Love Thy Neighbor

Hello and welcome to the gifted life podcast where we have conversations about organ tissue, ideonation and transplantation. You can always find us at thegiftedlife.org. I'm Maurice Dio. I'm Joey Buudrow.

I'm Sarah Blakemore. Coming up on the podcast today. We'll be talking to a longtime friend and colleague of mine who's also an expert in educating healthcare organizations to become more culturally competent when supporting patients and families. She'll be sharing a little bit more about her love-dye neighbor series with us.

Okay. Yep. And it's February and we all need help keeping our nearest resolutions. We're going to talk about it.

I didn't even make mine yet. Alright. All that more right here on the gifted life hang tight. Here on the gifted life podcast, we're going to talk a little bit about improving cultural communication and to do that, a friend, a colleague of yours, Joe, is going to join us.

Yes. So one of my longtime friends and colleagues, one of my favorite people in the industry that I've ever met, Hidi Agayor, is here with us. Hey, Hidi. Hi, Joe.

So, you know, for our background, we've been doing each other for quite a long time. We try to keep up as often as we can. You know, we actually talk about a lot of industry things and family things and stuff, you know, pretty much on a monthly basis. So we keep up quite regularly.

Hidi is one of the experts in the industry. She's been that for a long time in a lot of different areas. And that's why I like to pick her brain when things are, you know, when we have challenges. She's one of those that I go to.

She's one of my go-to peeps. I think expert might be a little bit generous. Expert is absolutely not generous. Or background is fascinating to find how she's here now and helping us in the donation world.

Sarah and I were just like, wow, can't wait to pick your brain. Right. So her background is very vast. And of course, from a professional standpoint, Hidi, tell us about what got you interested in organ donation and led you to the organ donation field.

Yeah. So I'm an intensive care nurse and I was working in London at the time in my very first job as an intensive care nurse. And I experienced my very first donor case and it was a very tragic situation. A 15 year old girl was involved even though I worked in the adults I see you in intensive care unit.

This 15 year old was brought to us and her little brother had cystic fibrosis. And so her parents always knew that he might need a lung transplant one day. And bear in mind, this was back in 1996. So I'm showing my age here.

Same age. So it's okay. But the situation was back then was that the life expectancy for people with cystic fibrosis was not terribly long. And so her parents had put all of their hope in her future, you know.

And so here she was admitted, unfortunately with a coloid cyst, which is something that blocked the pathways for the the cerebral spinal fluid traveling around the brain. And unfortunately, she went into cardiac arrest and was resuscitated. Unfortunately, her brain damage was too severe and her brain died. And so the only option was then for the family to make a decision about donation.

And so that was my first encounter really because as as hospital staff, we don't really see donation that often. It's actually very, very rare. And it was just an amazing experience to walk alongside this family and to see how how much comfort this brought to them knowing that something good was coming out of the situation. It just it left quite an imprint on me and to the point that I just started asking a lot of questions and looking more into it and just seeing the amazing miracle of life that can happen through death.

And so that inspired me. And then later on, I worked at Adam Brooks Hospital in Cambridge in England. And there we took care of liver transplant recipients in the unit. And I also did a brief stint at PAP with hospital, which did heart and lung transplant.

And so I got to see the other side, you know, the people who received that gift of life as well. And it was just such an amazing concept of somebody making this most incredible gift to a complete stranger who they don't know, reaching across that divide of unknown and making a completely selfless decision at the most difficult time possible. And so it was just it's something that would just blow my mind every time I was just so inspired by these families. And I really had to kind of reflect upon why is it even a fair to ask families about donation when they're going through so much grief and pain.

But then when I could see what it meant to them, I realized that this was super important, that if we don't present this to them, this option, then they're just left with a complete loss. Nothing good is coming out of the situation. And so I was inspired back then already to want to go into donation and transplant. I wasn't entirely sure which.

So in England at the time, the system was a little bit different than it is today. But I also knew I was trying to immigrate to the US at the time. So it wasn't really the time to make a big specialty change. And then when I came to the US in January 2001, I worked in the intensive care unit at first, and did that for a few years and became an educator and started developing these relationships with the people who worked for the Oregon Pecumen organization or OPO as we call them.

