How to take ownership of 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 for taking the time to listen to this episode as I talk about how to advance your career. Yes. Today I'm talking about how to advance your career.

1:23 And while it may seem intuitive and obvious to some, I think it's not always intuitive and obvious to everybody. And for that reason, I do want to make it explicit. We want to make it explicit because I needed somebody to make it explicit for me when I first started. And to be honest, somebody did. But it is hard to fit career advancement as a faculty member into the framework we've built over the course of our medical education and training. So personally, I remember going to medical school. And medical school, I don't know about your experience, but for me was a slog.

2:07 I finished, I mean, just like made it, barely made it through all the first year, and then it was time for second year, and then it was time for third year. And then, oh, fourth year was here and everything was over. And it just felt like every time you were learning something new and every time with an overwhelming amount of knowledge, that you were just following the curriculum. I was just going through the motions. And as long as I was studying hard and passing my tests, I was going to make it through. And then I got to residency and intern year was a fair. And it was just so intense and there was so much learning. And it literally took up most of my life. And then there was second year and then there was all this learning about how to be a senior resident and then there was third year.

2:52 And then it was over. Anyway, so there's a pattern being established here. There's a pattern of, wow, so busy, I can barely look around and breathe. But there's this curriculum. And as long as I'm following the path and doing all the things and taking the test, I'm making it through. So unthinkingly, I'm just working hard. I'm making it through. And then of course, there was fellowship and there was more of the same. But then when I got to my faculty career, all of a sudden, there's all this responsibility. There's all this stuff to do. But now the end of the road is not so clear. It's like, so what are we heading for?

3:34 Where are we going? At the end of this, what is the big prize? Is there a certificate? Is there an award? No. Is there more money? And sometimes the answer to that too is no. And so it feels nebulous. And so when a faculty member sat down with me and went through all the things it takes to succeed as a faculty member, I have to tell you that I didn't have any frame to hang it in. You know, you just get information. You're like, oh, there's nowhere to put that, throwing that away. Because when you think about the way we remember things, the way memory works is you take something new and you attach it to something that's a little bit similar.

4:19 And there you are able to kind of solidify that memory. There's a more technical way to say that. But you know what I mean. It's just that one thing connects to another and then you're able to make sense of it. And so if there's no clear connection, it's hard to make sense of it. And so I feel like all the advice I got, that's exactly what happened. I was like, oh, there's no way to put this. Thank you and no thank you. Fortunately, I wrote a lot of it down. And so over the years, I've been able to go back and say, oh, that's what this person was saying. Oh, this is what it means to succeed as a faculty member. And I'll give you the Cliff Notes version first, and then I'll explain it in different terms. Because I think there's a difference between all the steps and the motions you need to go through and the responsibility that you take, the ownership you take for your career.

5:10 And that's why the title of this podcast episode is How to Take Ownership of Your Career. Because you can go through motions as we did in medical school and residency and probably for some of you fellowship. But going through motions does not equal success. It equals success in training, but it does not equal success as a faculty member. Because to be a successful faculty member, you've got to define a direction for your career and then lead that direction. It's very different from all of the training. And so when you first get started in your faculty career, it just doesn't feel like anything you've ever done before because it's not. And there's still a feeling of deficit because you're like, well, here I am trying to succeed as an academic and I don't even really know how.

5:57 And oh, I'm looking around and is there a mentor who can guide me through? And if there's none, or if we perceive there to be none, then we feel lost. We feel like, well, I guess we just keep going through the motions. And unfortunately, going through the motions of your faculty career usually doesn't get you to where you want to be. And that's why I want to talk about taking ownership of your career. And today I think I have five things to talk about as far as taking ownership of your career. And the very, very first one, and I think is the most important one, is to first of all take responsibility. Yes. Number one way to advance your career is to take responsibility.

6:42 That means you say, I am in charge. You raise your hand and you say, it's me. I am the one responsible for my career advancement. I would like to invite you, if you're willing, to just pause what you're doing right now and raise your right hand. If you're left handed, please let it be your left hand. And in fact, it doesn't matter which hand you choose. Just raise a hand, please. And say after me, I am responsible for my career advancement. I'd like to invite you to say it one more time. I am responsible for my career advancement. Okay. The reason I wanted you to say it with me is because it's true.

