As a dietitian, confidence doesn’t always come easily. Use these 5 tools to feel comfortable and confident as a clinical dietitian when it’s time to speak up.
Speak up with confidence
As a registered dietitian, we have everything we need to shine. We have the education and we’ve got all the knowledge. What we don’t always have is the confidence to speak up at work and become confident in all that we know.
It’s not easy to find a way around imposter syndrome, but it is possible.
Why it's so hard to speak up
Speaking up can fee very scary and extremely intimidating. Especially when you’re planning to confront a doctor or a nurse who’ve been working on the job forever.
Before you become more confident in clinical nutrition, it takes knowing how to navigate a couple of big confidence shakers so you’re prepared and able to step up when the time comes.
The 2 big confidence shakers are:
- If we’re speaking up when we shouldn’t
- If we’re not speaking up when we should
Having to decide the if and when to speak up can feel like a huge decision to have to make. It can also feel uncomfortably significant and defining.
Significant because we can feel like whether or not we speak up can determine the outcome of the patient we’re responsible for. And defining because it might change everything about the way we’re respected by our colleagues.
Your personal range of acceptable behavior
Knowing when to speak up and when not to speak up are two very personal and individualized decisions. This is a range of acceptable behavior and it’s got more to do with how much power (or perceived power) we hold in each situation, than anything else.
As clinical dietitians when we’re working through these 2 confidence shakers, what we’re usually asking ourselves is this:
Will I be acknowledged by this doctor who probably knows more than me? Or will I be humiliated by a doctor who knows more than me?
It’s called a low-power double bind. The double bind is like a catch-22 and it looks like this:
- You don’t speak up and you go unnoticed.
- You do speak up and someone tells you you’re wrong.
Another way of looking at this? Speaking up proves dietitians are bitchy and wrong. Saying nothing proves dietitians aren’t really in charge of their patient’s nutritional health.
At the heart of this double-blind is a belief that there’s someone who’s more qualified to discuss nutrition than you are.
When we reinforce to ourselves that there are others in the room more knowledgeable about nutrition than we are, we immediately begin to give away our power. This is the power we earned with advanced degrees in nutrition, 1200 hours in a dietetic internship, and an insane registration exam that knocks folks down like flies.
What’s the solution? To grow our confidence as a dietitian in a way that feels comfortable. We can become more confident, be more assertive and also remain likable. It’s not only possible, it’s crucial.
Let’s dive right in and talk about 5 ways you can start building confidence as a dietitian today.
How to grow your confidence as a dietitian
These are the 5 skills that will help you find your comfort zone being both assertive and likable. They will open your acceptable range of behavior and allowing you to finally become the acknowledged nutrition expert in the room.
5 Key Tools to Become a Confident Dietitian
The 5 tools are:
- Advocating for others
- Finding a new perspective
- Giving choice
- Asking for advice
- Justifying your decisions
Let’s talk about this list and start to understand how to use each of these in everyday practice.
1. Advocating for others
Of everything on this list, this is probably the thing that comes most naturally to us as dietitians. Adam Galinsky calls it the Mama Bear Effect, something that can feel like a perfect fit for most of us.
Advocating for others increases our personal range of acceptable behavior, allowing us to push hard for the welfare of others while also taking the spotlight off of ourselves.
It has the added benefit of getting us allies, pulling together others who have the same agenda for our patient’s well being as we do. This can be a major win for both our patients, and our confidence.
When we speak to our clients and patients, we often find our power in our innate ability to connect and support those who are depending on us. When we acknowledge it, this same power can help us build confidence in ourselves when it’s time to talk to other health professionals.
Lean into the role as the health care professional who’s always looking to build a community for your patient. And speak up when it’s time to share your thoughts on what that can look like.
2. Finding a new perspective
Finding a new perspective is about looking at the world through the eyes of another. In this case, the other person might be a doctor or nurse who’s help you’re recruiting while advocating for your patient. It might also be a patient who you’re finding it difficult to connect with.
This tool is about first recognizing that you are the nutrition expert. Got that? YOU ARE THE NUTRITION PROFESSIONAL.
After you realize that, it’s about considering who are the other personalities involved in your patient’s care as you begin executing your recommendations. Sometimes this will mean navigating someone who pushes back on your roll as the nutrition expert.
When this happens it can help to consider what that person is looking to see done, and where the two of you both align and differ.
Assuming everyone’s ultimate objective is to see the health of your patient improve, the professional goals of their surgeon or their night nurse can be wildly different. And in the case of health care, each of these professional likely think their current goals are the most important.
The sooner you’re able to recognize what each team member’s objective is in caring for your patient, the faster you’ll find a way to start a discussion based on what’s most important to them.
