Here’s what you must STOP googling if you want to find work you enjoy
May 14, 2024Season 2Episode 32
Chelsea Turgeon
Are you chained to the idea of not wasting your expensive medical degree?
Imagine feeling liberated from the pressure to use your medical education in traditional, constrictive ways.
In this episode, we explore why finding fulfillment in your career might mean stepping away from clinical practice and redefining what success means to you.
Don’t let your degree define your future!
If you're tired of ticking boxes and ready to craft a career that brings you joy and fulfillment every day, this episode is your first step towards a brighter, more aligned future.
Are you chained to the idea of not wasting your expensive medical degree?
Imagine feeling liberated from the pressure to use your medical education in traditional, constrictive ways.
In this episode, we explore why finding fulfillment in your career might mean stepping away from clinical practice and redefining what success means to you.
Don’t let your degree define your future!
If you're tired of ticking boxes and ready to craft a career that brings you joy and fulfillment every day, this episode is your first step towards a brighter, more aligned future.
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 physicians, PAs, and NPs who are feeling unfulfilled in their current clinical roles have this idea that they have to find a way to use their medical degree and experience when figuring out their next steps. So this is something you might relate to. Maybe you're spending time googling alternative careers for physicians or nurse practitioners or you're googling what can I do with my medical degree if I'm not practicing clinically. And essentially, you can drive yourself pretty crazy trying to find this list of options that you can do using your past medical degree and experience. What I've learned in my four years coaching healthcare professionals to find careers that actually fulfill them is this whole belief is just not true. You don't have to find a way to use your medical degree and experience to figure out your next steps. And in fact, focusing so intently on how you can use your medical degree and use your medical experience is actually something that's preventing you from figuring out your next steps. Now I totally get why you think this and why this is where you're coming from. I totally understand why. you want to figure out a way to use your medical degree and experience. For one, you probably don't want to feel like you're wasting your degree. It was expensive and it took a lot of time. you don't want to just throw it away. You don't want to feel like you're wasting it. if you can find a way to use your degree and your medical experience in your next endeavor, I Then you don't have to think of it as a waste. It can just be another step along the journey. You also probably don't want to feel like you're starting all over, There's this idea that if you aren't directly using your degrees. the thing that you studied for, then you're basically starting from scratch in the career realm. That you'll have to go back to school and climb the ladder all over again and then you'll be behind all of your peers and you'll have to rework your success from the ground up and as a high achiever, someone who is competitive and who has worked so hard to get to where you are. That can just feel completely demoralizing and difficult to stomach this idea of starting from scratch or starting all over. So I get that it's really tempting to want to find a way to use your medical degree and your experience, but here's what you have to decide. It's like a moment of truth. Do you want your career path to be one that looks successful on paper and that makes sense to other people and is just checking all of the boxes? Or do you want a career that's not only successful, but also deeply satisfying and meaningful to the world? And something that's sustainable long term instead of something that's draining you and exhausting you every single day. Because if what you want to do is meaningful work, and if what you want is to find a career that is fulfilling so that you can wake up and look forward to your day, you're going to have to shift the way that you're approaching your career decisions. Because while education and experience can be important things to consider, They're not the most important thing, and they're not the starting point. It's your interests, your values, and your purpose that will truly guide you to make decisions that are not only good on paper, but they're also good for the soul and good for your well being. The intention behind considering your interests and your values and your purpose over just education and experience is to ensure that your career choices are not just successful, but also ones that are really satisfying and sustainable long term. And what we want to do is prioritize more holistic measures of success and also just this long term, bigger picture. Traditional markers of success, such as like what degrees you have, what positions that you have, those usually are focusing more on. external validation and financial markers of success. It's not wrong, but when you integrate also your interests and your values and your purpose, like what drives you, then your definition of success can expand to also include. how success feels. It can include internal satisfaction. It can include alignment with your personal ethics and just this feeling of making a meaningful contribution. Because if you're not having this feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day, like, what are you doing? you also want to think about this long term sustainability because a career built on the foundation of your personal interest and your values and your purpose That's more likely to be sustainable over the long haul, right? When you're engaged in your work and when you find it meaningful, when it's aligned with your values, you're much less likely to burn out, much less likely to become so drained and depleted by these day to day tasks. And so the intention of prioritizing your interests and your values in your career decisions is to cultivate not only a successful career in this conventional sense, but also a fulfilling life. And I think that's what we're here for, this approach is going to encourage you to build a career that resonates just much more deeply with who you are, who you aspire to be, and to ensure that your career Is enriching your life and contributing to your happiness and not something that's detracting from it. Too often, when I talk to physicians and MPs and PAs, you guys are in a career that is draining you and taking away from your personal life instead of adding to And so how do you do that? How do you find a career that brings you freedom and fulfillment? Really, you have to shift what you're focusing on when you're making these career decisions. So instead of thinking you have to find a way to use your medical degree and experience when figuring out your next steps, you have to realize that considering your interests and your values and your purpose, that's going to be significantly more important when figuring out what's next. And once you make that kind of internal shift, then you can start the process of soul searching. You can identify your values. I think of your values as what is most important to you. It's where you want to be spending your time and your energy, and not only do you need to identify your values, but you want to do a gut check and make sure that these are your true, authentic values, and not just These should values because the world can put these values on us like you're supposed to value family you're supposed to value success and especially early on in our journey of Coming back to ourselves and figuring out who we are and what we want. We really need to go through a process to Distinguish and differentiate. What is a true value that I care about? Versus what is something that I've been told I should care about and that should be important to me We don't just want to have this collection of words, right? When you identify your values, it can seem like, okay, well, this is just a cool collection of words. That's great. But we need to know, what does it actually look like to live these out on a day to day basis? That's the important part. when you understand your values, you can use those to help guide your career search. And then you also want to uncover your strengths. You want to understand like what it is that you are uniquely best at and how you can use those elements in your work. Because people who spend more time at work developing their strengths and doing the things that they're best at have significantly more job satisfaction and feelings of fulfillment. And then you also want to determine your purpose. Casual. No big deal. You want to figure out, like, what is the essential nature of the work you're here to do? What drives you? What do you care about? What actually infuses your life and your work with meaning? And once you've done this inner work, and you have it as a foundation, then you can see how you can get creative and maybe see how your past degree and experience can play into it, but you can fit them in after the fact, right? You don't want to design your career and your next steps solely based on that. So now you have two choices, right? So now you can decide if you want to keep Burning the midnight oil on Google, spending time searching alternative careers for nurse practitioners, for physician assistants, Googling, what can I do with my medical degree if I'm not a doctor? I have been there. I have Googled that. So you can continue trying to decide between this finite list of options that you find on Google that other people have done with their medical degrees and with their experience. You can continue prioritizing this traditional and limited definition of career success or you can decide that you want a career that's not just successful, but one that's actually deeply satisfying, one that is really fulfilling. You realize that work takes up so much of your time in your life. should be able to enjoy it and the way to find work you enjoy. is by using your interests, your values, and your purpose to guide your next steps to figure out what's next, using those first and foremost, instead of trying to force yourself to use your medical degree and your medical experience if it's not going to be relevant to what's next for you. And so if this is something you're interested in, if you want to go for option B, If you want to find a career that gives you fulfillment and freedom in a really holistic sense, that is exactly what I help you guys do inside of Pathway to Purpose. And I'd love to support you with that. So if that's something you're interested in, you can click the link in the show notes and fill out an application and we can see if Pathway to Purpose is going to be right for you.
