Liz O’Riordan, Breast Surgeon with Breast Cancer and an Advocate for Cancer Awareness, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I nearly missed the most dangerous person on my surgical team. She was nailing every operation and never missed a patient.
She was me.
It was only when I found myself crying on the floor of Maggie’s office, (one of the stoma nurses) that I knew something was wrong.
I was 34 and ready to quit.
I couldn’t take the constant pressure to be perfect.
The fear of making a mistake kept me awake at night.
One harsh criticism from a boss meant I was a failure.
And then Maggie said something that stopped me in my tracks.
‘You do know that every registrar has cried in our office? And now they’re all consultants. You just need to get through this bit.’
I thought that I was the problem, but it was actually my job.
No that’s not right. It’s the way I’d been trained to do my job.
And it’s not just surgeons who feel like this.
High-performers are the same.
They’re exceptional on paper but underneath they’re like a house of cards waiting to fall.
From that moment I started focusing on why I loved surgery, instead of rebuilding who I was if surgery was taken away.
It took cancer for me to do the hard work, and I now share it in keynotes to stop people ending up like I did.
What’s the one lesson you wish someone had told you when you were first starting out in your career?”
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