This doesn’t mean you should allow them to dictate the terms of a nutrition care plan. However giving that other person a chance to tell you what they consider to be the ideal recommendation allows them to feel heard and understood. This act of listening immediately gives you more credibility in their eyes and expands your range of acceptable behavior.
Once this happens, you’ll be able to advocate more effectively for your patient — and boost your confidence in your ability to get things done.
Give choice
As we’re talking about taking another person’s perspective, giving choices also becomes incredibly valuable. This tool works especially well when you’re trying to counsel resistant patients or those who are questioning your authority as a nutrition professional.
When you give someone a choice, you’re signaling your flexibility and telling the other person that their opinion matters. This lets them know you’re willing to work with them to find a solution that they feel good about.
But it works the other way too.
When you give someone a choice, you’ve now empowered them to make a decision on their own. You’ve positioned yourself as a person able to guide them towards correct answers. By doing this, you develop credibility in their eyes and subtly let them know that you’re the expert in the room, without ever having to make outright claims about what you know.
This tool works especially well as you’re building confidence around talking to patients and doing nutrition educations.
Experiment with providing some kind of choice when you’re just figuring out how to get a conversation started or what new goal to set. The more choices someone has the less resistant they tend to be about making any kind of decision at all. And the less resistant your patient is, the easier it becomes to give them a high quality nutrition education they’ll be able to benefit from.
Ask for advice
Asking others for advice is my favorite tool on this list. When you start really working this, you’ll begin to build confidence by allowing others to feel included in your knowledge and success.
Asking for advice solves something Adam calls the self-confidence double bind. The self-confidence double bind happens when you have confidence so you speak up and then you’re seen as arrogant. Or you don’t speak up and no one knows what you did in the first place.
Neither of these scenarios support you learning to speak up more confidently or becoming a more confident dietitian.
Use this trick when you’re feeling nervous about approaching someone about making a change or correcting a mistake. Asking for advice is kind of like a backdoor into achieving your goal, and it can be extremely effective. This is how it can work:
You’ve been diligently combing through your patient’s medical chart and notice an error. You have 2 choices here. You can either speak up (and risk feeling embarrassed if you misunderstood the issue) or you can say nothing (and risk allowing a medical mistake to go overlooked).
Instead of stating outright that you’ve noticed a respected doctor on staff has screwed up a diet order or telling a nurse she’s forgotten to bump up your patient’s feeds to goal rate, ask them for advice on how to solve the problem you’ve noticed.
Once you’ve handed the problem and solution over to them, you’re no longer in a power struggle. You have allowed the other person the curtesy of respecting their position and giving the opportunity to choose how to correct the error. In exchange you are given a confidence boost when they acknowledge that you’ve correctly identified an issue.
Justify your decisions
Justifying your decisions is the final tool — and it’s non-negotiable. You can do everything else on this list but if you cannot justify every decision you make as a clinical dietitian, all the confidence in the world will not matter.
Identifying evidence indicates expertise. Expertise leads to credibility. More credibility means more power.
Once you’re comfortable justifying the decisions you’re making with your patients, you’ll have all the information you need should you be challenged on one of your recommendations.
The confidence that comes from being able to support your clinical decisions to anyone who asks is one of the most powerful ways to increase your range of acceptable behavior and demonstrate to everyone in the room that you belong there.
Build this confidence by being super clear about every aspect of your nutrition care plan. Make sure to review the diagnosis list, the labs and all the medical notes so each part of your recommendation matches up with what’s happening with your patient in real time.
BONUS TIP: Stop apologizing
This final tip is can build dietitian confidence by way of putting a cap on the things that erode it. And a big one of those is apologizing for no reason.
There are 2 ways to expand your confidence in any situation:
- You feel powerful in your own eyes
- You are seen as powerful in other’s eyes
When we apologize without cause, both of these get broken down swiftly. It can become habit to apologize for simply having an opinion, a question or a thought. Starting a sentence with “I’m sorry” immediately removes any cache of power or authority you’re developing both internally with your self and externally with those around you.
There is absolutely no need for you to ever apologize BEFORE you ask a question. There’s also no reason to apologize AFTER you’ve asked a question. And in any moment where you begin to struggle with this, grab ahold of one of the 5 tools from above and start taking your power back today.
Instead of starting a sentence with “I’m sorry”, practice starting it with “Thank you…” or “. For example, “thanks for letting me jump in here” or “I know that was a lot, thanks for listening to everything!”.
And That’s It!
For a wonderful video on all of this, check out Adam Galinsky’s Ted Talk called How to Speak Up for Yourself.
Developing confidence as a dietitian can be a hard process. But the more attention you pay to these tips, the faster you’ll shed imposter syndrome and start owning your expert status.
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