One of the most fun things I get to do all year and it's really get to pick the Kennedy Lecturer. It's a great honor to pick the lecturer and it is it is a great pleasure to introduce him. And so the Kennedy Lecture was established in 1985. There's more details in your handout by the Kennedy Family Endowment and the American Journal of Sports Medicine. And Jack Kennedy was a founding member of AOSSM in 1972, president in 1979, and basically the lecturer in the honor of his outstanding clinical, educational, and research accomplishments in the field of sports medicine and orthopedics. So this year's Kennedy Lecturer is Chris Kading. He's a master team physician. He's been at OSU for 30 years. He's a team builder. He's built an outstanding and huge program in Ohio State Sports Medicine, and he's been a great team player. I've known him for many years in Moon Mars and in Bear Moon. He has many, many accomplishments and I just wanted, this is my interpretation of the highlights of his accomplishments. He's the Judson Wilson Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at OSU in the College of Medicine. He's the Executive Director of OSU Sports Medicine, Medical Director for OSU Department of Athletics. He's been the godfather of the AOSSM Traveling Fellows to the Asia-Pacific in the Orthopedic Sports Medicine Society. He has been the Ohio Athletic Trainer Association Team Physician in 2017. He's been president of the ACL Study Group. He's won the Kappa Delta Award twice. He's won the O'Donoghue Clinical Award twice. So it is my pleasure to introduce Chris Kading to you as our Kennedy Lecturer. You actually get a little gift, two little gifts here, so you can open them later. So thank you. Thank you, Kurt, for that kind and generous introduction. And I also want to thank AOSSM for allowing me to be up here today. It's an incredible honor, and quite frankly, I'm very, very humbled by this opportunity. I'd like to also recognize Dr. John Kennedy, the namesake of this lectureship, and recognize all his work and efforts at advancing our field of sports medicine. He was an exceptional mentor to many, many people, and I think we'd all benefit from emulating him. When I was thinking, you know, what am I going to talk about in this presentation, I really thought about it quite a bit, and I was struck by a couple of things. One is, life is busy. It's too busy. Everyone in this room has at times felt overwhelmed by all the activities we have in life that demand our attention, right? We're all struggling with this proverbial inbox that's constantly refilling and replenishing and overflowing with demands, requests, and requirements of our time and energy. And those requests, you know, come from various individuals, various organizations, and quite frankly, if you look at it, a lot of those actually come from ourselves. A lot of this is self-generated. We're all very, very busy. In fact, we're so busy in this treadmill of life that a lot of times we don't have time for reflection. But there are events in life that I think force us to hit that red stop button on the treadmill and force us to pause and reflect on life. I've had two of those events recently. One was the passing of my parents. It's never easy to lose your parents, and those out there, those of you who've been through it, you know what I'm talking about. I think the passing of one's parents is one of life's sentimental moments, and I can't imagine whether you were close to your parents or not that one losing your parents doesn't result in significant introspection. The second event was the birth of my grandson, our first grandchild. My son has a son. That kind of blew my mind. And the first couple of times I held my grandson, they were very powerful moments, much more so than I would have ever anticipated. So you can imagine the juxtaposition of these two events, you know, generated a great sense of the circle of life. Life is precious, and our time here on earth is actually quite short. So when you start thinking about these kind of ideas, obviously the next question that pops up, what should I do to maximize this gift of life that we've been given? So that's not an easy answer, right? We've all at some point thought about that, but with those two events, I thought quite a bit about it, and as I'm pondering this, these questions and issues, I would hear people make reference to this concept that kind of caught my attention. Work-life balance. Seems like a noble goal. Seems like it's appropriate to what I'm thinking about. I'd hear people say, I don't want to work too much. I want to enjoy my life. I want to live my life, not just work. He works a lot. He has no life. So it made me think, you know, what exactly is this work-life balance thing, and how does it apply to me? How does it apply to us? They seem to imply that work is this unfulfilling, tedious activity, and that life is rewarding and meaningful, and that there's tension between these two. So is work that for which we get paid? Is it always negative? Is life everything else, and is it always rewarding? Is work distinct from life? If so, if the answer to all these questions is yes, well then it struck me the answer is pretty easy. Don't work. But that doesn't seem to be the right answer for us. So the more I thought about it, the less I like this term work-life balance. It didn't reconcile with my personal experience. It didn't seem to apply to me. What is work? What is life? Is there a clear distinction between these? Is one a necessary empty chore, the other all blissful happiness and reward? I'd have people say, Chris, you got to stop working so much. You know, you'd have to play some golf. Okay, that's great. I think, but I think it's playing golf more rewarding than having a grateful patient. Now, I've got nothing against golf except keeping the ball on the fairway, getting it on the green, putting it in the hole. But other than that, I think golf's great. But I get great satisfaction from mentoring people, a great sense of contribution when researchers are involved in