Balancing new parenthood and your career

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is a pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. Today I'm talking about baby blues. Actually, more specifically, I'm talking about what to do when a baby comes into the picture and throws off everything.

1:21 And it's a really important topic because I remember when I started my first faculty job and within probably about eight months, nine months of starting my faculty job, my youngest baby was born. And I will say that it was hard. It was so hard because it was rough before the baby came. And then when the baby came, it just was harder. And it really did cause me to stop and re-evaluate what I wanted and how I wanted this experience to go. And it caused me to really think hard about what was important to me at work and how I wanted my life to look like.

2:03 Because at the point at which baby came, I will say that this beautiful baby did not want to drink from a bottle and would not eat, would not eat at all, would not drink from a bottle until I came home from work. And then baby wanted to stay up all night eating. And while we had done sleep training for our other baby, this baby was not willing to do any sleep training. In fact, this baby always, always wanted to get out of the bed. Like she would fall asleep and the moment you put her in the crib, she would just wake up. So it was challenging, but it was also good and really important. And I want to share with you some of the ways that I thought about being a new mom at the time and how that may or may not help you.

2:49 I think it will because it's really helpful just to see how other people did it, not because you're going to do the same thing, but because it may cause you to think differently about how you want to show up in your motherhood or fatherhood experience. Okay. So the first thing I want to say is, wow, a new baby is on the scene. Congratulations. Yes. Whenever a baby is here, the words are always congratulations. I mean, there's just nothing else to say. Congratulations. It is such a beautiful thing. Relationships are the source of life and this is a new relationship that's going to transform your life forever and it's going to be so, so, so, so good. And yeah, this may be baby number four or maybe baby number five, it doesn't matter.

3:33 Every new baby comes and changes your life in a significant and dramatic way. Now I will tell you honestly that I can mostly speak from the perspective of the woman who's had the baby, but I do believe that it's a significant change in the life of the father as well. And so I just want to acknowledge mothers, fathers, if you have a new baby, congratulations. This is a significant thing and you should celebrate even if right now it's causing you a little bit more stress than it has in the past. So definitely celebrate. All right. So start with celebration. And the first thing I really do want to share is that you've just got to breathe. You got to breathe and recognize that, wait a minute, you've been here before.

4:15 And when I say you've been here before, I don't mean you've had a baby before and maybe you have. Maybe this is baby number one, I don't know. But what I'm saying is that you've been in a place before where you've had to re-figure your whole life, where things changed and you're like, okay, well, the way I used to do it doesn't work. Let's think about how I'm going to do it this time. And that's exactly where you are right now. For example, when you transitioned from undergrad to med school, I mean, you may have worked hard in undergrad. When you got into med school, it was a totally different beast. And however you used to study for undergrad, you needed to re-figure it from med school. And then you learned all this stuff in med school. You thought you were ready for residency. You transitioned into residency and it became clear that you were going to have to up your game in a different way to be a resident.

4:59 And so what I'm saying is that you've had significant transitions in your life where you've literally had to reconfigure the way you do things because something changed. And sometimes the change is expected. So okay, well, you expect a transition from medical school to residency and you expect it to be different because you have a sense of how different it is. Sometimes the baby thing is a little harder because you may not always have precedent. For example, I thought, wow, I stay up because I take call. And that was when we would take 24 plus six hour calls and I thought, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, if I can do that, if I can stay up all night taking call, I can do a baby.

5:41 What I forgot or what I did not recognize was that at least call had an endpoint and then you could go home and sleep and no one would paint you. But here I was, wow, sleepless night after sleepless night after sleepless night after sleepless night. And I realized that I was not prepared. So the point I'm making is that it's a transition point. Like you've had transition points in your life and the things you used to do before may not work now, but you've been here before. You've been in the place where you have to re-figure everything and you've done okay. So if you look back upon your life, your track record is that you've always succeeded and you will succeed in re-figuring, reconfiguring your life at this point as well.

