When things go wrong - resilience to failure

Today we're talking about when things go wrong.
How do we deal with failures?
What's actually stopping us?
And how can we be better at dealing with them?
Resilience is the key word here,
so welcome to The Imperfect Clinician.
It's Yuen
And Mike.
And today we are discussing about resilience to failure.
Yeah, so we want to talk about what happens when things go wrong.
So, before we expand on it, what do you think resilience is?
Well, resilience is such, when I try to research it here and there,
it's the capacity to withstand or to recover, ideally quickly, from difficulties.
It's a sort of a function of toughness, or it's a measure of toughness, rather.
So, I'd like to see how you recover from sticky situations.
Okay.
So, when you have a failure or when you've done something wrong,
usually I call those sticky situations, which means they stick to you.
And how the skills that you've learned to remove the stickiness is what I would call resilience.
So, if you are in the starting stage of building resilience,
then things stick with you for much longer.
And then if you've practiced more skills in building resilience,
then you have the skill to remove the stickiness sooner or quicker.
So, like you said, how to recover quickly from difficulties.
So, this quote, I really like, it's from Yasmin Morgahed.
She said, resilience is very different than being numb.
Resilience means you experience, you feel, you fail, you hurt, you fall, but you keep going.
I think before we do that, I think it's important for us to understand
that resilience or failure in itself plays a role in our life.
Well, it does play a role in our life.
And we are genetically conditioned to respond to certain stress factors in our life.
And it's a part of human conditions because we are wired,
or our brains are wired in a way that we always want to venture on the safety part of the equation.
So, we usually overestimate the threat because that kept our predecessors to stay alive.
They didn't want to feel so much courage that they're going to jump into in front of the lion.
They had to venture on the cautious side rather than anything.
So, we want, our brains are created in a way that we make big things out of little things.
And we hold on to that negative outlook of the situation or experience.
And we also overlook those positive ones.
Because those positive ones, we feel like they're a given and we don't pay that much attention.
We don't draw enough of our attention to it.
So, our ancestors back in, like, I don't know, in a cave somewhere who faced daily predators,
they, in order to survive, they had to be cautious.
They had to assume the worst outcome of the situation rather than just jump into.
And it's how to preserve your life, how to preserve your safety,
how to preserve the future.
It's a survival skill, yeah.
So, what happens when you make a mistake?
Because one thing is to understand how we approach the problem,
how our biological sort of predominant are already sitting in us.
But then the reaction to it, I think it's worth exploring a little bit further.
So, what happens when you make a mistake?
Have you made any mistakes you want to tell me about?
I have.
I think I want to share something that stick with me for quite a while.
And I had to, it took me longer than I would have liked to recover from it.
And that's when I first received a complaint about myself.
So, this was a patient who was not happy about me not removing,
but reducing the pain medication.
So, sorry, I should say, not the patient him or herself.
It's the family member that's not happy that that was being done,
even though the family member is not being part of the conversation.
So, the conversation has always been myself and the patient,
and it's always been the shared decision.
However, the family member that was involved was not aware
and felt that it was done without any prior discussion.
So, a complaint was lodged and that was my first complaint.
And I took it very personally.
I felt that it was my problem.
I felt that I maybe could have done better, could have communicated better.
And that was a steep learning curve for me.
Okay, so how, if you were to describe out of three feelings that accompanied you
when it happened, maybe before you reflected on it and maybe a bit later?
I would say shock, then shame, and denial.
When you're talking denial, does it mean that you understood what was the problem?
So, denial came from, in this case, it can't be.
Why?
So, this is the thing, I feel that when we feel denial,
when we can't fully understand from a different perspective the situation that happened.
Yeah, and I can't fully accept it yet.
So, there was an instant reaction instead of a day later.
Instantly, that was the...
Of course, and you have absolutely right to feel whatever comes to you, you just feel it.
That's what happens.
So, what happened next?
So, what happened next was I had to respond to the complaint,
which means I have to do some fact-finding and write something back.
However, before I could do any of that, I had to be calm.
I had to find ways to calm myself down.
And in this case, I left my room to go and make myself a cup of tea.
So, I thought removing myself from the situation, from my room, really helps.
So, to gain the distance.
Yes, in some ways, in order for me to try to have emotional distance,
I tried using physical distance or actually remove myself from the room.
