Medicine is a profession with no shortage of high achievers. Success is an expectation and a goal in so much of what we do. From the moment we apply to medical school, our careers are full of high-stake tests and applications (residency, fellowship, work), with a focus on career advancement. We celebrate and embrace success, and rightly so. On the other hand, and while statistically more common than success, professional failures are seldom discussed among trainees and colleagues in medicine, and frequently result in distress and shame. This lack of dialogue around failure promotes an illusion that physician career trajectories are defined by a linear path of success.
In this webinar, presenters will focus on reframing “failure” as a constructive tool to help navigate a career in medicine. Yet to better help our learners, we must start with ourselves. Participants will be introduced to strategies to better understand our individual failures that can then be applied to our learners within the educational sphere. Through normalizing failure, we as educators can help facilitate a sense of belonging for our trainees and more effectively foster career advancement.