You're listening to Life After Medicine, the podcast for health professionals who want to make a difference, make a living, and still have the freedom to enjoy their lives. My name is Chelsea Turgeon, and my mission is to help you, the lost health professional, find your authentic path to helping others and generating stable income without having to sacrifice your own health and happiness in the process. Most unfulfilled healthcare professionals that I talk to who want to find work they enjoy are also very much paralyzed with fear. They're scared of making the wrong choice or the wrong move. And essentially, the thought process is, well, like, what if I choose something where I have to spend more money and more time going into further education, and I end up not liking it. At the end of the day, you don't want to make the wrong choice because you don't want to waste more time and more money. But the idea that making any sort of misstep in your career has to cost you significant time or money is just false. Now, I absolutely understand why you think that making the wrong choice in your career is going to cost you time and money. Because you have been there, done that, and bought the t shirt. So when you went into medicine, you probably thought you could use your love of science and help people and that it would be just this incredible, fulfilling career path. And so you invested your time, your youth, probably your 20s, and your money in pursuing it. And then turns out 10 years,$100, 000 later, nope, not what you thought it would be. Of course you're worried that that's going to happen again, that you're going to repeat the same pattern. That makes so much sense. But, let me ask you something. What if there's actually no wrong career choice? What if there's only steps towards finding where you can contribute the most effectively? And what if every career experience that you have actually contributes to your growth? What if you could see every role and every position and every past experience as an opportunity to learn more about what your strengths are, what you're interested in, what is the unique contribution that you enjoy making in various settings? By viewing each career decision as a step in this continual learning process, there's this shift from fearing failure To actually embracing each new experience as a teacher and having this mindset allows you to be more peaceful and more playful and just have a overall more positive attitude towards making any sort of career transition. Because every step you take is going to provide insights into what environments that we thrive in what sort of tasks really jazz us up or what drains us. Right? And you guys are all scientists, so you know this. That in order to discover new insights, scientists have to conduct experiments, And they don't always turn out exactly as hypothesized. Sometimes you design the experiment and you think one thing is going to happen and something else entirely happens. You don't get the results that you wanted. You don't get the results you thought you were going to have. But, if the experiment is designed correctly You still get really valuable information, even if it's not the information you expected. And conducting that experiment is actually something that, even though you didn't have the results you wanted, it still is bringing you one step closer to your ultimate goals. So if you can take this approach into your career and you can view your career as just a series of experiments. That allows for more exploration, more discovery, and you don't feel this pressure to get it right every single time. And this can actually give you breathing room and space to figure out, like, what you're actually good at. What are you really passionate about? Because when you're so worried about getting it wrong or right and you don't want to mess up, there's just not room to play, to grow, to experiment. But if you redefine each career choice. as a learning opportunity Then instead of being terrified of taking any wrong step, you can just celebrate each step as part of the growth process. And by doing this, you're going to have less stress and anxiety associated with every single decision. You won't have to be as paralyzed by fear. So, how do you actually do this? How do you allow yourself to make the wrong choice to gather learning opportunities? And how do you do that without wasting significant amounts of time and money? Because that is important, right? You don't want each learning opportunity to cost you 10 years and 100, 000. That's not what we're here for. There's ways to fast track this process. So that you can conduct these mini experiments with your career and gain clarity without wasting decades of your life, without going into debt. There's ways to make the wrong choice, quote unquote, without costing you much time or much money. Okay, so how? How do we do that? So, two things. One, we have to change the mindset, and then two, there's the actual tactical approach. So, number one, you have to switch from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And growth mindset, you probably have heard of this. It's a concept developed by Carol Dweck, and she writes about it very extensively in her book Mindset. So, just a quick overview. When you have a fixed mindset, you are assuming that your abilities, your intelligence, your talents, those are all set in stone, right? You were born with a certain amount of intelligence and talent and it can't be significantly changed. And so if this is how you view yourself and view your abilities, you're going to focus on documenting your intelligence or talent instead of developing it. You're also probably going to avoid challenges because they could reveal that you're not as intelligent or talented as you would like to be seen as. You're probably going to give up more easily and even see effort as fruitless. You'll take one step and you're like, well, I'm not good at that. And so that's it. End of story. Now, a growth mindset, on the other hand, is this really