And in that case, I linked the room to the situation,
remove myself from the room and go and make a cup of tea.
So, that's similar to what we were talking in the first season
when I said that I want to sleep things off.
There's a problem, in a way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then sometimes that helps.
Sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes I need to do more than that.
So, now I've built a toolkit of such.
So, either leaving the room or go and speak to a supportive colleague
or go out for a walk.
These are the things, just to clear my head,
I think these are the things I find helpful to help me gain a bit more clarity
in the situation.
And then I go in and I try, and then I go back in my room
and then I try to deal with the complaint by fact-finding.
So, I try to deal with their emotions and then let it simmer.
So, it's not rearing its head right in front of me.
Let it simmer and then I fact-find.
So, discuss, find out what actually happened all throughout.
So, approach it in a more methodical way.
So, we want to discuss it in a little bit more methodical way.
So, we're trying to disintegrate different components of it just to see, right,
what was the discussion, what was the outcome.
My notes, everything else.
So, I go into sort of private investigator mode
and then look into each detail based on what I remember,
but more importantly, based on what I wrote.
And the other part is also all the conversations are being recorded.
So, there is always evidence of what's being said.
Okay, so you were already prepped to it in a way
because you put some safeguards in place before that happened.
So, you have a good structure of recording the conversation that took place,
evidencing all the things.
So, you had something to work on.
That's, I think, quite precious to see in a clinical setting.
Yeah, I think for all clinicians, safety netting, making notes,
the consultation notes, all of that are really, really important
because, I don't know, three months down the line, three years down the line,
you wouldn't remember every single conversation
and having those safety reels or safety nettings are really important.
It's great that you say it to the patient,
but it doesn't count if you don't record it and write it down.
So, note-taking is very, very important on top of the recorded conversation.
So, this is to provide you the no-sleepless-night policy
that we discussed in the first episode of this series.
Okay, so how did it impact you for the next conversation
about a similar subject or any other?
What impact did you have on confidence or decision-taking?
How did you learn? What did you learn?
I think confidence is definitely, for me, in this case,
I find it's only normal for me to have a knock on confidence,
to feel that maybe my communication with the patient was not very clear,
maybe I should have done more, and this was the thoughts in my head.
In this case, for the complaint,
sometimes it's resulting in me speaking to the patient,
sometimes it's me speaking to the patient
and the patient wants me to speak to the family member, so it differs.
But a lot of the self-doubt usually happens in my head
before I am able to do anything else.
So, I think, for me, the biggest learning is to address those gremlins in my head.
Okay, so what support...
Did you need any support from anybody else?
Or do you feel like all you need to do is just work with it yourself?
So, I think, for me, it's both.
I needed to work on it myself, but I also need the people around me.
So, I feel during that time,
the words or the weight of other people's word carry a lot more weight.
It creates a bigger impact because I feel more vulnerable.
And in terms of help, so in the healthcare system,
the National Health Service in the UK,
there is some mental health support to clinicians.
And if you have a complaint, you are being triaged
because the risk increases in regards to suicide.
So, the study shows that when a clinician has a complaint,
it increases the risk of suicide.
So, wait, so this is very important, what you're saying,
because I have not been really aware of this.
So, you're saying that the impact can be so significant on the clinician
that it can lead to really dramatic consequences?
Yes, it does.
OK, so is there any need to let it out?
I don't know, put it into a discussion with the public to try to understand.
I mean, obviously, people have got a lot of valid complaints
and there are problems with medical practice in every sphere of healthcare.
But I think it's important for people to understand
what impact it has on the clinician, on the individual.
On the well-being of it.
On the well-being of it, yeah.
And I think this is especially a good opportunity
to shed a light on the importance on the well-being of clinicians
because the clinicians are involved and directly responsible
to a great extent the well-being of the patients.
However, what system is in place to support clinicians with their well-being?
And I think part of the reason why I wanted to raise it here
is because the well-being of you,
every single one of you that's listening,
is important not just because it affects you,
but it affects everyone around you.
The impact can be very severe, both ways, positive and negative.
Yes.
OK, so let me tell you, I remember my first mistake
when I was a young pharmacist many, many years ago.
But I remember it as vividly as it happened this morning.
It wasn't particularly major in terms of the consequence of it.
