Seven questions you should ask 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 an absolute pleasure to be talking with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I am so excited to bring you today's episode about seven questions you should ask of your career. Seven questions you should ask of your career. This comes from a coaching session that we did earlier today with some amazing clients, and we were talking about what do we want our careers to give us?

1:27 What do we want our careers to give us? And there were certain things that kept coming up, and I thought it was so important and so powerful because if you don't have a picture in your mind of what you want your career to give you, what you want from your career, then you can't go out and create it. And the natural tendency of a career is towards chaos unless there is a plan, unless there's a plan. And the analogy that I use is the analogy of a garden. So let's say you plant a garden outside, looks beautiful, and then you get really busy in life and it takes about four to five months before you really have time to surface because work is so busy and you take a look at the garden, what is it going to do that?

2:08 What's it going to show you? What's it going to give you? It's going to give you weeds. It's going to be overgrown. The paths are going to be overgrown. Things are just going to be all over the place. Yes, the natural state of nature is wilderness. It's chaos. It's disorder. It's not order. Order is something that people bring to things. And so if you look at your career and you have the idea that it's going to deliver something amazing to you, but you have no plan, you have no structure, then it cannot deliver to you what you think it will deliver to you. And you'll get what most clinicians, what most clinician scientists get out of their career, burnout, dissatisfaction, anger, bitterness, feeling of defeat.

2:56 There's so much negativity that can come with a career as a physician or as a physician scientist, but that people who have joyful careers, people who celebrate their experience, people who feel like they've left a lasting impact, they've had legacy, they've been intentional about the kind of careers that they're creating. Now when I first started, I had no intentionality. I just thought I would just go in like I did when I was starting med school or go in like I did when I was starting residency and go in like I did when I was starting fellowship. What I didn't recognize is that although I didn't have a plan, they had a plan. And there was a curriculum. There was a list of competencies that I needed to accomplish.

3:38 And so there was an end. And they were working me through the process. And as long as I followed instruction, I was going to get to the end. But you get to your faculty career and there's no such plan. It's all over the place. You can kind of do whatever you want. It's a free for all, except that there are different places where people are demanding accountability. For example, patient care, so much accountability. Submitting grants, not so much, at least not as much accountability. Submitting manuscripts, yeah, not as much accountability. And so if you're going to create a career you want, you actually have to have a plan. But if you're going to create a plan, you have to know what the end looks like.

4:19 And so here are seven things I want you to think about in terms of what you're getting out of your career. Number one is spiritual. Now some people are like, well, I'm not really a spiritual person. I'm not a religious person, but that's not really what I'm talking about here when I'm talking about spiritual. What I'm talking about is your source, your nourishment of you as an individual. When we're in our careers, we're so focused on the doing. We're focused on the, okay, well, I need to do X, Y, Z so I can get to whatever and then I'll be productive in these areas. And you're thinking all about the mechanics and all of that.

5:01 But in reality, you, the person who's underlying all of that is about more than just the doing. You're mostly about the being. And your being can drive everything else in a negative direction or positive depending on how your being is doing. Right? And so if you are someone who has gratitude, if you're full of joy, if you're nurturing the deeper person within, you're going to create something amazing. But if you neglect the side of you, the human side of you, you suppress your emotions, you suppress your need for sleep, you don't worry about your stress levels, you're just all focused on the doing, you will find out over time that your doing becomes less effective because you did not attend to the being.

5:49 And so when I'm talking about asking of your career, spiritual things, what I'm saying is to what extent is your career nourishing the inner you? To what extent is your career creating space for you to be everything that you can be? To what extent is your career allowing you to be the human that you've always been? To what extent does your career create space for you? And I hear some people laughing and say, are we talking about a medical career or are you talking about a different kind of career? Are you talking about like an artist career? I'm saying that for everybody, there is an inner you that needs to be nourished.

6:32 Your career takes up a lot of your time. To what extent does it create space for you to be nourished? And it doesn't have to be that your career is one nourishing your inner being. It could be that your career facilitates the opportunity for you to take time to nourish your inner being. But you got to ask of your career, your spiritual health, that you as a person, the inner you is being nourished and that you're not so focused on the doing that you forget about the being, who you are and nourishing that person and sharpening the focus of that person. Because as you get better, everything gets better. And so you, the saw, must be sharpened or it doesn't matter how many trees you're trying to chop down.

