1001 Ways to Love Your Mondays
We spend about 20% of our time at work, 30% sleeping, and try to fit a fully lived life in the remaining 50%.
That 20% can have a disproportionate affect on the 30% and the 50%. The reason many women in dentistry wouldn’t say their career is ‘enjoyable’, is not because it’s unrealistic for dentistry.
At the core, it’s not a dentistry problem.
It’s a self-permission problem.
Women are conditioned to be accommodating, grateful, and easy to work with. To avoid asking for too much, be the peacekeeper, to equate discomfort with virtue.
So when work is ‘meh’, you see it as unavoidable. That’s just how things work, it’s part and parcel of being a dentist. Anything that could possibly improve the situation has a million reasons why it cannot be done.
I want to scream in answer to those seemingly valid reasons. Because what you’re really saying is, “It’s just not important enough, painful enough, intolerable enough for me to make a change right now.”
What’s happened is, you’ve built a life, set down roots, routines, choices, debts, and now you feel that you have no choice but to be pushed along by the current of your previous decisions. Trapped by what you have carefully curated.
Your choices are not good or bad, you should not be shamed or judged for them, but when you use your previous choices as reasons and evidence that you can’t change your circumstances, resentment will grow.
Because you’ve handed over your agency without even realising it.
“It’s not the right time, not a good time.”
“We can’t afford to do that right now.”
“It could be worse.”
In other words “I don’t value myself enough, in this moment, to do something about it.”
The moment you realise you have the choice to ask for what you need, you have the right to set your boundaries, you have the knowledge to design your work days/weeks, that is when you’ll see that you have the ability to craft a career that works for you.
It takes intentional effort, and asks that you re-evaluate your priorities, but it will be worth it. Because whether you are conscious of it or not, we teach people how to treat us.