What I Wish I Knew About a Career In Medicine: What is a Healthy Work Mindset?
Are you living the life you always dreamed of? Do you wake up energized each work day? Are you fulfilled in your current career path? Is it possible to create your ideal job? These days, more and more working professionals across different fields would probably answer no. Do you want to ensure a life of fulfillment, flexibility and freedom? Most of us would answer yes.
Many of us know people who are experiencing burnout. It may even be you. While the onus is not on us to battle burnout (the work environment must undergo change), one thing that can be helpful for the long game is to interrogate our work mindset and expectations.
What do I mean by that? Young physicians, in particular, tend to be altruistic team players who are used to delayed gratification. We take on more than we need to, constantly adjusting to support others requests and needs, while putting ourselves on the back burner. You may often suffer in silence. Is this what work is meant to be? How do those outside of traditional fields such as medicine think about work and career?
I’ve had many of these struggles in the last few years. I have made a few big changes, and am planning more down the line. Here I will share with you what I’ve learned about a health work mindset so you can examine your career and be motivated to make the necessary changes for a more fulfilling life.
Whose dreams are you chasing?
A critical change in work mindset occurred a few years ago when I realized that I was expending a ton of mental and physical energy, BUT I was using it to fulfill someone else’s dreams and career goals. I found myself joining more and more committees, writing notes at night, checking messages on weekends in order to be a “good doctor” and stay on my promotion track.
I stopped to honestly ask myself, were any of these goals mine? Did any of these activities bring me closer to my ideal life? It is too easy to follow a blueprint, especially in a profession like medicine, where meaning is deceptively built in.
What is the meaning and purpose of work?
For many of us, entering the medical profession meant we would be doing deep, meaningful work, including thinking about patients, their disease processes, even systems that affect population health. The reality is that the day-to-day reality of being a physician makes most of us feel like a cog in a wheel.
A replaceable cog in a wheel.
Cal Newport’s book Deep Work resonated so profoundly with me as a meaningful mindset about work. I realized my growing dissatisfaction with my current work was related to a disconnect between what I felt I was capable of, and what I was actually being required to do each day. I also found this Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal podcast episode on Entrepreneurship fascinating.
The other struggle many of us have is that our profession becomes our identity. “What do you do?” Being a physician is only one facet of my identity. I am a mother, a wife, a friend, a writer, a foodie, an obsessed with-home-makeover/declutter culture fiend. Not only have I leaned into parenthood but also exploring and cultivating my creative side. Our profession is not meant to be our identity. Again, this is a healthier mindset shift we must consciously remind ourselves of.
Constant re-evaluation of your goals
Another critical lesson I learned about work and career is that I ought to constantly re-evaluate my career goals. My dream evolved from the time I was a medical resident and even more since I became a mother. I encourage you to check in with yourself regularly to see if your work effort is matching the journey toward your own goals.
Don’t go full speed ahead toward a destination you have no interest in. In medicine, the future is pretty much mapped out for us. Residency is followed by fellowship, which is followed by practice, then promotion by publishing papers and increasing leadership roles in societies. However, there is a good chance your goals will change and you may find yourself wishing for time to be available for your children’s after-school activities, or personal time dedicated to exercising and improving your own health. As Jenny Blake writes in “Pivot:The Only Move that Matters is Your Next One”, be prepared and primed to adjust course when this happens. Careers may be non-linear and that’s ok.
When is the last time you evaluated your goals? If you want to make a pivot, are you in position to do so? Is it time to take a pause?
Setting Boundaries
Once you have had an honest conversation with yourself and your loved ones, start setting boundaries in your work life that will help you achieve your goals for “smashing success”. It may require making small changes like limiting access to work emails or cutting back one day of work, or bigger changes like making a career pivot.
Now let me clarify that I am a staunch proponent of excelling at your work and not giving anyone any excuse to criticize you. At work, I am a respected and well-liked clinician by patients and colleagues. At my hospital, I head a departmental committee of physicians outside of my specialty. I also lead national workgroups in my field. Even though I wrote about quiet quitting, I am not arguing for shirking responsibility for the sake of slow living and intentional parenthood. I advocate doing your job and doing it well but with healthy boundaries and expectations that are allowed to shift over the course of your career.
Conclusion
Over the last few years, I have come across many helpful resources to digest all this information. How do I create the job and life I want? I am still a little bit away from my ideal work life balance but I am miles from where I was 5 years ago. I have compiled some of the most valuable books and podcasts in these two posts. They have been so instrumental in shaping and expanding my mindset on work, both within and outside of the context of medicine.
I hope this has helped you gain more clarity in your journey. Ask your self whose dream you’re chasing. Expand your mindset about work. Pursue excellence. Set boundaries. This is one of the first steps on the road to living the life you’ve dreamed of, with fulfillment, flexibility and freedom, and becoming the physician our patients deserve to have. (More to come…!)
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