And it's when I first encountered the folks from One Legacy, which was the OPO in the Los Angeles area, which is where I was working. And I was just so inspired by the teamwork amongst the staff. I was inspired by the positive attitude. I just loved the mission that they represented.

And yeah, so that's basically how I eventually met the people who worked on that side of the process here in the US. And at a certain point, I decided to apply. And I guess the rest is history. Right.

And a lot of history there in that rest. You became like I mentioned, and I know you don't consider yourself that way, but you become an expert. You work for years with One Legacy there in California and also with the one in San Francisco formerly known as CTDN, now Dona Network West. And then from there, and that's where you and I began knowing each other, sharing kind of war stories and sharing some of the greatness that is, you know, organ donation and transplant and helping each other, you know, kind of figure out ways to overcome some of the challenges that say help each other.

You helping me and us more than the vice versa. Oh, no, no, there's a lot of wonderful resources that we even see from Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency or LOPA, the organization you work for. You know, that's the one thing about the field of organ donation. Well, I should say organ, I, and tissue donation is that it's a nonprofit area of work.

And we have a huge responsibility to bring these families who are losing so much, some type of hope and healing or the opportunity to make that decision at least, you know, whatever that decision is going to be the best decision for that particular family. But it's a huge responsibility. And then in addition, we also know that there's many people who need the transplants and all of us could potentially need tissue transplants one day or an organ transplant. And so we also depend on that gift that people are making.

And so anything we can do to share and collaborate with each other across organizations, you know, we only in friendly competition with each other because we want to outperform each other. But at the same time, what's more important is really helping each other become better at what we do. And that's really how we started our communication, I believe. Yeah.

And that is the big, that's the key with this industry. It's so different from many others in that, you know, that you talk about the friendly competition. We do so much sharing with each other and better each other by all of our practices, all of the nuggets, all of the little challenges that we're able to overcome. We, you know, we can share and vice versa, they're shared with us.

So he, of course, you know, you work with one legacy there in South Southern California and you also work with the one in Northwest, in Northern California, San Francisco area. And of course, you've got this great affinity for educating people, you know, and I know it from firsthand. And so you then went on to train organ procurement or organ recovery personnel and staff at NADCO and again, at the Alliance. And until your final stop at the fundamental roots, you're a newest organization.

Obviously, you see and I see that there has been a gap, you know, with education with organ donation and transplantation, you know, there's a lot with healthcare, a lot with critical care, but not so much with all the different areas that come with supporting families and the whole donation process. So can you tell us a little bit about that and what took you to, you know, your final stop there at fundamental roots? Yeah, so I just wanted to clarify for the listeners that NADCO is the North American Transplant Coordinator Organization, which, and that particular organization provides ongoing education and training for people who work both on the donation and the transplantation side. So that was really volunteer work, you know, helping to teach some of the national courses and I presented more on the donation side.

And then the organ donation and transplantation Alliance is a national organization that is kind of a non membership based organization and their focus is also to help improve processes more from a national perspective and also provide educational opportunities and also focus a little bit on innovation. So I guess, ongoingly, even in critical care and then working for my, the organ procurement organization when I was working for them and then with NADCO and with the Alliance, any of those organizations, one of my areas of passion was always to get involved with education. I don't, I don't know if I necessarily saw it out, it just kind of happened. But with that, there was always a lot of requests for training on communication and there wasn't really much of that out there in the industry.

A lot of the training is focused more on how we improve our processes and the technical aspects. And I think that's typical for most organizations. Most organizations kind of hire you based on what we call, what in general is known as soft skills, those skills that are hard to measure like communication, conflict management, leadership skills, et cetera, et cetera. Most organizations look for that in an interview, but then typically once you get hired, you get trained to the job and you attend training that helps you advance in your job.

But there's not much invested by many organizations into helping staff grow in the communication skills. And I have this theory, this philosophy that probably, if we became master communicators, probably 95% of our problems would be solved. And so that's kind of, one, two main aspects that I have always been involved with. One was I developed training on how to bridge cultural communication and the other one is how to help improve communication with physicians.

