The pager on my hip beeped at 1:22 am with a call from the ICU. The nurse on the other end asked if I would please come down and pronounce a patient who had passed away. “I’ll be right there,” I responded, put down the admission note I was writing, and set off toward the ICU. This was my first inpatient medicine rotation as an intern, so I was embracing this task with a mix of overconfidence and not knowing what I didn’t know. I was also trying not to disturb my senior resident who was either addressing some important tasks or sleeping. Hitting the wall plate to open the double doors to the ICU, a nurse behind a desk pointed in the direction of one of the patient rooms. As I approached the room, I realized that I didn’t actually know how to pronounce a patient and had never been taught how to do so in medical school.

The rollout of a new year results once again in countless goals established that over time are soon forgotten. While goal setting is key, taking a step back first and reflecting upon “who do I want to become (e.g., intention)” is essential to achieve your goals. Goals are specific, external achievements that can be easily presented on a checklist versus intentions which are the inner relationship with yourself and others. It’s greater than any goal; it’s about who you are at the moment.

In 2015, the Harvard Macy Institute made the decision to ‘go social’ to connect our worldwide community via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, under the leadership of inaugural social media strategist Holly Gooding. We started our community blog, with the mission to “foster the ongoing connectedness of health professions educators committed to transforming health care delivery and education.” Our efforts were intended to bring our alumni up to date news in health professions education, to promote the inquiry and scholarship that the Harvard Macy Institute values, and to celebrate the global and diverse Harvard Macy Institute community of practice.

In this post, I will share a brief story of my journey since I first joined the Harvard Macy Institute community in 2015. I have heard from other faculty that it can take a few years after attending a Harvard Macy Institute course to establish real change at our local institutions. Certainly, this was true for me, as I embarked upon the challenge to develop a new nursing department at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. There is no doubt that this was not for the faint hearted, as starting a new department in nursing education at a University with no history of healthcare professions education was a real challenge! We are now at the end of our first year of our undergraduate nursing program with plans to move into the postgraduate space within the next three years! So far, all signs indicate that this has been a very successful process as our students and industry partners have provided us with really positive evaluations. I believe there have been a number of ‘secrets to our successes’, and I will spotlight three significant ones in this post: