TEDx- The Emotion Behind Invention

After talking much in this first portion of class about our own personalities, strengths, and weaknesses, I have began to acknowledge my lack of emotional intelligence. While I hope to be a doctor one day, I clearly have a drive for people and helping them as best as possible, however my bedside manners are very sub-par.

With a recent diagnosis of my mom, she has been very back and forth with her own emotions which has been hard for me to grasp, because I can barely understand my own emotions. I tend to ignore them. However, thinking about all of this, emotion is important in so many ways. Emotion is the driving force behind so much that we do every day. For me, my emotion lies with my studies and research and moving the face of medicine one day. Others find emotion in teaching our younger generations, or writing books or painting pictures. These are all dependent on our own selves, but our passions seem to be where we put all of our emotions, whether good or bad. If I had a bad day, I can focus on a recent science paper I want to read, and other person may go shoot some pictures in the woods. However we handle those emotions sort of show us what were supposed to do with our life.

Emotions can definitely get in the way if you do not handle them properly. Some people react poorly to their bad emotions while some let their feelings get in the way of their goals and aspirations. My research professor is very good at forgetting the goal and letting his emotions and other's feelings get in the way. But really, emotions are an essential driving force in everyone.

After thinking more about my EI, or lack thereof, I found a Ted Talk that is slightly slow, but it is about Dean Kamen, an engineer who helped build the first modern prosthetic arms. In this talk, you can see the emotion in his eyes. The respect and admiration he has for soldiers who have lost limbs drove his motivation, and he completed his first prosthetic arm in only 15 months. This had fine motor skills, different rotations, and was incredible for 15 months. I think Dean is a perfect example of having the right amount of emotions. He had a passion and a reason for what he did, but he did not let his frustration of seeing young kids without limbs effect his moral or his thought process. He just knew he wanted to help.

After a recent interview at Brigham and Women's for a potential job, I met with a doctor who is a leader in inflammatory response medicine. He has described all of the modern-day inflammatory mediators and helped to figure out what to target to relieve people of their pain. He has a hallway filled with covers of medicine journals his work was the cover for. His drive is incredible and he is now the head of a project consortium.

I think my ignorance to how powerful emotions are in the innovation process is incredible and I am excited to learn more on this subject and how to harness mine to be as successful as the people mentioned above.

Emotional Intelligence Results

For class this coming Monday, we were asked to complete an Emotional Intelligence quiz, which I new was going to be difficult for me.

I end to be an extremely straight-forward and blunt person, which has definitely gotten me into tough situations before. However, I feel that I treat others the way I want to be treated. I do not want people to beat-around-the-bush with me. Simple and to the point! It takes a lot to truly offended me in a way that it was actually cause disruption to myself and daily activities.

While this tend to be a good personality type, I acknowledge that I am totally unaware of other's emotions. I am basically like talking to a walk at times in terms of empathy and offering advice. When others are stressed or upset and cannot focus on the task at hand, I got frustrated, because I know that is not how I handle those situation. However, it is important for me to work on this weakness. It is good to be honest with one another, but you still need to acknowledge how actions can make others feel.

For our pre-work, we had to do an emotional intelligence quiz. 
My results were

Self Awareness- 6
Self-Management- 8
Social Awareness- 4
Relationship Management- 4

I do feel that these are an accurate representation of myself. I am generally aware and cognizant of how I am feeling, however I try very hard to not let it affect my daily life. I also have good control of myself and know my end goals. I am very disciplined and it is very hard to get me to veer from the path I need to take to reach my goals. This goes along with my relatively low relationship management score, because I can easily remove someone from my life who I do not see as beneficial anymore without a second thought. I can turn my head and continue working on myself and my needs.

As a potential leader, this may not be possible. I need to be able to fix and maintain relationships, not just walk away. I also must be able to analyze my situations and read other's emotions to understand the way I should act in different instances.

I think this class on Monday will be a good start to figuring out how to get a better handle on this emotional intelligence thing, and I am excited to see what my classmates do!

