Photo by Bruce Bottomley

At the beginning of 2023, Bryan Fader took the bold step of accepting a newly created position of student success strategist in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Dentistry.

Though Fader, with his background in sports performance coaching, might not appear an obvious fit for the role, the truth is that an oral health professional student and a high-performance athlete have more in common than one might think. Now a year in, Fader feels some significant breakthroughs have been achieved.

A meeting of minds

It started with a chance encounter in a Halifax supermarket. Fader ran into his friend Dr. Sachin Seth, the associate dean of student affairs in the Faculty of Dentistry, and they exchanged news. Fader said that he was finishing off some qualifications for a master’s degree in counselling and psychotherapy. This gave Seth an idea, which then turned into a job offer: Fader would teach some classes and also offer individual counselling sessions.

For Seth, it made sense. “Student success rarely occurs in a vacuum — it is closely linked with mental and physical well-being,” he explains. “We asked Bryan to help students deal with any personal issues that could affect their academic journey and provide strategies to help them be more resilient and better able to cope when life gets a bit rough.”

Fader quickly saw the similarities between his new students and the athletes he was used to coaching. “They’re all high achievers,” he says. “They’re highly driven, they’re intrinsically motivated, they’re used to challenges, and they all feel a pressure to perform.”

Surprisingly, he also discovered that each student felt they were the only one with these feelings, and this was because they hadn’t had opportunities to talk openly together as a group. Fader changed this by bringing them together in larger class groups — a safe space where what they said was confidential, and where conversations about worries and fears could take place. What the students learned, he says, was that they were all experiencing similar doubts and generally “feeling they’re not doing as well as they’re doing.”

Strategies for building strength

A technique Fader recommends for people struggling with anxiety is “horizon vision.” A feeling of stress, he explains, tends to speed things up.

“The more we drop our heads down, the faster the world gets because we’re seeing it more closely.”

While the technique originates in treatment of anxiety in general, Fader has also used it to help athletes. “It’s useful for any kind of performance,” he explains.

Fader also encourages students to understand how stress is felt in their bodies. “People often make the mistake of fixing the challenges they’re experiencing in their head with other thoughts in their head, rather than fixing their bodies,” he says. “That’s why [the way] we hold ourselves and our breathing matters so much. It helps us to slow down before we get into flight mode.”

An expression Fader says he uses a lot is, “how you do something is how you do everything.” This is another technique he encourages students to adopt. “When does the patient experience start?” he asks his students. Fader maintains that preparing to see a patient involves preparation, rather than waiting until they are in the dental chair.

“With difficult conversations, challenges, feeling overwhelmed, and seeing a patient, if you practice how you want to be, when the moment comes, you’re way more ready,” he says. “It’s much better than trying to pull yourself up in the minute before something happens.”

One of the important pillars he shares with students is the concept of desirable difficulty. “When I pitched this concept to the class, one guy said, ‘Dude, we have enough difficulty. We don’t want any more.’”

While Fader acknowledges this response is understandable, he affirms that when you push yourself, even in a small way, you build a muscle.

“Think about going to the gym,” he says. “The weights shouldn’t be lighter. The students need to get stronger.”

His role, he maintains, is to help the students realize they are stronger than they think, and to provide the tools and strategies to harness that strength.

Becoming comfortable with discomfort

Getting into dental school is not easy, so why do such high-achieving students suffer so much from imposter syndrome and anxiety? It turns out their high level of achievement is precisely the problem.

“These students have been the best in their class up until they started dental school,” Fader says. “For them, getting an 80 rather than a 90 counts as failure.”

Allied to that, Fader maintains that students experience an identity crisis as they transition from being undergrads to becoming oral healthcare students. They have to “let go of one rope in order to grab the next one,” he says, and that makes them feel uncomfortable.

“I try to normalize that sense of discomfort so the students don’t feel that something is wrong,” he continues. “Their role is changing, and they will feel discomfort as they progress from rope to rope.”

In the year he has spent in the Faculty of Dentistry, Fader has worked with students in both the classroom and one-on-one in his office. He believes students are realizing they are stronger than they thought and can rise above their feelings of stress and anxiety when they are under pressure.

Looking ahead, Fader says that he wants students to know they don’t have to be in crisis mode to reach out to him.

“Therapy tools are life tools,” he says. “The more we can work together to strengthen students’ abilities to handle stress — and even welcome it — the deeper their life satisfaction will be and the more prepared they will be for what the future brings.”

Fader also runs monthly professional development sessions for staff and faculty. In the future, he hopes to attend conferences so he can help professional dentists better understand graduates, including their strengths and the generational differences. This will help practice owners know what to expect when they hire a new dentist and make them better able to integrate them into the practice.