impacts clinical care, enjoy seeing any program I'm associated with grow and improve. And these are all work-related items, but they seem to be, they are a great source of personal reward for me. So I had this revelation. We've been blessed. Our vocation is not a negative, unrewarding, soul-draining ordeal that we're just required to live. It's quite the opposite. For the most part, I enjoy what I quote, do for a living, advising patients, building a program, doing surgeries, covering an athletic team. And what is more rewarding than a heartfelt thank you from a patient? I believe that every human being seeks social interaction and relevance. Really, who wants to be isolated and irrelevant? And any vocation that makes you feel isolated or irrelevant is indeed soul and spirit training. Fortunately, ours is the opposite. We have lots of opportunity for interaction and doing something that's relevant. So this distinction between work So this distinction between work and life blurs, you know, is covering your trials football game, is it work or is it life? Several years ago, my wife and I had the opportunity to spend a two-month medical service trip to Zorzor, Liberia. Phenomenal experience. Clearly work-related, but in this work-life concept, it had a huge aspect of life to it as well. Wayne Woodrow Hayes has this famous saying, you can't always pay back to those who helped you in the past, but you can always pay forward to the current and future generation. When I hear someone reference that quote, I always think back to this Liberia experience my wife and I had and how it was a real blending of work and life. So if this work-life balance concept, you know, doesn't work for us, yet there's something there, right? We all feel some tension in our life. So what is it? It's not this work-life balance, at least the way a lot of people define it. Well, I think our dynamic is different. In our dynamic, work is not unfulfilling and tedious, it can be very rewarding and meaningful. And instead of work subtracting from our total life reward, it can actually add to our total reward. So instead of this tension between a positive and negative that the traditional view of work-life balance is, we actually have two positives, rewarding work and rewarding life. But wait a minute, work and life, I don't like those terms either. I don't think that's right. I would suggest that we replace work and life with professional and personal, both of which can create satisfaction and reward. So our dynamic is we have to look for this ratio between professional reward and personal reward because our total life reward is the sum of our professional and personal. Now our professional reward, it can be, I divide it to extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic reward professionally can be financial, it can be national, local recognition, it can be a career advancement, it can be awards and recognition. Intrinsic award can be the grateful patient, it can be a mentee saying thank you, or the internal satisfaction of the health patient, a well-done surgery, relevance research, programmatic growth, and advancing our field. So I get asked quite a bit, you know, Dr. King, what do you enjoy most about your job? And when I think about that, there's no one aspect of my job that I enjoy the most. The fact what I enjoy the most about my job is it's so multi-faceted. Obviously I'm in clinical care, I take care of athletic teams, I'm involved in local organizations, I do some consulting, some product development, involved in national societies, I'm in administration, I do some teaching, I'm pursuing programmatic growth, involved in some research, and I do fundraising. I enjoy all those things and I know two weeks in my professional life are the same. Clearly orthopedic sports medicine is not unidimensional. We have multiple aspects and dimensions on which we can focus, on which we can achieve professional satisfaction and reward. And there's even more great news. You don't have to pick just one of those facets, you can do two or three or four of them. And your selections can evolve and they can change during your career. Sounds pretty good. Is it too good to be true? Well, there are challenges to this. No, it's not all good. As I've gotten older, I've become a huge yin-yang guy. Every yin is a yang. Every benefit comes with a cost. I'm a big believer in that. And our vocation is a huge benefit, so you guessed it, there are challenges to this. One challenge is, quite frankly, I just described the endless opportunities for professional fulfillment. These can overwhelm our personal efforts. We can have a black hole of professional fun and rewarding activities. They can take all our time and energy from our personal side, take it away from our friends, our family, personal health and wellness. Orthopedic sports medicine could be like the mythical Greek sirens that can lure us into tragedy. And I'm sure everyone has felt this draw to spend more and more of your time and energy on your professional side. Another challenge, the positive feedback loop trap. The more you give, the more you get. And the more you get in one activity, the more you tend to give it. This occurs in several areas on the professional side. And the corollary to this is dabbling, right? That's like the negative feedback loop. It doesn't work well on either side. I'm going to do some research. I'm going to dabble in it, you know. I'm going to spend one or two hours a month, you know, maybe doing some kind of research project. I'm going to be a team physician. I'm going to go to the training room once a month to see how the team's doing. I'm going to be a surgeon. I'm going to do one or two surgeries a month, you know, personal health. I'm going to go to the gym once or twice a month, you know, take care of my personal health. I'm going to pay attention to my wife and kids once a month. So dabbling just doesn't work. So this positive feedback loop, the more you give on one side, the more rewarding it is, but the less you have for the other side. There is a zero-sum game here, which is a challenge. So this is not an easy situation to optimize, right? This situation does not naturally find an equilibrium. Positive feedback loops don't lead to equilibrium. So this black hole and siren of our professional efforts can quickly overwhelm the personal side and lead to some tragedy on our personal side. So we only have so much time and effort on this earth. We clearly must be very thoughtful in how we expend it between our personal and professional lives. