Life After Medicine

Permission to Start Over: How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Your Authentic Career Path

June 22, 2023 Chelsea Turgeon Season 1 Episode 106
Permission to Start Over: How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Your Authentic Career Path
Life After Medicine
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Life After Medicine
Permission to Start Over: How to Overcome Fear and Embrace Your Authentic Career Path
Jun 22, 2023 Season 1 Episode 106
Chelsea Turgeon

In this episode, we explore the idea of starting over in your career and how it doesn't have to be as scary as we think. We talked about what it really means to start over in your career. We also discussed the cognitive biases that hold us back and reframed some of those limiting beliefs.

I shared some personal stories about my own career journey and how I found joy and fulfillment in my work by giving myself permission to pivot and start over

  • What it really means to start over in your career
  • The cognitive biases that hold us back
  • Personal stories about finding joy and fulfillment in work
  • Practical tips and resources for your own pivot journey

If you're feeling stuck in your career and wondering if there's something more out there for you, this episode is for you!

Learn more about PATHWAY TO PURPOSE:
www.coachchelsmd.com/pathwaytopurpose/

REACH OUT TO CHELSEA:
FREE downloads for if you are feeling lost or burnt out in your career:
https://coachchelsmd.com/free/

Ready to create a joyful life and career? Here’s how I can support you through my online courses and coaching programs.
http://coachchelsmd.com/offers/

Life After Medicine FB Group
Connect with a community of like-minded healthcare professionals seeking career change support
https://www.facebook.com/groups/leavemedicine/members

Find me on your fav social media platform for more daily content!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachchelsmd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChelseaTurgeonMD
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachchelsmd/



Book your FREE Career Clarity Call:
Ready to create a life of freedom and fulfillment? Let's connect to see how I can help you!
Click here to book your FREE 30 min Career Clarity Call.

Life After Medicine FB Group
Connect with a community of like-minded healthcare professionals seeking career change support
https://www.facebook.com/groups/leavemedicine/members

Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, we explore the idea of starting over in your career and how it doesn't have to be as scary as we think. We talked about what it really means to start over in your career. We also discussed the cognitive biases that hold us back and reframed some of those limiting beliefs.

I shared some personal stories about my own career journey and how I found joy and fulfillment in my work by giving myself permission to pivot and start over

  • What it really means to start over in your career
  • The cognitive biases that hold us back
  • Personal stories about finding joy and fulfillment in work
  • Practical tips and resources for your own pivot journey

If you're feeling stuck in your career and wondering if there's something more out there for you, this episode is for you!

Learn more about PATHWAY TO PURPOSE:
www.coachchelsmd.com/pathwaytopurpose/

REACH OUT TO CHELSEA:
FREE downloads for if you are feeling lost or burnt out in your career:
https://coachchelsmd.com/free/

Ready to create a joyful life and career? Here’s how I can support you through my online courses and coaching programs.
http://coachchelsmd.com/offers/

Life After Medicine FB Group
Connect with a community of like-minded healthcare professionals seeking career change support
https://www.facebook.com/groups/leavemedicine/members

Find me on your fav social media platform for more daily content!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachchelsmd/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChelseaTurgeonMD
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachchelsmd/



Book your FREE Career Clarity Call:
Ready to create a life of freedom and fulfillment? Let's connect to see how I can help you!
Click here to book your FREE 30 min Career Clarity Call.

Life After Medicine FB Group
Connect with a community of like-minded healthcare professionals seeking career change support
https://www.facebook.com/groups/leavemedicine/members

