Many of us identify as our job first. We may be a mum or dad, brother or sister, an aunt or uncle, but when we are asked who we are, our job role tends to be the first answer.
We find it easy to take the issues of our job home with us, going over what hasn’t gone right, what others thoughts about our decisions, how that conversation went, what I should have done better, what should be being done…. The list is endless
It isn’t just the thoughts we go home with, but that we ‘are’ our job rolw. There is no separation between how we feel we perform as our job and who we are as a person.
For me, I realised this when I was asked to do an exercise in my counselling training- I was asked to list all the roles I played in my life- dentist, daughter, sister, partner, friend, runner, saxophone player, etc. After making this list, I was asked to imagine my list after I had removed every role on my list from my idea of my life. This led to such a powerful realisation for me- I completely identified with being a dentist, there was no other part to me. I could remove the other roles without a problem, but I really struggled with taking my role as a dentist out of my life.
All the difficulties I was finding within dentistry, I took on as if they were wrong with me. This included:
– patients saying that they hated dentists- I took it as hating me because I was a bad person
– I was finding certain treatments difficult= I wasn’t good at anything
– things weren’t going to plan= I can’t get anything right
– my boss stopped talking to me= I was a horrible person
– I wasn’t allowed anything I asked for= I wasn’t worth anything
– I was in constant physical pain= this will never go away
I never stopped to consider why these problems were happening or that they were happening because another person was having issues themselves and taking it out on others. All I knew at the time was that I was terrible and that nothing I did was right. As a result, this translated into the rest of my life- I wasn’t good at anything and wasn’t worth anything. I was absolutely miserable and couldn’t see that I would feel any different.
This realisation enabled me to reassess how important I let my job be in my life and how I felt about myself. Yes, I practised as a dentist, but I was and could be so much more. Dentistry can be a stressful enough profession without allowing it to become personal as well. This is when realising what we do is not who we are. We use who we are to bring our own unique take on what we do, but we can be not as good as we hope at something without that making us terrible at everything.