“Wow! Being a perfectionist is a curse!” I dramatically said to my patient with a sly smirk on my face.
After what felt like an eternity of revisiting the stupid ledge that remained on that damn distal box floor of the MOD prep on #3, I had nearly given up. Fighting the patient’s tongue with my right hand while holding the mirror to barely see around my left hand doing the actual work, my right arm became fatigued. I was caught up in an obsessive pattern of alternating between blindly reaching for that ledge with a quick zip of the handpiece and pulling back to check it with the mirror. My perfectionist ways were getting the best of me.
“Maybe I got it this time,” I thought.
But no, that ledge was still there. So, I went in for it again. Dang it. It’s still there.
This pattern continued for way too long. It wasn’t working. The ledge was still there. They told us in dental school that once we touched a tooth we owned it. If I didn’t make it absolutely perfect, I was sure to have problems with this tooth that I now owned. Problems with this tooth meant problems with my patient.
Beyond the pressure I put on myself in that moment, I began to get a little paranoid about the patient. I worried to myself, “Do you think the patient can tell that you’re struggling? It must be so obvious that you’re not getting this. What if you go back in one more time and make it worse? You need to stop. Think of something quickly.”
I took my hands out of this crowded mouth, leaned back in my chair, and that’s when it came flying out of my mouth, “Wow! Being a perfectionist is a curse!”
That declaration became my charming little explanation any time I became wrapped up in my compulsion to be perfect, and patients loved it. They egged me on every time saying, “Oh no, please! I love that you’re a perfectionist!” It helped ease the tension I was feeling, and it helped me to move on and except good enough. If only I could figure out how to use it earlier in the process.
We always had a great laugh, and while it was charming, it was the truth.
Being a perfectionist is a curse.
It all started in dental school. Let me rephrase that. It probably started much earlier in our over-achiever lives, but it was set in the strongest stone in school. The competitive environment and the grading system taught us that in order to succeed in dentistry, we needed every prep, every angle, every measurement to be perfect. That’s fine and dandy in a perfect world, but the real world of dentistry is far from perfect.
What other profession says you must sculpt the ideal art form and keep everything absolutely dry in this wet, dark, and impossible-to-reach environment?
I know our educators meant well, but they forgot the lesson about how imperfect dentistry actually is in the real world. This created a bunch of dental monsters.
Why do we do this?
We think we can protect ourselves. Of course, we genuinely want what’s best for our patients, but it also comes from a bit of self-survival too. We don’t want to deal with problems if this tooth that we now own doesn’t do well. So we end up always trying to please patients and make things perfect. As a result, we are actually practicing defensively. Always worried, always defending, always trying to avoid.
This creates the weight of the world for our shoulders to carry.
There is a cure for this curse.
Practice imperfection. Notice when things in your personal life don’t go perfectly, and the world keeps turning. I cooked a meal for some friends this weekend. It was decent, but it wasn’t perfect. Normally, I make a big deal sharing all of the things I wish were better about the meal, and I go on and on about it. That keeps the problem alive. This time I just let it go. And it didn’t matter. Within minutes, I had forgotten about it. Start with the small things and it will get easier to practice with the big things.
Remember that you are ________ enough to ________. Insert your own terms here. You are strong enough to handle a challenge. You are creative enough to create a solution. You are kind enough to show the patient empathy.
Remind yourself that your patient is ________ enough to ________. Insert your own terms here. Your patient is strong enough to handle bad news. Your patient is capable enough to adapt to an inconvenience. Your patient is self-sufficient enough to choose for themselves. The sooner we can let go and have faith in our and our patients’ abilities to handle what life throws at us, the sooner we can lift that burden that we are carrying around for them.
There are no guarantees.
I love the quote by Voltaire: “Perfection is the enemy of good.” We know by now that even when things are perfect in dentistry, it’s not a guarantee. The real world is not like the lab in dental school. The more we try to be the hero, the more we carry the responsibility and burden of our patients’ outcomes and their lives.
It’s not your job.
Practicing imperfection is exactly that: practice. You may not get it right every time, but that’s the whole point, right?
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