And there were others later on that had greater impact,
but this was the thing that it happened
as soon as you think that you're invincible as a young clinician.
Of course, you realise that you don't have everything,
you don't have experience,
but you feel that you are confident enough,
you're OK to work as a qualified clinician.
I remember, well, I let pass the prescription,
I checked the prescription for anti-epilepsy medication
for carbamazepine.
It was the modified release that I let go
instead of the immediate release tablets.
And I found out about it from the patient
who came in and said that I'm not feeling very well
after taking those tablets.
I've been taking them for a long while.
And I froze.
I was listening to it,
and I'm looking at the box that was brought to me.
It had obviously the correct label on it,
but the medication was given wrong.
And it just froze me.
I didn't quite know how to respond.
I didn't feel prepared.
I think I was aware that things like this will come,
because we all make mistakes.
But I wasn't prepared for it.
I think I was prepared mentally,
but I wasn't prepared emotionally for that.
And probably that's the reason why I still remember it until today.
I can hear the patient saying,
I wasn't feeling very well.
I could feel a little bit more drowsy.
I could feel, you know, not myself.
And luckily, nothing major happened to the patient.
He didn't have a fit, didn't bang their head,
and didn't die or anything more severe.
But the fact that you can make this difference
by a wrong decision or by a bit of absent-mindedness,
I mean, you know, you just need a fraction of a second
to change the medication for, for example,
for a month for a patient, or for a few months,
or for a few days, or for a dose.
And I'm sure that impact on the person
or the idea that started to grow in my head
on the impact on the patient,
just say that, well, actually now I need to make sure
that I need to do more to provide that safety.
People rely on you because people are not expected
to know things about their medical conditions,
about their medications, about the treatment.
So they rely to you.
So there is an additional responsibility on it.
And ever since then, and it was many, many years ago,
I always open carbamazepine box to see
what colour tablets are,
because the immediate release are white
and the modified release are beige sort of colour.
So I-
It's not even easy to differentiate.
Yeah, but you know, I always now just check
and do it by the colour.
No matter what happens, I just want to convince myself
that, you know, and this is one of the things
that we do to minimise the risk in the future.
This was the lesson learned.
But I still remember being frozen,
stood in front of the patient
and not being able to respond to it
in a way that I can do now.
I wasn't equipped to it.
And I think that the knock on your future decisions
on how you approach it, you can never get used to it.
I mean, me as a clinician working in healthcare,
I can never get used to making mistake.
And I don't think there is a lot of clinicians
in any capacity that can just go well and not care.
That's not how we are.
It's not in our genes.
Do you know what I mean?
That's something that always sticks to us
and building resilience.
It's something that is a way of a natural progression
of us as clinicians to become stronger.
Yeah, and I want to go back to when you say
you think you've prepared mentally but not emotionally.
What did you mean by that?
What I meant is I knew it was going to happen.
And I knew that what you need to do is to first check
whether, you know, the patient's okay,
making sure that the patient is safe
and make sure that you, I don't know,
follow the procedure for reporting the incident
or work in action plan.
So I was, my brain knew what actions should be taken.
What you needed to do.
What I needed to do, I needed to, well, you know,
look at it and I knew that I needed to reflect on it.
I knew that I needed to put an action plan in my head
as well as in the organisation that I worked in.
But what I wasn't really sure is how I'm going to respond
in a real world situation.
It's not always you get surprised by something like this
for the very first time.
There's always first time.
And how did it make you feel emotionally?
Vulnerable.
You feel the weight of the decision.
So you understand the importance of your role.
And I think a bit scared.
Yeah, definitely.
You, that could have been something much bigger.
Yeah.
That could have been something that would have been
life changing or life ending.
That's something that is present in our everyday practice.
And so how do we go forward?
How do we build the necessary resilience?
Because the things go wrong and you have to assume
in my opinion that they have to go wrong.
Or do you?
I think having the emotions really helpful
to almost relate to that situation.
I wanted to see how you then spoke to yourself after.
Was it a lot of self blame or was there?
Yeah, there was, of course there was blame.
And there was guilt that I didn't conduct the due diligence
to provide the safe outcome for the patient.
Because even if you're like, I don't know,
medication checking pharmacist or pharmacy technician,
or the amount of decisions that doctors make in a day,
you multiply it by the amount of items or decisions
or process that go through it.
