If you are an emergency room doctor, death and Fear of failure are constant companions. A countdown timer starts when a patient comes in with a wound or fatal condition. If that timer reaches zero, the patient will die. If prevented from reaching zero, the patient will survive and live to fight another day.

It's literally a race against the clock, and the ER doctor's role is to fight that timer directly through medical interventions and keep the patient alive long enough for a trauma surgeon, interventional cardiologist, or other specialist to solve the issue that's killing them. .

As you can imagine, when the ER staff wins that fight and saves a life, it's a great feeling, but when they fail and lose a patient, it's devastating. Worse still is when they lose a patient who could have been saved because they either made a mistake or didn't have the resources to save the person. Every ER doctor has memories of patients they've lost. In fact, a requirement for a long and healthy career in emergency medicine is the ability to find peace with this notion.

I recently had the opportunity spend the time with Dr. Dan Dworkis, a Trauma and ER physician, Professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, Medical Director of the Mission Critical Teams Institute, podcast host and author of The Mind of Emergency. Dan has spent his career working in emergency rooms. In fact, not just emergency rooms, but a busy trauma center in Los Angeles.

As you can imagine, Dan has seen it all and, as a result, carries the stories and memories that come with working in a hospital attended by children who have been shot, traumatic car accidents, and people with life-threatening injuries and illnesses. life. .

Dan has spent much of his career studying how we make decisions under stress, how to operate in high-stress environments, and how to create a culture of continuous improvement. Not surprisingly, I learned a lot from Dan. But, by far, the most profound thing I learned from Dan was a unique way to approach failure and, in the process, we open ourselves to growth and learning.

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Ritual: Learning by Embracing Loss

As you can imagine, trauma doctors see a lot of death. No matter how good a doctor you are, you will lose patients, and some of those people could certainly have been saved with different skills or different resources. It would be easy to just block yourself from these feelings, harden your heart and put them away bad experiences in a mental box that you close. While this may not be great for your mental health, it is certainly a seemingly easier thing than dealing with these memories and feelings. However, Dan actually advocates doing the exact opposite, building on the failure and attacking it directly.

When a patient dies, there is a difficult moment immediately after, where the team that treated the patient must leave that fight and move on to another. Despite only minutes before starting a fight to save their lives, the team must get away from this person. Machinery must be shut down, pipes and wires removed, and each member of the team must emotionally restored and get back to work.

It would be easy at that point to block out the feelings and doubts that arise, put them in a box, and move on to the next task, hoping never to think about those feelings again. But that's not what Dan does or advocates. Instead, he engages in a ritual he was taught as a young doctor, which is to assemble the team at the patient's bedside, place a hand on the dying patient, and utter the following phrase: “Thanks for teaching me. I'm sorry all I could do for you today was teach.”

This seemingly simple act and short statement is more than just a ritual to clear the mind before proceeding. Instead, it's a deeply insightful approach to situations where we can't succeed and lays a solid foundation for learning and growth.

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Embracing failure

The first significant thing this ritual does is admit and accept failure. Instead of moving on and pretending that something profoundly negative just didn't happen, this ritual looks failed on the eye and leans toward distressing the situation. Embraces failure and immediately causes the learning process.

The first step to growth is recognizing and accepting that what we currently do or know is not enough. To learn from others, we must accept our own DISADVANTAGES, and this practice opens the door to that and to discovering something better. If we do not accept our faults, we cannot improve, and this is precisely the essence of this ritual.

Just look at the phrase: “Thank you for teaching me. I'm sorry that all I could do for you today was teach.” By its very nature, it says I have failed you today and I wish I had more to give. It doesn't say, “Too bad you're dead” or “Wow, that's a bad break you got.” He says, “I'm sorry.” It embraces the fact that the team didn't have enough to save the person (and frankly, no one could have), but that recognition just doesn't go far enough. Rather, it says “I learned from you.” It implicitly says, “I'll be better next time” and “I'm growing and improving my skills.” He is active, not passive, and immediately takes the first step towards learning.

CONCLUSION

A deep learning extends far beyond the medical field and this ritual only for all of us. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a business leader, or even a parent, creating a culture of learning from mistakes and continuous improvement is essential to getting better. We should never run from our mistakes or try to hide them. We should embrace our failures and see them as perfect opportunities to grow. By putting a process in place that immediately addresses our failures or shortcomings, we also immediately focus our attention on how we can improve, where we are lacking, and perhaps most importantly, we immediately begin the process of learning and growing.