Emerging Champion

To bring someone into this role is to mentor. Begin talking informally with possible successors. Build by inviting them to help with projects. Invite them to join a substantial dialogue with the mission team. This is a good time for team members to articulate their perception of each other’s skills and spiritual gifts. The mutual approbation of such a dialogue helps motivate candidates and increase the mission team’s cohesiveness. Conversations like this go a long way to define early team relationships which then evolve with a growing appreciative disposition. The candidate now becomes a protégé and will have many questions about what will seem uncharted territory for most physicians. The dialogue will allow other team members to answer questions and give perspective.

Methods

The budding physician champion will need methods to help physicians self-discover, renew motivation, and re-energize. He or she should be able to develop CME (continuing medical education) programs, practice meditation and prayer, become comfortable with public prayer, and learn methods of formative reading (in contrast to informative reading.) There will be calls to create presentations and speeches for larger groups. Some personal skills warrant development, too. Among them are journaling, fasting, and intercessory prayers. Skill acquisition takes time and confirms that identifying your successor is the first priority task for a new physician champion.

Listening

General medical training does not provide all of the skills that you need for this work. Listening to people is unquestionably the most important skill to develop. We might imagine that we physicians listen well and often. Instead, we use an “efficient listening style,” whereby we listen selectively to find a story that fits our diagnostic paradigm. Once we recognize an acceptable theory of disease we commonly cut short the conversation. Physicians interrupt their patients’ stories within an average of 30 seconds. To be effective in the physician champion role, listening will require a greater interest, a much greater investment of time and a realization that the dialogue itself can be therapeutic.