Should experienced vets feel more confident?

It would seem logical that confidence grows over time, but in fact, you can be experienced and still not feel confident.

Indeed, for some more experience equals greater expectation and lower confidence levels. After all you've done x procedure several times, have been qualified x years, or have a certificate in x so you should feel 100% comfortable and confident right? But each of these things create another level of expectation, heaping added pressure onto your already burdened shoulders.

It's almost universally accepted that confidence comes with experience, and it can do, but in the veterinary world you can be told “Do 10 bitch spays and you’ll feel more confident. The more you do the more confident you’ll feel.” And that’s not always the case.

Just doing something more frequently doesn’t necessarily make you more confident.

If you’ve struggled with a bitch spay previously and then someone puts another and another and another in front of you then it can actually make things worse. You might think about a mistake you made in a previous one and that mistake follows you into every subsequent spay, which can often mean we are moving further and further away from confidence and more and more into anxiety. That downward spiral of thoughts and emotions can easily usher anxiety in.

And anxiety has a really important job to do. Believe it or not, anxiety’s job is to warn you that you are in some kind of danger. Your thoughts have convinced you that you are in some kind of danger and your subconscious mind takes those thoughts at their word and produces anxious feelings in order to get you to pay attention, in order to keep you safe.

As human beings we have a thought, just one thought can start the whole spiral, we take hold of that thought and we wander off down a path into the imagined future with that thought. More thoughts join that one and more and more, as we give them more of our attention those thoughts multiply. And that imagined path into the future gets darker and more doom laden.

There are about a billion possible outcomes from that thought but we pick the one that is the most catastrophic and convince ourselves that will be what happens.

It's almost inevitable that anxiety is going to come along, because now we’ve convinced ourselves we are in some kind of danger, your subconscious mind doesn’t realise you are imagining it all, it just thinks whatever you are focusing on right now is your reality right now.

But here’s the thing, anxiety is a necessary emotion. It should only be an emergency emotion but it goes into overdrive because of our thinking.

So at ACCess CPD we don’t teach people to get rid of anxiety completely, you actually need it for your survival, we simply help you to not experience it all day every day because that is unnecessary.

We teach you how to work with your natural anxiety, what to do with those what if thoughts and how to process difficult emotions so you can start growing your confidence so that it matches your level of experience.

To find out more about how we can help your confidence grow take a look here