LOUISA LEE: A LIFE OF CONGRUENCE
The perfect photograph. CLICK!
Whether playful group photos, selfies in front of idyllic landscapes, or just vacation photos of famous landmarks – CLICK! We’ve all seen them and we’ve all taken them.
The problem is, quite often… they’re not ‘real’. They’re what some among us would call ‘fake news’ at worst, ‘altered’ at best.
They go through multiple crops, filters, and maybe even a touch-up or two before they get anywhere near our social media for all to see. Digital airbrushes hide what we may see as our physical flaws (what’s wrong with blurring out a few pesky blemishes, right)? A homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk may be unceremoniously cropped out of the perfectly balanced shot of a multi-million-dollar city skyscraper.
And sometimes even our smiles act as a filter, hiding an inner pain or depression.
Dental entrepreneur Louisa Lee sees this discrepancy between reality and its portrayal as underlying a growing distrust between people in the modern world. And Louisa has more than a dental prescription for us: Live a more congruent life and that trust will grow again.
That gives us the freedom to pursue great things and make a positive impact on our world.
HEALTH CARE, NOT “SICK CARE”
Louisa runs Singapore-based DP Dental. She is also the director of Progressive Practice, an innovative education and consultancy service. Not surprisingly, she is aware of how important oral health is to overall health. She believes this holistic notion is distressingly absent from modern medicine.
“Why is it that in modern medicine the body is carved out in parts and assigned to different specialists?” she asks, “We are not robots with parts manufactured separately and assembled together.”
Doctors often concentrate too much on alleviating symptoms in what Louisa calls “sick care”, as opposed to health care. She views this as shortsighted.
“We need to move from treating the symptoms to fixing the root causes of these symptoms,” she says.
READING THE FINE PRINT
As an educator, she also sees too much compartmentalisation in the way subjects are taught with little regard to their connection to other subjects. Her aligned approach to health and education is why her favorite UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) is Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
In and of itself, helping improve global health already sounds like a great idea, but Louisa really likes to dive deeply into this SDG. It’s not just the overall goal that gets her excited, but the specific targets outlined in the UN sub-headings.
Three targets in particular fuel Louisa’s passion and DP Dental’s efforts through B1G1:
- end preventable deaths of newborns
- strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse
- cut the number of deaths and injuries from traffic accidents in half
These goals may seem ambitious, but with the right mindset Louisa sees them as attainable.
LEGACY: SIMPLIFICATION, ALIGNMENT, AND FUSION
Louisa has set up her business to have a mission greater than itself – one that’s way beyond just the profit motive – by aligning its values with her own. This congruence, she thinks, is the key to everything.
“When our personal values are not aligned to our values at work, we are simply not living fulfilled lives,” she says.
Her legacy, like that of so many parents, is about leaving a better world for her children and others. You can’t do this without tackling difficult problems and you can’t do it without the cooperation of others who share your vision.
To set the stage, Louisa says, we need to simplify. Don’t try to be everything to everyone like we do in our social media postings. We should follow the same set of rules, aligned with our values, with everyone we meet. This makes us genuine – and it garners trust.
When we allow our values to drive everything we do – whether work, family, friends, or giving activities – we are always moving toward our goals and in that simple act, we’re making the world better for ourselves, others, and the future. CLICK.
DP Dental is B1G1 Legacy Maker for the week of 12 August 2019. By sponsoring the B1G1 giving space for a week, DP Dental has enabled thousands of giving impacts to be created around the world.