7:14 If I may use a tree chopping analogy. So you matter. You matter most. And your career should create space for you. Okay. Number two, it's family. Okay. So nobody's an island. I didn't say that. This has been around for a long time. And the whole idea of only you existing is a fallacy. And to be honest, we're kind of like, so, I mean, I don't know about your med school, but in my med school, not many people were married. Like I had one person in my class of a hundred and 203 who was married by the time that we graduated, maybe two by the time we graduated. Right. So not very many people married in medical school.

7:56 And then going on like that, and over time you start to get more people that are added to the mix. Right. And so there's this whole fallacy that, oh, it's just the rugged individual, you know, you're showing up, you know, here you are, you're in class from, from eight to five, and then you're doing all the studying and the homework. And then on the weekends you're coming in to dissecting your cadaver. There's this whole idea that it's just you, but it's never been just you. There's always been family in the background, whether that is family, a significant other in your life, whether that's children in your life, whether that's your siblings, your parents, there's always family. You do not exist by yourself. You didn't come to medical school. You didn't come to medicine by yourself.

8:36 Hopefully you don't leave by yourself. And though, though, if you're not paying attention, you're going to neglect family. And so to what extent does your career support your ability to nurture the family that makes you whole, that makes you spiritually meaningful? To what extent does your career allow you to support your family? Right. To what extent does your career allow you to spend time with that family? And so if you're going to ask of your career anything, you want to make sure that there is space for your family, for nurturing your family, for growing your family in that career. The next thing is your health.

9:17 Okay. Now, it should go without saying, I'm talking to people who are in the business of healing others. The people in the business of healing others don't do so well when it comes to healing themselves. And so health is something that many physicians struggle with. And now I'm not even talking about physical health because somehow we do, we do okay. I mean, some of us are good at getting out in the mornings. We're running, we're exercising, we're at the gym, we're doing all the things. But what about stress? What about the way we're showing up as we eat? What about sleep? What about rest? What about all the things that make us a whole healthy being? Does your career give you space and opportunity to do that?

9:59 Now, as I'm talking, I'm hearing some people saying, are you talking about the same career that I'm talking about? I am. I'm saying it doesn't give it to you unless you demand it of your career. And how do you do that? We're going to get there, at least temporarily. But this is really about you asking the questions because until you ask the question, until you create the picture, well, you can't create what you want until you know what the image is, what you're driving for, you can't create it. And so what you should ask of your career is the ability for you to have good health because of not in spite of your career. The next thing is finances.

10:40 Okay, your finances. So in academic medicine, money seems to be a dirty word. Nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone's just like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get paid a fair salary. We know that's not always true. But fair salary or no fair salary. The reality is that you live in an economic world and your salary needs to go far enough to support you, support your family and support your future self. In addition to your ambitions, your fun, the things that you want to do. And so your finances matter. And if you're not thinking about what financially you want to get out of your career, then you can't plan for it.

11:22 Now this is not, oh, well, I knew I came into academia and I wasn't going to make a lot of money. It's okay. Yes. Making a lot of money is not necessarily the key to financial success. It is helpful, but not always necessary. I mean, we've heard about the school teacher who after like 20, 30 years of service, accumulated a couple of million dollars and donated it to a university. So it's not about how much money you earn as much as how much you keep, how much you invest, right? But you do know that your career acts as a platform to give you the seed that you use to create other wealth. And to what extent does your career supply you financially as you want it to so that you can go and create the wealth that you want to.

12:11 And you can create whatever you want for your family to come. And so understanding what your career will give you financially, or at least having a plan for it is important because until you're clear, then you don't know how to go about creating what you need to create so that you get where you want to be. All right. Another thing that your career gives you is personal development. Okay. So we love being in medicine because of all the things we learn. And it is so fun to grow as we take care of patients, as we do research, as we discover things, as we educate, we're growing, we're personally developing, we're studying, we're learning, and it's so much fun as long as we're doing that.

