Let’s be honest. For too long, “healthcare” has been all health and no care. It’s been a bad date. You know the kind—stiff, impersonal, talks about itself all night without ever asking who you are. It’s policy and procedure. It’s charts and compliance. It’s a noun. A thing. A static, stubborn… thing. But what if we’ve been focused on the wrong part of the word? The noun is the diagnosis, the system, the policy. But the magic, the healing, the humanity—that’s all in the verb. And as a Grammy Nominated Spoken Word Artist Sekou Andrews, I’ve learned my job isn’t just to talk about things, but to put them into action.
I once walked into a room as a walking, talking collection of diagnoses. A provider asked who I was, and I, deep in my cynical routine, barely looked up from my insulin and diet coke on the rocks as I pointed to the crinkled name tag on my chest. “Hi, my name is Diabetes.” It was Wednesday. On Tuesdays, I’m Heart Failure. Weekends, I’m partial to Obesity. I was a chart, a data point, a problem to be solved. I had surrendered to the old ball and chain notion that providers are from Mars and patients are from Venus. I was just another noun on a long list of nouns, waiting to be processed.
But then, she did something unexpected. She didn’t check a box or update a file. She leaned in, looked past the label, and asked again, her voice a quiet miracle. “No. Who are you?” In that moment, the entire dynamic shifted. She wasn’t treating a condition; she was connecting with a person. She chose to read the poem, not just the chart. She listened for the unspoken scriptures whispering the secrets to my healing. She performed a kind of soul transfusion by trading the passive noun of “health” for the active, powerful verb of “care.” This is the kind of Spoken Word Poetry I believe in—the kind that finds the human story beneath the data.
And just like that, I was hers. Mind, body, and soul. Why? Because she gave me the verb. She didn’t just offer health; she demonstrated care. She knew that to lead differently, she had to learn differently—to earn my trust by changing her own behavior first. That singular act of human connection did more for my healing journey than a thousand sterile procedures ever could. It’s a lesson that I, as a Vanguard Artist and Motivational Poet, try to bring to every stage: your real impact isn’t in your information, but in your inspiration. It’s the difference between a data dump and a goosebump.
This is the pinky promise of all our work. Whether you’re in a hospital, a boardroom, or on a stage, your mission is to find the verb. The belief in “health” is useless until it collides with the action of “care.” The best and most inspirational leaders understand this. They know that trust isn’t a policy; it’s a practice. They know that “care” isn’t a department; it’s a promise you make with your eyes, your hands, and your heart. So I ask you, are you managing a noun, or are you living a verb? Because the soul isn’t a thing to be fixed; it’s an action to be felt. And that, my friends, is how we truly begin to heal.