empowering belief that our abilities and our intelligence can be developed through dedication and through intentional effort. People who embody a growth mindset, they understand that the brain and talent and all these traits that you're born with, it's just a starting point. And that abilities can be developed pretty significantly through effort, through learning, through persistence, and so they're going to be more likely to embrace challenges, to learn from criticisms and setbacks, and to see effort as this pathway towards mastery. And within Pathway to Purpose, I teach you how to reliably make this shift from the fixed mindset into the growth mindset when you shift into a growth mindset, you're not going to be afraid of making the wrong choices because you know that each setback can be used as a data point. This piece of information that gets you closer and closer to the career you actually want. But without the growth mindset perspective. you won't actually learn. And then each wrong choice will be a waste of time, because you're not taking anything valuable from it. And once you've made this mindset switch, then we can start the process of intentional experimentation. So within the framework of Pathway to Purpose, I teach you how to design Do, and debrief, leap actions. And taking leap actions is a concept I learned from Tara Moore in her book Playing Big, which is another required reading for all the people who join my program. So what is a leap action? I think of it as these mini experiments to get you maximum clarity while reducing the time and money costs required. So when you take leap actions and then you learn how to properly debrief them and find the clarity through action, you're going to fast track your clarity so hard. So you're going to experiment, you're going to learn, and get closer and closer to the solution. And it's not going to be a waste of time because each leap action is really only supposed to take two weeks, and I really discourage, especially at the beginning, I discourage you from spending any money during these leap actions, so they're going to be free. So, for example, if you think you want to start a podcast before you drop a thousand dollars on the perfect microphone and buy a podcasting course and try to hire someone and spend so much time researching all the, tech and how exactly to do it. First, your leap action would be you interview somebody over a cup of coffee. You use your phone or your laptop to record it. And then you check in, like, how did that feel? Did I enjoy the process? Did the person enjoy being interviewed? Are you excited to share some of the results with people? Do you want to share that conversation? Do you feel like there's valuable things within that, that you want to share with people? That's a leap action. There's so much clarity you can get from something that doesn't take that much time and doesn't take that much money. If you think you want to do medical writing, that's Before signing up for a certification course, dropping a few thousand dollars in weeks and weeks, learning how to do it, first, let's do a leap action. Let's make an account on Upwork. You can search for medical writing jobs and start writing some proposals, see if you can get hired for an entry level hourly rate, do some medical writing type projects. This is something I did years ago when I was first starting out in the online space, I actually did some writing for creating like EMR templates, I started doing some additional medical writing projects, and there's so much you can learn from that experience. You learn, do you enjoy the process? Do other people enjoy the results? Is this something that you want to develop mastery around? Is this something that you think could be financially viable? There's so much more information you get from conducting these mini experiments than just from sitting around thinking about it. You can only get so far from just being in your head, trying to plan things out in your head. But when you can learn how to view your career as this series of mini experiments, run the experiments, and then pay attention to your findings and course correct accordingly, you can Don't save so much time, so much money, and so much heartache during your career transition process. Making the wrong career choice does not have to cost you much time or money. If you know how to shift into a growth mindset and design these mini experiments, take these leap actions. So the question is, do you want to continue staying stagnant in your unfulfilling job where you're working all day, coming home feeling drained, depleted, and then spending your evenings getting caught in this Google rabbit hole, trying to figure out the perfect plan forward in your head, but not really making much progress? Do you want to continue believing that if you make the wrong choice, it's going to cost you so much time and so much money? And do you want that belief to keep you stuck in your current situation for another three months, another three years, because you're paralyzed by this fear of making the wrong choice and what it could cost you? Or do you want to learn how to get out of analysis paralysis and actually start taking your next steps forward? Do you want to learn how to design these intentional experiments that can fast track your clarity and actually help you find a fulfilling career? I don't know about you, but option two sounds so much better to me than staying stuck for months and years, just going in this analysis paralysis so, if you want to take the second route, option B, this is exactly what we do inside of Pathway to Purpose, my group coaching program. In this program, I help you create a clear plan for what's next, so that you can find work you enjoy. You'll learn how to transition to a bridge job, start a fulfilling side gig, and trust yourself and have fun throughout the whole process. So if that sounds good to you, we can see if the program is right for you. Click the link in the description to apply and we can start that conversation.
