Whether you have a tough day at work or actually hate dentistry, I hope that you don’t regret becoming a dentist for long.
The crazy thing about dentistry that many people don’t understand is that we can enter into the field thinking we are going to help people, create solutions, and have nice relationships. But we get here, and we spend much of our time feeling like we are not impacting patients, our solutions don’t always work out, and those nice relationships get overshadowed by the difficult ones. Believe it or not, it’s easy to regret becoming a dentist.
Some of us get here, and we don’t even get to experience the reasons we chose this career in the first place.
Even if you love dentistry, you still have those days too– those days where no matter what you do and no matter how perfectly you do it, things go wrong. You may spend that whole night spiraling about how you regret becoming a dentist. Hopefully that goes away and doesn’t rear its ugly head too often.
What really concerns me is when hours of regret turn into days, which turn into months, which inevitably turn into years.
It’s a long, tough road. Despite how miserable you feel, it’s hard to imagine that another way will be better. You stay stuck because the pain you know is always better than the pain you don’t know. You worry what others will think if you change anything– your hours, your days, your job, or even your entire career. And you are so identified with being a dentist, that you don’t even know what you’d do or who you’d be if you weren’t a dentist.
It creates a painful pattern of obsessing over wanting to change something but feeling so paralyzed that you can’t take even a tiny baby step. And the pattern continues on with no end in sight.
I know it so well because I’ve been there. And one thing inspired me more than anything. It was discovering that people who were dying shared some of the same regrets about their lives. Imagine that… there were universal regrets that people shared being so close to death.
The #1 regret of people who are dying will amaze you. It’s never wishing we made more money or worked harder. Nope. Instead it’s this:
I wish I lived a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I first discovered the Top 5 Regrets of the Dying, a book written by palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, back in 2013. These top 5 regrets stuck with me. They motivated me to put one foot in front of the other and create my life on my terms.
There’s a beautiful by-product that comes with designing your life on your terms– not only do you have nothing to regret, but you also don’t see regret the same way. You don’t need to regret anything you’ve done because you know that your past choices and actions led you right to where you are today. They created this unique, special YOU. You begin to live more in the present and not the past, and you give yourself a break. You learn to let go of perfectionism and embrace gratitude.
Now, come on, who doesn’t want more of that?
I know you would rather find solutions and create whatever type of happiness you deserve in this life, not regret becoming a dentist.
Two months ago I spoke in Dentistry’s Got Talent in Miami, Florida. It’s a 10-minute Ted talk style presentation, and I cover this exact topic.
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