. And again, that cycle of negativity will overcome you if you don't reverse it.

So I have little reminders around me everywhere. I'm not always a very positive person. I try to be, but I need little reminders around me everywhere. I'm not always a very positive person. I try to be, but I need the reminders. My wife got me this bracelet that says, focus on the positive. I've been wearing this for months because every time I start to get in that place, it kind of re-centers me and reminds me of what's important. Can you share some of the little things that you did that actually did work? I took time for pain. So I carved out time to feel the pain and to just be one with the pain,

acknowledge it, greet it, feel it. And I would let myself have that space. And then I would move on from that. I would keep it very short periods of time because it could last 24 hours if I let it. That's an easy kind of rabbit hole to get into. But I just took 10 minutes a day or so to just kind of come to terms with everything, to try to internalize all of it. And then I would visualize myself healing. Tip from a friend said, as you're in kind of a meditative state,

picture your body healing, like physically picture your body healing. And the power of visualization has always been really strong for me. It's always been something that's worked incredibly well. So I would picture my spine healing. I would picture the things I'm going to do when I'm all healed and getting back on a boat and going to concerts and going to ball games and just doing things, living life the way that I was before. This is brilliant. The lessons are so universally applicable. This is what I'm hearing from you. So someone who's going through, it could be something minor,

like just a hard time at work or a hard time in a relationship, or something more significant, mental health challenge, depression. And I think so often we try to suppress it, or we think we have to be positive all the time. But to allow it in, allow myself to be angry, allow myself to be sad, allow myself to be disappointed. As you said, to allow 10 minutes a day to be that, and then to engage in strategies that help you move beyond that. So one of the other things, in addition to visualization that I made a habit of was meditation and gratitude practices. And I kind of combined them. So, and I still, still am doing this today. Every day when I start my day and when I end my day, I take this

approach. So I'll pop headphones in usually, noise canceling so I can kind of get in my own head, lay down, palms open so you can kind of receive what you want to receive. And I consciously think about all the good vibes that were sent to me, all the people that were sending me love, all the people that were thinking of me. I started making a list on my phone of people that reached out or people that did something because I wanted to remember them. And I was forgetting a lot at the time. So I wanted to remember who had my back when I was in one of my darkest moments. And the list got so big that it became emotionally overwhelming. And I started saying to myself, I have to be better at kind of

receiving all this love because if I'm just stuck in my head, focused on the negative, I'm not going to heal. I'm not, I'm going to be in a mental slump even when my body starts healing. Now, when I was in pain, I would do it as long as I needed. But now on a normal basis, it takes about 15 minutes. So picture your body as a gas tank and each breath in, you're accepting everyone's good vibes from around the world. All your friends, all your family, everyone who's sending you a note saying, hey, cheering for you, bud. You're taking all that in, every breath. And if you need to think about specific individuals. So deep breath in, I'm thinking about Simon and nice note he sent me. I breathe out, I'm getting rid of all the stuff.

I just spent 10 minutes collecting, all that garbage that I ended up collecting about pain and all that other nonsense, and I'm breathing that out. And as I breathe in, each breath, that gas gauge is filling up. It goes from my ankles to my knees. Another breath of positive vibes going up to my hips, up to my chest, until it's overflowing out of my head, until I have more good vibes bouncing

around in my body from all the people thinking of me and sending me love that I can sit with. That's when I know it's time to get up and start my day. So when I was in the middle of the dark place, I might do that for two or three hours in the morning before my tank was full and I was overflowing. But when you start doing it habitually, it becomes a lot easier. And if you struggle when you start, think very specifically. Think about an individual moment

where you felt cared for or loved and breathe that in and take those vibes in and breathe out the negative stuff. So that gratitude and meditation practice immensely helped me manage my pain differently and think about pain differently, receive it differently, acknowledge it differently. I want to explain to people who are listening, and this is sort of one of the reasons I wanted

to talk to you. It's not just I wanted to talk to a guy with a positive attitude who got into a bad accident. It's not just a guy who came up with a gratitude practice. I wanted to talk to you because I wanted to share with people the power of what you practiced and now continue to practice in your life. I saw you not that long ago. If I asked the people who are listening, how long do you think it takes to have a car accident like he had

and then be taking a trip and visiting friends and hanging out and getting on a plane, walking by yourself, no wheelchair, no neck braces. How long do you think that would take? How long did that take, Pat? From the time that you got on your accident to the time that I saw you? So it's less than five months from now. I think I saw you right at four months after my accident. We went on a three-hour hike or so. Yeah, four months and we went on a three-hour hike.

three-hour hike or so? Yeah, four months. And we went on a three-hour hike. Okay? You got in an accident with a broken spine. And four months later, you're going on a hike with me. Four months. That's incredible. I mean, if you asked me, I'd be like a year, a year and a half, like four months. Tell me your doctors weren't a little bit amazed by that. It sounds like a quick period of time, but it sure as hell didn't feel like it. It felt like an eternity. So yeah, I mean, I guess when you look at it like that, I'm making great progress. I got another two months left of physical therapy. My physical therapist said, man, you're making a lot of progress lately. What's gotten into you? And it's hope. Hope is what's gotten into me. For me, it's a bit of a,

I guess you could call it a personal renaissance. Being quiet, being still, cocooned for months, it does something inside of you. Because as soon as I came out of that, you know, and was on, felt that I was on the other side, my comeback tour started. I feel like things are exploding inside in terms of inspiration and energy and ideas. And sometimes things like this make you stronger. I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say that I feel great, but that's life. We all have things to deal with. You can let it slow you down or you can let it propel you forward.

