Resilience & Emotional Mastery: How Dentists Are Sustaining and Thriving Today?

By Bobi Seredich

Most healthcare professionals and dentists place patient care first. What happens when stress and mental fatigue happen to the ones in charge of providing healthcare to others? How do you identify burnout with dental professionals, and what can you do to sustain it?

The pandemic has sped up the rate of change in our world, which was already experiencing an extraordinary speed due to advances in technology and changing ideas. Today, leaders and their organizations are forced to address increasingly complex challenges as well as grow with uncertainty.  The key to sustaining during times of unpredictability is emotional mastery and building your immunity against “Learned Helplessness”.

Failure is a familiar trauma in life, but its effects on people differ widely. Some reel, recover, and move on with their lives, while others get bogged down by anxiety, depression, and fear of the future. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, has spent three decades researching failure, helplessness, and optimism. 

What is resilience and optimism?

• Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; think along the lines of toughness. When discussing resilience, it’s important to define optimism as they often work in tandem.
• Optimism, like self-regard, reflects how we believe in ourselves and how we view the world. It’s hopefulness and confidence about the future or the successful outcome of something. Optimism is also believing that you bring your best self to the table. 

What is learned helplessness?

Martin Seligman shares key findings from his study on how humans and animals become passive when they experience failure and feel powerless. He discovers that we develop learned helplessness when we expect failure again. In his study, a third of the researched group of animals and people who experienced continuous failures never become helpless; Seligman attributed this to optimism.

How to become an optimistic and resilient leader

1. Believe in yourself – Believe you have the power to change a situation for the better.
2. Spread positivity – Speak positively about yourself and others. Don’t let negative talk of yourself or others sabotage your performance. Share your experience with others.
3. Fail and recover fast – Try to see the good in situations. Believe that problems are short-lived and won’t affect everything you do.
4. Stop, breathe, ask – Manage your emotions and setbacks with the SBA™ tool: Stop, Breathe, Ask.

1. Stop the negativity in your mind and be in the present moment.
2. Breathe and take 3 deep belly breaths before responding to someone or something.
3. Ask open-ended questions and seek contribution, don’t blame others.
4. Approach uncertainty and don’t give up – Experiment with uncertainty. Move forward with emotional tolerance and a gut feeling to approach uncertainty with excitement.

Optimists are purpose driven 

Be the example to others when faced with challenges or pressure. It’s not what you do, it’s how and why you do it.

You can’t control others, but you can control how you react to a situation and your mindset. Remember: When you’re experiencing a setback, remind yourself that it’s temporary, local, and changeable—you have the knowledge, toughness, and power to overcome it or solve it.

For dental professionals, it is also important to maintain relationships with their peers and involve themselves in dental associations or other groups to share their experiences. According to a Mayo physician clinical trial, “An intervention for physicians based on a facilitated small-group curriculum improved meaning and engagement in work and reduced depersonalization, with sustained results 12 months after the study.” In this trial intervention, rates of burnout and emotional exhaustion decreased significantly.  

If you want to learn more about how to be a more resilient, optimistic leader, join us for our next EI Online Leadership Course on August 15, 2023. Here is a link to our Emotional Intelligence Online Leadership Programs. At check-out, please add 15Off in the Coupon Code area. 

Bobi Seredich is the Founder of the Southwest Institute for Emotional Intelligence in Phoenix, Arizona. She can be reached at bobi@swiei.com.