Hello everybody. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of et chat. Today, we are very fortunate to be joined by somebody who has my favourite name in the veterinary world, Lizzie Lockett.

Lizzie joined the RCBS in February 2015 as head of communications, bringing with her 13 years experience in agricultural, environmental, and veterinary marketing communications, both in the UK and across Europe. She later became the RCBS director of strategic communications. In autumn 2014, Lizzy set up the Mind Matters initiative to make a difference for mental health and well-being members in the family team.

Lizzie took up the role of acting CEO in September 2017 and was appointed CEO several months later. So Lizzy, hello, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

That's quite an introduction. So today, we're gonna be looking at failures. So, we're gonna have a look at how members of the veterinary team can learn to grow during what can be really tough moments that can feel like failure as well.

So, you know, on paper, your career, you know, in the profession over the last 15 years or so, it can look like it's been, you know, a huge success, which I'm sure it has. Over that period of time, could you tell us if you've ever felt like you were going to fail at something or, you know, felt like you had done? Yeah, I mean, it was, it was really interesting to get this question from me, Catherine, and it's a question I've been asked before.

In fact, I remember I went on a leadership course about 7 years or so ago and one of the questions that they wanted you to consider was when you'd had a failure and what you'd learned from it. And you know, I really struggled with that question, and it's absolutely not because I'm perfect and I do make mistakes, but I, I really realised that I've never actually allowed myself to fail. And that's because I think I'm a what you might call a maladapted perfectionist.

So I'm of the view that, well, it was certainly at the time, if I couldn't do something brilliantly, then I wouldn't try. I would give up if something wasn't going very well. So I wouldn't let myself get to the point of failing because I would just give up.

And what that actually meant was that my world was getting small, my world of opportunity, I think was getting smaller because if I saw something that might potentially be a failure, I would run away from it. So actually, in a slightly meta way, I think my failure is lack of failures because I've never really allowed myself to push because I had, certainly at that point recognised that, you know, I, I was scared of failing. I think in terms of a, you know, a good example of this is that, my, my degree, so I did a degree in English and I was always told I would get a first and I didn't get a first.

I got a 2-1. And for me, when people said, Oh, how did you do in your degree? I go, Oh, I didn't do very well.

I kind of failed. And for a long, long time I felt like I'd failed because I didn't get the best possible degree. And in fact, I didn't actually even graduate for 10 years because I was too ashamed.

So that I think tells you all you need to know about my failure. My failure is not allowing myself to fail, and so yeah, that. That says it in a nutshell, I think.

Do you know what, it's so interesting because my little girl, she's, Sophie, she's 6, and the other week she did a taekwondo exam and, you know, you kind of get like a pass or fail, but then you can get like a pass plus. And she got a pass, so she did brilliant. And the first thing she She said when she came out was, oh I didn't get past plus, and she was like really disappointed, you know, even though she passed and she'd done greatly, she was like, you know, drawn into the fact that she didn't feel good enough.

Isn't it funny that we, we do that from such an early age? Mind you, my, my story about, tiny children doing, doing stuff like that. So when I was about 5, I took a ballet exam.

And, and you could, you could pass fail or get a commended, but I would, I don't know if I was slightly dyslexic or something, but I remember rushing out to my mom and saying I got highly condemned. She looked at me like that doesn't sound so good, and it was commended, but I've got the letters all mixed up. Yeah, no, it is, it's so interesting, isn't it, how you kind of brain works and how you perceive these things.

So how, how would you sort of describe, you know, feelings of failure that you have sort of experienced? Yeah, so I mean, I think it's that, that what I, when I come to the brink of doing something that I think I'm going to fail at, and I would say I have, and we'll come on to it later, maybe I have changed quite a lot, I think in the last 5 or 6 years in terms of how I look at failure, so we, we can perhaps talk about that, but. I start to get kind of nervousness and anxiety, that something's going to go wrong, that I'm not going to be the best, that, you know, if I drop a mark, then that's like the equivalent of complete failure.

And, and also the flip side of that, I think weirdly is, is a lack of acceptance when things are going well as well. So I was recently asked to, to go back to my old university to do a talk about leadership. And my first thought when they asked me, Wasn't, wow, that's good they're, they're recognising that I'm in a leadership role.

