Surgical Resilience: Navigating Failure with Dr. Ben Hechler

Everyday Oral Surgery

Denial and avoidance are common reactions to experiencing a failure, but these actions might only serve to make things worse for you. Dealing with failure in a responsible, proactive manner is an important life skill for all humans to have, and even more so for those with a scalpel in their hands. Now, you may consider him as our resident co-host or maybe our most frequent guest. In either case, Dr. Ben Hechler is back with more expert tips and tricks, this time on how to better navigate failure as an oral maxillofacial surgeon. We discuss Dr. Ben’s coping mechanisms and other healthy ways of dealing with failure, why it’s vital to have adequate protocols in place for overcoming surgical complications, how your daily activities (including what you eat) influence your ability to cope with failure, and why we all need to avoid denial and accept responsibility when things don’t go out way. Excellent communication is an important aspect of handling failure as it builds trust with patients and provides a platform for your colleagues to help you wherever they can, and using failure as motivation for improvement is a sure way to prevent blaming others and indeed yourself. After assessing how failure plays out in gender roles and why there’s this distinction in the first place, we hear about Ben and Grant’s favorite movies and series before ending with some valuable lessons on failure as taught by Michael Jordan and LeBron James.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Welcoming Dr. Ben Hechler as he shares his initial thoughts on failure as an OMS.
• Coping mechanisms: how to accept and deal with failure.
• Why it’s important to develop a system or protocol for dealing with complications.
• How daily life activities can influence the way you deal with failure at work.
• Avoiding denial and accepting responsibility.
• Why surgeons may be traumatized after complications, and how their colleagues can help.
• The second victim, professional burnout, and using failure as motivation for improvement.
• How OMS failure plays out within gender roles.
• A brief outro: Ben and Grant’s favorite things to watch in their downtime.
• What Michael Jordan and LeBron James teach us about overcoming failure.

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Dr. Ben Hechler on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-hechler/

Blue Cross North Carolina — https://www.bluecrossnc.com/

‘Complications: acknowledging, managing, and coping with human error’ — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5583051/

Crime and Punishment — https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7144.Crime_and_Punishment

‘Combating professional burnout’ — https://www.joms.org/article/S0278-2391(84)80004-X/fulltext

KLS Martin — https://www.klsmartin.com/en/

Everyday Oral Surgery Website — https://www.everydayoralsurgery.com/

Everyday Oral Surgery on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/everydayoralsurgery/

Everyday Oral Surgery on Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/EverydayOralSurgery/

Dr. Grant Stucki Email — [e-mail]

Dr. Grant Stucki Phone — 720-441-6059