The chances of us being wrong or making a mistake
is really, really low.
I mean, we have to understand that if you work
in a relatively busy pharmacy, for example, here in the UK,
and if you take out the holidays or whatever,
days in a year, you still would check, I don't know,
100,000 items a year easily.
Okay, so this is easily what you're checking.
And in those 100,000, you are actually making
a clinical decision each time, not just prescription
but the patients that you speak to.
Absolutely, you also discuss, you provide advice,
you, I don't know, deliver a service.
And, you know, there is 100,000 essentially situations
when the things can potentially go wrong.
And what we need to understand that the percentage
of us essentially being wrong, I don't want to, you know,
big any, you know, any professional group
because nobody wants to make a lot of mistakes
in any capacity.
But if you're making, you can have a one decision per year
that's going to be really bad and it's going to affect
all the other almost 100,000 decisions.
And I think it's those situations, they stick to you.
That's what you said, they are sticking.
I quite like how you describe it as a sticky situation
because they sit with you and you have to deal with them.
No one else can fix it for you.
No one else can heal it for you.
You are affecting other people and other people's wellbeing.
And it's not only in healthcare, you know,
if you have a bungee jumping facility,
you also want to protect your clients.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, definitely.
That happens in so many areas around us
that it's not exclusive to people in healthcare.
But I think you feel guilty that something could have happened.
You feel shame, you shame yourself by, right, am I worthy?
Is it something that is going to just cross my, well, career
or starting career or career in the full swing or whatever?
And like you said earlier on, life changing rather than career changing.
That's the thing.
It impacts others' health, it impacts others' wellbeing.
And it impacts another person directly.
It's not something that you drive into somebody's car and you scratch it.
You hurt people.
And I mean, natural thing for us is that we don't want to hurt anybody.
I want to say for most people, shall we say.
And I wonder what happened to your self-talk
when you had to deal with a mistake done by somebody else
because that somebody else is not here.
I, well, first of all, you want to make sure that nobody's hurt.
Okay.
You want to make sure that what happened, whatever the mistake happened,
didn't impact anybody's wellbeing or health,
especially didn't impact any longer term situations.
I don't know.
Patient wasn't hospitalised.
Patient didn't, you know, drop off bungee jumping rope.
Can I be honest?
I do that, but also at the same time, I'm very urgently checked whether I was involved.
And then if I'm not, I internally breathe a very big sigh of relief.
I think I'll do it later.
Do you do it later?
I think I'll do it later because I think I get so directly involved with the patient
because you are effectively the person that is taking the complaint,
somebody coming with a mistake in directly to you,
that I don't really have time about thinking I'm trying to fix it, remedy the situation,
put things right.
And I think the setting's a bit different in your case.
Patient actually comes to you and bring you the error.
And in my case, I have a combination of either that or I get a call about the mistake or the complaint.
And so I'm able to fact check.
Of course, I make sure patient's okay as well.
But also whilst I'm fact checking, I'm making sure that it's not me.
Okay, let's solve this problem.
But with a bit more distance from it.
Of course, if it doesn't directly impact you that you weren't part of the causing the problem,
it ultimately gives you a chance to have a big side later on.
But I think I feel for any clinician that I'm working with that it could have happened to
because ultimately we're all on the same side.
We want to fight for people's well-being,
making sure that people are better after seeing us than before.
And I think it's quite important to show the empathy to the patient
and try as much as you can, of course, to put the things right for them
to minimize the impact or inconvenience to the patient.
Because sometimes, you know, it might be just a minor inconvenience.
But it's still an inconvenience.
It's still you let somebody down.
And I think it's the feeling of letting people down collectively.
Okay, I feel for other clinicians, I feel for doctors that I work with,
errors, I feel for whoever is involved in it, I don't know, dispensers, anybody.
And I feel as a part of a wider group, of course, individually, I might not be involved in it.
But we all care for the same patients, you know, the patients are coming to me.
And I am the first line of contact for the patient when they come in to make a complaint,
to show us the error, show us the problem, that we are the first line.
And I feel for any clinician that it happens to, because it's never our intention.
So I wonder, how is it different if you then spoke to the person that made a mistake?
How would you break the news?
And how would you guide them through it?
Oh, this is a longer discussion about giving feedback, to some extent.
