Note: this little scribbling was written after I set up today’s work agenda. It resembles the labors of Hercules, with with co-pays attached.  Spo

Nearly every morning at work I open the day’s schedule I wonder how on earth am I going to manage everything. The roster, full  of folks  many of them ‘difficult’, evokes the anxious anticipation ‘what to do?” You would think after nearly thirty years of doing this I’d be over this sort of nonsense. My batting average for getting through the workday after three decades is 1.000.  Every dreaded appointment regardless of the situation: a sticky issue; an angry/upset patient; a pending confrontation on shenanigans, never turns out the way I fear it will go.* Patients often come in with unexpected plot twists, not at all what was written in the script, thus shattering again the scenarios in my skull.

I suppose this is the closest thing I have to an ‘imposter syndrome’ as the media likes to call one’s basic fears of inadequacy.  After three decades of shrinking heads – and having a good reputation for taking on the toughest cases – I still have a sense I am not up to snuff. It feels like a small stone in my sneakers as I walk about, not enough to cause pain or disability, but enough to let me know it is there.  So I remind myself:

I am OK enough at my job.

I get through every day.

I cannot do everything for everybody.

I do more than I realize.

There is lots of positive feedback I am good at what I do.

So, I take a deep breath, and take things one at a time. The obstacle is the way. I do what I can, and this is often quite enough and more so.

Tune in tonight. I will be tired and perhaps a bit drained, but I will be here and probably have already forgotten exactly what happened.

*This is the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy by the way. One looks at one’s anxious fears, considers the worst-case scenarios, and then the more-likely-case scenarios, and apply such to future similar events to act differently.