Be a Conscience

It's such a foreboding concept, conscience. Foreboding because we give the idea so much weighted respect. Conscience, after all, is one of our higher functions that make us truly human. It is one of the attributes of humanness that our moral mentors hold up through human history, as a "thou shalt" skill to acquire. Conscience is so much more than consciousness.  Where consciousness pertains to the baseline self-awareness of your internal state, conscience gives legs, voice and vision to your internal state. If consciousness is the voice of "I am", then conscience is the voice of  "Here I am, and - OMG! What did I just do?" Conscience may cause the ground under your professional life to go shaky, but with experience and good humor, you may keep your self-awareness balanced and have the best possible day in the workplace.

The profession needs consciences - individual clinicians, academics and advocates that actively bring their legs, voice and vision to keep their work focused, vital and memorable. When the work is focused, the clinician respects the work processes that have been proven optimal. Processes that do not allow the integration of the professional's skill, the needs of the person served, and the goals of the institution that sponsors the clinician - they get re-tuned to resonate with the vitality or life force of the clinician.  When you are prepared for the work day by being grounded with your own vitality, you can complete work tasks that can stand on their quality, and can be applied as memorable across patients and impairments.

As you become grounded in how your conscience, properly applied, can bring the most to your clinical or research activities, - also think about how the world external to your workplace can be guided by conscience. Does your person served, live in an environment that could contribute to their impairments? Is the support structure for the person the best that could be imagined? How do the person's communities, in concentric circles about this person's world, bring positive or negative energy to the person's quality of life? The clinician - researcher who exercises her/his conscience in the wider world; it is work that can be most rewarding - but perhaps not of the monetary variety.

Martin Luther King, Jr., is quoted as saying "There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right".