Powerful Conversations to Shape 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 what a pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm excited to bring you this particular podcast episode because I will tell you that it's one of those podcast episodes that I'm actually recording for myself. I record many podcast episodes for people based on questions they're asking me or conversations that come up, or things that come up in conversation.

1:29 Today is a unique day. I'm recording for me. And so as I'm speaking, I hope I say something that resonates with you, at least one thing of many of the things that I say, but if it doesn't, let me know. And if it does resonate, if something resonates with you, let me know as well. I'd just be interested to see, because I feel like this is one of the first ones I've done where I'm literally speaking to myself. Anyway, if I hadn't said that, maybe you wouldn't have known. But I wanted to say that because I'm going to come back and listen to this, and then I'm going to make decisions on the basis of how I feel at the end of listening to it. So anyway, you've been warned. But why this particular episode? So this episode I'm calling Powerful Conversations That Shape Your Career, Powerful Conversations That Shape Your Career.

2:16 And I recently submitted materials for promotion. And I have to tell you that ever since I did that, ever since I hit the submit button, I feel like I've been thrown into an existential crisis. And I don't know if maybe existential crisis is the right way to see it. It feels a little bit dramatic. Like really, this is an existential crisis. But it really is the place of like, oh, well, what do I do with my life now? I mean, yeah, I've submitted the materials for promotion, right? My work is done. There's nothing more I can do. I cannot guarantee the promotion. I can't do any of it. But I'm done. And so we know how sometimes in life we wait until we win before we celebrate. Well, I learned a long time ago, fortunately, I have a group of wonderful peer coaches.

3:00 And we meet weekly when we can. And we celebrate wins. And we celebrate wins not when the outcome is granted. Like for example, we submit. We submit a grant. We celebrate the submission, right? We submit the manuscript. We celebrate the submission. And many times in life, we're waiting for the thing where we're like, oh, it got accepted. Celebration. Yeah, it is a celebration when it gets accepted. But to be honest, that's like a late celebration. The real thing that you have control over is showing up every day and shipping, showing up and just pushing it out, right? That's the win. That's the part you control. Whether people accept what you ship out, whether people accept your submission or whether they love it or they don't love it, out of your control, right?

3:47 You do everything you can. You commit with excellence. You put it all together and then you send it out into the universe and then you're done. That is the moment of celebration because it is the combination of your efforts. It's a combination of the things that you have control over. And therefore, the fact that you've come to the finish line and you submit, that is a big deal and worthy of celebration. So it's a practice that we've had now for really over the past five years now. And I have to say it's a practice that sticks. And I now celebrate at the point of submission. Whatever happens is out of my control, but I celebrate the work that I've done up until this point.

4:30 So I submitted my materials for promotion and I celebrate it. I celebrate it. It was such a great experience pulling together the materials and writing my intellectual statement and shaping it. It was such a great experience. And one of the great experiences that came out of it was that there was just such a sense of gratitude. Like, wow, like, wow. Looking back over the past 10 years of my career, I have really enjoyed my trajectory. I've enjoyed the things I've done. I love the questions I've asked. I love the manuscripts I've written. I am proud of my work. And what a thing to celebrate.

5:10 Well, so yeah, I submit all of that. And then I'm like, well, what do I do now? What am I going to do with my life? I mean, clearly work doesn't stop and the schedule continues. The cycle of life continues. But I changed. Something's changed inside me and I can't even really explain what it is. I just know that it's time for something more. And you might say, hey, why don't you wait, see if you get the promotion and then try to change things up. But again, I told you it already happened. The biggest event happened. I submitted everything else outside of my control. I'm not even looking to that as a thing to celebrate. So that's where I am in this place.

5:51 I'm like, well, how do I do now? What do I want to do? And to be honest, if I don't change anything, life is great. But I just know, you know, when you just know that it's time, but you're like, well, what is it time for? Anyway, so I feel that to say that, you know, when you have this feeling, you know, feeling that something needs to be different and you're not even sure what, maybe you've been there, maybe you haven't. I suspect you've been there because we've had many transition points in our careers already, like just coming to the faculty role. Many transition points have happened, but it's always happening at least. But there are some points where there's just a clarity of like, okay, some things needs to be different, but you're not sure what it is. So I want to talk about conversations that shape these transition points and the importance of thinking critically about who is in my circle, my circle of counselors that helps me make decisions, right?

