"I'm smart enough to be a physician. As if being the smartest person in the room makes you the best physician in the room. Hint, it doesn't. Being a good physician is a culmination of knowledge, skills, and strengths that you, as an individual physician, uniquely brings to the field.

It's taken some rewiring to pull shame out of my professional narrative. Shame is not there to serve you. It's there to diminish you and to prevent you from fully embracing and accepting all parts of yourself, flaws and all. It chokes off growth and evolution.

It starts with subtly shifting the narrative in difficult situations from who you are to what you did. You can deal with what you did. You can learn and do differently next time.

On that first call night of my formal medical career, I wasn't a mistake. I made a mistake."

Tracy Asamoah is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and can be reached at Tracy Asamoah Coaching.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, "How shame tried to hijack my medical training." (https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/04/how-shame-tried-to-hijack-my-medical-training.html)