And those two particular trainings became, it seemed there was a lot of requests for those types of trainings from organ procurement organizations. And so my business of fundamental roots kind of organically grew, just by itself, just kind of word by mouth. I wasn't looking to develop my own business, but it got to the point that there was so many requests that I had to make a decision. Do I try and make this a business or do I just keep on trying to put it into my vacation hours?

And but I love to teach, I love just developing new materials. And so finally, I made a tough decision to branch out on my own. And the reason the name fundamental roots is think about the roots of a tree. And if you have healthy roots, you have a healthy tree, you have healthy fruit on the tree, but they lie under the surface.

We don't pay much attention to the roots. We only think about it when we start seeing the tree dying or bad fruit being produced or no fruit being produced, I should say. And so they lie under the surface. And that's how I equate kind of these skills that absolutely crucial to everything that you do, whether it's just interactions with others, but it's also very vital in any type of process because if you cannot communicate well and strategically think well through the process, then you're going to have a problem as well.

And so they're those skills that lie under the surface. So it's easy to ignore them. But what do we all say when everything goes wrong? We need to communicate better.

So we suddenly realize that they're really important when everything goes wrong. But a lot of the time we ignore them. And so it's a tricky area to focus your business on because, as I said, most organizations don't think about having this training because it's also hard to prove the effectiveness of it because ultimately you cannot change anybody else. They have to choose to want to work on their weaknesses.

So really all I can do is try and make a compelling invitation to invite the participants to really consider why they should work on their own skills, their own soft skills, and then to provide them with the resources to accomplish what they want to work on. And beyond that, then it's up to them what they do with that information. So it is a bit of an in a sense a gamble to focus my entire business on that. But I think people are seeing the need for it.

And there's more and more publications out there that talk about, especially in the era of information technology. We really, really need to make sure that we hone our communication skills and our interactions with others. So let's focus on the Love Thy Neighbor series, bridging cultural, ethnic, and racial divides and misunderstanding. And tell us a little bit about your personal background, which is pretty fascinating.

And I'm sure woven into your lessons. Yeah, it's funny. I always think why do I need to use my background? Unfortunately, it seems that people tend to make judgments and assumptions about other people if they don't know much about the background.

And so, and I guess that's just how we are wired as human beings is that we make a lot of assumptions. So I know that you can already tell by my accent and I already gave you a little bit of a background that I immigrated to the US. Where my passion for bridging cultural communication comes from, which led to Love Thy Neighbor, is that I am half English, half German. So I actually carried dual nationality German English or English German, however you want to put it.

My father is German, my mum is English. And I grew up in Indonesia. So Indonesia is the world's largest island group. It's actually a very large country.

A lot of people don't realize how big it is. And it's based in Southeast Asia. And my parents were missionaries in Indonesia. And so I grew up very remote on the island of Sumatra.

And so as far as I knew, I was Indonesian. And though I didn't really look Indonesian by appearance because it's a pretty homogenous society. And so as a little white blonde girl, I stood out and everywhere where I went, I had 30 to 40 children following me, watching every move I made, which in itself brought insecurities because I felt, I never felt like I belonged, but I thought I should be belonging because as far as I knew I was Indonesian. I spoke Indonesian was my first language.

I understood English and German, but I couldn't answer Indonesian, sorry, I couldn't answer those languages until I learned to read English when I was four. So then I learned to reply to my mum in English to my dad and German, but outside of the home, everything was an Indonesian. And then from Indonesia, I went to boarding school at the age of six and I went to boarding school in the Philippines in about Guillotine City. And then from there, the school moved to Singapore and then I went to school in Singapore.

But in between, I would go home to Indonesia, you know, for Christmas, for Easter, and for the summer, I would go home and visit my family and be with them. And then I would go back to school. And so even within Indonesia, there's actually over 600 different ethnicities. So when I lived there, I could sometimes tell or quite often tell which island somebody was from just based on their looks because there are distinct differences.