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we spend it between our professional and personal lives. We need an active assessment of the time-effort ratio between our professional and personal lives. There's no clear or single correct answer. In fact, I think the answer is a process, not a result. We must intimately make a hard stop in our lives and perform a purposeful assessment of our effort ratio between our professional and personal lives. This has to be a hard stop. This isn't, oh, you know, driving to work today at the red light, I kind of thought about, you know, maybe I ought to do a little of this. No, you need to be very thoughtful in this. I'm going to come back to that. And it needs to be done repeatedly. One time going through this process is not going to do it for you. Your situation on either side can change. The reward that we seek can change. And you can change in your stage of life. And there's more traps that we have to deal with, all right? You can fall on the, oh, I'm too busy to think about it. I'll get to it tomorrow. You can be a momentum rider. Hey, my life seems to be doing pretty good right now. I'm just going to keep riding this momentum deep in the next 10 years, the same thing I've been doing the last 10 years. I think that's a mistake. You can be following external guidance. You can be putting your time and energy into something that someone else is telling you what you should be doing. Oh, you can fail to recognize that every benefit has a cost. And of course, there's always hubris. One of my favorites, it's kind of subtle. Hubris is excessive pride or self-confidence. You know, it doesn't sound like an orthopedic surgeon, right? You're thinking, I can manage this. These challenges aren't going to affect me. I'm too smart and capable to fall into those traps. It's not going to happen to me. It always happens to the other guys. Well, hubris has been the demise of many a soul. Now this next is a little video that one of our PhD researchers made. And, um, it kind of reminds that, you know, humility is right on the corner and life is not always glamorous. So, this is a game we're in white. We play in Iowa. This is our star quarterback. This is me. I get knocked right over the fence. They love showing that over and over again. and all the players come running over. Of course, they go over and they get our quarterback, and they just, they left me turtled between the bench and the wall. I'm sitting there, I see my feet, and I see the sky, and I'm stuck in there, and no one is apparently coming to help me. And some of the fans lean over the wall, and they're like, dude, man, you got blown up, and they're like, help, blow me up. So, life's not always glamorous, and humility is always right on the corner. But we've been given a great gift, but with that gift comes some hidden cost, right? So, we need to recognize that we have a gift, and it has hidden cost. We need to be grateful that we have the gift, and we need to be purposeful on how we deal with those challenges that come with that gift. So, I'm going to propose a six-step plan, all right, six steps on how to try to find some balance between your personal and professional. Step one, find professional reward opportunities. Now, there's an aspect of our vocation that is tedious and unfulfilling, but look in your professional life. What will make your work interesting, rewarding, stimulating, or fulfilling? We've talked about there's many, many areas that you can look into. And I think you need to stop, pause, think about what are the professional areas that I could put some effort into that would make my professional side much more rewarding. Now, studies have shown that regardless of your profession, when you're young, your professional goals tend to focus on attaining and acquiring. You want to attain or acquire money, reputation, professional advancement, those type of things. But as we age, our professional goals tend to shift more toward relationship-oriented goals, such as giving back, making a difference, or leaving a legacy. So, be aware of that. As you go through life, your goals, priorities may change. Identify, step two, identify your personal reward opportunities. Is it family? That's an obvious one. Is it personal enjoyment, your hobbies? Is it your personal health and wellness? Is it friends? Is it some social organization, your church? And then, obviously, your personal situation is going to evolve in time. The obvious one is your family situation. But other things can change as you go through life. Step three, you need a brutally honest assessment. What do you really want from your professional life? Not what someone else is telling you you should do. Not what your mentor, your spouse, your friend, your teacher, your peers tell you. What do you want out of your professional career? You need to put some real thought into that. And what are your personal life priorities? So, step three is a brutal honest assessment. And this is an honest list of your personal and professional priorities. Alright, so now you have this very audacious, ambitious, robust list of prioritized list of your life goals, right? You're going to do all this. Of course you do. You've got 15 pounds of life goals that you're going to try to fit in a 10-pound sack. So, can you fit your list of personal and professional priorities into a 24-hour day? I'm guessing no way. So, you're going to have to redo your priority list to fit your time-energy capacity. And you have to recognize that a gain here can be a cost