Show notes
Miriam Aschkenasy, MD and Harvard graduate, currently works as the Program Manager for the Initiative on Institutional Anti-Racism and Accountability at the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Miriam works with a small team to build a new program including developing and executing a strategic plan, mission and goals and is responsible for laying the foundation for their programming including obtaining grant funding, striving towards team objectives and incubating and enacting new ideas and events. She previously worked as Deputy Director of Global Disaster Response at the Mass General Hospital Center for Global Health, and was a pivotal part in developing and executing the team's strategic plan where she acted as the team leader due to her extensive experience working under pressure in a fast-paced work environment. Show Notes: 8:15 - “Field work is like taking whatever job it is that you do in your office every day and then taking away 90 percent of your resources, making your phone only work 10 percent of the time, making the room 40c, and then getting the same job done. You really have to learn how to make everything work with nothing.” 9:05 - “There’s one thing both of my jobs have taught me and that’s gratitude.” 9:35 - “When you work in the field you realize how people live with so little. It redefines to you what it is to have.” 17:00 - Hear how yoga and meditation helped Miriam survive medical school 18:34 - “I think you have to have real coping mechanisms. In emergency positions you have to know how to do real self care - and I don’t mean getting a manicure pedicure. That’s not real self care.” 19:10 - Learn how this former field hospital director found time for self care in the midst of running a 500 bed relief effort in Haiti after the earthquake. 24:30 - “You don’t need a yoga mat for yoga.” 25:40 - Miriam describes her process for grieving when she loses patients. “There’s nothing more difficult than having a patient who is talking to you and telling you how scared they are and you watch them die in front of you.” 34:00 - Learn how to overcome failure. “You can’t learn from failures until you’re honest with yourself about who you are. You have to critically evaluate what makes you tick, you have to critically evaluate what sets you off, you have to critically evaluate what makes you happy, and i think you have to have some understanding of what your personality it really like. I think you need those things because you have to look at a failure and dissect it unemotionally. If you wallow in it, you can’t learn from it.” 40:06 - What does it take to figure yourself out? Miriam describes how she found her true purpose on a trip to Nepal. 45:00 - Hear the real reason why Miriam never got married, and why she and her partner decided to adopt two babies. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sumi/message