It was, oh, I wonder how many other people they asked who couldn't make it before they got to me. And so I think the flip side of always having this anxiety about failure is that you never quite allow yourself to, to succeed either. You're sort of stuck in this sort of this grey area of, of, of not wanting to push yourself.

And I, and I do think that probably there's vets and veterinary nurses who can associate with that, that kind of feeling of lack of control you, you get if something's not going to plan. And I think also one of the problems is that if you don't allow yourself to fail, then you don't build up the coping mechanisms to deal with failure. So it becomes almost like, it's like a, a, a snowball rolling down the hill, you know, but then you worry more about failing.

And if you'd actually allowed yourself to really screw up once or twice and dealt with that and looked at the, the resources that you need in order to deal with that, which I think I now have done. It just becomes worse and worse. No, absolutely.

And I guess if you don't make mistakes, you're kind of not learning something new and you're not necessarily pushing yourself out of that comfort zone as well. So I think if you're scared of, of making mistakes, and it's not that I don't make mistakes, of course I do, but I think if you're scared of them, you also then find it harder to admit to yourself when you have screwed something up. So then you're missing out on that kind of that learning, that learning opportunity.

Mhm. Yeah, no, absolutely. So thinking about, maybe some situations where you, you feel like you have failed, has there sort of been any key learnings from those situations that you've, that you've had?

Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, there's, there's one, I was just thinking when you, you, you know, were giving me the topic for, for our chat today. One I remember specifically was, so before I was doing the job I'm doing now at the college.

I used to look after the communications, and we did a rebrand of the college back in 2010. Some people might remember it. And we've done all of the work, excuse me, we need to do, we've done all of the focus groups.

We had the research commissioned. We knew exactly where we were going, and we were doing an internal launch of it. And my feeling was, having worked in agencies before where it was all about kind of pleasing the clients and the great sort of theatre of it, that we'd have a, a meeting of our council and our staff and we'd go, ta da, here's the new brand and this is a new rationale for it.

And actually, it fell completely flat because people didn't feel that they'd been engaged with the process, therefore, they didn't like the outcome. And my real learning there was That we needed to have been communicating all the way through the process rather than just going, ta da, here's this brilliant thing. And so I think I've learned that from a college perspective is that while I know what we're doing is right and I understand the process that we need to keep the members better informed with what we're doing every step of the way.

And sometimes we don't manage that and sometimes we need to Have certain elements that we keep internal for a little while because of legal constraints and what have you, but trying to be more, transparent about what we're doing because not everybody likes the tada moment. So I think that's a very specific learning. I think since I got the chief executive's job, I've, I've definitely failed more and I've had to push myself into situations where the outcome is uncertain and the likelihood of failure may be higher.

And often it's a situation where by the time something comes to me, In the organisation, pretty much everybody else has had a go. You know, if it, if it was all working smoothly, it wouldn't come to my door. So it comes to my door because somebody's had a go and they've either, it's not gone smoothly or nobody's been able to solve the problem.

So because I'm getting more problems, more complexity, they're not all going to be solvable and they're not all going to be solvable with an A 10 out of 10 method. And so I'm, I think I've learned over the last 4 years or so since I've been in this role that, yeah, things won't always work and we may have failures and the outcome will be uncertain. And sometimes you feel equipped to deal with that and other times you think, oh, I need a grown up in the rural room and it's not, it's not me.

And I think actually COVID's been a really interesting period of time for me because I think as with many people, I have some sort of impostor syndrome to use that horrible expression, you know, you kind of think, why am I here? Why am I doing this? I don't really know what I'm doing.

But during COVID, certainly during the early stages of COVID, it was, it was actually weirdly liberating because you had a sense you're sitting in a room with all the key people in the veterinary profession. You realised that nobody knew what was going on. Nobody had any more information than anybody else.

We were all given the same information, a lot of uncertainty. We had to evaluate it really quickly. We had to make decisions really quickly.

Were they always the best decisions? No. Were they best?

That we could make at the time, hopefully, yes. And did we have to keep changing them and re-evaluating them and assessing them and moving forward? Yes.