There's also over 700 different languages. There's a national language, Indonesian. And then there's also the tribal languages based on the tribe that you live in. And so even within Indonesia, my parents had to move several times and part of my life was just having to learn how to be flexible and adaptable to whomever I was around, you know, and figuring out how do I fit in.

Never feeling like I belonged because I was constantly moving, but feeling, but knowing how to figure out how to fit in wherever I was. But part of that is it kind of honed the skill of cultural humility, which I think is really what I focus on in my trainings. And so fast forward, I went to college in Germany for a year, and then I went to nursing college in England and then moved to the US, actually on the way married a Brazilian. I met him in England, and he had just come from Brazil to England, and then we emigrated to the US together.

It was interesting coming to the US, just kind of watching people's interactions with each other in communication. I felt like it was just a deep fear of offending. And consequently, people were not asking questions when they should be asking and were making decisions based on assumptions or based on something they read in a book or learned in a workshop or saw in a documentary. And so my concern was what can I do to help bridge culture communication?

And then when I was working on my master's program as a clinical nurse specialist, my professors really encouraged me in my last, for my final project to focus on this topic because it's such a hot topic in healthcare that we need to become culturally competent and provide culturally competent care. And so that's how I kind of started getting more into developing materials for training and education on this topic. And then fast forward to this year, it was kind of the perfect combination. I had this idea for Love Thy Neighbor a few years ago when I thought about, I would love to do interviews with individuals and demonstrate what cultural humility looks like, how to just ask simple questions to learn from somebody.

What is important to them? Because I think the biggest concern I have is we look at somebody and we make assumptions about them. And that's perfectly normal. That's how our brains are wired.

The problem becomes when we act on those assumptions, and when it dictates our communication and our interactions, that's when it becomes problematic. And so we're not acting on track, we're acting on assumptions. The next thing that we tend to do is then because we're afraid to ask questions and we run with those assumptions that can dictate our interactions with that person, now we're already sort of navigating into a troublesome area because our conversation is going the wrong direction without having full information about what's important to that person. And here's what's really, really important is what the definition of culture is.

And that was the other observation I made coming here was that it seemed like people interpreted culture as somebody who looks different or sounds different than me. They have culture. And that is part of the definition of culture, but there's so much more to the definition of culture. Every single person has culture.

Culture is about your values, your beliefs, your practices. And even within your own family, you're always in a cross-cultural conversation because every person has their own journey on how their values, their beliefs and practices develop. Yes, we're taught certain things at a young age, but over time that changes based on our friends, the mentors and teachers we have in life, the education we pursue, the work, the line of work that we pursue, the people that we choose to share our lives with, all of those things bring new ideas and concepts and then the world is constantly changing around us. Around us, for example, technology, if you think back to 20 years ago, we didn't have most of the technology we have today.

And that alone has already influenced and changed our culture because you have to keep up with how the world is evolving around you. And so even generationally, you have cultural differences. Men and women have different values and different practices and beliefs. And there's cultural differences there, social, economic, educational, political, religious affiliations.

There's so many things that influence every single person's personal culture. And so the only way we can truly learn about that person that we're interacting with is to ask questions. Because if we don't, and I'm not saying questioning, I'm saying asking good questions to learn from that person, what's important to them? Not because I want to change my culture, but because I want to learn how to best meet them where they are and how to best communicate with them where they are.

And so consequently, I would love that neighbor. So I had this idea that a couple of years ago that I wanted to demonstrate what that would look like because it's just simply becoming a student of the person or letting them become your teacher. And I thought about making it all complicated with like a tend to do, I tend to overcomplicate things. And we're thinking about fancy video interviews and all of that.

But then when this year COVID hit, or last year, I should say, seen that when 2021 now, when COVID hit in 2020, and everybody was kind of seclusion to stay at home and the virtual world was kind of exploded and people became more open to participating in virtual platforms. And then the George Floyd situation happened. It just broke my heart to see so much division in our country here in the US when we should be embracing our differences and embracing the opportunity to learn and enrich ourselves from each other, just by asking questions. And so I thought, you know what, this is a perfect time to start my family neighbor.

