Tying shoes, washing feet and cleaning toilets

The foundation of everything you think you know about medicine

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash

John Wooden started every basketball season the same way.

Not with plays. Not with strategy sessions. Not with inspirational speeches about championship rings.

Teaching grown men how to put on their socks.

These weren't amateurs. These were elite athletes who'd been dressing themselves for two decades. But Wooden knew something they didn't: wrinkles in socks become blisters. Blisters become injuries. Injuries mean you can't play.

The feet were always the foundation.

Your feet contain more nerve endings per square inch than anywhere except your hands and lips. Every step sends signals through your entire body. Get the foundation wrong, and everything else crumbles.

This is what Monday mornings are really about.

Not the dreaded return to work. Not the weight of another week pressing down. But the chance to get the foundation right. To strip away the layers we've built up between ourselves and the work that actually matters.

The best mentors I know don't start with complex procedures or brilliant diagnoses. They start with humility. They create conditions where their students have to set aside the white coat, the status, the need to be seen as important.

They go first.

They wash feet. Literally and metaphorically. They serve at the cost of their image, confident enough in who they are to lay aside who they're supposed to be.

Here's the part that makes you uncomfortable: what if your students spent time cleaning toilets?

The part of you that just recoiled? That's exactly what needs examining.