A view from the coffee room…When you are feeling down and you are an introvert, and someone asks you for your mini autobiography (and other benefits)

Now really personal stuff: I am very reluctant to talk about me. I am more into talking about factual professional stuff. Nonetheless I was asked by BJS Academy to write about my path from there to here. How to solve this problem? I solved this by making a very boring bullet point list of turning points in my life. Then I entered this list into the AI podcast generator.

Hear, Hear, a lot of wows, ooohhs, love its and I like that’s, with an American accent. Not exactly what we call European mentality and certainly not Scandinavian or Finnish. Listening to this was balancing between embarrassment and proud - in the beginning. The further the podcast got, the better I felt. Actually, it is quite good to hear voices talk about you enthusiastically.

Then it hit me! This is just the remedy we all need when things are going not so well in the OR. We, or at least I, encounter situations that are hard, difficult and sometimes that we don’t have control over. They just happen. But we are expected to solve them and handle the aftermath. Although the system nowadays takes most of the burden from the individual, surgical complications are still identified solely as the surgeon's responsibility1.

What is the moral of this story? If you are feeling down or had a bad day, use those podcast generators to see yourself differently, in a very positive way, and be proud of how much you have accomplished!