You know, and it wasn't a situation where we were worried that people were going to say, oh, the RCBS has done a U-turn, and we were like, well, we can only make the decision based on what's in front of us, and if we have to change it later on, we have to change it later on. So actually, I found that was quite a liberating period in terms of this kind of anxiety around being the best in the room or being a failure. Because we were all on the same playing field there.

And also, it really made me absolutely realise that you have to ask other people for help and you have to work as a team, because when you're working really rapidly with a broad range of stakeholders, you can't be the one knight in shining armour that solves the problem. You have to do it together. So I think that was really, really interesting.

And I think one of the other things around failure that, that I've discovered probably in the last couple of years more than ever, is the importance of having a set of, of values. So the outcome might not be what you wanted, but did you make sure you didn't compromise your values in getting there? I think is really important.

And we, we put together a new strategic plan at the beginning of last year. It seems a long time ago now. I mean, it was a weird process.

We spent like 18 months putting together this brilliant plan. We had it approved by our council in January. We published it in February.

We went into lockdown in March, so we didn't get very far, but The, the plan was very much, rather than what you do with a lot of strategic plans, which is have your strategy and then say, and these are the values that we will use. We said, these are the values, and then this is the things that we're going to do to make sure we live up to our values. And so actually having the values at the core of the plan, which were around compassion and diversity and straight talking and being forward-thinking.

Meant that although a lot of our work went out the window during the pandemic, and we were dealing with decisions that we'd never made before on issues that we'd never made before where there was no blueprint, we could say, is this the most compassionate thing we can do right now? How do we make this, this, the clearest thing that we can do at this point? And did we all succeed?

I don't think so. But it was good to hear my teams going, we've got a problem here, and I've looked at it. We've never dealt with something like this in the last 20 years I've been here, but we think the most compassionate route is to do this.

What do you think? So that was actually quite, quite helpful. And I think the, the flip side of that as well is to make sure that you're being compassionate with yourself.

So this idea that it's really important to reflect on the situation where you failed, but not to ruminate on it. So you need to be honest about it, don't try and cover up anything, and certainly that's where we see a lot of issues from vets and nurses in practise when the thing they've done wrong isn't massive, but they then try to cover it up and that's kind of compounded it. So yeah, I think that, that's quite key when you've made a mistake as well.

Yeah, absolutely, it sounds like, you know, you've created a really nice culture and a really nice environment within your team where, you know, failure is accepted and can sort of be shared openly around everybody. We've tried. I mean, I think you, you would find people in the organisation who would say that that's not their experience and some who say that it is.

I mean, I think I would be wrong to say we've got a perfect culture. We, we're trying. I think that's all I can say.

We're trying and we're also trying to be good role models so that, we can pass that down to, to practises, but it's, it's really difficult. It's really difficult because somebody's instant reaction when something's gone wrong is to say, who, who's at fault for that, who can we blame, who's failed, and trying to turn that around is, is, it's a lot of work. Yeah.

Do you have any, any sort of tips around, you know, managing and supporting people within the team who might have made a mistake, but don't feel kind of comfortable opening up about it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's an interesting one. I think senior leaders need to They need to create a structure.

So it almost needs to be a process. So there needs to be the time and place. There needs to be colleagues who are going to be supportive.

There needs to be a culture. And there needs to be, sometimes it's down to something like a physical space, you know, if you're in a large animal veterinary practise and you come in in the morning to chat to the receptionist and you get your list of calls, which, OK, might vary throughout the day and that's the last you see. Where's your opportunity as a group to get together and chat about these things?

And surely it was really hard during the pandemic as well. So I think there has to be some, some physical space and mental space given over to it. I think also setting a culture as a, as a leader in terms of, authentic leadership.

So talking about your mistakes is really important. But one thing that we've tried to do is to, when our presidents go and do talks to new graduates, for example, is make sure they talk about some of their mistakes they made as, as new, new vets or new veterinary nurses. And we've also supported the Association of Veterinary Students.

They've done something called Failure Fridays where they get some senior Academics and, and tutors to talk about things that they've done wrong. So it's not always that, you know, that they're seen as these infallible people and, and it's, you know, again, it's this kind of hidden curriculum thing, isn't it? You learn what you're taught, but you also learn what you absorb from the structures around you.