6:22 So congrats again in advance. All right. So number one is celebrate baby, right? Number two, breathe. Number three is for you to be very aware of the fleeting nature of time. Now one of the things, at least for me, that has helped me recognize how time flies is the growth of my children. It's like, wait a minute, you're tall, you're taller, you're taller than me now. Like when did that happen? And what, you know, so the changes that are happening in the children's lives remind me of the passage of time where by myself, I'm not really thinking much is changing because I feel like I look the same even though I know I don't, but their growth, especially their accelerated growth helps them recognize that, wow, the years are ticking by.

7:17 And so it is important to recognize that this moment will pass. Baby will be three months older and then baby will be four years older and then maybe you'll be 16 years older and then 21 years older and no longer in your life, at least not in the way they were at the very beginning. And so when you recognize how transient this time is, how much of the time is already taking away, then you have to ask yourself, well, how do I want to spend this time in relation with this child or in relation to this child? How do I want to be as mom or dad? How do I want to show up? And how do I want my life to be lived in my parenthood?

8:02 And I think as with everything that I talk about, it really starts with intentionality. Like are you going to be intentional about this time? Or are you going to look back 21 years later and say, I don't even know where the time went and oh, I wish I'd done it differently. And so fast forward to 21 years from now and then say, I'm so glad. I'm so glad. I'm so glad. It was the best parenting experience ever. And I'm so glad at the way I did it. So fast forward to then, then come back and say, well, how did you do it so that at the end you are celebrating, not crying, not regretting things or not regretting decisions that you made.

8:44 And so one of the biggest strategies, one of the biggest keys to success in managing your parenting journey, as well as your faculty career is intentionality. It's like, okay, what are you going to do so that you get the outcome you want at the end? And this is not the time to throw up your hands and say, I have no choice. This is just the way it is. It always has to be this way. I would just say that, okay, if that's what you're choosing, as long as you recognize that it's a choice you're making. And in reality, there is always choice. In reality, everybody doesn't do it the way you're doing it. And the question is, what do you want? And are you taking the steps that get you to where you want?

9:28 Are you taking steps that get you further away from where you want to be? Recognize that you are making a choice and time is fleeting and recognize how you want to spend that time. All right, number four is to re-evaluate your priorities. Okay, so here's the thing that happens. That happened to me is that I'd always been able to hustle more and make it work, hustle more and make it work. Okay, expand the boundaries of work and make it work. I could just, okay, I'll take a Saturday morning and finish off the notes. I'll take a Saturday evening. There was always the ability to expand a little bit, steal a little bit of time and make it work.

10:12 But when the baby came, baby broke the bank. That was no, I'll take a little bit extra time on Saturday morning because Saturday morning was taking up. That was no, oh, I'll take a little bit of time on Friday afternoon because Friday afternoon was already busy. And so it's important to just stop and re-evaluate your priorities. Like, why are you here? What is important in your journey as a faculty member? What are the things you're doing that you're supposed to actually be doing? Right? Because what happens is we take on so much, so many things from all over the place and we're like, I'm going to do all of these. And we don't really ask which ones we should be doing or which ones we shouldn't be doing.

10:54 But what a great opportunity when a baby or babies come along or your parenting journey forces you to say, wait a minute, I can't do everything. And that is beautiful. Just to get to the place where you're like, I can't do this. It's great because it's like, okay, well don't. What will it take to be able to do the things that you need to do and not worry about everything else? And I know we're going to talk about a strategy for that shortly, but it is important to reassess your priorities and ask yourself, like, you know, when you had all this excess time, when you were not a parent and you picked up all this additional work that wasn't really your responsibility, and now that you're a parent and you don't have all the time, what do you do with that?

11:39 Recognize that there are some things that are priorities at your institution. People may yell a lot about a lot of things, but there are very few things that really, really matter. And if you're a scientist, if you're a physician scientist or you're a clinician researcher building a research program, there are some things that really don't matter at all. If you're a faculty member trying to get promoted, there are some things that count much less than others. Recognizing what the priorities are allows you to create time windows or strategies to move those priorities forward, even if other balls fall, because there are some balls that can fall and break and some balls that shouldn't break.

