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Leadership Lesson #6 is choose your battles carefully. Sometimes we spend a lot of time and effort trying to make obnoxious people happy, but they will never be happy! Not everyone will like you as a leader. Accept those who do and move on. Bradberry (2017b) agrees that not everyone will support you. In fact, he suggests that most people will not.
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Sometimes, though, this is hard to do. I'm sure we can all think of a situation or two where some truly obnoxious person was able to bring us down to his or her level. The problem is that these individuals are likely much better at bullying than you, because they've had more practice. And when you try to compete with a bully, you're probably going to lose.
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That brings me back to a situation where I learned this lesson the hard way. I was a staff nurse in the ICU. One of the local vascular surgeons, whom I'll call Dr. X, had a quick temper and a history of bullying nurses. His policy was that postoperative patients with a temperature of 37.4 degrees C or higher needed nasotracheal (NT) suctioning to keep their lungs clear. Because NT suctioning was so traumatic to patients, the nurses often tried some basic cooling measures first.
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On this particular day, I finished morning handoff and went in to check on one of my patients who was recovering uneventfully from a femoral artery bypass. He was under numerous blankets, and when I checked his temperature, it was 37.4 degrees C. I informed the patient that I was going to take off a few blankets and let him wake up, and then I would recheck his temperature. Just then, I turned around and saw Dr. X standing behind me. He moved to within inches of my face and began screaming at the top of his voice, asking whether I thought this patient looked like a lizard. I was more than a little confused. I was also embarrassed, because every nurse in the unit was watching the interaction. Even the patients in other cubicles were trying to see what was going on.
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"Some people will inundate you with negativity, passive aggression, anger, or jealousy, but none of this matters, because, as Dr. Seuss said, 'Those that matter don't mind, and those that mind don't matter.' We can't possibly get support from everyone, and we definitely can't spend our time and energy trying to win over the people who don't support us. Letting go of the opinions of people who don't matter frees up time and energy for the people and things that do."
-Travis Bradberry (2017b, para. 14)
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When I asked Dr. X what he meant about the patient looking like a lizard, he began yelling that the patient was not a cold-blooded animal that would adapt his temperature to his surroundings. My normal response would have been ...