My mom always has said to me my whole life, she said, if that's the worst thing that ever happens to you today, then you're a lucky boy. And so I try to keep that in perspective because one of the other things that helps you get out of a dark place is helping someone else. And that's something you preach all the time, Simon. But you might be thinking, okay, well, who are you going to help when you're all laid up in a neck brace and you can't lift anything, you can't move? Well, guess what? You can help people with your voice. You can call people, check in on them, ask them how they're

doing. So I started making it a point to do something for someone else every day. So I started making it a point to do something for someone else every day. Maybe it was selfish of me, but it helped pull me out of a pretty dark place. Through this ordeal, is there a lesson that you've tried to instill in your kids that had you not had this ordeal, you wouldn't have taught them this lesson? I think the lesson is you choose the weather. You choose the weather in your mind. You're always going to have challenges thrown at you, but you choose what you do with that. How old are your kids?

My kids are 15, 19, and 23. challenges and kids can be mean. Have you seen any impact on your kid at school in how your kid deals with high school because of the lessons imparted by your experience? I think my youngest probably has developed a bit more compassion. I didn't look good for a while. You go out in public and everyone's looking at you. So I think if anything, it normalized some of that for my youngest son and made him more compassionate to people who are facing hardships and understanding that that sort of thing can happen to anyone. My youngest, Benny, was talking with a colleague of mine recently, and he made a comment that was later on shared with me, and I was very moved by it. But even Benny took this accident with a very kind of positive and optimistic mindset.

He said, when I saw my dad after the accident, after the surgery, I didn't know if he'd be able to do anything again, to play with me, to shoot around, to swim, to play games or whatever. And I was just grateful that I had had 15 years of him playing with me and spending time with me that, you know, I didn't miss anything because we had so much time already together. That was a pretty powerful thing for me to hear. ready together. That was a pretty powerful thing for me to hear. When I think about what he has taken away from watching me suffer, I think that's a big piece of it is just gratitude for what we have day in and day out. And if you don't have things that are a crisis right now, you should be grateful. If you're healthy, if you have employment and can put food on the table and have loved ones around you, that's a lot. It reminds me of my favorite Dr. Seuss quote, which is, don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Amen.

My sister got me this three foot hourglass that I keep in my office. And it's so symbolic to me. I've always been obsessed with hourglasses. and I actually like to cover the one end of it when you tip it. So you don't know how much time's left. I kind of think about that, like our lives, you know, like we're always running out of time. So what are you going to do with it? Yeah.

It's raining outside. Yeah. It's a crummy day. Yeah. It's, you got this going on. Yeah. I broke my neck, whatever. You're still alive. Deal with it. Easier said than done as you, as you've learned. Let me change subjects on you.

Take a sharp left turn here. You were tasked at work with two teams were put together. Your company went through an acquisition. Is that what happened? Yeah, it was, wasn't it? It was an acquisition. No. Yeah. I'll start you from the top on that one. It's, I had taken a new role within my organization and was moving back to the United States. Then the president of this business comes to me and says, listen, Pat, I'd like you to lead a culture project. We just did our organizational health survey. And what we learned was people generally don't trust leadership. They don't feel like they have a voice or that their voice is heard. They're not proud to work as a part of this team. And, oh, by the way, we're taking these two businesses that have historically competed against each other and we're putting them

together. Basically, this employee base really doesn't like each other too much. So that was the environment that I walked into and was asked to fix. And so we launched a program called Culture Circles. And we had started this cultural initiative thinking, okay, we've got to find that one silver bullet, the one fix for our culture. What we learned was there's no such thing. And so we started trying to tackle that one person at a time and getting people involved and working together and collaborating to try to solve for problems that impacted them at a local level. Don't try

to boil the ocean. Don't try to solve this for the whole company. We just want you guys to fix this for your subculture. As leaders, we need to double down on community and on that human connection, getting people to trust each other and work together. And Adam Grant talks about this as one of the key drivers of happiness is having community as a part of your work that changes the mindsets. It teaches people that they can make a difference. They can drive change. It empowers individuals to drive change within their organization. What have you seen transform in people, in relationships in general? I think inspiration. I've seen the contagious aspect

of inspiration. Inspiration is like poison ivy. The more you itch it, the more you scratch it, the more you spread it. And I think it's important for people to share with other people when they've been inspired. I think the other thing, Simon, that I've seen come out of this is people develop courage through programs like this. You talk about this a lot when you say courage comes from the outside. Completely agree. Courage comes from the outside. And in addition, fear comes from the inside, right? So if fear comes from the inside and you're stuck in your head, you're just creating more fear. You're creating all these self-doubts. And self-doubts are going to kill more dreams than failure ever will. So if you can get yourself out of the self-doubt stage that you're developing on the inside, you can develop that courage from

the outside. I think we can develop more empowerment by just validating and encouraging other people. So I had the good fortune as a very young kid to learn what empowerment was all about. I'm colorblind. So when I was in second grade, we had one of those color by numbers things. I screwed them up royally. I was terrible at those because I couldn't get the colors right. And in the second grade, we had moved from crayons to markers. It was a big transition year. I don't know if you recall, but on Crayola crayons, they had the name of the colors.