And we, we did a survey, it was rather informal back in 2017 with, with practises, with individuals, sorry, about, it was kind of about blame culture and how you report things. And only 40% at that point said they were comfortable with reporting mistake and had a structure on how to do it within the practise. So we've started, you know, through my matters, for example, we've been doing a pilot something called sports rounds, which it's not really about mistakes, but it's about giving people the time and space to talk about the emotional impact that work has had on them, and of course mistakes will come into that as well.

Yeah, no, it's brilliant. I think it's, you know, you're so right, everybody makes mistakes and, you know, where possible, you know, should feel comfortable being able to admit them and, you know, correct them and learn from them, you know I mean I know it's hard in a sector like. Because the stakes are high, you know, and so expectations from animal owners are really high.

So, you know, do you want to celebrate, mistakes when it ended up with the, with the death of a beloved animal? No, that's, that's really, really, really difficult compared with some other sectors. So I think we do appreciate that.

But I also think it's hardwired into veterinary students in particular, you know, they're A star students, they're high achievers. They may not have the coping mechanisms for failure. Veterinary nurses, you know, super bright people who've been brought into a situation where they're having to learn so much in a short space of time.

And I think there's, have you ever heard of Carol Dweck? She's a woman who writes on growth mindset and open mindset, and it's this idea that if you've always been considered a high achiever and you've always been rewarded for being a high achiever and the kind of language that's used around that, people will say, oh, you're a good girl because you've got 20 out of 20, it starts to become like part of your brain set, which is, I'm a good person because I'm clever. I'm a good person because I don't fail.

Therefore, when I fail, that makes me a bad person. And she, she reports in a book that she had this really interesting, experiment that they did with some kids with jigsaws. I don't know if you've heard about this one, but they had two groups.

I, I'll probably slightly misremember it. You'll have to look it up, but two groups and they were given jigsaws to do, and both groups finished the jigsaws, and one group were praised saying, wow, you're amazing. You're so good, you're so brilliant to do those jigsaws.

And the other group were told, oh, you know, well, well done. That was, that was fine. It wasn't a particularly difficult task, but glad you did it.

They then gave another set of jigsaws to the group, but the group that they praised for being brilliant because they completed them, they gave them jigsaws that it wasn't possible to finish. And the other group, they gave jigsaws that they could do. And they told the group, try and do the jigsaws, but when the bell goes, just disassemble and put them in the box and go away.

So there was no sense that you were going to be checked up on. And the group that had been just said, well done. That was a pretty average task, but you did it well.

They managed to do the, the jigsaws and it was all, actually, they had ones they couldn't do as well. They said, we, we couldn't do the jigsaws, but it wasn't a big problem. The group that, Had been praised, lied.

Basically, they, they lied and said they'd been able to do them. And I've got a quote here because I thought, I thought it would be really interesting to share this. So Carol Wex says in the fixed mindset, which is that group who've always been told that they're brilliant, imperfections are shameful, especially if you're talented, so they lied them away.

What's so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars simply by telling them they were smart. And it makes me, you know, reflect on the fact that we're always saying to, to vet students, you're the creme de la creme, you're the best, you're high achievers, and, and what do we set people up, up for in that, in that context. And I, I was at, I went to Oxford for my university and I think it's similar there, you know, it's similar high achievers.

You've always been told you're the best in the class, you know, you get the top marks and everything, and then suddenly you get with a group of people who are all equally clever and you're pretty average actually, and that, that's, that's quite difficult. So yeah, I think that that failure is, is interpreted differently in different groups. I mean if you look at from a corporate world, you know, you'll see.

Entrepreneurs going, oh, I, you know, built up and lost my first company, age 21, and then I built up another one from grassroots at 25. And it's seen as, you know, a real positive that they've had this kind of roller coaster ride. And if you look at online, like, like, if you Google, Google, Google graveyard, that's not too better, they have a, a whole section of all the projects that didn't work.

The graveyard of failures, what they learned from them, why they failed, you know, really different mindset. And I appreciate you wouldn't want to have a, a graveyard of all the mistakes you made in the, in the pet cemetery, I suppose. You wouldn't, you wouldn't want that, but there are ways of, of learning from mistakes and, and, it just tells a slightly different narrative about, what you can do next, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. No, it's fascinating, isn't it? And I think it's, you touched on it a little bit earlier as well, you know, around impostor syndrome and perfectionism, and they are also, you know, closely linked together, aren't they?