12:20 Okay. All right. Or they can fall. Some balls can fall and break and some others you're like, yeah, but for that, that didn't break, right? That didn't fall and that didn't break. And so recognize what your priorities are. And if you don't know, figure them out. Because sometimes when we first start our faculty careers, no one tells us that everything is not weighted equally, right? And so here we are trying to be good and we're doing everything because people have asked us to do everything. And then when we finally get to the place where it's like, wait a minute, I don't have time to do all these things, then you have to ask the question, well, what am I supposed to be doing? What are the things I'm doing that I shouldn't be doing? And that leads me to number five.

13:02 Review the 80-20 rule. Remember we talked about in a prior episode, the 80-20 rule, and this comes from the Pareto principle and that is that 20% or less of the things that you do actually give you 80% of your outcome. And so if there are very few things that really move the needle, then you want to make sure that you're optimizing for the 20%. And what we tend to do, at least what I used to do, was to just try to do 100% of everything. But then when you realize that 20% of things matter the most, then you're going to focus more on the 20%. And so review your 80-20. Look at all your activities.

13:42 Yes, write them all down so that you can see them and evaluate them. And then ask yourself, well, which of these things that I do give me the highest value for my time invested? You're going to want to know what things do that for you. You want to know the things that you invest a lot of time, but they don't really move you forward. You don't want to know because you have a hard decision to make. And actually, honestly, when you finally figure out the things that are dragging you down, taking up a lot of your time, but not moving you forward, the decision may not be so hard, but you need to know. Because again, it all starts with intentionality.

14:23 When you know the things that you do that take up a lot of your time that actually don't move you forward, then you can make a decision that's informed. As opposed to right now, you're just kind of trying to do everything and some of it doesn't matter, is not valuable, but you don't even know that. So you're going to want to review the 80-20. Number six is to hold on to the things that fit, the priorities. One of the books I really love is Essentialism by Greg McKeon, and it's a great book. I recommend it. And it talks about the fact that there are only very few things that really, really matter. And so once you figure out having assessed the 80-20, once you figure out the things that are absolutely essential, that's what you should do.

15:12 But you should lay everything else aside, and you should find a way to fit into your schedule the things that are highest priority. Yes, the things that fit, schedule those. And then everything else, that leads us to number seven. Everything else you're going to find a way to either negotiate out of or delegate it. Because what you're saying, when you look at all the work you're doing and you decide that this is a priority and these things are not the priority, you're not saying it's not that they're not important. You're not saying these are not important. You're saying, well, they are important, but do they need to be important to me?

15:52 Think about the Eisenhower matrix. The Eisenhower matrix, if you are familiar, helps us prioritize what's urgent and important, not urgent, unimportant. And it really arranges things into four quadrants. So in one quadrant, it's not urgent, it's not important. Why are you doing it? In another quadrant, well, it's urgent, but it's not important. You shouldn't be doing that, but somebody should do it. But who can do it for you? But if it's important and urgent, well, you should do it.

16:32 But if it's important and not urgent, you want to make sure you schedule the time to do it. And you want to spend a lot of your time in the things that are not urgent, but important. Because it means that you are looking far ahead in advance to work towards the things that you need to do and not allowing them to become urgent before you actually do them. Right? And then what you're also not doing is focusing and spending a lot of time where most of us spend our time is in the matrix of things that are urgent, but not important. Like someone's yelling, they're like, I want this now. It's not important. But because the person is yelling, or they're really bothering you, you give them all the time and attention in the world.

17:13 And so what I'm saying is that the things that you have found that don't fit into your schedule, it doesn't mean they're not important. It just means they're not important for you to be the one primarily doing them. And so who can do them for you? And you may be like, oh no, there's nobody helping me. And I just want to pause and say, that's not true. Because sometimes you look at yourself and you think, oh, I'm like lowly on the totem pole. There's no one to do anything for me. And I would challenge that. I would challenge that assumption. And I would say, is that true? Is there really no one to do anything for you? No one you can delegate anything to? You may not have an administrative assistant, but is there no one to delegate anything to?