But go back in the 1980s, they did not have the names of the colors on the markers. They only had them on the crayons. Right. And so I brought this color by numbers thing home because I was too scared to leave it in my cubby at school because everyone was making fun of me. And I came home and my mom said, what are you doing with that? I said, I don't want anyone to see it. And I crumbled it up and I threw it away. And she got it out of the trash and she said, well, what's the problem? I think it's beautiful. I said, all the colors are wrong. Everyone's making fun of me because, you know, the sky is purple and the grass is brown and I got everything all messed up. And she said, well, what are you going to do about it? I said, well, what do you want me to do about it? What am I supposed to do about it? I thought that was blue.

I thought it was color in the sky blue and it's purple. And she said, well, if you don't like it, then fix it. I said, mom, I'm not going to color with crayons. What do you want me to do? Everyone's using markers. She said, well, then think about how you can fix that problem. And she kept challenging me to figure out what I could do about it. So, you know, we ultimately did? We went to the library and we looked up Crayola. We found the CEO of Crayola and I hand wrote a letter to the CEO of Crayola explaining my predicament. About two months later, I received in the mail a package of markers with the names on them and a letter from the CEO of Crayola that said, Dear Pat, thanks for the wonderful idea. Not sure why we didn't think of that, but here's the first pack of markers with names on them.

And from now on, every marker that's ever produced will have its name on here. So a very valuable lesson and empowerment at a very young age that, you know what, if you don't like something, you're not getting any work complaining about it. Do something about it. And to think that, oh, no, that's too big of a problem. I can't fix that. Baloney. You can always do something about a big problem. One of the things that I'm learning from you is optimism doesn't necessarily have to be an innate strength. I'm going to equate your optimism to your colorblindness, right? Some people can see

color and they're just inherently optimistic and that's it. They just go through life. And some people, optimism requires work. You can still color by numbers. You can still be optimistic if you just simply do the work and develop a system for optimism. And so ultimately, all the colors went in the right places because you figured out how to do it. And what I so love about you is you self-admittedly are not a natural optimist, but you come across with such incredible optimism because you are developing systems and working at how to be an optimist. And it's imperfect and you fall back. But at the end of the day, I would consider you an optimist. You're a huge optimist. And I think it's very empowering for people to hear that you do the work to be an optimist. I think it's wonderful. And I really, really appreciate you coming on

and sharing that work that you're doing, that practice. Well, thank you. I think the best definition of success that I've ever heard is from Ben Zander, who leads the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. So Ben Zander says he defines success by the shining eyes around him, the number of shining eyes around him. So the people that are highly engaged, people that are inspired, and it's contagious. When you surround yourself with inspired people, it's impossible not to be inspired. Let me see if I can pull this all together, because the synapses are firing. I do believe courage is external. When you have to find courage to do something difficult, the thought that you dig down deep and find the courage is, I don't think, true. I think that when we have to do something difficult,

all it takes is at least one person to say, sincerely, I've got your back. If this whole thing goes sideways, don't worry. I'll still be with there and I'll still support you. And remarkably, when we feel that someone is there for us, we do have the courage to do remarkable things. It's when we feel alone that courage is more difficult. Fear, we can do all by ourselves. Success is a team sport, but failure, we can do all by ourselves. Success is a team sport, but failure we can do

all by ourselves. And I go back to you in that hospital bed, learning meditation and gratitude that is now a life practice for you, where what you do is breathe in the love and service of others. What you do is breathe in the relationships that you have. What you do is breathe in and fill yourself with courage. And what you exhale is fear. Breathing in is all of the outside stimuli that make you a wonderful human being, which is your relationships. And what you're getting rid of is all the inside chatter that makes you the individual that thinks that you don't need anybody and you can do this by yourself. And I think that idea of breathing in the gratitude of the service of others in our lives and getting rid of the belief,

exhaling the belief that we have to do everything ourselves has made not only you a remarkable leader and a remarkable executive, but a better friend, a better father, a better husband, a happier person, capable of dealing with your own stresses in a healthier way. The one image I'm really left with is this inhaling and exhaling, the inhaling of gratitude of others and the exhaling of just stuff I want to get rid of. I can do that in the car. I can do that on a train. I can do it absolutely everywhere. And turns out it helps you get through the most difficult physical demands, being stuck in a hospital after a horrible accident. But it's probably a pretty effective tool to manage our lives and daily stresses as well. Pat Burgess, thank you so, so much. I really appreciate this.

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to learn more about the topic you just heard, please check out the Optimism Library at simonsenik.com, where you can get access to more than 35 undemanded classes about leadership, culture, purpose, and more. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.