there. Again, efficiency aside, we've got a zero-sum game here on the issue. So, you're going to have to trim your list. That's step four. Step five, things are going to change. Recognizing your situation and priorities will change. So, you need to plan another hard stop. And in a hard stop, you have to repeat steps one through four. You have to do that intermittently. Step six, it's not going to be perfect. And recognize that your list is not going to be perfect. Don't fret about this, that it's not perfect. We don't live in a perfect world. Be satisfied that you're thoughtful and proactive in how you're spending your personal time and energy. And that's doing more than what 99% of everyone else is doing. So, in summary, the six steps. Define your professional opportunities. Define your personal life opportunities. Do a brutally honest priority list of which of those you want to pursue. And remember, you can't do everything. Revisit the list. Trim your list. Recognize that things will evolve. You need to reevaluate. And you intermittently have to repeat steps one through four. And accept and be thankful. It won't be perfect, but it will be thoughtful. Now I'm going to shift gears. How do you maximize reward on either side? Well, on the personal side, far be it from me to tell you what to do on your personal side. You're on your own for that. But I have a couple thoughts on the professional side. The first one is team. Kurt made reference to that. Team, a group of people performing interdependent tasks to achieve a common mission or goal. We've all seen teams in work. John Doan, a poet and cleric from England, said, No man is an island. None of us is where we are today without some help or interaction with multiple other people. And the fact that we don't function in a vacuum is just reinforced by someone like Isaac Newton, who had some incredible, unique insights and innovative thoughts. He admitted that if he's seen further, it's because he stood on the shoulders of others. So I'm telling you, let's encourage you. Embrace others in your professional journey. But, yin-yang, working with people is not easy. Building a team is a challenge. Building a high-performing team is a huge challenge. So what are some of these challenges? Agendas. Does every member of your team, do they have a personal agenda that jives with your team agenda? What about the level of commitment of your different team members? What about personalities, complex human interaction? What about credit? Don't underestimate the issue of giving credit when your team has some successes. What about the perspectives of your individual members? They can be different and that can create tension. Skill sets. Every member has the same skill set? No, they have different skill sets. Are those appreciated and recognized by everyone? Ego, self-explanatory. Trust. Do your team members all trust each other? What about the logistics of, quite frankly, operating and functioning with several different organizations? Clarity of structure. If you don't have clear structure and rules of operation within your team, you're very likely to devolve into some chaos. What about priorities? Are the priorities of the team, how well do they dovetail with your team members? So there's a lot there. Don't be intimidated, but also don't be naive as you go into working with a team. So being solo, simple, fast, easy, less complex team, more complex, but has infinitely greater potential. When I first arrived at my institution in the 90s, I was pretty much the only orthopedist taking care of the team. I was scoping elbows, scoping ankles, doing shoulders, doing knees. The primary care doc was doing all the family medicine stuff, doing psych counseling, nutrition counseling. We were doing it all. That has evolved into a very robust, multidisciplinary medical team now. We have five primary care docs, five orthopedists, four sports psychologists, two sports nutritionists. It just goes on and on. Now, I look back with fond memories of what we were doing in the 90s, but clearly this team that we have now is much more effective in delivering higher quality product than what we were doing, although it's more complex managing that team. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. A lot of wisdom in that African proverb. Whether you're trying to climb a mountain or trying to understand some basic elementary particles of our universe, if you want to achieve something big, you're going to need a team. A couple quotes from people who know something about success. Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. Steve Jobs. Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships. Michael Jordan. I think my favorite, teamwork is that fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results. Andrew Carnegie. A team can be viewed as a high-performing interaction of moving parts. If you're going to build something that has a lot of moving parts, you'd be very careful in your construction if you want it to be formed at a high level. Then that machine or team of moving parts is going to require diligent maintenance. Team building and maintenance, though challenging, can obviously give some incredibly rewarding results. Several years ago at the AOSSM Council of Delegates, we were dealing with the issue of team physicians crossing state lines to take care of their teams. We took that challenge on. The Council of Delegates was able, over the course of three years or so, to get 44 states to pass legislation to exempt visiting team physicians from state licensure requirements. That's an impressive achievement. That's because of the team effort of people. Individually, we couldn't make that happen, but the Council of Delegates came together as a team and made that happen. At my institution, the Sports Medicine Institute. About 15 years ago, my institution was going through a transition, and I met with the athletic director and the dean. They said, Chris, what should sports medicine be here at our place? I put some thought into it. I remember telling them, at an institution