Talking to my friends in the dental community, I noticed this chaos in our lives was a more common phenomenon than I anticipated, and also that I was not alone in feeling like this. Maybe you can relate to us on some of these struggles and points too.
I started my journey in the dental field with a lot of enthusiasm, passion, positivity, love, and care for my profession and the people in it, almost 2 decades ago. I was very excited, had big expectations from myself, and set out to achieve my dreams and goals.
Anyone who knows me personally and has seen me go through my journey so far, knows I am all for keeping positivity, optimism, and faith while going through ups and downs in our lives.
However, I also do believe that struggles and negative emotions can be powerful signs and motivators towards change and our growth. We can’t appreciate our wins without struggles.
‘Discontentment is the first necessity of progress.’
- Thomas Edison
Whilst, I enjoyed working in dentistry in all the different roles and felt grateful to be part of a noble profession. Over time,wearing all these hats and managing everything at work and home became overwhelming, chaotic, more effort, and fewer results and satisfaction.
After every little while, I would find myself thinking, ‘I used to be excited to wake up every morning, go to work and take care of the family. Now, I am losing a part of myself in all this running around, people-pleasing, finding it hard to say ‘No’ to my limiting work schedule, losing motivation, and feeling disconnected with what was important to me in my personal and professional life’.
What I didn't ponder upon at that time was that we do have a choice to design our lives consistent with our values, goals, dreams, and belief systems and could change this chaos to calm. I nevertheless kept going fulfilling other people’s visions for some more time. I was burnt out, frustrated, dreading Mondays, fretting about those stresses at work and home. Needless to say, it was affecting my health big time too. Life was not looking promising, joyous, calm, content, and fulfilling anymore and I had no idea what work-life balance was.
I didn't want to keep on going like this. 'Change' was in order. It is never easy but never too late to act. We get comfortable in doing what we are used to or situations we are in because we fear change but somewhere in our subconscious mind, we know when things need to change for better or for good.
Stresses, adversity, and change are part of our lives. We cannot escape it, but we can make these growing pains go a little easier on us.
What do you do when life throws curveballs and lemons at you? Like, when a Pandemic hits out of nowhere and everyone is affected by it one way or another. Do we sit and fret about the problems? Or, squeeze the solutions out of it, make the lemonade, and gulp it up.
A lot of us go in 'denial mode' instead of confronting our problems head-on because we are fearful of change. Instead, we need to act upon them and find a solution to them and not be overwhelmed about the problems and chaos thinking that, 'I am stuck in this. I can't ever come out of this, so leave it right where it is' and keep being in denial about them.
The biggest change that I made and that I acted upon at first in this process, was to look within, wake up and accept that there is chaos going on in certain areas of my life and calmness is not there, like I want it to be ;
I paused, reflected, observed and recognized which areas of my life needed attention or change and started working on finding solutions and acting on them accordingly.
Are you in the same chaotic rigmarole as I was going through? Comment and share your story, thoughts and suggestions, so we can turn your chaos to calm too.I would love to include your ideas and suggestions in my future blog posts coming up in this series, with shout outs of course.