And so I reached out to friends of mine who are African Americans who identify as African Americans. And I asked them, would you be willing to be part of the first episode? And I explained to them, my goal here is not to get all political. Of course, if you want to talk about politics, that's up to you.

But I just want us to learn from each other. And so, and I wanted a panel, men and women, and a group of them, because I wanted to demonstrate that we can have shared customs and shared values and practices within an ethnicity. But that doesn't mean that everybody's going to agree with that as an individual. And so I cannot make an assumption just because somebody identifies with a certain ethnicity that they have certain cultural values, beliefs and practices, because I don't know what their story is.

I don't know what their journey was. And so consequently, the only way I'm going to find out is by asking questions. And so we've only done a few episodes so far, but I really hope that it will grow and that people will take the opportunity to listen to them. They are longer because it's an interview, but the good thing is it's video.

So you see the people and you can see their reactions and interactions. And because I do work in healthcare and I wanted it to help the healthcare community, there are a couple of healthcare related questions. But most questions are just general, learning from each other. The first episode was on African Americans.

The second one was on Aboriginal Australians, which was fun. It seems random, but I have a friend who worked amongst the natives in Australia, the indigenous people of Australia. And it was just absolutely amazing to learn from them. And then the next one was on the Japanese ethnicity.

The next one was on Puerto Rican culture. And so we'll continue, I try to do them about once a month or so. And they're freely available on YouTube. So anybody can watch the recordings of them or join us on the live stream on Facebook.

So do we just search for a love-dine neighbor or how do we find them? Actually, we search for love-dine neighbor. Tyler Perry is episode. Of course he has way more following that.

But if you search fundamental routes and go to my channel, then you can find the playlist for love-dine neighbors. There's different playlists on different topics, but there's a playlist for love-dine neighbor. And that's probably the quickest and easiest way to find it. Or you can go to my website, which is fundamental-routes.com.

And I have a link to the YouTube channel on the web page as well. And then the Facebook page is fundamental routes. It's at fundamental routes of you, such a Facebook page. And that's where we do the live stream.

So then if you choose to be part of the live stream, I announce it on Facebook and you can tune in at the time of the live stream and actually post questions in the chat. And if we have time, we'll get to those questions and pose them for you to the panelists. I think we're all a little bit speechless because this is just such incredible work. And I am a family advocate.

And one thing that makes my job easier is asking those simple questions to families, not feeling afraid that, like you said, I think a lot of people are afraid to offend. So instead, they shut down and they don't ask. But in order for me to do my job, I have to ask those simple questions about people's faith, their culture, their ethnicities, what are their end-of-life practices, and how does donation fit into that? But just on a more personal note, as most people know, who know me, I had a brother who was an organ donor.

And he donated his liver to a Japanese boy who was living in Japan at the time. And this was many years ago. They had a little bit different laws surrounding donation in Japan, particularly with pediatric donation and transplantation. And so in order for his family to have him live and receive a transplant, they had to come to the United States.

And I think within three days of them landing in their airport, he got matched with my brother's liver. And then years later, they came to visit us, my brother's, his recipient family. And we had to have a translator there. And what's so interesting is that we come from across the world to different countries, completely different ethnicities, cultures.

But there was so much that bound us, the two families. There was so much connection there in terms of we had experienced her, Kankatrina. They had experienced the tsunami. We had similar interests in movies.

And what I love about donation is it crosses all races, ethnicities, religions. It connects us. And I don't think a lot of people get to see that there are so many more things that connect us than divide us. And having that personal experience with another family who, you know, we couldn't be more different, but we couldn't be more the same.

It was a good thing. Yeah, that's an amazing story. How old was your brother when he became a dude? He was four years old and he was in a car accident.

So he experienced a head trauma, which resulted in brain death. And then my mom is a registered nurse. So our family brought up an aspect donation and it just changed our lives. And again, too, you know, I'm not very worldly.

I live in Louisiana. I've lived here my whole life. I went to college here, but it just opened up so much opportunity for me to want to learn about other countries and their values. And, you know, maybe that makes me less afraid when I'm with families and supporting families to ask about them.

