When we polled young veterinarians about what their career concerns were, more than half of the respondents listed worrying about making mistakes as one of their biggest problems.
This is not surprising, and not altogether unwise, considering the myriad of things that can potentially go wrong. However, making decisions based primarily on trying to avoid stuffing up can have very negative effects on our working lives.
So, how can we think about mistakes in a better way?
Impairing growth
The anxiety that comes from a fear of making mistakes – that ever-present uneasy feeling of “what have I forgotten?” – is a big enough problem in itself, but a more insidious and possibly more damaging consequence exists that arises from an “error avoidance” based approach: you run the risk of not becoming the best possible version of yourself.
Avoiding all risk of failing by never undertaking anything challenging might protect you in the short term, but it also keeps you weak. To allow growth, you need to continuously push yourself – even when it puts you at risk of making mistakes.
To be sure, making mistakes will be painful, and our natural inclination is to avoid pain, but pain is a very good teacher. When you do make a mistake, you will think you’ve failed, but you only really fail if you give up. The pain will eventually go away, but the lessons will remain.
Feeling good
The flip side of pain is the pleasure of success. The rush of positive emotions you experience when you succeed at something hard creates positive feedback loops that will drive you to challenge yourself again and again. This will increase your general sense of self-worth and accelerate your professional growth. In the absence of this kind of stimulation, it is likely you will become bored and dissatisfied, and eventually stagnate.
While it’s easy to be philosophical about it, we need to be realistic about the fallout of actually making a mistake. Besides the immediate deleterious effects on the patient you are trying to help, we also worry about the effect on our future careers – not to mention the havoc this can play on our self-confidence.
We worry about losing the respect of our colleagues and peers. We want to feel and appear smart and capable – after all, most vets have a long history of success and achievement, so to suddenly be in a position where we’re faced with the embarrassment of failure is an uncomfortable new space to occupy.
Know your limits
So, how do we get past these fears? Well, for a start, you can get over the idea you are above making mistakes and that making errors is a sign of weakness or inferiority.
Forget about pretending you know everything. When you acknowledge to yourself and to others that you have room for improvement, you will make it easier on yourself and those around you. You don’t always need to be right. In fact, you almost certainly aren’t. And that’s okay.
This way, when you do mess up, it’s much easier to see it as an inevitable part of our profession and an opportunity for learning, rather than a personal failure. Reframe “mistakes” as “lessons” and take comfort in knowing that, if you are making mistakes, you are operating at the edge of your abilities – and it’s at that edge where the fastest growth will happen.
Ride bigger waves
Big wave surfer Shane Dorian once said that if he’s not regularly wiping out, it’s a sign that he’s not pushing himself enough, and that his surfing will suffer for it. Instead of sticking to the easily makeable waves at work, we need occasionally paddle for the ones that have the potential to give us a beating. It might be scary, but this is where you’ll get the ride of your life.
Of course, you need to recognise which waves can hurt and which ones can kill. You also need to be fit and prepared, and know your limits – and if you end up in a big wipeout, you need to know how to get yourself out of trouble so you don’t actually drown.
In the next post we’ll look at some practical tips on how to best deal with the consequences of making mistakes.
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