Maybe age or experience or just time has passed that's helpful for us, maybe reflection or maybe luck. I'm not sure, but you get to choose your narrative, don't you?
As you get older, you realise that nothing is ever perfect all the time (or actually, really any of the time), but in and around all the things that are happening, there are some great things and some terrible things, too, and if you're lucky, they're probably in equal measure.
So, you can't get away from the fact that sh*t happens and bad things occur, but you can focus on them, or you can focus on the other things which are inevitably good and are inevitably there even in small numbers.
You get to tell your own story about what's happening, even if you don't get to write your own story entirely every day.
It's a choice, isn't it?
It's a muscle that you can work and build through practise and at the end of the day, looking back and going, 'What did we do today that was good? ' 'What happened that we liked?
As a little example, I had a patient today who I've treated lots of times. The plan was to do some extensive surgery, including grafting, but it had been planned a little while ago, and she arrived back, and we started to work and realised it was a much smaller job now. She had surprisingly healed a lot better in places than we'd expected.
And so, the 'value' of the case in the practice dropped by about 66% and so if I'm all about the value of the case in the practice, then I'm really disappointed.
The patient was absolutely thrilled, as was their partner, and when we went to reception to see them out, everybody was thrilled, delighted that the result had been great for her, delighted that we had someone who was delighted to be happy.
Sometimes up, sometimes down.
Pick the good bits, focus on them, and drive forward; the bad bits will come, and they will go.
"This too will pass".
Blog Post Number - 4074
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