7:26 And it's because sometimes you have to hear yourself say it to agree that it's true or to decide whether you believe it or not. And the reality of the statement you just made alongside me or you just repeated after me is that it's always been true. It's always been true. Who applied for you to get into medical school? Who took the MCAT for you? Who went to all those interviews for you? Who applied to residency? Who went through all the residency interviews? Who went through intern year and survived? Who did residence?

8:07 Who did their resident year? For us it was a junior assistant resident year and then it was a senior assistant resident year. It was a three-year program. For some of you, maybe it was four or five. Who did that for you? You did that yourself. And yes, there was a curriculum. And yes, there was a group of things you were going through, but you took ownership and you did it. You applied. You went for interviews. You said all the right things. You researched all you were supposed to say and do. You have been in charge of your own career advancement from the very beginning. And so why do you get to your faculty career and suddenly hand that over to someone else? There's the sense that there's somebody else who knows better.

8:50 There's somebody else who can tell me where to go. There's somebody else who's done it before. Therefore, they're responsible. But at the end of the day, it's really you. The reason it has to be you, the reason nobody can do it for you is because your life is so amazingly unique. It is so incredibly yours, so uniquely yours. Nobody has lived your life before. Nobody came from the same place that you came from. No one's passed through the same kind of challenges you've come through. No one has the same career as you. And yes, there's a general framework for how academic faculty careers can work. There's a general framework of what things are considered academic currency, so to speak, signing papers and submitting grants.

9:36 Yes, there is that overarching window or overarching banner of what a faculty career should look like. But the individual issues, the specifics are really yours. And so nobody can take ownership of it like you can. So don't abdicate responsibility. Take ownership and say, hey, I'm the one who's responsible for this career advancing. And no, it doesn't mean you disregard your mentors. It doesn't mean you stop looking for them. It doesn't mean you don't go get what you need. It doesn't mean you don't take advice from people. But it does mean you're not just accepting whatever you're told.

10:17 You're synthesizing it in light of your career. And you're saying, okay, I get that these are all the metrics. How can I make it work in a way that's uniquely mine? Because sometimes what happens to us is that people say these are the metrics to succeed. Okay. And then they say, well, if you take this project and do this and apply for this grant funding and do this, you will succeed. And they're not wrong. If you follow verbatim everything your amazing mentor outlines for you to do exactly to a T, you probably will succeed because they're probably outlining for you the way they succeeded.

10:57 And at the end of the day, succeeding in academic medicine really is about following a set of principles. But the set of principles could be skinned in different ways. And one person did it one way and another person did it the other way. And everybody swears by their method. The question is what works for you? I think about the fact that mentors can advise you whether or not they're in the same life situation as you. But the specifics of how it works out is yours. For example, one of my mentors doesn't have young children. Like, now that my children are older, I get it. There's an amnesia that happens once you pass the stage where your children are toddlers or even in the stage where they're not even sleep trained yet.

11:43 There's an amnesia that happens. You totally forget that stage. You forget that your mind was fuzzy and cloudy all the time. You forget that you barely knew left from right. You forget that you were tired. You just forget all of that. I've forgotten. Intentionally so. But the reality is if you're in the middle of it, it is your reality. You are living it. And so when someone tells you that this is the way I worked it out and I did this and I did that and then I didn't sleep for three weeks in a row and then I did this, it's great. What I want you to take from that is the principle that's underlying it. The fact that when you are committed to something, you do what it takes to succeed.

12:25 I get that. And then the question is how does it fit in the life that you're living right now? Do you have the resources to do that kind of thing, to make that kind of commitment today or do you need to take it a little bit easier right now because the season of life you're in doesn't let you do that? That's something that only you can decide because I don't know about you, but in my mentoring conversations, we are not talking about my kids. We are not talking about how much they sleep. We're not talking about what stage of life they are. For the most part, they're kind of just not part of the conversation. And maybe it's not your kids. Maybe it's a significant other and a big relationship problem that you are experiencing.

