Navigating change with intention
Change is inevitable, and while we can’t control that, we can control how we deal with it.
Parul Somani never set out to be a patient advocate. Born in India and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and embarked on a career as a management consultant before getting her MBA from Harvard Business School.
But a medical diagnosis that came the same week as her second daughter was born changed everything. She was told she had an aggressive, stage-two breast cancer.
“I was 31, I was pregnant, and I was being told that (the lump) was nothing to worry about,” she said. “That entire journey of what I experienced within the health care system and the role my own advocacy had to play as well as the experience of facing that level of uncertainty and stress of having so much be out of your control is something that truly changes who you are in terms of what you prioritize.”
Somani will share that journey and how it led her to create a method for dealing with change in Saturday’s keynote address, “The Kinetic Life: Your Power to MOVE Through Change With Intention.”
On the five-year anniversary of her remission, Somani launched a company called Silver Linings that continues to inspire and advocate for patients, medical professionals, and anyone dealing with change in their lives.
“It’s really inspired by this belief that the dark clouds, the curveballs, or the unwanted change is inevitable,” she said. “And whether that happens to us in our health, in our career, or in our relationships, the mindsets, strategies, and coping mechanisms that we can respond with are the same. They are teachable and learnable, and we have agency over how we can move forward from it.”
Navigating those changes and learning to move forward, Somani explained, is what the Kinetic Life is all about.
“It’s this mindset of how we can live our life with intentional actions that propel us toward our desired future,” she said. “So if we think of ‘kinetic’ as being the energy of movement, then living kinetically is living with this mindset that is always moving us forward in a productive way.”
Somani said her own experiences within the health care system have played a crucial role in shaping how she approaches her own life and how she hopes to inspire others to approach theirs with her presentation.
“It’s a deconstruction of my own experiences in terms of what helped me navigate my health issues and those curveballs,” she said. “But it’s also supported with neuroscience and psychology studies. I have case studies of other people who have benefitted from applying these principles to their life in really different contexts than my own. It’s about empowering people to embrace change with intention and to live a kinetic life so they can move forward from whatever is holding them back and teaching them this framework for how to do that.”
Hospitalists have had a rough couple of years having been on the front lines of the pandemic, and Somani said she is hopeful they will get some recognition and inspiration from what she has to say.
“It’s been a very hard number of years for people who work in this field, with the pandemic and burnout on the rise. There’s just a lot of burden on hospitalists,” she said. “There are obviously institutional and systemic drivers of that burnout that are not going to be resolved in this keynote or this conversation, but the focus is about as individuals, how can we be empowered or better control what is within our control and how can we then apply that in our day-to-day — whether that be in hospitals as professionals or as mothers and fathers or just living and leading our life with more intention among all of that uncontrollable change.”
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