I find it very difficult to recover when things go wrong. When a patient needs a recheck on their prescription I lose my confidence and wonder if I’m good enough to be an eye specialist. Do you have any advice?

What you are describing is resilience. It sounds as if you could do with improving your resilience to adversity.

Everyone has bad times and it’s important for your own well-being, your patients, and practice success that you develop ways of increasing your resilience.

Resilience can be learned.

 Try and incorporate the following into your everyday life.

 Learn to relax; take care of your mind and body. Develop a good sleep routine, do some light exercise, and use physical relaxation techniques like deep breathing and meditation.

Practice positive thinking; don’t talk negatively to yourself when something goes wrong.

Edit your outlook; change the way that you think about negative situations and bad events.

 Learn from your mistakes and failures; look for the lesson in every situation and make positive changes

Choose your response to bad news; you can choose to react with negativity or to remain calm and logical to find a solution. Your reaction is always up to you.

 Maintain perspective; an overwhelming situation in the moment, may not make an impact over the long term.

 Set personal goals that match your values and that can help you to learn from your experiences.

Build your self-confidence; believe that you are going to succeed eventually, have the strength to keep moving forward, and to take the risks you need to get ahead.

Develop strong relationships at work and in your personal life. A support network to fall back on will help when things are difficult.

Be flexible; things change. Be ready to amend or scrap plans.

It’s tough improving your resilience but it’s an important attribute to have in work and personal life. Give these ways of developing your resilience a go. Good luck.