Stay safe around clients 🥷🦸♂️
Most of us try really hard to be as perfect as possible, do everything as perfect as we can, hoping that it will be perfect enough that we’ll be safe in our own little bubble and never called out for being wrong. None of us like facing an angry or frustrated client, and we work hard to keep everyone happy.
And it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do: if you poke your head out of your cave, someone might not like you, or misunderstand you, or you might mess up and be blamed for it, or a lot of other things that are OUT OF YOUR CONTROL. No matter how thorough you are, and how much you have studied, and how hard you work - you will at some point make a mistake, or someone will THINK you’ve made a mistake.
Realising that no matter what you do: We can’t control other people's thoughts and ideas about us, can free you to stop trying to be perfect. It frees you up to just do your best, AND try new stuff out you KNOW you’re not good at (yet), because either way, people will think whatever they want about you.
So you want to create safety for yourself and not depend on others to tell you that you’re good enough, professional enough, worthy enough; that thing YOU maybe struggle to believe and hurts you when people say you’re NOT.
How do you create safety within yourself?
You need to learn to have your own back, and know that you’re not going to beat yourself up if something goes wrong, or someone doesn’t agree with you.
THIS, my friend, is a superpower, especially if you’re a perfectionist veterinarian.
You need to learn to rely on yourself as your one and only most important person to support you.
Other people are free to think about you what they want, and it doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING about you.
Maybe the perfume you’re wearing reminds them of a horrible first grade teacher.
Maybe they have a thing against veterinarians because they once had a traumatic experience with their pet.
Maybe they are incredibly insecure and finding faults in others makes them feel better.
You just don’t know, and you can’t control it.
The only thing you CAN control are the thoughts that pop into your head about yourself (spoiler alert: you can DECIDE if you want to keep them).
You can learn to take a breath, put a hand on your heart and repeat to yourself “I am safe. I am safe. I am safe”, when your primitive brain overrides any logical thinking and panics because it makes other people's words mean we have been thrown out of the cave and out of the tribe and we’re going to die.
When you think about it, it’s actually rude to try to control other people’s brains and force them to think thoughts about us WE want them to have. I’m sure you wouldn’t want anyone trying to control YOUR brain, right? So let us all take a breath, let people think what they want to think, and just make sure we have our own backs, and let our nervous system know we’re safe. No-one is going to stone us (where I live, anyway).
So do your best, and don’t try to control the world in order to feel safe. You have the ability to create that safety within you, and you can’t control the world anyway. All it takes is practice, and a lot of awareness around your thoughts and your emotional state/nervous system.
In your corner,