12:53 But if for whatever reason we are not developing personally, then we are really going backwards, right? We've got to continually be in the process of self continuous improvement. And I would say that medicine tends to do that okay, because there's all the CME that you need to be able to continue to get your license renewed. And so continuing medical education is necessary, but I'm not just talking about continuing medical education. Are you growing as someone who has new fresh ideas from other industries that are not in medicine, that are not in healthcare? If you go out to a dinner party, are you able to converse with people who are not in healthcare and feel confident that you can converse enough in a specific field?

13:37 How are you growing? What are the latest books that the New York Times bestsellers or whatever, what are the books that everyone's talking about? What is information that you should know at this stage of your life? And that's not limited to healthcare. And to what extent are you personally developing? Because if you're not developing, then you're stagnant. And you know what stagnant things produce, right? That smells and they don't look good. It's just if you're stagnant because you're not developing personally, then you're not happy and people around you are not happy either.

14:17 And so personal development is really important. Another thing is social capital. You spend a lot of time with your work friends. I hope you like them. I hope you're building a network that you actually want to hang out with. And for some of us, maybe not. Maybe we're like, you know what? I don't want my social capital in my career. Well, okay, maybe you don't want all of your social capital in your career because the reality is that there's a lot of social capital in your career. You just, you work a lot. And so the people you work with happen to be people you hang with, right? Or your collaborators happen to be people you talk to routinely. And so you want out of your career, a strong network, strong social capital, or at least the opportunity to create a social capital beyond just your contacts and healthcare.

15:08 To what extent does your career serve as a platform for you to grow your social capital, your networks, your communities? And finally, to what extent does your career give you the opportunity to create fun? Yes, because all work and no play makes Jack or Jill a dull person. And you know that being able to have fun in the midst of your career, now not talking about one or two vacations a year, those don't really count because you go to vacation and then you have to come back and recover from the vacation. And they're like, did I really have fun? You get a lot of great pictures, but maybe you didn't have fun. But I'm talking about sustained fun throughout your career, fun in the career that you're having, fun in the work that you're doing, fun in showing up to work, fun in the work that you're doing, fun in the things that you're producing, fun when you're not at work, but also fun when you're at work, does your career give you that?

16:02 Now these are the seven things that you should ask your career to give you. I want to summarize spiritual growth, family, health, your own personal health, finances, having fun, growing in personal development, social capital as well. Now these are things that you want to have from your career. Now there are other things, I'm talking about legacy. And many of us come and we're like, I came to help, I came to grow another generation, I came to give back. And so legacy is part of that as well. So let's call it number eight is legacy. But to what extent does your career give you all these things, some of these things, maybe none of these things?

16:44 So I'm going to invite you to rate yourselves on a scale of one to eight, right? Eight being legacy. To what extent does your career give you all these things in a way that's satisfactory to you? And if your career doesn't give them to you, then ask yourself, how can I get what I need from my career? Now remembering the garden analogy, if you don't specify what you want from your career, then all you can get is weeds and thorns and things that don't look good. Because the default state, and we know in medicine, the default leads to burnout and stress and anger, bitterness, all of that stuff. If you're going to have a career that delivers to you what you want from it, you've got to be very clear about what you want and how you're going to get it.

17:29 And being very clear about what you want allows you to decide, well, how do I get what I want? Is it really like, is it a dream? Is it true that I can get growth out of my career? I can get health and finance. My finances can be where I want them to be. Yes, yes. But only if you decide. And you can't decide until you've imagined that this is what you want. And you have a plan to get there. And so the first step is for you to consider to what extent can I get these things out of my career? And then just start to make a plan to get there. And it helps you because then you decide if you're going to sprint, like maybe in the first five to 10 years of your career to get things and then move to a different industry, you might decide that.

18:18 Or you might say, okay, these are the steps I need to take to recreate what I already have to get me to where I need to go. Or you might say you need a new space altogether. But you don't get to choose until you define what the outcome is so that you can now assess what seeds you're planting right now to determine if it gives you the garden that you actually want. So my next episode, I'm going to be sharing about what you could do to create what you want out of your career, no matter what your career is, but very especially to physician scientists, people who are growing as scholars in their academic careers.

18:59 It's been a pleasure to talk to you today. I look forward to talking with you again 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.

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