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Leave a living will
The document protects
your loved ones from conflict
On Dec. 3, 1963, Mary and Robert Schindler gave birth to a wonderful baby girl, Theresa Marie. Terri grew up in Pennsylvania and had a typical childhood playing with her brother and sister and the family pets. As a teenager, she loved music and did artistic sketches.
In November 1984, just shy of her twenty-first birthday, Terri married Michael Schiavo. Terri seemed to have everything going for her. At age twenty-nine, Terri was living in Florida with her husband and had a job she liked.
However, in February 1990, her fairytale life shattered with shockwaves that continue to reverberate through the lives of those who love her. Terri collapsed in her home from a heart attack. As a result of the heart attack, Terri suffered a severe loss of oxygen. This loss of oxygen caused damage to her brain. Terri slipped into a persistent vegetative state and has never recovered.
If a person has expressly indicated what should happen under such circumstances, their wishes will be followed. However, in the absence of such a clear expression, the family falls into a legal and emotional quagmire that gets steadily messier. In Terri's case, her husband and parents started out harmoniously and even lived together during the first two years of her care. However, that relationship went downhill quickly. By 1998, they found themselves on opposite sides of an intense court battle. Michael sought to have a court remove Terri's feeding tube, indicating Terri would not have wanted to live for years and years in a persistent vegetative state. Her parents wanted to keep her alive.
This court battle has raged for years. On Oct. 15, 2003, Terri's feeding tube was disconnected pursuant to a court order obtained by Michael. However, Terri's parents were able to convince the Florida legislature and governor to pass legislation allowing the governor to overturn that decision. Six days after removal, the feeding tube was reinserted and the battle continues. The rancor between the parties continues to intensify. Fingers are being pointed and blame is being cast.
While Terri's medical condition may not have been avoidable, the aftermath was. Terri could have clearly expressed her wishes in an advance health care directive or "living will." This document clearly states whether Terri wants to be kept alive under such conditions. This would have saved those closest to her, her parents and husband, from years of bitter, emotionally-charged fighting.
A qualified estate planning attorney can assist you in preparing an advance health care directive so that you are not at the center of a bitter fight among those you love.
Attorneys Judith Sterling and Michelle Tucker are certified public accountants and partners in the Honolulu Law Firm of Sterling & Tucker. Reach them through their Web site, www.sterlingandtucker.com. For a free copy of "Where There's a Will, There's Probate" call 531-5391, Ext. 0.
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The higher you get,
the harder it can be
to continue to advance
I am increasingly finding myself interacting with senior executives from diverse organizations, across many cultures, who are facing a relatively unexplored and unspoken challenge. Indeed, they are often hesitant to even broach the subject for fear it will make them appear to be somehow arrogant, over-confident and lacking in humility.
Simply put, as a result of years of hard work and discipline -- mixed with some opportunistic breaks and good genes -- they are blessed with having risen to lofty pinnacles of success as leaders. They serve as role models for younger generations. So "What's the problem?" you think to yourself.
The challenge they face has two dimensions. The first part is these leaders want to inculcate an even more valuable meta-lesson to those who seek their counsel, their mentoring and their coaching. They want to help them to see, that learning is a life-long process. If they are not learning, they don't feel alive. They embrace the fact that perfection is an unachievable ideal for which we strive. But it is the journey, the continuous striving to make progress, to be the very best that we can be is our challenge.
The second dimension of their challenge is rooted in the natural consequences of success. As a result of getting where they've so very successfully gotten in their respective careers, they have developed a set of absolutely essential and finally tuned behavioral strengths. If we were to put a hypothetical numerical grading system to it, we could say their current combinations of intellectual and emotional capabilities would score in the 95th percentile.
The recognition that a) learning is a life-long process, b) that progress not perfection is our lot in life, c) some existing behavioral strengths may need to be set aside [not eliminated, but rather not so heavily relied upon], and d) some new behaviors developed to wrest the one more point they'd like to achieve next year invariably brings us to several issues.
The first question I ask them has to do with their motivation. I stress that the desire to advance must be primarily intrinsic, for their own good, and not extrinsic. They must want to strive to make themselves even better because doing so will make them feel better about themselves.
The second question I ask has to do with their current sources of mentoring and coaching. This discussion goes quickly because this select group fully understands that they will never be without the need for their own mentor, their own coach for two reasons: 1) their integrity with those seeking mentoring and coaching from them would suffer if they "didn't walk their talk," and 2) they would have less to give because they'd stop trying to be all that they could be themselves.
The third area we explore deals with their personal feedback mechanisms. It is in this area we find the greatest opportunities for moving beyond the 95 percent level. We explore how they can begin to move beyond a reliance on the anecdotal, abstract, periodic, anonymous data that characterizes the feedback they have gotten thus far. Moving from good to better to best requires an ability to drill down to the smallest of details, to identify exactly what was already "good" and how it could be even better. True leaders "never let it rest, until good is better, and better is best." That's what they continue to outperform the rest.
Irwin Rubin is a Honolulu-based author and president of Temenos Inc., which specializes in executive leadership development and behavioral coaching, as well as large system culture change. His column appears twice a month in the Honolulu Star Bulletin. Send questions and column suggestions to temenos@lava.net or visit temenosinc.com.
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