Yeah, you're such an asset. And I think more people, you know, what you're doing is you're teaching people how to ask those simple questions in order to better support and serve them. And that's ultimately what we're doing in donation. Yeah.

And the key is ultimately, like you said, I think it's great to learn about different countries, different cultural groups, different ethnic groups. Those are really important. But the baseline and all of that is cultural humility because the risk with those things, those kinds of trainings or that kind of information is that if we're free to ask questions, we can make assumptions then. And just because somebody identifies with a certain ethnicity or race does not mean that I really know anything about their values.

Right. And so like you said, the important thing is to ask those simple questions. The one thing that's interesting, you brought up an important point, you know, race is a social political construct. It's not, it kind of started back from my understanding.

It started back in the colonial days and they were classifying people based on looks, based on skin color, texture of hair, shape of eyes, bone structure. But it's completely useless because there's no way if you did a genetic testing on somebody, there's no way to tell what their race is. You can have, in fact, there are videos out there of twins who would be classified as two different races, but yet they have exactly the same ethnicity, you know, can be closer than twins. Right.

And so that kind of highlights how that kind of information really doesn't give us much plus if I tell you I'm English German ethnicity wise, I'm English German, but that really doesn't tell you anything about who you are. And I value is seeing that I grew up in Indonesia and so many of those values were the values that I embraced and are still important to me today. And now moving to the US, I've adopted new values. You know, Thanksgiving wasn't something that we celebrated before we came to the US.

Everybody's celebrating. But now it's become my husband's favorite holiday. Even if we were to move abroad again at some point, we probably would continue to celebrate Thanksgiving. You know, we do the turkey, the football, and a little secret on our family tradition.

We do the Godfather trilogy because I love that family. I love that. I love the term cultural humility because I think, you know, no one can perfectly understand anything in our world. And so I think knowing when we need to learn what we need to learn and how to ask for that is really, really invaluable.

Yeah. And you bring up a really important point. Nobody can learn everything. And that's, I think, the problem with the term cultural competence.

I'm not sure that's really possible because just when you think you have something figured out, you know, the world is changing all the time. And about the cultural humility, which is being willing to be humble, I think it's important to define what humility is, right? Humility is not thinking less of yourself. CS Lewis said, humility is not thinking less of yourself.

It's thinking of yourself less. It's thinking about what's important to the other person. How can I learn from them? How can I meet them and serve them where they are and communicate with them the way they can understand?

And so that means I have to be adaptable and flexible. But I wanted to come back to a point that you made, Sarah. Donation is an amazing, amazing opportunity. It really bridges that, not just that cultural ethnic and racial divide.

It also crosses that religious divide. It crosses that social economic divide, that educational divide, that political divide. Every single divide. Anything that can cause division and that we see causes division, donation bridges that.

That's the beauty and amazing piece of the donation opportunity. It truly is that bridge. I agree. And so if anyone's curious of our conversations, honestly, every month, basically it's like the following time session.

Right. I love, I've always said that he is the most interesting woman in transplant. Yeah. You're two times.

Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of your background and all of you and everything that's put you into this field and to help our listeners to understand a little bit about more about cultural humility and more about learning that person in the moment and not just focusing on a skin color or a location, a geographical location, where someone's from or anything like that. It's always such a pleasure to talk to you both on a personal and a professional aspect. I just want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing everything that we talk about on a monthly basis with our audience. Well, I really appreciate the opportunity to share my passion for this subject.

And I guess I would like to leave you with four questions to ask yourself when you're interacting with somebody else. One is do I really know what assumptions am I making and what do I really know and then am I embracing our differences? Am I seeking to learn and am I adapting to the needs of others? And I think if we can work on those areas, so make sure that we know which means we have to ask questions, which means seeking to learn, embrace the differences and then adapt to the needs of others.

I think that will go a long way in helping us to bridge interactions with others, our cultural divides. Boom. You're a great teacher. Yeah.

So, thank you so much. Thank you. And you're great calm. Take the sting out of it and let's just have a conversation.

So thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to share. Here on the gifted life, we take a moment for mental health. Yeah, see, we're talking about something that I'm not very good at.

