What moves you?

I watched the latest episode of Ted Lasso tonight.

To prewarn you, if you haven't watched Ted Lasso, you might not fully grasp all I'm going to write in this post. But surely, if you read my blog, Ted Lasso should be on your list of what to watch next.

Seriously.

Stop right now and go watch it.

Just kidding. Keep going. It will all make sense in the end (hopefully).

As I was saying

I watched the latest episode of Ted Lasso tonight.

It was about cliques. About people separating into groups, protecting their own interests, and what happens when those divisions begin to affect the wider team.

And somewhere in the middle of watching it, I found myself thinking:

We probably all need to be a little more like Ted Lasso sometimes.

Maybe most of the time, actually.

Except life has a habit of teaching us not to be.

We learn that if we're too trusting, people might take advantage of us.

If we're too enthusiastic, we might be disappointed.

If we care too much, we make ourselves vulnerable.

If we're endlessly kind, somebody will eventually mistake that kindness for weakness.

So, little by little, we become more guarded.

Perhaps that's why Ted can sometimes appear almost painfully naïve.

Except I don't think he is.

Ted notices far more than people give him credit for.

He sees the politics around him. He notices people's intentions. He understands when somebody dislikes him, undermines him or is trying to manipulate a situation.

He just doesn't always react.

And I think that distinction matters.

There is a difference between not seeing what is happening around you and seeing it very clearly but consciously deciding that somebody else's behaviour doesn't get to decide yours.

That isn't naivety.

It requires an enormous amount of self-trust.

Just remember the first episode:

Ted arrives at Richmond as a complete fish out of water.

He knows very little about football. He doesn't understand the leagues. He doesn't know the players. He certainly doesn't know that Rebecca has hired him with the intention of bringing the club to its knees after her divorce.

But Ted knows why he is there.

He has a purpose.

And perhaps that is why he can withstand so much of what happens around him without constantly changing direction.

It made me think about something I have only really begun to understand relatively recently.

Know what moves you.

Because once you understand that, you can recognise the people and environments that amplify it — and the ones that slowly require you to become somebody else in order to survive them.

I've experienced the latter.

I have worked somewhere recently where, over time, I noticed myself changing.

I arrived as I usually do.

With enthusiasm. Ideas. Questions. A desire to contribute. And, probably, an occasionally irritating tendency to see a problem and immediately start thinking about how we could make it better.

That's just how my brain works.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped.

Not because I stopped caring.

Because caring had become exhausting.

I found myself fighting systems I didn't have the power to change. Eventually, I realised that the easiest way to get through the working day was to put that part of myself away.

Stop suggesting.

Stop questioning.

Stop getting excited about what something could be.

Just come in. Do my job. Go home.

And I could do that.

But I was miserable.

Because perhaps what was exhausting me wasn't simply the work.

Perhaps it was the amount of energy required to continually not be myself.

We talk a lot about burnout in dentistry.

And rightly so.

There are enormous pressures within this profession. Clinical responsibility. Regulation. Complaints. Financial pressures. Time constraints. Staffing problems. Running businesses. Managing patients' expectations while trying to provide good clinical care.

But I wonder whether there is another kind of exhaustion that we don't talk about quite as much.

The exhaustion by incongruence.

Of spending your working life in an environment that repeatedly asks you to behave against the things that naturally move you.

Keeping quiet when your instinct is to contribute.

Becoming detached because caring too much has become painful.

Learning not to suggest things because nothing ever happens.

Suppressing enthusiasm because enthusiasm repeatedly ends in frustration.

Eventually, perhaps we start saying:

I've lost my passion for dentistry.

But maybe sometimes the passion hasn't disappeared at all.

Maybe we've simply learned that it isn't safe — or worthwhile — to light that fire there.

And of course, this isn't unique to dentistry.

Every career will have moments when we question whether we still belong there. No career, however much we love it, will be a perfectly smooth journey.

Perhaps that's why finding the right people matters so much.

And frustratingly, I'm not sure there is a shortcut for that. Sometimes we only learn what we need from an environment by experiencing one that doesn't provide it.

And I think Keeley and Rebecca represent this really well in this episode.

At the end of a difficult day, Keeley sits down with Rebecca.

Rebecca apologises for not immediately saying yes to all of Keeley's requests while they are considering bringing a potentially very important investor into the business.

Keeley's response is beautiful.

She explains that Rebecca's "no" doesn't discourage her.

It makes her more creative.

Every no sends her away thinking:

Okay. So what else could we do?

I recognised myself in Keeley in that moment.

I don't necessarily lose motivation because somebody tells me no.