as large as ours and with the breadth of expertise that we have, we should not limit our sports medicine providers by housing them and keeping them restrained in their home departments. We need to take the orthopedists, the family medicine docs, the internal medicine docs, the PM&R docs, the exercise physiologists, the biomechanists, the athletic trainers, the physical therapists, the sports nutritionists, the sports psychologists, all these people that our institution was doing, quote-unquote, sports medicine. We need to bring them together under one umbrella, under one center. Well, they accepted that. We moved forward on it. We formed an organizational center, both on the academic side and on the clinical care side. I would describe what we have today now as a multidisciplinary, multi-mission integrated model. You can see all the different disciplines we have. When I had that discussion with the dean and the athletic director and we started down that road, we had 12, maybe 15 people total in our sports medicine program. That includes the secretaries and the clerical staff. We're now well over 300. So proof is in the pudding. That model not only helped us have great success in recruiting and retaining faculty and staff and programmatic growth, we were also able to leverage that concept in some philanthropic success. We were able to build the Jameson Crane Sports Medicine Institute, a 112,000 square foot sports medicine dedicated facility. I am convinced to my core that none of those things would have happened if we hadn't had the model of the multidisciplinary team working together. I'm not saying it was easy, but it led to some great success I'm very proud of. The Moon Group. I think everyone in this room is aware of the Moon Group. I was very fortunate to be a founding member of the Moon Group. You can see the different institutions and the faculty that were part of the Moon Group, the behind the scenes sports staff. You can get a sense for how complex this was to make this all a high performing organization. But I think the Moon Group was a great example of how multi-center collaborations, multi-center teams can be very professionally rewarding. They can be very powerful. Here's the Moon Group winning the Kappa Delta Award. It can be very impactful. All the peer reviewed publications that Moon generated. I know definitely for myself, and I suspect for most members of Moon, individually wouldn't be able to achieve those goals, but as a team you can achieve big things. But it's not just on the professional side. It can be also personally very rewarding. You develop these lifelong friendships and very trusted colleagues. So when you're building a team, a couple comments. I think you need to be aware of some traps. You need to be crystal clear on the objectives of your team. By forcing yourself to be crystal clear on your objectives, that's going to force you to determine and define a meaningful goal or research question for your team. And that will allow you to get buy-in from your team members. And that's critical to the success of your team. That your members all buy into and are committed to your team goal. And a clear objective will help drive the size and the processes of your team. Also be very thoughtful of the size of your team. But be aware that increased size of your team also equals increased complexity of managing your team. If you're too small, you're going to be ineffective. You can be underpowered. If you're too large, you can be ineffective and you can collapse under the weight of your complexity. And then don't be naive about the clash of personalities, cultures, and bureaucracies. You need to be very thoughtful of those as you put your team together. Because if you don't pay attention to those issues, that makes maintaining your team even more difficult. And it's difficult enough if you don't take into consideration these issues. Now if you're an Einstein, an Aristotle, or a Shakespeare, these guys achieve some great things on their own. You don't go alone. But if you're like me and most of us, I recommend you find a team. One with common vision and values. Teammates that you respect and you value the same goals. Now, to me, a corollary of team is mentorship. I think any high-performing team, almost by definition, has significant mentorship going on. And a lot of the great mentors I know were big believers in teamwork and team concept. Now I'd be remiss if I was discussing mentorship in a talk and I didn't recognize one of my mentors, Dr. John Bergfeld, who is a huge believer in working together as a team and teamwork. I also want to touch base on Larry Senn. Larry Senn has this book on the mood elevator. And you can see the different types of moods on the right there that you can have as you go through life. The ones on the bottom are negative, the ones on the top are positive. And you can see at the very top of his list is being grateful. And he would say, and I agree with him, you can choose to a large extent what mood you're going to have when you go through life. So let's be thankful. Even though medicine is becoming much more challenging, it's still a better job than 99% of the people in the world have. And we can never forget or take for granted our home team, right? This is your foundation, your home team. So in our sports medicine journey, let's be thankful. Let's embrace it. I have three bits of advice. One, be very thoughtful and proactive to find your personal professional balance. And do what you can to minimize those traps that we just talked about. Number two, don't go alone. Find a team. It's going to be much more rewarding. But at the same time, not necessarily easy. And you have to be aware of the challenges. And number three, find a mentor and be a mentor. So, last slide. Our sports medicine journey, it's a living, dynamic, evolving process. Let's enjoy the ride. And remember, it's later than you think. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

balance

sports medicine

teamwork

mentorship

priorities

reflection

opportunities