18:83 Speaker Series: ‘Embrace who you are’
To find success and be your best authentic self: ‘Embrace, engage, evolve,’ Altru president and UND alum says
So how does a kid who graduated from a class of 30 in a tiny little town in northwest Minnesota end up on this stage today?
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That was the question posed last week by Dr. Joshua Deere, president of Altru Health System, during his 18:83 Speaker Series talk in the UND Memorial Union.
And the answer was, ‘Embrace who you are.’
Deere, who grew up on a small family farm near Kennedy, Minn., said his journey to finding his authentic self — from his early days as a young child of divorced parents to his 2006 graduation from UND’s School of Medicine & Health Sciences and later, his 11 years of serving as a physician leader — had its share of challenges.
“One of the most important things to remember about leadership is, you need to embrace who you are,” Deere told the crowd gathered on the Social Stairs for the spring semester’s final talk in the series. “You need to embrace where you came from and embrace what experiences you’ve had.”
In Deere’s case, some of the challenges came with that period in life when his parents lived and worked apart and he and his brother would be “passed off every weekend.”
“On the exterior, my brother and I looked like we had it all. We were dressed right, but we happened to live in low-income housing and had different food than the rest of the kids in school,” Deere said. “My parents were both bright — honor students and great people — but they married young and had a lot of growing to do.
“So in that time, there was chaos. There was turmoil. There was change. But that was life, and that frames how I am and how I react as a leader today.”
His parents ended up getting remarried when he was 12, but Deere said his grandmother, Mary Louise Deere, was his rock whenever he got bullied or when times got rough.
And in a profound way, she also was his inspiration for going into medicine.
It was Grandma Deere who took him to Grand Forks the day he got his braces off at age 14. After the big event and a metal-free lunch at their favorite restaurant, the pair were on their way home when she suddenly took a deep breath and slumped over and onto him.
She somehow managed to drive the vehicle into the ditch, and Deere waved down a van that happened to be carrying two nurses who immediately started CPR. Though his grandmother was rushed to the local hospital — then called United — she soon died.
“From that moment forward, I made the decision to be a physician,” Deere said. “Naive, helpless and maybe not understanding what all that entailed, I was going to go forward and not ever have that feeling again. I was going to embrace this challenge and figure out what I needed to do to make good out of this bad.”
Pausing to stress his point about embracing every challenge, Deere asked the audience to stop and reflect on their own lives.
“I want all of you to really think about the adult challenges you have — the challenges you have at work, the challenges you might have at home, your personal upbringing,” he said. “Understand that your perspective is really unique, and the solutions that you bring to problems in leadership, life and work are going to be a lot different than others’. So, that’s great. That’s what a team is.
“If you can find a way to cultivate all of those different solutions, all of us are going to be in better places.”
So, embrace was the first answer. The second and third were stay engaged and evolve. To hear Deere’s full 18:83 speech, including how he weaves in Ed Hakstol — father of famed UND hockey alum and former Coach Dave Hakstol — as well as beloved TV character Ted Lasso, click on the link below.
>> Watch more speakers in the 18:83 Speaker Series. Read their stories at UND Today by searching 18:83 in the Archives.
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