How my first nursing home job changed my life.

When I was about 15 years old, I decided it was a good time to start working.

Since my parents owned a nursing home less than a mile from the house I grew up in and I didn’t yet have a driver’s license, that nursing home turned out to be the most practical place for me to work.

I don’t remember exactly how the conversation went. I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about working at the nursing home but my parents certainly didn’t force it upon me either. It was just something that sort of made sense to all of us and so it happened. When I started, it certainly wasn’t my intention to spend the next 13 years of my life working among the several other nursing homes my parents owned but, alas, that’s how my life played out.

Being that I was 15 years old with no previous work experience, I was pretty much only qualified to work in the dining room as a food server. I served the residents at the community breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

My responsibilities included making sure the dining room was clean and ready to go prior to each meal, serving residents as they arrived, cleaning the dining room once the meal was over, and setting up for the following meal. The technical skills involved in this work were few. I learned how to properly fold napkins and how to plug and unplug the commercial coffee machine which proved to be the most technically demanding functions of the job. Aside from these basic tasks, you could basically train an animal to do it. 

It was fine for me. I wasn’t there because I was looking to learn how to build rocket ships or start the next great tech company. I was there so I could make a couple bucks, make my parents happy, learn a little about the family business, and, honestly, hang out with some of my other friends that worked there. 

After a few weeks and the initial nerves of working with a group of people so much older than I was, I got pretty good. I began learning about all of the people. I started to know who needed what and when they needed it. I’d know that this person got that coffee at this temperature and I learned all sorts of things about people that I never needed to know before. For the first time in my life, I was forced to think about someone other than myself. I was learning so much more than how to make a scorching hot cup of coffee or how to ‘thicken’ a glass of iced tea.

I didn’t realize it then but in some ways, working in the nursing homes was the perfect job for me. Not the food service part but the talking to people part. I got to hang around people all day and talk to my little heart’s content. I was finally getting paid for the very thing I was always getting in trouble in school for doing: talking. Those nursing home dining rooms were endless wells of stories and tales that I’d sit and listen to as long as the old folks would tell them.

The more stories I listened to, the better I got at listening. I realized that the more closely I listened to the people I was working with, the easier the other parts of my job became. I started to see the correlation between listening closely to someone and how much they enjoyed having me around. It wasn’t clear to me then but I was learning how paying close attention to someone when they speak to you is simply a great way of displaying respect.

And so, yes. I made a couple bucks that summer working in the dining room. My friends and colleagues shared a few laughs behind the kitchen doors. And my parents were content that I’d at least started to learn the value of a dollar through work. But more than anything, it was that first job that helped me understand the power of listening. 

Now, at 29 years old, I still find myself calling on that skill that I learned all those years ago. I still love having good conversations with people and I’ve found that the best way to have good conversations with people is to listen as intently as you can. It takes patience and practice to become a good listener. But it’s something the world could always use more of.

I’m grateful for all those people I talked to in that first nursing home job, my parents for encouraging me to get that job, and for nursing homes which provided me such a unique environment to develop my listening skills. 

And most of all, I’m grateful for good conversations. Without them, who knows who I’d be.