17:56 And if you say there isn't, well, it's like, okay, so who can you pay? Who can you employ to do work for you? For example, maybe you're doing all your cooking. Who can you delegate cooking to? Maybe you're doing all your shopping. Who can you delegate shopping to? Maybe at work you're doing all your gels. Who can you delegate gels to? Like who can you delegate to? And so it's going to take some thinking. It's going to take some creativity and it may even cost you some dollars, but it's so important for you to free up your time for the things that matter to you, including building a relationship with this new child that has come into your life and other significant others that you have in your life as well that you want to continue to have a great relationship with.

18:44 So I talked about seven things. The first is congratulations. Just celebrate because this baby has come, changed your life forever. The second is to breathe. You've been here before. You know how to rework everything. You've done it successfully. You will do it successfully again. You're going to make it happen. Number three, recognize that time's precious and you're going to want to make sure that you spend this time in a way that you're going to be proud of years from now and that you're not going to regret. Number four, re-evaluate your priorities. What are the things you're not supposed to be doing that you're doing and what are the things you are supposed to be doing? What is the priority as a faculty member?

19:24 Number five, review the 80-20 rules. What are the 20% of activities that give you the biggest bang for your buck, 80% of your outputs and make sure you focus on the 20%. Hold on to the things that fit. It's number six and number seven, negotiate out of and or delegate everything else. I didn't want to point one more thing out about the number seven, negotiating out of or delegate everything else. There are some challenges that are not yours. For example, there's no APP and there should be one supporting your clinic and you're like, well, there's no APP so I'm going to triple, quadruple book myself because someone's got to see the patient. And I would say that there are administrative things and systemic things that should be in place to support you and if they are not there, it is not your job to take on the whole system and to try to fix it.

20:16 Because number one, you're obscuring the fact that there's a problem. So number two, you're taking on work that's not your responsibility and you're probably doing a poor job of it. Yes, when you triple quadruple book yourself, you are stressed, you are harried. The patients who do come to you don't get very much out of you and frankly they complain. And then they say, well, she's so harried all the time. She's just always overworked. And then they give you bad scores. You're like, but I'm just trying to help. I'm just trying to help. And it's like, no, you're not helping very well. You're kind of stressing yourself out and giving everybody else a bad experience. All because you're stepping into a role that's not yours. It's not your job to fix the fact that there are not enough faculty.

20:59 You can't fix that and it's not your job to fix it. What you can do is have conversations with your leadership about what's needed and to let them know what your boundaries are as far as how much you can support that or not support it. But I just want to encourage you not to take on the world's troubles as your own. As a physician, you tend to want to do that. It's not beneficial for you. It's not beneficial for this new relationship you're building with this new child that's coming to your life. You don't look good when it comes to the patients you're trying to help. They're not impressed with your not really having much time to be there for them. What you want to do is you want to be able to do a great job. You want to do it well.

21:41 And so I invite you to think about in what ways are you shortchanging yourself by trying to be everything to everybody when that's not really your responsibility. All right. What is the one thing I invite you to do this week? Well, I invite you to reassess your schedule. Maybe you're not a parent and this doesn't apply to you or maybe you're a parent of children who are out of the house and it's like, huh, not my problem anymore. There's still always opportunity to assess what you're doing and to say, well, yeah, if I didn't have to be here 24 7, what else would I want to do with my time? And ask yourself, what are my priorities? And am I doing the things that actually want to be doing? Am I doing the things that actually matter? Am I doing mostly the things that give me the most output for the work that I do?

22:26 All right. I invite you to think about that this week. And as always, if you're looking for a coach, I'm here for you. Send me an instant message or a direct message on Instagram or on LinkedIn. I'd be happy to work with you to figure out how I can best support you. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of your day. And I look forward to talking with you again next time on the Clinician Researcher Podcast. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

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