Sheetal Patel

I attribute my success to my family, my parents, for sure. That's kind of how they pushed forward on what they wanted to see with their children, and to just do better, and be more involved, and do things that care about people. Because of them is who I am. I'm truly my mom and dad.

The best career advice I've ever received is actually the whole reason I got into this - someone said, why don't you try and see if you like it? If you don't try, you're never gonna know. I truly believe in trying everything, and then seeing where you fall. And that goes with anything, right? You don't know if you'll like something to eat unless you try it. How would you know what it tastes like? I believe that in my career, and I tell my girls this, too. I'm like, try it first, and if you don't like it, tell mommy, and I will say, okay, you tried it, but if you don't try it, don't tell me you don't like it. You haven't even tasted it yet. So my best advice is try everything.

I would say it's hard, it's tough, but stick through it, and you'll see the fruits of your labor. You will feel rewarded, and it's not just about monetary rewarding, it's about being a good person and feeling rewarded, like, internally. Like, you actually feel good for what you do and make people happy. And that in itself is a reward, I feel.

The biggest challenges I feel are to show people truly what our company is all about, that it's not your little cookie-cutter type of corporate assisted living, where the staffing levels are what they are, and this is what it is. Here, like, we're really, like, if the acuity of the care level goes high, then we add another staff member. We don't just say, oh, we need to ask our higher-ups to see if it's affordable, we just do it. We want to make sure that the resident's care is top priority. So, I think the hardest part is actually getting people to see this is what we're about, instead of just kind of looking at the big picture, and this is what all assisted livings do. But it's not, because each one is individual. So, sometimes it's hard to get that message out to people without them actually coming to see us.

In my workplace, the values most important to me are that people are compassionate and respectful and caring for one another, because everyone can just come and show up to a job and obviously possess the skill, but if you're not almost like a human being, like, caring about another person to do our job and care for others is almost nearly impossible if you don't have a compassionate heart. So that, to me, is held high. And in personal life, I feel it's the same thing, and I think you need patience, because unfortunately, all your patience goes in running the senior living, and then going home, you want to hold that same patience, but sometimes it's hard for your own kids. That's really high for me in my personal life, that holding patience.