Still Here,
Still Trying

I started this because there were things I could not quite get onto a page.

Writing gives me time to go back, move things around and figure out what I mean before anybody sees it. Talking is different. Sometimes I need to hear myself work through something before I understand what I actually think about it. The podcast gave me a place to do that, and I liked that it felt a little less finished.

At first I thought Still Here, Still Trying would be a fairly straightforward show about leadership, healthcare and life. I had spent decades running a community health center, raising kids with Kellie, making mistakes, losing people, getting older and collecting more stories than I knew what to do with. I figured I would talk about some of that, bring interesting people into the conversation now and then, and hopefully make something useful. I did not have a grand podcast strategy. I had a microphone and things I kept thinking about.

Then people started writing to me after episodes, and what they sent usually was not about the podcast. They told me about themselves. Something I had said about work reminded them of what they were carrying. A conversation about healthcare brought back an experience they had never quite known how to explain. Episodes about marriage, family, grief or trying to be better opened up other stories. Somewhere along the way, that became the part of doing this I cared about most.

Now I turn the microphone on when I am still in the middle of something. I talk about leadership and healthcare because they have been part of my life for nearly three decades, but the conversation goes wherever life is going. Kellie and the kids show up. So do endometriosis, my mom, grief, faith, music, AI, creativity, getting older, things I have screwed up and questions that have been following me around for a while.

I used to feel like I needed to know where an episode was going before I started. I don’t anymore. Some of the episodes I like most are the ones where I understand something differently at the end than I did when I sat down.

That is what Still Here, Still Trying has become for me. It is a place to work things out in public and leave enough room for somebody listening to recognize part of their own life in the conversation.