6:43 They may not even know that you're talking with them about big decision-making moments, but who are the people we go to and what are some of the phases you think through as you're thinking about these people as your counselors? So the very first thing, the very first group I think about is your early-career mentors. Now, I don't know about you, but I really grew up with this sense of like, who's the one mentor who's taking ownership of my life? Who's the one mentor? Who's the one mentor? And I, you know, I mean, it was never real for me. It was never one person, right? There was never the one. I don't even believe in the one. I don't preach about the one. I think it's important for everybody to think about the network of mentors. But definitely when you're younger, and I think some of that comes from kind of our early life and the fact that we have parental figures and they were kind of really prominent.

7:32 So I liken it to that in our early career where there's this sense like, who's the one person who I go to for the most important big decisions of my career? And I think it's okay to start there because, hey, where else are you going to start? You start with one, right? And you never despise the small numbers because small things become great things. And so, yeah, you start off with one person that you trust and you speak to a lot more than others, right? And we have many people in our lives. It's not just our, you know, the people that we have in our careers. But when we think about our medical careers, there's a select group of people who can speak to our experiences, right? In our families, our families may be like, especially if they're not medical, they're like, well, you've done a lot.

8:14 Is there more? You just like dial it back. So it's not that we don't have people surrounding us. It's like you start to think, who are the people who get it? Who are the people who get me? Who are the people who understand? Right? Anyway, so you start out with the early career mentors, you know, the people you go to regularly for advice. But even if you have that, and many of us don't have that, or many of us didn't have that, or we didn't, and we didn't really acknowledge it, or it didn't feel like what we thought we were looking for. And so, I don't know, we never, we feel like we didn't win that lottery. But even if you did, you get to a point where you realize that this one person that you go to often is not enough.

8:57 And the questions, to be honest, have always been bigger than this one person. But the more you advance in your career, the more experiences you gain, the more people you meet, you begin to realize that I need more. And in reality, there was a point in our lives when we're okay just talking about the career stuff all the time. But then there's a point we get to in our lives where we're like, well, I'd love to talk about the career stuff, but can I just acknowledge that I need to care for my parents, and I'm wondering about how to do that in the midst of my job? Or can I just admit that my kids are no longer babies, but hey, they're at a place in life where I feel like they need me more, even though they kind of don't, right? Those are the kinds of conversations, or maybe you're like, well, you know, I need help.

9:42 I want to talk about our relationship, maybe a significant relationship in your life. What I'm saying is that there's so many things beyond your career where when you first start out, you're content to leave them all out of the conversation of your career because you're like, well, this is my career and that's my life. Then you get to a place where it's like, wait, can I just be honest about how these things actually color my perspective on my career? And it's real. And to be honest, it's always been there. But it's us getting to a point where we feel comfortable or confident enough to say, can I stop lying? Can I come out of the closet now and tell you that my relationships matter in my career decisions? Can I kind of just be honest about that?

10:23 Can I tell you that, yeah, I mean, I may never have said that this is what I'm dealing with in my family, but this is relevant. But we move from where we are like, okay, let's just talk about career. Let's just talk about career with our one mentor. When we get to a point where we're like, I need more, who else can I talk to? Who else can I talk to that helps me think about how I'm shaping my career in light of everything else that's going on? Who else can I reach out to? And so that's where we move on to another phase. And that's where we talk to peer mentors. And to be honest, I think many of us do a good job of having peer mentors along the journey. When we get to our careers, somehow we say, hey, peer mentors, you guys are good for residency at all?

11:04 I'm going to focus on this one mentor right now. But as you grow, you start to realize that, you know what, my peers, my peers, or my near peers, they've got a lot to tell me. They may not be super senior to me, but there are a lot more things, more conversations I can have with these people who are my peers and feel like, okay, I'm bringing more of my life to the table. I'll tell you this earlier this evening at a great gathering with a group of some of my colleagues from residency. I just was struck by the kind of camaraderie that we still share. We don't really talk very often, but when we see each other, there's just such a depth of love and understanding that exists.

