A 3-year-old patient has a history of being violent and combative and is coming in today for a blood draw. A 19-month-old needs a STAT echo without sedation and the echo tech doesn’t think child life should be involved. Parents have requested the child life specialist stay out of the room because they don’t think child life “does anything of value during a procedure based on their previous experiences.”
My friends, these are times when I have been “frozen” – feeling insecure as a CCLS.
My goal for these blog posts are to be transparent, authentic and vulnerable. And so, without further ado, I invite you into this familiar feeling of when I become paralyzed with fear and self-doubt to the point where I freeze up. I become so frozen at times that I consider not even trying to provide child life services. (And just a side note: this will probably be the first of several blog posts like this, as I have learned and am still learning a lot about this! Stay tuned for more stories of these moments.)
I can easily recall one of my first frozen moments. It was during my internship – my first independent week on a surgery unit. Though I felt confident and eager to begin practicing child life skills on my own, things quickly changed that first day. As soon as I walked on the unit, nurses began asking where my child life supervisors were and a swarm of insecurities began to cloud my brain. I ran back into my safe haven of the child life storage room and sat there, frozen, for a good two to three minutes.
“I can’t go back out there. I don’t know what I am doing.”
“I am only an intern. No one will really trust me.”
“I doubt I can really make a difference.”
All these lies and more screamed in my head.
Flash forward to today and I will admit that these insecurities can easily come up even as I am more of a “seasoned child life specialist.” And often there is a clear source for my insecurities: my intense desire to be a people pleaser.
If I sense that there is a risk of failure and not being liked – like not being able to have a breakthrough with the 3-year-old, having to advocate for myself to the echo tech or even parents to remain in a procedure – then I feel the temptation to freeze and just not try anything. The lie: doing nothing is better than “failing” in front of others.
Can anyone else relate? I would love to chat more with you if you do!
Though I am far from perfect, I have learned that the more I cling to truth in the midst of hearing lies, the more confidence I have to push through and move forward despite feeling frozen and shut down.
The lie: doing nothing is better than “failing” in front of others.
When facing the fear of failure and of letting people down, these are some of the truths I anchor myself to:
- My value as a person is not in the outcome (i.e. I am not a good child life specialist only if this kid smiles ear to ear throughout his blood draw or if the echo tech sends me flowers for being so awesome).
- I can’t control others. I can only control myself.
- At the end of the day, life is bigger than just my job. Life is more than just being a child life specialist. What truly shapes me isn’t the intervention I do or the distraction I offer, it is what character and integrity I develop in the process.
- Be an advocate for the pediatric patients. What do they need to be successful?
- I am responsible as a child life specialist for simply trying my best. (And just a hint I have learned: even if a procedure goes “horribly”, never underestimate the power of debriefing with the patient afterwards to help them cope in the future!).
- If I don’t even try because I am scared, what message is that sending to my patients? The very patients I encourage: “Being brave doesn’t look like things are easy. Being brave looks like pushing through it anyways – even when it is hard.”