13:07 That's not at the table, but that's really taking up a lot of space and energy in your life. And they're all important. All of it is important. The one person who has the vantage point and can actually synthesize all of it is you. And therefore, I tell you and you know that the one person who needs to take ownership for the career is you. And I invite you to step up and take ownership. Again, it doesn't mean that you disdain the advice that you get. All the advice is important and asking for help is still important, but recognizing that really you're making the final decisions and that it's okay to live a career where you're not trying to make everybody else happy because making everybody else happy usually is not honoring yourself, not honoring your needs.

13:55 It's not recognizing your needs and tailoring life to your needs. So, number one, and I spent a long time on that one, was take responsibility. The second thing is to look for your blind side. You got to look for your blind side. What does that mean? You know when you are driving a car, there's a blind spot. It's a blind spot. Not your blind spot. It's your blind spot. And you can't tell what's in that blind spot unless you angle your head to look around. The mirror is great. There's a particular part of your car and some cars driving in this zone, you can't see it.

14:40 And so, the blind spots in your career are the things you don't yet know that you don't know. The transition from being a trainee to being a faculty member is a huge transition. It's really like nothing you've ever done before. And yeah, the clinical stuff, you've got that down. But all the other stuff, there's just no one's, you haven't done it before. And it's hard to know what you don't know. Even if you have been so equipped and so prepared and you have mentors who have been telling you from the beginning, you didn't really have any place to hang it until you actually started walking the path as a faculty member. And even then, it just feels like one big ball of fuzz. It's hard to know exactly what you're supposed to do until you begin to do it.

15:24 And so, there's so much that's out of your fear of knowledge. And so, you have blind spots. There are things you can't see that you should see because if you collide with them, they kind of will hurt you. There are things you don't yet know. And so, what do you do? How do you look out for your blind spots? Well, it's helpful if you have a specialized kind of mirror. Okay, now I'm talking about driving. But really, it's helpful to have somebody else help you, help you see what those blind spots could be. It's helpful for you to have peers that you can ask questions of.

16:06 It's useful for you to have mentors that you can ask questions of. What's important is when you know that there are things you don't know, it changes the way you behave because it means you go out seeking to find those blind spots, making sure that they are not hidden from view. It's just coming into your career, knowing and understanding that there are things you do not know, and then taking the steps to go figure it out. But what you want to do is you want to make sure that you are acknowledging the fact that there are some things you do not yet know, and it's okay.

16:46 The next step, once you've figured out your blind spots, not your blind sites, is to pursue knowledge. And if you're going to succeed in your faculty career, you're going to want to pursue knowledge desperately. Now, you're a physician, so pursuing knowledge is something you've done for years and years and years of your training. It's a different kind of training. It's a different kind of pursuit of knowledge now. Now it's not the pursuit of knowledge of how do I take care of patients? What's the path of physiology? But you're going to continue to do that forever and ever as long as you take care of patients. Amen. But it's the knowledge of what does it mean to be recognized in your field? What does it mean to have a program of research that's highly regarded?

17:32 What does it mean to be internationally renowned? What does all that stuff mean anyway? Pursue knowledge. And I want to invite you to not just pursue knowledge within your own sphere. And I think this is a mistake that I made that I do see other people making as well. This sense that everything begins and ends at their own institutions or within their own divisions or within their own mentoring networks. And the reality of this world is that it's huge. It is so huge. And sometimes knowledge gained from outside of your sphere, your immediate sphere, feels more valuable than knowledge gained from your immediate sphere. Because I don't know what it is.

18:12 The moment someone comes from outside and tells us the same thing, it's like, oh, yeah, of course, this is true. Sometimes it's harder to believe from the people we already know. And so pursue knowledge. Pursue knowledge about how to grow as a faculty member. Pursue knowledge about how to succeed in publications. Pursue knowledge about how to succeed in grant writing. How to succeed in getting funded. It's knowledge. It can all be learned. Sometimes I hear people say things like, oh, you know, no one's succeeding anymore and it's not true. There are people succeeding all the time. There are a lot of people talking about not succeeding. And then there are people who are not talking.