11:45 And I was sitting down pondering that today. I was like, what is that? I mean, you know, residency, it's a challenging time. And so the people with whom you've had a shared experience, there's a certain bond that grows, but you don't have that with everybody. But there are some people where every time you meet them, you know, this person's got my back, this person's looking out for me. And so these are peer mentors where you can sit down and have a conversation. And I had one with one of my colleagues who was like, hey, it was a stressful time and I could just sit down and listen and be a sounding board. And he in turn for me, and so what a beautiful experience to have that network of peers where even if you don't meet regularly, but I actually do have a network that I meet weekly with and I haven't been able to meet with them for two weeks now, but we're still checking in and we're saying, hey, how are things going?

12:36 We still maintain the network. We have a group chat. And so there's that connection that continues. And it's great because it's career focused. We are clearly about advancing our careers, but it's also very much more real life, very much more, yeah, we're talking about our careers, but can I talk about my recent visit to the doctor with my son and the challenges that that brings? And that's all part of our ongoing conversations. And it's a really beautiful thing because, you know, there's no feeling that we have to hold back or pretend everything's okay so that maybe a mentor doesn't feel like, hey, can you handle this work? You know, just none of that, right?

13:18 Okay, so you start off with those, you know, focus, I'm just here for my career, senior mentor, tell me what to do. And then you start to branch out into, who can I really talk to where my career and my family can come together and I can really talk, you know, talk about the real things. And so that's your peer mentoring group. Okay, now the third group is colleagues on the edge of the rim. That's what I call them, I call them colleagues on the edge of the rim. So the people I call colleagues on the edge of the rim, and maybe that is a better term, I'm not even sure what the term should be. But these are your colleagues who, they're on the edge.

14:00 They're on the fringes of faculty life. They haven't left for industry. They haven't, you know, left to go do something else. They haven't quit medicine altogether, but they're not doing things the way everybody else is doing. You know, they're just, they're out there doing different things. And you look at them and you're like, you know, I don't want to be like you, but you know, I kind of want to be like you. Can you help me understand why you do what you do? Why you think how you think? You know, one of my colleagues, and he came to mind as I've been thinking about my, these powerful conversations that shape my career, he comes to mind and he's very much a guy who, when I first started, he'd be like, you don't see, you don't have to do it. Just say no.

14:41 And I'm like, oh, you know, we've been asked to cover vacation. He's like, you know what? Don't want to cover vacation. Just say no. It's like, you can't say no. Everybody has to cover. It's like, nope, just say no. And you know, so, you know, one of those people who's like, you're, you're like, yeah, you clearly don't follow the convention, you know, and you have mixed feelings about them. And I did. I have mixed feelings about this. My colleague, he's a great guy, but I'm also like, I'm like, I don't know if I'm ready to be off on the edge like that. How about I go over here? But every so often you get to a point where you're like, you know what? I'm not even sure what I want to do. I want to go find those colleagues who are kind of doing things differently or who think radically differently and, and pull them or, you know, talk to them and say, Hey, talk to me about how you think about X, Y, Z. And you need those people.

15:32 The reason you need those people is because whenever you're on the fringe of transition, you need people who don't think like everybody else does. You need people who are not status quo. You need people who think differently because they cause you to think differently. They cause you, they jog, they jog, jog your memory or they, they, they stir things that are deep inside you that you suppress because you're, you know, probably like me, goody two shoes. You want to like follow the rules, do what everybody else is supposed to be doing. Once every once in a while, you're like, I want to go to the people who seem like they're doing things differently. And I wouldn't say, Hey, how are you thinking about this? Because I want new thought. I want, I want new ideas and you have ideas that are different.

16:15 I want to hear about it. And so these are some of these conversations that I think are important to have with the faculty who are doing things differently, who live life differently, who show up differently. You don't see them. You got to go find them. So that's my colleague. We're going to have a meeting with him in a couple of weeks. He doesn't know yet. And I haven't even scheduled the time. I haven't reached out, but I know we're talking. And I have to go find him because he doesn't walk the hallways. He's not in the meetings. I usually don't see him. These are the people I call colleagues on the end. They're on the fringes. They haven't left. They didn't quit academia. They're still doing it, but they're doing it uniquely. They're doing it in their own way. And I think it's important to have these conversations so you can say, Hey, what else is out there?