Welcome to the Life After Medicine podcast. Where we help you create a fulfilling and non-traditional career as a healthcare worker. I'm your host, Chelsea Turin. In 2019, I left the hustle and grind of my ob gyn residency and set out to create a fulfilling career on my own terms. Now I'm a best-selling author, career and burnout coach and world traveler. Through this podcast, I'll show you how to enjoy your work. Make an impact and support yourself financially without all the stress and burnout you are currently experiencing. Let's get to the show. Are you feeling unhappy and unfulfilled in your career? That feeling that something is missing, but the idea of making any sort of change is just overwhelming and sends you into this tailspin, you start to feel lost and directionless and you don't even know where to start or how to go about making a change. If this is you right now, if you're feeling stuck, Or trapped in the wrong career with just no real sense of how to get yourself out. I am so excited to announce that Pathway to Purpose will be opening for enrollment this July. This will be a live eight week group coaching program to help you get clarity on what career path is the right fit for you. Pathway to purpose is basically this. Streamlined soul searching process. By the end of the eight weeks, you'll identify what you want for your career and clarify your next steps. You don't have to keep settling for unhappiness in your career, and you don't have to keep circling around and around and indecision and feeling this analysis paralysis around what's next. Pathway to purpose is for anyone who feels stuck in their career, unsure of what direction to take next, and for those who want to find a career path that aligns with their true self and create a life that's both fulfilling and purposeful. If you wanna learn more about Pathway to Purpose, go to coach chels md.com/pathway to purpose to find out about when enrollment is starting, and I am so excited to welcome you in. Hey, love. I am so happy you're here. Today we are gonna be talking about giving yourself permission to start over. And if you are new to this series, I would recommend going back and watching the first day we did was permission to disappoint others. We did that a little over a week ago because I actually took last week off. And in that, Episode we talked a lot about just what the definition of permission is and giving you some moments to reflect on where you're currently not giving yourself permission. So I go through some of the basics. I'm really introducing the series, and then I go through giving yourself that permission to disappoint others. And the really, the main premise behind that is getting to a place where you can say, I would rather disappoint everyone else in the world before disappointing myself and really acknowledging and realizing that you are somebody who like your worth not disappointing for yourself, and that you're the person you have to live with day in and day out. And that really matters. Let's go ahead and get started and diving into permission two. Start over and it's not as scary as it sounds, I promise. But I wanna start today with a question. So if you could start all over as a brand new. High school graduate, right? You just graduated high school. The whole world's in front of you. And knowing everything you know now about the medical field, what career path would you pursue? What would you choose? So if you could start all over as a high school graduate, what career path would you choose? This is a question I asked in the physician nonclinical career Facebook group, and I got 308 comments for this question. People answered so many different things. There was like scuba instructor, Hawaiian tour guide. We had a lot of people wanting to be interior designers or do something creative. Someone said professional equestrian athlete, which I love. There was a lot of people wanting to do writing of some sort, like fiction writing, creative writing becoming an author. There was people who wanted to own bookstores or a coffee shop. Someone said they wanna be a Peloton instructor. So there was lots of these ideas and these dreams. When I posted this in the Facebook group, there was all of these ideas and dreams when it was this hypothetical question, but most people that I speak to, They don't actually feel like starting over is a real option when it comes to their careers, especially like in, in lots of things, but especially when it comes to their careers. They think for various amount of reasons. Maybe they think they're too old. They think they've already invested too much time and energy in their career path. They think, like Eminem, you only get one shot. Do not miss your chance to blow. So people are just in that mentality of you don't get a do over, you don't get to start over. When it comes to your career path. Because I think the idea itself can feel daunting. And I said to one of my clients yesterday, we were talking about this fear loves ambiguity. And so the more specific we can get, the less scary it actually starts to seem. And so if you're feeling fear at this sort of ambiguous idea of starting all over, one important question to ask is why? What am I scared of? What is it about this idea of starting over that scares me? Because the idea is we're starting over. We're not starting over to go do something else you don't wanna do. That's not the point of it. The point of it is you're starting over to do something you want to do. So ideally the education or the certification or the training is something that you're actually interested in. And so yeah, that would be something interesting to look at is like when you think of education, what about that? Is scary to you. And you know what? It's so interesting. We think that, I think most of us are living in this model that in order to start a new career, we have to get another degree. And the world we're living in today, It does not require that, for the most part, it does not require you to have, once you have, I think most of the people in here have an md. They have a graduate degree of some kind. Once you have that, you most likely do not need another degree unless you're wanting to do something else. Highly specialized, but for the most part, Many of the jobs are the things that you actually truly want to do are not gonna require you to go back to school for another degree. And if so, it's likely because it's something that you're so passionate about. Like for example, to become a writer, you don't need a degree, you don't need a degree for that. There's so many things you don't actually need a degree. So that would just be something interesting cuz when you think about more debt, we think because of student loans, But then, yeah, these are things to question in general. Okay. And so then I want you guys to continue to ask yourself. why does this scare me? Why does the idea of choosing the wrong career scare me? Why do I have the idea that there's a right and a wrong career? Why is the idea of failing and starting over again scare me? Why are these things so scary to me? A lot of the things that we're looking at right now that not good enough, not gonna work out failing, starting over again. This is all very fixed mindset outlook on life, the idea of the right and the wrong career. The idea of it has to work out in this one way. And so most of us have this idea, and