18:53 They're just doing it. What you want to do is leave all the people who are talking about it and not doing it and find the people who are doing it. And I tell you that the reason you don't see them or hear them is because they're just too busy doing it. They're just too busy applying principles and succeeding based on those principles. I'm not saying that, oh, the economy is not hard or that grant funding is not difficult. I'm not saying all of that is not true. I'm just saying that there are people who spend time talking about it all the time and there are people who don't talk about it. They just get going and get to like working at it. And at the end of the day, the principle, the principle of pursuing and persevering always work.

19:38 And so pursue knowledge, pursue knowledge like crazy because the knowledge you get is a knowledge that transforms your career. Number four, don't just pursue knowledge. Oh, my goodness. We've been pursuing knowledge for years. Some of us a decade or more, but take action. You're going to learn things that you have not done before. And you can stop and say, ah, that doesn't sound like it's ever going to work. Or you can take action and test for yourself whether it's going to work. You can say, you know what, I submitted one grant four years ago. That thing doesn't work.

20:19 Or you can say, how about I do it again and this time use this strategy or this time take the feedback I was given and do it this way or this time go and establish a feedback loop and do it that way. You could just take the knowledge and just be full of knowledge or you could take the knowledge and take action. Because I don't know about you. I had, you know, the experience I had in residency sometimes was, oh, if I could go back and do med school over, all that information would now stick because now I've been using it. So now it makes sense to me.

21:01 And I feel like I would go back and I would learn it so much better. And it's the same thing. Experiential action is so much better than experiential knowledge. Yes. Like, knowledge as you work is so much better than knowledge as you, you know, that you just imbibe and you're not really doing anything with. And so don't just pursue knowledge. Don't just get knowledge from everywhere. But take action. The last thing I want to say and what number am I at now? Take responsibility. Look for your blind spots. Pursue knowledge.

21:41 Take action. Aha. Number five, get connected. Okay. Someone's got this information. You could spend a lot of time looking it up or you could connect to the person who already knows it. And for many of you, that's your mentor. Great. It's a peer mentor. Awesome. Or it's somebody who's just, you know, putting out that information like me. There's a lot of treasure in this podcast platform, if I may say so myself. But I'm not the only one, right? I'm not the only one putting out information about how to succeed as a faculty member. So many other people are doing that. And so go get the information.

22:23 Get connected to someone who can show you how to do it. Don't wait. Don't wait for the information to come to you. Don't say, well, my mentor didn't tell me. Don't say, well, it's not something anybody talks about at my institution. Don't say nobody will pay for me to do that. Please do not do that. This is your career. Remember at the beginning of this episode, you raised your hand with me and you said, I take responsibility. I take responsibility for my career. Remember that? Because it's true. If you don't succeed, your mentor will be sad, or at least a little bit. And then they'll move on. They'll keep living their lives because they were before you came along. But if you don't succeed, you get stuck with the bill, right? If your career doesn't go the way you want it to, if your career is crazy, if it's not the career you want, you get stuck.

23:08 You get stuck with the bill at the end. And so I want to encourage you to connect to people who will accelerate you, people who will advance you, people who will help you be everything you can be. And I want to invite you, I want to invite you to think today of all the things we talked about. So we talked about five things. We talked about taking responsibility. Remember we raised our hands together and we said, I take responsibility for my career. And then number two, we talked about looking for the blind spots, the things you don't know that you don't know. We talked about pursuing knowledge inside your institution, outside your institution. We talked about the importance of not just having the knowledge, but actually taking the action. And then we talked about the importance of getting connected.

23:49 I invite you to just take one of those things and use it. I invite you to just take one of those things and just do it this week. Take responsibility, maybe take action, maybe pursue knowledge. Just one thing, just one thing this week. Don't do too much. One thing. And then I want you to come tell me about it. Come tell me about what you did and how it helped you advance your career. Or even if it hasn't yet advanced your career, it hasn't obviously advanced your career, tell me about how it helped you feel confident, feel more confident that you were heading in the right direction. Because the moment you decide that you're in charge of this career, you show up differently.

24:31 Yeah. All right. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen today. I look forward to the next time that we can talk about how you can advance your own career and maybe advance the career of other people around you as well. All right. Thanks for listening. I look forward to talking with you again the next time. 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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