Compassion is the compass for your success

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 an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Today I'm talking about compassion, and I'm talking about compassion, and it's important to your success. I'm talking about compassion, and it's important for your success.

1:22 You may ask the question, well, what does compassion have anything to do with my succeeding as a clinician scientist or as a clinician researcher? I would tell you that compassion has everything to do with your success. We as physicians are so, so good, I'm going to put that good in air quotes, at showing compassion to our patients. We tend to not apply the same level of compassion to ourselves or to others as well. And I will tell you that one of the ways in which this became really obvious to me was during some work I did on myself, really, in identifying the saboteurs that were interfering with my success.

2:06 And so this comes from the work of Shurzad Shamin. He wrote the book Positive Intelligence, and he talks a lot about PQ reps, and those are exercises, in fact, you can call them mindfulness exercises that help you get in touch with you and help you focus your mind. They're really good, and the book is a really great read. I recommend that you read it. But I will tell you that one of the things I got from it was recognizing that, wow, there is a judge in my mind. I'm judging myself, and I'm judging myself so harshly.

2:49 And nobody thrives in the presence of harsh judgment, but here I was judging myself so harshly. And this judge, this judging of myself was making me shrivel up and not be the best that I could be. But what I had deceived myself into thinking all through my life as I had allowed this judge-like character to take over was I had convinced myself that it was a good boss, and that when I yelled at myself or when I berated myself for doing the wrong thing, it helped me shape up. And I have to tell you that I recognize now that that's a lie, and that whatever judges causes people to shrivel, it causes people to shrink, to turn inwards, and they may produce work but it's not their best work.

3:41 They may produce results, but it's not their best result. And if you're really going to help people to excel, and if you're going to help yourself to excel, you're going to treat yourself with kindness and compassion so that you give yourself a platform to thrive. What you find out is that when you let go of the harsh judgment of yourself, so much better work comes out of that space. You're not less productive, you're not less hardworking, but you have a sense of freedom and a sense of realization that, you know what, if this fails, it'll be okay. And if this succeeds, it'll be okay. Because there's a sense of not judging yourself and then not judging others as well.

4:21 So I recommend it, Positive Intelligence by Sharazad Shaman. It is a great book. And if you have the opportunity to do his work, and that occurs usually within what he calls pods, across a couple of weeks, it really helps you to think critically about your environment, yourself, and to gain control over your mind and sometimes the way that it can get out of control and sabotage you. So that's enough of my public service announcement for the book, Positive Intelligence. I want to talk to you today about seven things you should consider as you think about compassion as a key to your success.

5:02 And the first thing I want to share is that physicians think they understand compassion. As physicians, we think we understand compassion. And to be honest, we are compassionate people. It takes compassion to care for patients. It takes compassion to sacrifice yourself, to say, I'm not going to sleep because I'm going to take care of the patients who come in overnight. It takes compassion to have conversation with patients. It takes compassion to have conversations with patients. It takes compassion to be a physician. It absolutely does. But here's the thing about being a physician, and this applies whether you're a physician, scientist, whatever you do, this applies to you, is that where you may extend compassion to some patients, you actually don't extend compassion to all patients, not in the same way.

5:54 And there are patients for whom you've decided that this person deserves my compassion and for others for whom you've decided that, well, they deserve your judgment. And it may not be an explicit decision that you're making. This comes from very inherent deep-seated places of our biases. For example, sometimes you meet a smoker who has lung cancer. You're like, well, so is you're right for smoking for 30 years. You don't have the same level of compassion and for someone who's say 30 years old, never smoker with lung cancer, then all of a sudden there's a different sense of like, oh, wait a minute, you didn't do anything wrong. Therefore, I have compassion. So do you see how our compassion is flawed?

6:38 We as a profession, we do tend to be compassionate people, but our compassion is actually conditional. And there are situations in which people show up and we're like, well, you don't deserve this level of compassion. And it's for different reasons. So we talked about a smoker. Sometimes it's someone who's obese. You're like, well, if you hadn't gained all that weight, would you be suffering this problem? So we struggle with compassion. And what we find in medicine is that we are up against the limits of our compassion constantly because sometimes we just are too tired to even demonstrate that we care. But even when we're not too tired, there are some people that for whatever reason, we don't show the same level of compassion as we do for others.

7:25 And sometimes that comes from fundamental beliefs about people or their role in causing disease or illness. And so I just want to put that out there that physicians are supposed to be great at compassion and to some extent we are, but our compassion has limits. Now why is this important? It's important because of number two. Number two is that physicians tend to reserve the harshest judgment for themselves. And on the surface, this looks great. Oh yeah, if you're going to judge anybody, you judge yourself. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You put yourself to work. You make sure you're not out of control. It looks good on the surface, but here's the challenge though.