New Year's resolution. Can you teach me something, Sarah? Ouch. Yep.

So today we are going to talk about New Year's resolutions and the best ways you can actually keep them. So first, let me just say that most people's New Year's resolutions are, you know, go to the gym or eat healthier, which are all good things. It's all over my feet. Yes.

And every time I go to the gym in January, I have no spots for everybody's take up everything. Honestly, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't even know the gym. Yeah.

I don't know what the gym. But if I definitely wouldn't go in January. I can't wait till February. I hear all those people who are there.

That's mine. Go for you. Yes. But one thing I want to say is while those are great intentions and great news resolutions, maybe pick something that's less to do with your physical appearance and more to do with, you know, being more engaged with your family time or reaching out to friends more, things like that, that benefit you not just on the outside but also on the inside.

So that's my first kind of, you know, little take care of you. So that's the include, I keep on saying every year, I say, I'm going to get better at Facebook and social media. So reach out and those in and out and I'm terrible. And of course, I walk into the studio today and I hear you need to show your baby more.

I would like to see more picture. You can text too. Okay. So maybe that's for you, Joe, engaging with the people who want to see your new brand new baby.

Congratulations. Thank you. I'm going to go. So the first thing really to kind of keep this new year's resolution for a happier, healthier, more engaged self is instead of saying it's a resolution, say it's a promise to yourself.

So I promise myself this year, this month, I'm going to talk to family twice a week or I'm going to reach out to a friend that lives in a different state once a month and FaceTime. But really just instead of saying it's my resolution, saying it's a promise to yourself goes deeper and it really works in terms of with anything, if there's something you want to change in your life, make a promise to yourself and you're more likely to stick it out. It feels more accountable. Yeah.

You know, that word promise, like I know, I got to keep it. You can't just go back on your promises. It feels like a lot. If I say once a month or I'm just going to do it, like I'm just going to try to reach out.

Yeah. I tell myself like, I'm going to do that. Yeah. So and I promise myself, I'm going to reach out because this is going to be good for me and good for my friend family, whoever you are reaching out to.

If that's the resolution. And drop the try. Yep. And I know it's just the thing we like to like we do all the time.

I'm going to try to do this more often. I'm going to try to get on Facebook more often in show pictures of my little bambino. I just need to do it. And you know, yeah.

And don't go. Don't be so hard on yourself if you skip on accident. If something happens and you become too busy, don't, you know, what people oftentimes when they skip and that gives an excuse to be able to skip again. Well, I'm going to fill off anyway.

So yeah, if you skip, say that's okay. I forgive myself. I promise myself next month I will do better. I'll recommit.

Yeah. Yeah. So did you make resolutions there? I did.

I made a resolution to be a little bit more engaged in what in news. So like what's actually happening in our country with also going to the source instead of just reading off a Twitter. Just to read. Yeah.

I like that. I like to be more engaged with what's happening in our country by going to the source and reading and trying to learn more. So that was my news resolution. Have a couple weeks.

It's been a hot couple weeks. I've been trying. I'm trying. Trying.

I owe you more pictures of the baby. We're going to put that one on. I'm going to. Yes.

I'm going to take it all in. I'm going to take it all in. I'm going to enjoy. I love that.

It's the time. I love that. I love that. I like it guys.

Maybe you have a question you like to share to cover. Email us at info at thegiftedlife.org. In today's question and answer segment this one came from one of our listeners and this is for you guys. What is the best way to start a discussion about organ tissue and eye donation?

Number one, love that we're thinking about this. Number two, there's not one best way. Right. I think you have to know who you're talking to.

I was just at dinner the other night. And one of my friends said, how do you like get to talking to people about this? And I said, what do you mean? And so I'm at the gym.

We saw a news story about donation. I thought that was cool, but they didn't think it was cool. And so it's like, where you go from there? I thought that's a good question.

So we just kind of started having conversations. So you're going to see a new story. Movies. We see that.

And so the topic of donation comes up. And it's uncomfortable talking about death. Some people don't want to talk or don't know enough about donation. So it depends on kind of where they are and meeting them where they are.