16:58 And if someone's shaping their careers differently, how, how might I think about doing it? How might I think about doing it? So think about your colleagues who I call colleagues on the edge of the room, colleagues on the edge, maybe colleagues on the edge. All right. I need to find a better name, but that's what you get. Number four is to talk to people who are nearing the end of their careers. Yeah. That means that 20, 30, actually more like 30, 40 years out, they're nearing the end of their careers. And you can tell because they've started stepping down. They've started stepping back. I met such a colleague today and she's giving up one of her pivotal roles. And I'm like, what's going on? What are you doing?

17:39 Are you retiring? And she's like, no, not retiring. I'm just stepping back. When colleagues are starting to step back, they're closer to the end of their careers because they've kind of, I don't want to say they've peaked, but they've done it. They've like gone for gold. They've gotten all the, you know, all the, they, they met all the criteria. They've been promoted. They've been in leadership. They've just done it all. And now they're like, don't have to do that anymore. And they're starting to peel back. You know who those colleagues are, but it's really important to have conversations with these kinds of colleagues because they may not necessarily tell you what to do. They have a unique perspective.

18:20 They talk to you about what really matters. They're like, yeah, all this checking box stuff. I did all that. And what really matters is, and they share and they have such gold. And so what you get from them is perspective. It's an opportunity to travel to the future and look back. And now they're not in your future. You're creating your own, but it's such an opportunity to say, okay, what do they say matters the most today? As they're looking back on an illustrious career, like these people have really done amazing. They're not just like, you know, I was just a bum the whole time of my career and now I'm just going to quit.

19:01 They've really done it. And so it's so helpful to have these conversations with them to say, hey, how did you think about your career? Why did you do it this way? What are you thinking about? And in these conversations, you're not going to ask them, what do I do? You're just going to get wisdom from them. I'll share with you one such wisdom that I got today. And I'm trying to think, which one do I share? But one of the things this colleague told me is that, yeah, you know, sometimes you get to a point where you know something has to change and you have to respect that.

19:41 And you know, as I speak about it now, it doesn't feel so powerful and insightful, but it is. It is because sometimes we're doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, and we need someone to tell us it's okay to pause and pay attention, pay attention. It's okay that you're thinking differently or that you're thinking about your career differently. So yes, go talk to people who are nearing the end of their careers because what they give you is perspective. When you come back from their perspective giving or their perspective taking to your small neck of the woods, it changes the way you see your current experience.

20:24 And it helps you do what is number five. Number five for me is listening to that still small voice. You know, when all is said and done, there is a voice and it's a voice inside you. I want to say it's your voice and I wouldn't be wrong to say it's your voice, but I want to say it's bigger than your voice. And the reason I want to say it's bigger than your voice is that it's a voice you only hear when you're really listening. You only hear it when you're really listening. It is such a quiet, still, small voice. It does not yell. It does not scream. It does not jostle. It will not fight you, but it's there and it's sure and it's steady and it's sound is pretty clear, but it doesn't speak a language.

21:12 It's not English. It's not French, but it's a language of peace. Actually, it's just this sense of, yeah, that's what I'm supposed to do, but you don't hear it until you make space for it. You don't until you're quiet, until you quiet every voice and you're like, okay, checking. How do I feel? What do I want to do? And I have to say it's hard to get to the place of hearing this voice because you really got to be still. And it's not just still like I'm just sitting still. It's stillness of like, hmm, moving aside everybody's opinions.

21:54 I have all of this information I've gathered through my conversations over the time and the course of my career, but it's really saying, okay, let's push every thought aside, every perspective aside. Let's move it all aside. Now what do I want to do? For some of us, this voice has been pretty much squished for years and maybe not by us, maybe by other well-meaning people who are like, nope, this is the way you go. Oh, I don't care that you care about that. This is what I told you to do. I'm your senior. You should do this. For many of us, fear and anxiety and shame have kept us from this voice.

22:35 And so it takes us a long time to reconnect. For some of us, we need help. Thank God for coaches. I love them. I'm one. You should come catch with me. But what they do, what coaches do, what we do is we create space for you to hear that voice. And part of how we create space is we ask you powerful questions. And then you have to answer them. Well, you don't have to, but you do. And those powerful questions cause you to do this thing where you're literally pulling the thoughts out of yourself out into the open, where you can more easily hear.