Yeah, I think they are, but I think what's interesting is that they're linked to on the whole they're linked to work. Not always. I mean, I, people, my friends will give you examples of where I've just given up on something because I couldn't think I could do it, which wasn't work-related, but I did a really interesting session at BVNA Congress.

Oh, it must be a couple of years ago, certainly before the pandemic. Looking at kind of well-being and stuff with my Mind Matters hassle, and it will be kind of strayed into this territory of, of mistakes. So I said to people, OK, what are your hobbies?

And they all went around the room and they're like, oh, I paint paintings, I make cushions, I garden. I was like, OK, so what would happen if you made a mistake when you were painting an oil painting? What would you do next?

They're like, well, firstly, I'd laugh about it and I'd maybe tell my mate who I know is also into painting and ask her for some advice and I might Google it. And, you know, I might buy some new whatever it was they need to rectify the mistake and I'd have another go. Like, fine, OK.

So what happens if you make a mistake in work? Do you talk to anybody about it or no? Do you Google it to find out what you could have done differently?

Oh, not, not really. And, and what do you do next to make sure it doesn't happen again? Well, I, I don't really do that.

And it was fascinating. So something that was close to their professional identity. They didn't want to talk about because the structure wasn't there, the support group wasn't there, and they didn't have the motivation to examine what had gone wrong.

Whereas something that was much lower stakes for them, a hobby, the first thing they did was tell somebody. The second thing they did was to look at how they could avoid doing it again, you know, it's really, really fascinating. So we need to bring more of our Our low stakes hobby mentality into the work, not being reckless, of course, I don't mean that.

And from a regulatory perspective, absolutely, I wouldn't, but that inquiring mind, that curiosity of, of interrogation to find out, what, what might go wrong. And, and there's a really interesting, TED Talk actually by this guy called Brian Goldman. I've mentioned it in talks before, called Doctors Make Mistakes, can we talk about that?

And he's looking at actually the, the, there's more damage done. In the medical sector from people not talking about mistakes than from them talking about mistakes, because people are not sharing what's gone wrong and making sure it doesn't happen again. Lovely.

Who is that, Lizzie? Sorry, Brian Goldman, was it? Goldman, yeah, he's a cardiologist in the states and it's a really fascinating TED Talk where he, he talks, he starts off talking about sport and saying, you know, if you hit 4 out of 10 home runs in baseball or whatever, you're considered to be a legend, but if you only say 4 patients out of 10 as a cardiologist, not so good.

Therefore, people tend not to talk about things that have gone wrong and then they don't learn, and then he feels that, you know, they're letting. Letting the public down, I suppose you could say the same from an animal health and welfare perspective, you know, we, we, are we letting. Animals down, are we letting clients down by not better examining failure.

No, absolutely. I'll definitely have a, have a little listen to that. It sounds brilliant.

Yeah, it's really good. And we're trying, I mean, we're trying through college to look at how do we change this culture. So firstly, it's about talking about failures and, you know, we have them.

We tried it through our Vivec project, which is around innovation to look at different ways of thinking, design thinking, more creative ways of, of looking at solution finding, I suppose. And then also there's some really great work done by RCVS Knowledge. Our charity partner on quality improvement.

So it's kind of that's looking at the flip side, isn't it? Let's not focus on the failure. Let's look at, focus on what can you learn, what's that cycle of evaluation and improvement and, you know, how can you do that.

So it's a real genuine continual learning cycle. So I think there's, there's really some great resources out there now. Once you start to sort of unlock that bit of your brain that says it's OK to talk about this stuff.

Yeah, brilliant. Oh no that that sounds great. And I know a lot of the webinars that you've done with us as part of the Mind Matters initiative as well have been fascinating.

I was listening to one the other day by Olivia around sort of taming you in a perfectionist, which was a really, really great session. So I think you know that would be really useful as well for people to listen to. If they do want that support.

Definitely there's some great resources on the webinar there, and I think that issue of perfectionism is, is so interesting. It's often, you know, you ask people at an interview, what's your greatest weakness, and they kind of sit there rather smugly and go, well, I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and so that was a good thing. And I was probably in that camp, you know, in the past where I've thought, oh, well, yes, being a perfectionist is brilliant because it means I'm always perfect, but actually it's a really, really maladaptive trait.

