To help and empower people in their health journey with diabetes, the most important thing that I needed to do was to be silent.
Living with diabetes is no easy feat, and there is no way to fully comprehend what a person who lives with this disease goes through. We may think that a body-worn medical device might give us insight as to what an individual might be going through, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. For example, wearing a continuous glucose sensor that will never go out of range, no matter how many times you tax it with an attack of carbohydrate, does not show what happens when a person who needs this device miscalculates. And this miscalculation doesn’t have to be anything big. Something as simple as missing a carbohydrate estimate by 5 mg can be detrimental. The ensuing rollercoaster from something that seems quite arbitrary can be a rocky ride.
As diabetes care and education specialists, what can we do to help people who live with diabetes feel that we do in fact understand what they are going through? The answer may be tough to hear, especially when it is something as simple as giving them our silence.
I always felt that it was best to bestow my knowledge to every person that I saw. I put my expert hat on and babbled on and on. I watched people look like they were listening and taking it all in. In reality, I think they were rolling their eyes and just praying that my soapbox speech was somehow going to come to an end.
No one cared about what I had to say. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if what I was saying was pertinent to the individual that was being held captive by my know-it-all approach. It wasn’t until I became a nationally board certified health and wellness coach and began learning about coaching techniques that I realized I had it all wrong.
To help and empower people in their health journey with diabetes, the most important thing that I needed to do was to be silent. Individuals looking to make changes will come when they are ready. They will ask questions that will serve them best at any given time. What I realized was if I am too busy spewing my knowledge, then I won’t be able to hear others when they ask for what they need.
Once I took a step back and let others speak, I could provide what they needed. It was unbelievable how much they began to change and flourish. It was like they had become empowered in their own health. When they achieved their first goal, they wanted to set another goal. It started to become like an endless salad bar where they just couldn’t get enough. It made my job a lot easier, too. I no longer had to keep sitting there telling people the same thing over and over because now they were doing all the talking. They were talking about what they achieved and already moving on to their next goal.
I know that we are all capable of educating and empowering through silence. Back in the May 2023 issue of ADCES in Practice, there was an article published on providing person-centered care. In this article, we were asked to put people living with diabetes first and to listen to what they had to share. I thought that I would put this concept to the test, and I was not disappointed.
I got to experience this silence firsthand when I stood up at ADCES23 in Houston and gave my presentation to all of you. It took me longer than the 12 minutes of my presentation to be able to process this experience fully, but what I can tell you is that it reinforced just how powerful the moment of silence was. Despite my overactive nervous system that was trying to fight me every step of the way, I was able to chill out so I could scan the crowd. As I did this throughout the talk, I was shocked to see that despite a few people with their heads down on their phones, the rest of you had your eyes on me. It was almost as if you could hear a pin drop in that large room.
You gave me not just a minute of silence but 12 minutes of silence as I shared these important coaching concepts. The feeling that went through me was like nothing I had experienced before. I felt heard, and I felt alive. The full impact of this wouldn’t hit me until after I got home from Houston, but when it did, it was powerful!
They say for coaches that the most important moment of a coaching session is the minute before it starts. This is the minute when we silence our minds and get ready to open our minds to hear the perspective of the person with diabetes. Sitting back down after my presentation, I felt a sense of empowerment come over me. I realized that despite my fear of getting up in front of a crowd, I wanted to do it again. I felt empowered to keep sharing how important these concepts are to providing the best diabetes care to those that need it. I felt empowered to use silence even more with those that I work with on their health journeys. I felt like I could conquer the world! Who would have ever thought that something like silence could be that powerful?
Let me bring this back to the topic of diabetes self-management and education and how silence can impact those we are in this to help. What if we didn’t pretend that we understand what people who live with diabetes are experiencing? What if we sat back and listened to their stories? What if we gave people with diabetes a chance to share their perspective and get what they needed off their chest? What if when we became eager to put on our expert hats that instead we reminded ourselves that it is better to WAIT (an acronym for “Why Am I Talking”)?
After seeing how powerful a moment of silence was for me at ADCES23, I believe it could have some astounding impacts on diabetes selfmanagement and care. Could you just imagine what a moment . . . or more . . . of silence could do for a person living with diabetes and how much better their health outcomes could be?
Christina H. Fetcenko, PharmD, BC-ADM, CDCES, NBC-HWC, is with Type 1 Tina Health and Wellness, LLC in Avon Lake, OH.