23:17 I wanted to say where you can more easily see. It's not really a thing you see, but it is a thing you see with your, I guess, inner eyes. You perceive it better. Because all of a sudden someone created space for you and they allowed you to bring it out of you and evaluate it like you would do other things logically. And so for some of us, we get that experience to some extent in therapy, right? Where we're pulling things out of us. And because we're pulling it out of us, we're recognizing what the answer is. It's like, oh, this is so obvious to me now. I now know. And all because somebody created space for us. For some of us, maybe we have a friend who does that.

24:00 There are many, many people who don't. For some of us, maybe it's a sister, but someone who just gets you. And there are people who get you naturally and there are people who study how to get you. They create space for you so you can pull out those thoughts that are muddled. And when you pull them out, you lay them out in front of you and you're like, oh, that's it. That's exactly what I should do. And I want to invite you to that place. I'm going to invite you to that place because it's the place of inner wisdom. It's the place of the sage. If you've read, gosh, what's this guy's name? The PQ, Positive Intelligence by Shozard Chamin.

24:44 He talks about the sage. The sage knows the answer. Yes, I'm talking about the place of the sage. The wisdom that's buried deep inside you that's not superficial. That really you have to go after. You have to go searching after. Having gathered all the wisdom from so many people, it's time to be still and to hear the voice that's inside you. What do you really want to do? Here's the thing about that voice. Sometimes it tells you things that feel crazy to your logical mind. But the more you sit with the thought, the more you know that that voice is real. It is true. It is telling you something you should pay attention to.

25:25 You may struggle with it in your logical mind. For example, maybe the voice is like, maybe it's time to give it patient care. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Many times it will be something that's radical like that where your mind is like, no, no, no, I'm very logical. I spent 20 years of my life. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. But it's there and it's waiting for you to stop resisting and to listen and to listen again. And it's not just about listening. It's about honoring what you hear.

26:06 It's about honoring what you hear. And the reality of our lives is that for every time we dishonor what we hear, we hurt ourselves. Before we finally come back, months, maybe years later, you're like, yeah, yeah, I should have listened. I should have listened. You've probably had that experience. I certainly have. Where you just telling you something and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, that can't be real. And then later on you're like, I had a feeling. It's that feeling I'm talking about. The feeling I want you to listen for and the feeling I want you to respect as you're making decisions in your career.

26:46 And this is a place where you come off the box checking ladder, you come off the climbing ladder and you sit down. It's kind of like deep dark in the dungeons, but it's not really the dungeons. It's better than that. It's like the valley, the beautiful green valley where the streams are just gently, gently rolling by and you hear the trickle of the water. It's not noisy. It's quiet in a different kind of way. That's the space I'm talking about. The space of beauty. The space where blue meets green and creates all sorts of beautiful colors, purples and yellows and reds. That's so rich and so beautiful.

27:28 It's that space. Maybe what you need to do now is close your eyes and imagine that space. That space of a deep knowing of what the inner you is really saying. And I want to say that your major life transitions, your major decisions need to come to this moment. But once you've gathered all the information, it's time to now decide what direction you go in. And I want to invite you to trust yourself. Trust the voice. It is you. It's bigger than you and it is never wrong. So those are five powerful conversations that I have talked about today and I told you I was talking to myself.

28:12 But I hope that this was helpful to you. I'm going to recap these five powerful conversations. One is the conversations you have with your early career mentors. Pretty narrow, pretty focused, all about the career. The second is with your peer mentors where you can expand it a little bit and really talk about the stuff. The third is with your colleagues on the edge, the ones who didn't leave yet, who haven't left yet, but who have a very different way of doing life in the academy. And the fourth is people nearing the end of their careers because they give you that kind of perspective that you may not be thinking about, but that will be helpful when you get to number five, the place of the still small voice.

28:56 The inner you, the powerful voice that really knows what the next step is. I invite you to that space and I hope that you'll discover it and I hope that you will honor it and move forward with boldness and courage, even when it's telling you something that feels a little bit odd and weird. All right. Thank you so much for taking time to listen. Remember we are always here. I am always here, available to coach you. If you are interested in setting up a coaching conversation call, please send me a message. I am on Facebook. I'm on Instagram. I'm on where am I on most often LinkedIn. Definitely find me there. I'd love to talk with you and love to see how I can connect with you and be a blessing to you.

29:40 All right. It's been a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to talking with you again the next time on 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. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.