Yeah, but highlighting a mistake is, I think, the most difficult part of feedback.
Because the feedback can be on behaviours, can be on attitude that is transient.
You know, you may not feel very well at a time, you may be absent-minded and have an attitude snap at someone,
you know, this is it.
But here, this is zero-one situation, an error happened, okay?
I think it's quite important to be, it's very important to be open and honest about it and discuss it in a very transparent way.
I think that constructive is one way, but I think that clinician that you're speaking to has also responsibility on accepting that feedback.
And I think that we may not be ready for it mentally, or I don't know.
When you say we, you mean the clinician that's made the mistake?
Us, as all clinicians, because I'm also putting myself in a position, right, what would have happened if somebody came to me and said,
you make a mistake as a clinician, yeah.
I mean, being open and honest about things means that you still have to be quite diplomatic on how you do it.
You don't want to knock anybody's confidence down.
And I wanted to highlight, I think, the language here.
Would you have used the same words that you've spoken to yourself in your head when you've made the mistake compared to somebody else?
Would you have used the same language or would you have been kinder?
I would have been kinder, definitely kinder.
When I'm talking to myself, although I don't think it's particularly unkind when I'm talking to myself now, knowing what I know after many years.
So first is, right, is anybody hurt?
Okay, you answer that question.
Then what happened?
I want to have facts.
I don't want any cotton wool around me.
What happened?
I know what the consequences would be.
Somebody just tells me, right, you did this, that and the other.
So I know what kind of consequences.
First of all, when you know how the patient is, then you start to unravel it.
And when I'm speaking to others, I don't know what they expected me to do.
But just to be honest, I always try to be kinder, to provide a bit softer landing.
Do you know what I mean?
Because you want to work in a supportive manner.
You don't want to, right, you've done that wrong, fix it.
That's not something that I would do.
I would say, right, something happened.
We need to, you know, have a little look at it and take it from there.
And how would you practice that on yourself?
I think now after many years.
And after we talked about shame and guilt.
And after we talked about shame and guilt, I would do my best to avoid thinking that,
oh my God, everything is wrong about what I'm doing.
I want to look at the problem rather than at myself.
Of course, you want to learn from it.
And you have to touch on the fact that, right, what have I done?
Because this is the feeling, that's the emotion that comes into you.
But if you are a bit trained and a little bit more resilient, I think it's where you start to understand, right,
this is not a defining moment.
Yeah, this is a drawback.
This is a setback.
But talking about resilience is impossible without failures.
Exactly.
And I think this is where we need to think about how do we build resilience when things go wrong.
And I think it's then important for us to explore the model of resilience.
Of course, there'll be lots.
But I think the one that relates is the three P's model of resilience.
So it essentially started by the psychologist Dr. Seligman.
And you mentioned about personalization, pervasiveness, and permanence.
So when you hear personalization, what comes to your mind?
I think it's about myself, what's happened, how did I personally respond to it?
Like, I don't know, my feelings around.
Is that what he means?
And I think so he's trying to say that the belief that we are at fault and taking it all on personally.
And sometimes, a lot of the times I should say, it's not just you.
It's a combination of factors.
It's not.
So when you take it on personally, it can be very tiring.
And the other part he mentioned about pervasiveness.
So if something bad happened, it seeps through every part of your life.
So let's say I've made a mistake.
You then take it on personally.
I am a bad clinician.
It becomes I'm a bad person or I'm a bad mom in other roles that you hold.
So it seeps through all of that.
And you start shaming yourself.
And the other part is permanent.
So you think it's going to stick with me forever.
I can't ever get rid of it, get rid of the feelings.
When you say that, I always, and it's sitting with me all the time, pretty much.
When I had a phone call from work, I still can't shake it off, no matter what happens.
I don't know.
It's a habit or something.
When I had a phone call from work, I usually ask, what have I done?
I want to get the bad news out first, even if I haven't done.
Because this is what you say in the permenescence.
You know, when something happens and then you are badly affected by it, you start to
realize that actually something can go wrong and it can go wrong.
You know, it could have happened a while ago.
Maybe now you're in the top form, you feel great and rested, but maybe something happened
when you weren't feeling that great.
And it comes to you after, I don't know, patient left hospital after you'd made an error, for example.
And I don't think it's just you because...
But is it habit?
Is it insecurity?