Preparing for Resiliency Class

Over the last week, my group and I have been preparing for our first class presentation on personal resilience. After watching our first classmates go last Monday, we had an idea of what was expected (great first presentation, guys!) and how we wanted to adapt the class to fit our topic.

From Management I last semester, to this semester, I have worked in multiple groups. However, I believe this semester the groups are much more intellectual and everyone is working hard together. I believe this group of classmates is much more dedicated to getting a good experience from this class! Last semester I felt that many students were not interested in topics or the group work we had to do. This semester, my group has been wonderful and accommodating for everyone! It has really been a good experience so far!

I believe the setup of Management II is really interesting. While it is hard to prepare a 70 minute presentation, I did enjoy it more than anticipated. Having the chance to prepare a presentation gave us insights on how to get our listeners interested and how to make a 90 minute class not feel excruciatingly long.

As a transferrable skill, everyone in management positions is expected to give presentations to supervisors as well as to the staff they oversee on a daily basis. Having interesting, interactive presentations is not only key to keeping everyone awake, it makes the material stick much better. People may not remember every definition from a presentation, but could remember an activity they did and what they learned from it. From this, we worked hard on coming up with good activities for our class and ways to get everyone talking.

A major plus to the students teaching the class is that many students who are not very interactive can find a way they feel comfortable to express their opinions. The fact that everyone needs to give these presentations and we all need to participate in everyone's class makes it much easier to talk about your opinions and thoughts on the topics that we cover. For myself, I tend to shy away from discussions with the class, but in such a small setting with a close group of classmates, it makes it not as anxiety-provoking.

With all of that, I really enjoyed putting together our first class and am looking forward to presenting it with my group! I believe we created a presentation that will be interesting and teach everyone about the importance of personal resilience. This is the key to success and sticking it out through hard times, and I hope everyone enjoys our presentation as much as we enjoyed making it!

Personality Test Reflection

Hello!

To begin my Healthcare Management II blog, I thought it would be a good idea to share and reflect on the results of my recent personality tests. In class, we are beginning by discussing our individual selfs and learning what types of leaders we are and how we work best. Being a biochemist, this is not something I have ever truly investigated about myself, because we tend to work on our own and are analytical rather than objective.

Initially we took the Myers-Briggs personality test. My results were ISTJ- which I was the only one in the class to get. I think this was extremely reflective of my personality.

I- introvert
S- sensing
T- thinking
J- judging

While many of my classmates tend to extroverted, I struggle with the idea of the spotlight on me. While I have a strong personality, I tend to keep to myself until put into a position where I need to assert my opinion. I tend to not handle other's emotions well and analyze everything to make sure I am making the right decision. For me, this is important, because I work in labs could be affecting patient's lives. I do not necessarily feel that I have time to think about how my actions could affect someone's feelings.

As a future leader, this could be difficult working with groups of people who may have different personalities and feel that I am insensitive.

For our Monday class, we were asked to do both the DISC personality test and the Big Five.

For the Big Five, my results were:
O: 0.54
C: 0.90
E: 0.54
A: 0.42
N: 0.54

This test showed that I tend to be extremely organized and reliable, but tend to easily criticize others and can be anxious. Again, I do believe this is a reflection on other parts of my personality. I can be quick to judge, because I am not the best with emotions and communication.  However, I am extremely type A and cannot function in disorder. Again, my biggest weakness as a leader will be communicating and working with people of more sensitive personalities.

For the DISC test, my results were:

50% Dominance
30% Compliance
15% Steadiness
6% Influence


For this test, I do not believe that compliance fits in line with my personality, but I do believe the high dominance and low influence are fitting. I tend to not be good at compromise, which is the interpretation I get from having a higher compliance percent. I do tend to expect everyone to have the high levels of motivation and drive for work as I do, and when they do not, I can tend to be judgmental.

Overall, I think it was interesting to see how I tend to function with others and how this could affect my future lines of work. Overall, I tend to be very strong minded, but reliable and willing to help. Overall, I believe the Myers-Briggs test was the most reflective of how I see myself, however there are parts from all of the tests that accurately describe my personality.