8:07 When you judge yourself, it actually also shows up in the way you treat others. And so when you treat yourself harshly, when you drive yourself to go, go, go, go, go, it shows up in the way you interact with people around you as well. It becomes really obvious when you have people who are really close to you who live in the same home as you. So significant other, children, your harsh judgment of yourself tends to show up in your harsh judgment of others as well. And so I want to just announce that it is a problem. It is a problem when you judge yourself because you're judging others as well.

8:48 Now the reverse is also true. Number three, when you judge others, it is the sure sign that you're judging yourself as well. There is no way of judging another human without judging yourself because the thing that bothers you the most in other humans tends to be the thing that is inside of you that perhaps you don't want to address or you don't want to face. Now if we go back to the example of the smoker, now you may not be a smoker and you're like, oh no, no, no, I'm morally upright and upstanding in the area of smoking. I do not smoke, therefore I judge you, smoker. Yeah that could be different because when you're judging others, it doesn't mean you're judging yourself as a smoker.

9:28 But what it does mean though, you may not be judging yourself as a smoker, but you're judging people in the choices that they've made that may or may not have brought on the illness that they had. And when you think about it, you really are judging yourself for some choices you've made that may have brought you to a place that you are. And so even though the judgment doesn't necessarily immediately translate like smoking, not smoking, there's just a sense of if you look down on people for whatever reason or you judge them harshly, you really are first judging yourself. Because the things that you don't hold to be dear, you tend not to judge people in that.

10:09 You're like, yeah, I don't really care about that issue. I'm not worried about that. So you're not judging others and it's a thing in which you don't judge yourself. So if you pay attention to the things in which you judge others for or the things that you judge others for, you pay attention to the places in which you struggle and you need help as well. Okay, so the first step to breakthrough, and this is number four, is to stop judging yourself. That's it. It's the first step to breakthrough. And why is it important? It's important because hey, you're human. And I know that you've been through rigorous training experience and sometimes you've come away with a misguided notion that you're superhuman.

10:58 I mean, you're amazing. You're really brilliant. I appreciate you. And I'm so grateful for physicians. They're a rare breed. You really do do the impossible. But you're not superhuman. You're just human. And the problem with humans is that they make mistakes. And the beauty of humans is that despite their mistakes, they're still able to accomplish beautiful things. And so judging people for mistakes they've made, whether intentionally or unintentionally, limits their ability. Judging yourself for any mistake that you've made limits your ability. It limits your potential. It limits your ability to thrive.

11:40 And if you're going to stop judging those around you and not experiencing the fullness of who they are, who they could be by creating an atmosphere in which they thrive because you judge them, you need to first stop judging yourself. Because the moment you are able to truly have compassion on yourself, that's when you can have compassion on others. It is a false notion that you can judge yourself and have compassion on others. It doesn't happen. The compassion you have on yourself is a compassion you're able to gift to others. And the absence of that compassion, any other compassion that you say you show is kind of false.

12:25 It's fake. It's like, oh yeah, of course, you judge yourself harshly, but you're so kind to other people. Yeah, that's not compassion. That's manipulation. It's pretending. If you cannot love yourself first, you do not have enough capacity to love others. And if you continue to judge yourself, it's a sign that you continue to judge others. And so if you're going to break through, if you're going to break free, if you're going to have the opportunity to live and thrive, the first step is to stop judging yourself. And I will tell you that Sharzad Shamin did a great job of just kind of outlining the problems of this judge-like character that overcomes all of our minds.

13:13 And I want you to think about it, read it, go read a summary or something, because it's not the place or the time to necessarily go into all of it. But it is important to recognize that judging yourself is a problem. And if you are doing it, and it's likely you are because most humans are, it's an important place in which to get help. Because until you can manage the judge inside of you and show compassion to yourself, you're not going to be able to show compassion to others, not consistently. And that's part of the problem when you're able to judge some patients and not others. It's a sign that you struggle with compassion.

13:55 So the moment you stop judging yourself, and number five is that you find courage and strength to stop judging others. Because in the thing in which you no longer judge yourself, then you have permission and freedom to stop judging others. I have to tell you that it takes work to stop judging others. And again, Sharzad Shamin's book was so good in helping me think about, okay, I'm not judging myself and I'm not judging others. And I will tell you that I'm very mindful about that. Like I'll pass and I'll be like, I can't believe she's wearing that. I'm like, oh, nope, there's no place for judgment. And I start doing PQ reps. These are mindfulness exercises that Sharzad Shamin talks about in his book. He calls them PQ reps.

14:37 But I'll start doing them because I'm like, there's no place for judgment here. And it's an exercise. Like I exercise in not judging myself and I exercise in not judging others. Because I have to tell you the stance, the posture that you have when you judge others, it's not pretty. Your face contorts in like an ugly, ugly manner. You smell a bitterness. Like people can just be like, you judge others, you do not look good. You just don't. And fortunately and unfortunately for us, usually when we're judging others, we're judging others in a group. Like someone will say, I can't believe she wore that. And others are like, yeah, doesn't she know what's fashionable?