It's habitual, perhaps in the healthcare setting, because usually it's similar to when we say
to patients, if it's bad news, we'll give you a call.
If you don't hear from us, it means everything's okay.
Yeah, we always say when there's no news, it's good news.
And even when I was saying to a few of my colleagues, come to my room, I've got something.
And I was actually have some gifts for them.
But the second they opened my door, it's like, what have we done wrong?
Is it bad news?
And I was like, no, it's not.
It's actually presence.
They're like, oh.
You always assume, that's what we go back to the biological setting, that we always assume things going wrong.
Do you think as clinicians, we are just anticipating the inevitable?
I want to say sometimes as clinicians, especially for myself, I feel that if I think of the worst case scenario,
I am more prepared for it.
But it doesn't.
In the long run, I find that it really stresses me out because I'm always like fight or flight.
I'm always on the edge thinking something bad's going to happen.
And it takes a lot of practice.
So therefore, when the things go wrong, so are we prepared?
Are we always assuming that the things will go wrong?
So when you say, are we prepared?
I want to say you will be prepared or you'll be more prepared if you work on the resilience part of it.
And if you don't, then it sticks to you longer.
I have to go back to my analogy because I really like it.
I like it too.
And yeah, and I think when we talk about what resilience consists of, different things, I think those are really important.
So when you say whether we are prepared, we can be even more so when we work on those pillars of resilience.
Okay.
So how do we prevent burnout?
Because if there is a lot of challenging situation grinding on you and you can't really manage it in a way, you're going to inevitably head towards the vicinity of burnout.
Yeah.
What do you do?
So if I start by expanding what I feel is the four pillars of resilience, and then we can touch into burnout.
Was that okay?
Yeah, go on.
So I find for me, and when I've been reading a few or quite a few other people, self-awareness, self-care, community and compassion.
So self-awareness is understanding your own reaction, both physically and emotionally.
So for some people, the palms get really sweaty.
For some people, they get really flushed.
It's understanding your own reactions.
That's the physical side, the emotion.
So how would you react to it?
Is your, like you said, is your first response blaming yourself?
Are you shaming yourself?
And understanding your own strengths and weakness.
What is there around you?
The next is self-care.
So when you talk about burnout, I think self-care is really important.
So that includes your eating, sleeping, mindfulness, things that you nourish yourself with.
So you have that.
Imagine a seesaw.
So you have the problems and you have the self-care on the other side.
And if problems become the majority of your life, not just problems, but tasks that you
have to do, whether it's complaints, whether it's mistakes, and you have minimal self-care,
that's when burnout happens because your body don't have time to reach that equilibrium
or that balance.
And then community, straightforward.
So that is support network.
So I sometimes go to people around me when I mentioned supportive colleagues.
They're there to be a voice of reason, or they will be the other part about compassion.
They will be a compassionate voice when I sometimes struggle to find that for myself.
So you said earlier on, it's actually easier to show compassion to others and actually
harder for myself.
So I think these four, I find really important to be aware when you are stretched and be
aware when you're reaching burnout.
So when we're going back and we want to link in with the preventing burnout by finding
time to relax and looking after ourselves, are the problems with resilience due to the
fact that we care more about others than about ourselves?
Yes, to some extent.
Let me, let me expand on that.
So I think that can be multi-layered when you put other people's need above yourself.
And we mentioned it in season one where you find that your self-worth is bottom of the
list.
So you don't prioritize yourself, but it can be also your, it reflects on your ability
to set boundaries, to say, this is what I need.
I'm going to say no to you or to the request or to whatever that's encroaching on my time.
Okay.
So do we, these are just questions for you, for me and for the listener.
Do we give us enough time to recover or to relax?
Do we know when to ask for help?
Because that's an important factor as well.
When you mentioned, do we give enough, do we give ourselves enough time to recover and
to relax?
To recover?
Not sure, because I don't know whether you feel this way, but when I am unwell, I have
to be really unwell to not go to work.
And if I do, I do feel guilty.
And I think, and I think, and I think this is the same regardless of what role you do
in healthcare.
When I speak to other colleagues, when they are off sick, they are really, really unwell,
like maybe off with COVID and all, even with COVID, still feeling guilty about having some
time out.
And what about setting our own expectations of our, I don't know, response to things when
they go wrong?
