As 2024 comes to a close, all I can say is, “It’s ALL about the team.” Do you know how that works when everyone supports each other and collaboration sparkles with creativity?
This is what is happening now for EBT. There is a collective resonance in which we give off positive energy from each other. For example, today I met with Debbie, who is working with Shelby, Laura, and Cassidy on redesigning our provider training.
Then the group emailed a video they had made and I accidentally clicked on a Zoom line and walked into their meeting where everyone was in rapt attention and certainly doing magic. We chatted briefly and solved one last problem.
Passion for the purpose
Every person there and those who weren’t there – Michael, Dev, Andrea, Kelly, Walt, Frannie and our entire vendor team – have one thing in common: a passion for purpose.
Oddly enough, that may ultimately be the true essence of EBT. All of the science brings us back to basics: If we can remove enough of the inevitable trauma circuitry that every great life can encode in the brain, the energy of the search for meaning emerges. You feel it and others can feel it in you.
If the system doesn’t work
I think back to some work environments that didn’t work. There was my first $1.50-an-hour job at Burger Queen in Radcliff, Kentucky, straight out of UC Berkeley as an Army wife with drama bigger than the fries. Then I worked at Blue Cross in the financial district of San Francisco in the complaints department where no one spoke to anyone (ice cold). And another job, all before she went back to graduate school, as a trust secretary at a company where sexual boundaries were routinely crossed. It was the 70s.
Fresh out of UC Berkeley, I needed a job while I waited for my husband to complete undergraduate training. Jobs for army women were rare.
But even then, so many lessons were learned. At Burger Queen, I learned to ask the boss for more hours, even if those hours were spent scrubbing the outdoor tables with cleaner. And how to be one no matter what. It was actually pretty fun.
At Blue Cross I learned that a seemingly nice boss can immediately become aggressive when she realizes that she no longer needs me. I trusted her and felt affection for her, and when I went to Kentucky to be with my husband in the military, she said, “This solves my problem.” I learned how aggression can wither you in an instant. I definitely gained wisdom there.
At the title company, I learned that the work can be dangerous because there are so many boundary crossings in the affections of management and employees. I also enjoyed bringing order to chaos, which was as simple as drafting a closing statement on a complex deal.
The gifts vary, but there are always gifts
Although this blog started as an ode to the EBT team, in hindsight I was experiencing what I was experiencing all along. So many images from my early, unkempt jobs glow with images of extraordinary people overcoming great obstacles and living their own style of purposeful living.
The gift right now is being part of a great team creating magic together and I will enjoy it but perhaps appreciate even more that everything is perfect no matter what. We get exactly what we need when we need it, at least I have over the years.