What is a professional?
Someone who shows up to do their best work even when they don’t feel like it.
A professional does the hard work of getting better at their craft.
A professional is open to feedback so their craft can get better.
A professional does not bring authenticity, they bring commitment and consistency.
– Seth Godin
My ‘To-Do’ list before every shift…
Maybe it’s a symptom of the low-level anxiety I feel before every shift, maybe it’s a degree of superstition, or maybe I’m just getting old and boring, but here are some things that I like to happen in the 24 hours before a clinical shift at the emergency hospital where I work:
- 8 hours of good sleep. This means no coffee after 2 pm on the day before the shift, no screens for at least an hour before bed, and the door shut so the sausage dog can’t sneak in at 2 am for a cuddle. (Cold-hearted of me, I know.)
- A mindfulness meditation session on the morning of the shift.
- Some heart rate-increasing exercise on the day of the shift, ideally outdoors.
- A decent high-protein breakfast. (It’s been exactly the same breakfast for more than 10 years now.)
- A nap or at least an ‘unwind’ an hour or so before the shift if it’s a late shift.
- A good coffee 30 minutes before I leave for work.
- A healthy meal that is easy to eat on the go at work.
- Lots of fairly healthy snacks to take to work. (Otherwise, I’ll eat whatever crap I can get my hands on at work and probably stop for takeaways on my way home after the shift.)
I say ‘like to happen’, but really, they’re almost non-negotiable. My wife rolls her eyes at what she thinks is borderline obsessive behaviour, but it’s not obsessive – I’ve just learnt what makes for a good shift and what can ruin a shift. I know what impact these things have on my levels of resilience.
Could I still be a good vet without my ‘To-Do’ list?
Could I do it without my little idiosyncrasies? Sure, I can. I’ve proven that to myself hundreds of times over on shifts with minimal sleep and with hangovers, and in all sorts of states of disrepair. But that just makes a hard thing even harder, and I can sustain THAT level of hard for a while, but not for 10 years. Heck, probably not even 2 years.
No, it’s not obsessive, and I don’t think I’m going soft – I think I’m being a professional.
I started with a quote from Seth Godin. Seth talks a lot about professionalism, as does Steven Pressfield, who I also love quoting on this topic. What I learnt from them was that for a very long time, I was under the mistaken impression that I became a professional vet on the day that the dean of our vet school donked me on the head with my degree certificate and made me solemnly promise not to be dodgy.
I believed that a professional was someone who gets paid for their work. But I’ve learnt that professionalism isn’t about money or about qualification – it’s about an attitude. It’s about a decision that leads to a series of other decisions.
Being professional is really about attitude
Consider the professional sportsperson. I think we all have an inkling of what goes into being an Olympic sprinter. The Olympic sprinter does not finish her sprint training when she moves out of the university athletics team. She doesn’t coast along for the rest of her running career, drawing on the things that she learned and the training she did as a young athlete.
She has a coach. She keeps learning new skills. She finds ways to be 1% better. She shows up for training, even when she doesn’t feel like it. She is disciplined in what she eats, and she’s structured with her rest. She adjusts her training as she gets older to deal with the injuries she’s had over the course of her career. She probably has a mindset coach. She’s definitely not going out drinking before race day, and she’s likely to be fussy about the pillow she sleeps on.
Do we expect it to be easy?
So here’s our thing to think about: is a part of the lack of sustainability of clinical vet work because we expect a hard thing to be easy without paying our dues by doing the things that can make the hard things easier?
Are we dabblers and amateurs, or are we true professionals?
This post first appeared in The Vet Vault 3.2.1 email on 12/01/2024 and has been republished with full permission.