What do you feel? Right. I agree. And I think it comes down to people aren't uncomfortable with the idea of donating and gifting.

They're uncomfortable with death. So I think a good way, if it gets brought up, if you want to bring it up, you can share why you think it's an important decision to make to register. Or if you saw a story that was really moving, you can bring that up. And if they have questions, you can always give them resources.

They can go to lupa.org. They can go to donate life America. There's so many ways to just talk about the good of it without making people feel pressured to do it themselves. I think it's important to make sure there's connections in the conversation.

I mean, everyone's got connections to donation. We've learned that even though our obvious connections with lupa, but everyone that you talk to at some point has some connection with someone maybe who's needing an organ for transplant, like someone who's on dialysis or has diabetes. Everyone knows someone or someone who maybe has had that second chance at life or maybe someone whose love was a donor was a hero. So we all have some connections and in movies and different things that you'll see around it can be brought up as part of that conversation.

I think that's the important thing is to show those connections and in the conversation because it's difficult to explain how we all think it's a great thing, obviously, but just to really put more of an emphasis on how good it is and faces with that, you know, is to talk about those connections that may have impacted you. Right. Because I think people don't realize they have a connection to the donation transplantation world. Like you mentioned, people on dialysis, I think everybody knows someone who's sick and that's a good way to bridge it.

And I think they don't realize bigger picture what that means. I always let them know I'm registered, family connections, and then where you can go to get more information because I don't like to be pressured, like a salesperson or something like that. And so I don't do that either, but just learn the facts and I let them know kind of what I do. Like I work with these families from the donation side, the recipient side, those waiting for all of these years.

And it's so good. And I hope that they can learn that and I'm happy to help walk them through. So, and I've never had a bad conversation. So I hope to keep that straight going in 2021, right?

But we do have a resource page, lopa.org. You can register there. You can learn the facts there. So I usually send that as a great resource for people to learn more and then this podcast.

Maybe you don't want to join the conversation just yet. Maybe you want to learn about it here about it. That's why we're here. So we appreciate the question.

Maybe you have a question. You could always give us a call by 04648 3477. In every episode of the gifted life, we honor a hero. Today we honor Rodney Smith, Sr.

Rodney loved to cook. He considered himself to be the best cook in the family, which sparked many memorable moments. His siblings affectionately nicknamed him Chef Boyardee. Rodney was ambitious and family oriented.

He did not simply wake up to exist, but he lived life each day and loved life. He left no stone unturned because there were very few chances that he was not willing to take. And now we pause and say thank you to Rodney for the gift of life. And that'll do it for this episode of the gifted life, episode 154.

Yeah, huge thanks to my buddy out there, HeeDagER for coming on and sharing with our audience. Like I said, things that she shares with me on a monthly basis, it's always so fascinating having that conversation with her. Yeah, and then we got to learn more from Sarah. So thank you for sharing as well.

But she was so calm and inviting and you want to learn more, it seems like a simple concept. Just go to more of it. Yes. Listen, ask questions.

Yes, simple questions. That's it. If you're listening to our podcast, you can go there and look for the Love Thy Neighbor series or on Facebook, fundamental routes. Thank you for listening, everyone.

If you're not registered as an organ eye and tissue donor, you can do that anytime. Register me dot org and tell your friends the best place to find us here. We're all about learning where one big team is the gifted life dot org. You can listen to any of our episodes on our website.

You can also listen on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you do listen on Apple podcasts, please leave us a five star rating and subscribe so that others can find us. If you're on social media, our Facebook page is the gifted life podcast on Twitter and Instagram or at gifted life pod. Thank you so much for learning with us today.

We ask that you go out and do something you would normally do to help us make life happen. Have a good one. This is a production of LOPA, or the Louisiana Organ Procurement Agency. The gifted life is hosted by Lori Steele, Joey Boudreau and Sarah Blakemore.

Our executive producer is Kirsten Heis, producer Ishelan Caraway. Intern is Rebecca Rannam and we are recorded, engineered and mixed in our Covington, Louisiana studio by Troy Perez.