August 5, 2026 Salus Health Care Forum

Jeremy

I am going to inviting someone who is going to be involved with Martin Seligman to review a large Canadian study. It is an attempt to get coaches for everyone in a province up in Canada. This is going to be a fascinating study. This is really looking at the use of positive psychology constructs around coaching. I don’t know what exact coaching mechanism or tradition they’re going to follow completely, but it will be interesting to hear in real time about what is occurring. I don’t think anyone has ever tried to get coaches for everybody in a province. That’s called being really optimistic.

Jack

I just want to offer several ideas that have to do with optimism. Over the past year, I’ve been changing my life narrative. And I may have told you this already, but I offer an example of being more positive and intentionally optimistic. The story is that after college, seven medical school admission committees offered me a gap year. That’s my positive reframe. It was an important year in my life, and I lamented it for decades. But now in retrospect, I can look back and go, wow, I don’t know how many people have been offered gap years by seven different medical schools. I was offered a gap year by seven medical schools. And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, I was rejected by seven medical schools. But I like the narrative better that I was offered a gap year.

There is a term that I came up with called intentional incompetence. I really started this with my team, where sometimes you just don’t have time to get stuff done, or sometimes you just don’t get stuff done because the stuff isn’t big enough or important enough to matter. So I just wouldn’t do it. Then, my staff have to step in and do it, whether this may be in the clinical setting. Mostly it is in the research setting, where they have to make decisions on their own. So they would be like, Jack, why didn’t you do this? And I was like, you did it, Linda.

You were able to get that done. And they suddenly, or over time, learn they have capacity, authority, intelligence, creativity. As I was thinking about this mastery piece, I think part of mastery is being able as a leader to differentiate between those components that are crucial elements. They have to stay firm. Those that are optional can be handled in a flexible manner.

Linda didn’t do things the way that I did them. This is one of my research staff. But they were just as good as the way I would had done it. The difference being that a controlling master says, even in the optional pieces, I want the room painted blue. I want the floor, you know, hardwood. They’re specific about everything, as opposed to making sure that just the crucial elements are managed at a top level. The other elements can be selected and chosen by all the various team members who can have input regarding these elements. It’s a balance. You don’t want somebody to get burned out or feel abandoned. So sometimes my staff would be like, Jack, you have to answer my emails. You have to, because I’m feeling abandoned. So those were just some things that I was thinking about. That relates to some of the key points Jeremy is talking about. It’s co-regulation. I think that co-regulation is that making sure that the sine qua non, the crucial elements get done. That’s part of being the leader or having mastery, but differentiating between those components and the other components of co-regulation.