Give me a problem and I quite enjoy finding another way around it.

But there is an important distinction here.

Because not all "no"s feel the same.

A no can mean:

That solution doesn't work. What else have you got?

Or it can mean:

Stop thinking.

Know your place.

Don't question this.

Don't bring me another idea.

The word is the same.

The environment it creates is completely different.

A good team isn't one where everybody agrees with each other.

It isn't one where the leader constantly says yes.

Perhaps it's one where disagreement doesn't threaten belonging.

Where I can challenge your idea without challenging your value.

Where your no makes me think harder rather than makes me smaller.

We don't all have to want the same things

I think this matters enormously when we choose where we work.

Especially in dentistry.

As an associate dentist, I can have plenty of clinical autonomy, but ultimately I am still working inside somebody else's business.

I don't decide its direction.

The owner does.

And people come into dentistry for all sorts of reasons.

Some genuinely want to help people.

Some love the science.

Some love the craftsmanship.

Some value financial security.

Some want to build businesses.

Some entered because of family expectations, status or simply because it seemed like a sensible career when they were eighteen.

None of those motivations automatically makes somebody a good or bad person.

But what moves us inevitably influences the decisions we make.

And it has taken me more than a decade of moving between jobs to understand something that now seems incredibly obvious:

It isn't enough to ask whether a practice is a good practice.

You have to ask whether it is a good practice for you.

Because you don't necessarily need to work for somebody who thinks exactly like you.

You don't need somebody who agrees with every idea you have.

You don't even need somebody whose ultimate ambitions are identical to yours.

But there needs to be enough overlap in your values and purpose that you aren't spending your working life swimming against the current.

And you can't necessarily discover that during a job interview.

You discover it by being there.

By watching how decisions are made.

By seeing how people respond when something goes wrong.

By noticing what gets rewarded.

By listening to how people talk about patients when the door closes.

By seeing how the person leading the organisation responds to ideas, mistakes, disagreement and challenge.

Eventually, you begin to understand what moves the people around you.

And once you do, you can ask a much more important question:

Can what moves them coexist with what moves me?

It brings me back to my last blog post, and something I've been thinking about ever since.

What do we actually need from the people who lead us?

Perhaps one answer is someone who doesn't need to have all the answers.

Have you noticed that Ted doesn't constantly gather everyone around him to deliver long speeches about what they should have learned from the latest difficult situation.

Instead, he creates situations where people often reach those conclusions themselves.

He watches.

He listens.

He asks questions.

He brings people together.

He sometimes allows discomfort to exist for a while rather than immediately trying to fix it.

And he has people around him who challenge him too.

That matters.

Because Ted isn't the team.

He needs Beard. Rebecca. Roy. Keeley. The players.

He asks for help when he doesn't know something.

He trusts other people's expertise.

Leadership isn't having all the answers.

Sometimes it's understanding people well enough to create the conditions in which they can find better answers together.

Perhaps "be more like Ted Lasso" doesn't mean walking through life relentlessly optimistic, smiling while people take advantage of you.

It doesn't mean ignoring bad behaviour.

It doesn't mean suppressing anger, avoiding confrontation or pretending that everything is fine.

Sometimes the right response is to challenge something.

Sometimes it is to say no.

Sometimes it is to leave.

The important thing is knowing why you're making that decision.

Reacting immediately gives the situation — or the person who created it — enormous power over what happens next.

Responding allows us to feel whatever we need to feel while still deciding what we want to do with it.

And perhaps that becomes easier when we know what moves us.

I know what moves me increasingly well.

I want to help people.

It just so happens that I took a degree in dentistry and acquired a particular set of skills through which I can do that.

Perhaps I could have been a teacher.

A doctor.

A counsellor.

Or something completely different.

Life brought me into dentistry.

And when I am able to practise it in a way that connects with that purpose, I still have enormous passion for it.

That's been quite an important thing for me to realise.

Because there have been times when I thought dentistry had extinguished something in me.

Perhaps it hadn't.

Perhaps I'd simply spent too long trying to keep my own fire down so that I could fit comfortably inside somebody else's environment.

I don't want to do that anymore.

And it's something I hope to teach my children much earlier than I learned it myself.

Know what moves you.

Choose your friends, relationships, workplaces and, where you can, your career with that knowledge.

Find the people who challenge you without making you smaller.

Find the no's that make you more creative.

Find the teams where you don't have to extinguish parts of yourself just to belong.

And when life inevitably puts you somewhere that doesn't fit, try not to let that environment convince you that you've lost the person you used to be.

Sometimes the fire is still there.

You just need somewhere it is allowed to burn.