What I mean, just to clarify it, is for example, how often do we think about failure?
Is it like a stopping block preventing us from progression?
I think it is possible, especially if you take it personally, anything is going to last,
you become very risk averse.
Do you think it's a function of volume?
So the more stressful situation, or is it the weight of them?
Well, I suppose it's both.
But what I'm really trying to find out is how do we prevent those situations becoming
stopping blocks in progress of your career?
So I want to use the three piece that we mentioned and then turn it round.
So besides what we mentioned about those four pillars, understand the impermanence of it.
So the mistake that can happen will affect you, but it wouldn't stay forever.
As it, you would feel on the spot there and then, and the pervasiveness of learning to
have that distance.
I made a mistake, but I'm still a good clinician.
I've made a mistake, but I'm still a great person.
So it's the action that we need to work on.
There's nothing that reflects the character.
So having a distance from that and personalization is accepting that sometimes, like you said,
somebody might be unwell, somebody who might not be at top form, a glimpse of an eye,
something distracted you and accepting that we are human.
100%.
What about building the team resilience?
When you, when you're looking at the support or the community support network, how about,
how do you build resilience of the whole team?
Because the problems they affect us personally.
Yes.
When we make a clinical decision or managerial or leadership decision.
But what about the team?
The team is impacted as well.
I agree.
I think building your own and your team's resilience will in turn improve organizational
resilience because organizational resilience is consist of flexibility, learning and adaptability.
And with any small or big organization, you can't escape the culture, the structure and
the strategy.
And who makes up organization?
People.
People.
So when you build those people's resilience, so individual and team's resilience, you are
improving organizational resilience.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So we, I think we sort of agree on the fact that resilience can be built when things go
wrong, but can, can we build resilience without facing failure?
Oh, I, I don't think so.
I think failing really helps to build resilience.
So the more we feel, the more resilient we become.
And then the more we grow because when we address failures, we have a deeper understanding
about how we react, why we're doing things.
So we shouldn't be avoiding failures.
We should be learning or focusing on recovering from failures.
Yeah.
If we are avoiding, then we're sort of jeopardizing our work in a way because it's inevitable
that you're going to come across challenges.
Exactly.
And resilience is a, is a skill you need practice without, without having the opportunity to
practice those skills, then it's not as sharpened.
And I think it happens when we face something that we cannot change.
That's the sort of definition of resilience.
I mean, we only build on failures that we cannot change.
So some things already happened and there is little we can do to fix it.
So we can just mitigate it, I guess, you know, one thing that we can do is to learn from
it and use it as an opportunity for, for growing.
Definitely.
I think we need to respect our potential for mistake in this context.
I would treat it as a vulnerability.
Yeah.
Okay.
So going further, we need to be challenged to grow.
And how do we ensure we do not take on too many challenges?
This is about the setting the barriers that you mentioned before, I believe, because that
can be overwhelming.
By building resilience, we increase the bandwidth and also the capacity for coping with them.
I think every mistake or, you know, when you discover a potential mistake, it leads to
a tiny step of growing, of learning, of becoming a better clinician, leader, manager, whatever
role you want to position yourself, parent.
Yeah.
So I think that the success does not test us.
It doesn't provide enough motivation, enough impulse to build the resilience.
But my dad always used to say that you always have to be resilient, not only to failure,
but also to success.
And I think in this context, it means that you just need to stay humble.
If you're doing great things on your path, on your professional path or in career, and
you're making a difference, you're making all the right decisions, you still have to
assume that you are not...
A know-it-all.
Yeah.
You're not a know-it-all.
You're not an oracle.
You stay grounded.
And there's always a potential for learning.
I mean, we're talking about being resilient to success as well.
If you win the lottery, how resilient you're going to be to the, well, success?
Well, not yours particularly.
Okay.
Yours was a bit of luck and being the right time in the right space.
But how do you become resistant to it?
How do you remain cool headed in the face of not only a failure, but also a success?
You know, you just need to make sure that you work on yourself in whatever the circumstances.
So the outright conclusion is we have to keep working on ourselves.
Exactly.
And I like Nelson Mandela's quote.
He said, do not judge me by my success.
Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
Okay.
Yeah, absolutely.
I completely agree with Nelson.
Another question probably about dealing with failure.
Would writing down failures have an impact on the way you deal with it?
