St Emlyn´s - June 4, 2016 - By Simon Carley
"The bottom line is that it’s really tough to know how good you are without looking hard and getting help. The personal picture that we create in our minds, about how we are perceived by others, is almost certainly a very different one to our friends, family, colleagues and patients.
As an example just stop and think about your own physical image. If you think about it you never never see yourself as others see you. Look in a mirror and it’s a reversed image, a photo or video is 2D an even 3D filming is clearly not the same. You can experiment with anon-reversing mirror which gives a true reflection, and if you do it’s quite an unnerving experience (and not exactly portable) but beyond that you never see yourself as the world sees you. Our internal image is different and yet if we are to improve our performance we really need to know how others see us.
So this talk was delivered at SMACC to ask us to stop and think about our abilities, our judgement and our perceptions. Perhaps I put this together as I sometimes feel that it’s all too easy to get ahead of ourselves in the world of Social Media and #FOAMed, it can sometimes seem that everyone is awesome, all patients get an RSI and even the ankle sprains get REBOA. Of course that’s not true and our personal journey of improvement is somewhat less exciting, though no less important.
This talk was an opportunity to invite us all to think about reflection, calibration and some fair, honest and tough feedback that will make us better clinicians and educators.