Because you can end up being perfect at one or two small things and you don't try anything else because you don't want to lose your badge of being a perfectionist. And then how narrow does your worldview come? It's, yeah, but it took me a long while.

I mean, I'm 50 now. It took me probably till I was 45 to get some of this stuff. Yeah, no, absolutely.

I know, I think with, it is something that a lot of people in the profession, I think, do struggle with, you know, the idea of perfectionism and not allowing themselves to make mistakes and experiencing failure. And I, and I think it, it doesn't, so this is whereas as a regulator is, is an interesting thing. So often when I talk about these sorts of issues, people go, well, that's all very well, but if I do make a mistake, you're gonna come down on me like a tonne of bricks, aren't you?

And I think that's where we, we try and unpick this, this difference between negligence and serious professional misconduct. We know there's a fear factor going around at the college. And that can actually play into this, this issue of people not wanting to talk about failure as well, because they're scared of what the reg regulator might do.

And we're all about people taking responsibility for their actions, but not about judgement in, in that sense. And I think if people are scared about a disciplinary, all they need to do is really look on our website at some of the previous cases, and they will recognise that those things that have happened are not things that you just do by accident. As I mentioned before, sometimes something can become a big issue if you're dishonest about it, but on the whole, most of those cases are, are quite serious things.

So, from a regulatory perspective, we are trying to encourage people to recognise when things are going wrong, to ring up our advice team, you know, to do all of that stuff early so that they don't allow things to, to get into a difficult situation because it's not good for animals or clients or their own mental health and well-being and that their colleagues to, to let something drag on. But we do recognise that people make mistakes all the time. Yeah, absolutely, and I think you know what it would be great to do actually when excuse me, you know, we do release this to everybody is we can put it on the blog and any of these things we can mention, so you know the advice line links to the website, you know, we can make sure that everybody's got all the information that they might need to help to deal with these situations that you know can cause.

And everything that is linked to failure as well. So we can absolutely do that. That, that would be brilliant.

And, and I think it's about reflection generally. I mean, we, we through the work we're doing with the vet vet GDP, the graduate Development programme, and also our CPD around getting people to reflect more. It shouldn't just be something that you do when things have gone wrong, but trying to encourage people to spend a bit of time thinking when things went right as well.

And I know when we, we started doing that reflection thing for CPD there were great groans, or am I going to have to write a 2000 word essay, but actually, no, it's relatively Relatively straightforward. You have to say what you learned, so what? And then now what?

That's pretty much it. So what happened? What was the impact of that and what do we do next?

And it can be just a few words, but I'm trying to encourage people to do that. I know through practises in the practise standard scheme and they have to gather feedback from, from clients, but, you know, making sure that you, you reflect and recognise what went right and what you can learn from it as well, having the structure to do that is really important. Yeah, absolutely.

One thing that we've actually started doing. In our full team meetings at the webinar on a Monday is just having 5 minutes at the start, you know, before you get into the madness of the week and just everybody you know has that time to reflect and talk about highlights or low lights from the week before and it's that's a really good idea. Yeah, the team seem to really love it and it's, you know, it just does give you that that time and that space just to have that, you know, reflection and then, you know, think what you're going to do differently moving forward as well.

Definitely, brilliant. Oh, well, Lizzy, thank you so much. We are out of time.

That, that flew by. Thank you so much for, you know, all your openness and honesty and for sharing all your thoughts and experiences with us. Can I, can I just share one quote with you that I wanted just to share, which I think is a really good one.

Of course you can. So Alistair Campbell, who, who some of your listeners will. Remember as Tony Blair's spin doctor.

He's been a real champion of mind matters and mental health campaigning and actually his father was a vet, so he does understand, the landscape, but he has a, a book called Winners and How They Succeed, and there's a quote in there which I think is, is brilliant, which is the winner is the loser who evaluates defeat properly. So I thought that would be a, a nice note to end on. That's brilliant.

Thank you very much, Lucy, for sharing that with us too. That, that's great. Thank you very much.

All right, take care. Speak to you soon. Bye, bye.