Would it help?
I don't think it would particularly help me personally.
For me, instead of writing down failures, I write down how it makes me feel.
And I try to identify where it comes from.
For me, writing has always been positive because if I am deep in it emotionally, I feel that
my brain is very foggy and I can't really put it in a structure where I can comprehend
and slowly process.
So for me, the writing helps.
It's a tool for me to break down.
I feel not listened to.
I feel angry.
Why do you feel that way?
What are you afraid of?
And keep asking myself that question.
And then when it's clear to me, then I can work on it.
So writing has always helped me.
Well, for me, writing, I think I would find it too slow.
I think I have things, I solve things faster when I'm thinking about them.
When I'm, I don't know, channeling it in a different way, in a different direction.
For me, writing is not, it's not like, for example, we sometimes tell kids, oh, just
write it down, scrunch it up and throw it in the bin and get rid of your emotions.
That does not work for me.
I think things stay with me in my head for a little bit longer, but it doesn't stop me
from going forward.
I mean, I do like problem situation.
I think I'm quite competent in handling them.
I agree, you have a reputation of being very good at conflict resolution.
I am quite, I think it becomes a skill when you have very conflict generating parents
and you have to deliver what you need to say in a way that's going to be diplomatic.
And I think diplomatic doesn't mean dishonest for me.
Yes, and I think you have way more practice than anybody because of that.
So you had to start really young and you had to practice so many times.
So again, as a skill, you become so good at it.
But the other part about, you mentioned about writing.
So writing works for me, doesn't for you.
For some people it's, I don't know, cooking, making music, going for a walk, just sit down
in the blanket and hide and think.
There's so many ways, just finding couple, at least a couple or a few ways to work for
you.
Maybe for us it's recording a podcast.
Okay, I think that in the future we're going to look at other things that impact our dealing
with failure.
All we want is just to put some questions in your head.
I mean, we don't have all the answers.
We have our own experiences and maybe if you find them relatable, that would be always
good to let us know.
Good to let us know.
I will also always remind you that when you sign up to our podcast, you have got a chance
to listen to something very exclusive.
Yeah.
So go on our website if you haven't done so yet.
Subscribe, yeah.
Yeah, subscribe on our website, put your email and we're going to surprise you with some
exclusive bit of content that we created together.
A bit less serious than all this proper litigation we do during our episodes.
And yeah.
Hope you're able to listen, reflect and rise.
Thank you all for listening.
Until next time.
It's about time for Yuen Reads.
Welcome to our new segment of Yuen Reads.
Today, I'll talk about a book that I have read and made lots of notes and still go back
to it, which is called Play by Stuart Brown.
So if you follow us closely, you know, play is still something that I tried to incorporate
in my day to day activity because I'm somebody who likes to plan things ahead, including
play.
So this book really stressed the importance of play because it links to creativity.
And not only that, it really helps nourishes the soul.
So this for me is a strong reminder how to incorporate play.
So the notes I've made on the sides are how does it work if you're a parent, authentic
play and protecting your creativity, properties of play and six steps of plants.
I like plants as you all know.
Different personality of play.
And I think when I tried to do this, I learned from the children as well because children
is the best place for me to learn about play.
I guess for everyone.
And so I'm hoping that I go into parenthood or now that I'm in it, I see as both a learning
journey and also a type of play.
So I love playing with kids.
When we have kids over, I'm the eldest kid, essentially.
But it really relaxes me and I get really good rapport with the kids and they always
come and talk to me after or when they come again next door, come and find me because
they know I'll engage with them.
So yeah, it really helps me make a conscious decision, I guess, to take on a more playful
attitude and addresses some of my fears and insecurities, I guess, because a lot of plays
making emotional contact with people and it's quite easy to be defensive and be proper.
So I'm trying not to be proper all the time because it's quite boring and quite, what
shall I say, quite stunted in some ways, I guess.
We can let you know directly about any news and free exclusive content for subscribers.
If you review us on Apple podcast or Podchaser, there is a chance we can reach more people
seeking support and encouragement.
Reflect on how you are now and let us know about one thing you would do differently after
listening to us.
We love to hear from you.
So please keep the questions coming via direct message, email, comment, or record a voicemail
on our website.
We will do our best to answer you either directly or via the podcast.
Bye for now.
And until next time.