15:17 You're all ugly together. And so it's hard to really identify who's the real ugly person because you're all being ugly together. But I say all that to say that judging others makes you look ugly and feel ugly inside. And so, wow, what an important exercise it is to consciously catch yourself when you start to judge another person and to reel it back and to say, there's no place for judgment because there isn't. It's not our place to judge others. And in fact, we don't even really have the right to judge ourselves. And if we think about us as we're trying to move forward as clinicians, as researchers, we are doing the best that we can.

15:59 We're doing the best that we can with the tools we've been given. And so we do deserve compassion and others around us deserve compassion, not our judgment. Number six is that only in compassion can your true self be found. When you stop yelling at you, when you stop criticizing your every mistake, you allow yourself to blossom and thrive in a way that you've never done before. If you've ever watched a child being yelled at, and maybe that child was you when you were a child, you know that yelling makes them shrink up. It makes them lose creativity. It makes them just lose their sense of self and they're afraid and they're anxious.

16:44 When you yell at yourself, it's the same effect, whether you call it just being, I don't even know what you call it, but whatever you call it, judging yourself makes you shrink and shrivel inside. And so when you begin to create opportunities for yourself to thrive by showing yourself compassion and love and mercy, wow. It's like the child who's spoken to kindly and whom kind words are used and encouraged. Oh my goodness, they're able to just thrive and blossom. They're not afraid. They're not afraid to make mistakes. They're not afraid to take chances. And so when we show ourselves compassion, it helps us to take risks.

17:30 We're not afraid anymore to step out and do the research project that everybody says is not going to work because we're like, that's what I want to do. I'm not afraid to take risks because I'm not afraid to fall. I'm not going to break. And the more that you can show compassion on yourself, the more you're able to create an atmosphere in which you thrive, you take risks and you're not afraid of the future. And that is transformative because only those who take risks are rewarded with big rewards. And if you're going to move forward in your career in any meaningful way, you're going to take risks and some of those will not pan out, but some of them will. And it only takes one big win to really win big.

18:11 And so you show yourself compassion because you thrive in the place of compassion. The last thing on the chair is that only in compassion can you do your best work. Now you may look at yourself and say, I've done pretty well with this taskmaster personality I have had over the last few years. I've done really well. I just want to tell you that you've done well. That's just not even pretend, but there is so much more, so much more that you could accomplish. If you were in a place of thriving, if you were in a place of acceptance, if you were in a place of not harsh judgment. So if harsh judgment was lacking from your environment, you would thrive so much more.

18:57 Don't take my word for it. Don't take my word for it. You should do the experiment. You should go for one week, not judging yourself and not judging others and see what happens. Now it is not as easy as it sounds. It's very hard because we are wired to judge. As physicians, we're so wired to judge. It's part of our training and we judge ourselves and we judge each other harshly. Gosh, we turn up noses at each other. Like I can't believe the outside hospital and what they did. Oh my gosh. We are so full of it. And I mean that not in a bad way because now I'm judging. Oh gosh, gosh, this is hard. You just have to dial it back and say, oh.

19:39 But anyway, I'm saying that it's hard and I just demonstrated right now that it's so easy to judge, so easy. And part of the exercise is not that you stop judging at all, but that you can recognize more easily when you're judging and at the distance to dialing it back and showing compassion instead of judgment gets shorter and shorter, the more you can recognize the judge. Because what it is, is that it's tricky. What it is, is that it's tricky when you do not recognize how harshly you judge yourself and you judge yourself without being conscious of it. And part of practicing not judging helps you to become so aware that you are able to continue to practice less judgment and less judgment and less judgment.

20:26 And so it really is about practicing an awareness that helps you be conscious about the way you speak to yourself, about the way you carry yourself, about the way you represent yourself to others. All right. I want to summarize those seven points, is that physicians tend to believe they understand compassion, but they really don't. They struggle with compassion. Number two is that physicians reserve the harshest judgment for themselves and they also easily judge others. And the first step to break through, number four, is to stop judging yourself. Number five is that once you stop judging yourself, you find the courage to stop judging others.

21:09 Number six is that only in compassion can your true self be found. And number seven is that only in compassion can you do your best work. I want to invite you, if you do not already have a coach who works with you, who encourages you, who helps you thrive, I want to be that coach for you. And maybe you already have a coach and everything is going great. That's wonderful. I still want to support you. I'd love to hear from you. You want to reach out by DM, on Facebook, on Instagram. I'm also on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best place to find me. All right. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. I invite you to go and show yourself some compassion because you are deserving. You're absolutely deserving of compassion.

21:50 And I hope that you'll take time to show yourself the compassion you deserve. All right. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. I look forward to seeing you again on the next episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast. Thank you for listening. 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. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it.

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