let me know if you guys resonate with this, that our careers are some sort of race to a finish line, and we might have different ideas of what the finish line is. So for some of us, the finish line is, We just reached this stable point in our career where we're making good money, we're paying back loans, we're buying a house, we're saving for retirement. So we have this idea that there's this sort of, this arrival point that there's this finish line to reach. And that speed is really important in that process. And so there's this fear of falling behind. And I think there's also a fear. There's like sort of the timeline fear of we have to be at a certain place so that we can be saving for retirement. And there's all these ideas of. We have to go at a certain speed. I remember going through med school and I had a friend who we graduated high school together and then he also ended up going to med school, but he started a year after me. And then I think he failed a year and he was just taking his sweet time to get through. And my mom kept, coming up to me. Every time I would go home she'd be like, oh, he failed again, or, oh, he's still not gonna graduate another year. Oh and it was this whole thing where Every time that he either took some time off or did something for himself. My mom was panicking for this guy, and it was like her friend's kid. My mom was panicking and I was like, mom, not everybody needs to go through something like straight away. Not everyone needs to go straight from college to med school. Not everyone needs to just be in this race. But it was like the kind of the pressure that she was putting on. This other person who wasn't even her kid, so obviously she was putting it on me, is this idea that it has to go very quickly, that it has to be that sort of, line graph, that your career success just needs to go up and to the right all the time. And there's not room for setbacks. There's not room for wrong decisions, there's not room for wrong turns. It all needs to just be planned out. It all needs to be practical. there needs to be no missteps. So that's one reason that we're afraid to start over because we're afraid that if we start over, we're gonna fall behind. And we're not gonna make it to the finish line, and other people will maybe get ahead of us and that we're in this race in comparison to other people or in comparison to our own lifespan. And we're, by a certain age, we need to be at a certain point in our career. So we have these these milestones and these sort of arbitrary timelines pushed upon ourselves thinking that career needs to look a certain way. Another reason that we think we need to race to that finish line is this idea that. We think once we get there, things will be different in some way, right? We think there's something special waiting for us when we arrive at a certain point of success in our career. Maybe that's a certain like promotion level. Maybe it's a certain income level, maybe it's some other marker. But usually one of the reasons we're racing to this finish line is because we think that something special is waiting for us there. So of course we don't wanna delay reaching the goal or reaching the finish line because every moment we're not there experiencing whatever it is that's supposed to be waiting for us, we're missing out. And that is what is called the arrival fallacy. This idea that once we make it to our destination, we're gonna reach this state of lasting happiness, or we're gonna feel different or better about ourselves in some way. I used to think this when it came to my step one score, this is when I did it the most, and it was when this happened that the illusion really started to shatter for me. So I used to have this idea that if I scored really well on step one, that would be my ticket out of Alabama. Because if I did well enough on that standardized test, I could leverage that score to get into any residency program anywhere in the country. That was my ticket to Alabama and then out of Alabama, and then I would finally like, feel better about myself. I would finally feel like I've escaped or like I've made it and I scored really well. On step one, I got a really great score and I remember getting it back. I was sitting on a bench outside of my research lab. And I was looking at my score on my phone and I was like, oh, 2 54. That was a really solid score. Like top, top score. People who were getting into ortho and derm programs like got that score so I could, I was competitive for anything I wanted with that. And I remember looking at it and being like, oh, I don't feel any different. This isn't how I thought it would feel. For the first two years of medical school, I was under this impression that once I achieved a certain score on this exam, once I reached that destination, I would feel this state of lasting happiness, fulfillment. I would feel proud of myself. I would feel success. Everything would be okay. And it happened and it actually was very disappointing and it was quite a letdown when it occurred because you were holding your breath waiting for this goal, this destination. And you got there and you were like, wait, isn't it supposed to be better? And it actually wasn't. I. So that's what we do with the arrival fallacy and that's another reason we're so afraid to start over cuz we're like I'll be further from arriving if I start over. And the arrival point, reaching the goal, that's for all the good stuff is, and if I start over, I'm gonna have to wait even longer to get all the good stuff. It's like when we're living in this way, we're waiting for something else outside of us to save us. And it's a very convenient because it allows us to, Dismiss the suffering in our everyday experience because we think we're paying our dues and that it's gonna add up to something good later on. So it's okay that we're not happy now. It's almost like procrastinating happiness, which is a very strange thing. But, or it's a way for us to rationalize a way our unhappiness because it's like this is not happy now, but this is buying me happiness later. But the problem is later doesn't really come. And when or when it comes. It's not what we thought it was gonna be. And so then it's like we wasted all of that time holding our breath for this later. That doesn't really arrive in the way we want it to. Okay. The other reason, I'll go through one more, there's one more psychological principle I'm gonna give you, and then we're gonna go through some reframes on how to start thinking about this concept of starting over differently. So the final principle I wanna talk about of why we're afraid to start over is called loss aversion. So this is a cognitive bias that describes why for individuals, especially the pain of losing something is two times as painful as the pleasure of gaining something. So just like in very simple terms losing$50 is two times more painful than what gaining$50 would feel like. The pain of losing$50 is more painful. Do e more painful than the joy of gaining, right? So we're more afraid to lose something than we are excited to gain something. And they've studied this with different gambling studies and they've done other weird studies on imagining a hypothetical pandemic and we have these different solutions and which one are you gonna choose? And people are always much more afraid to lose something than they are excited. To gain something, and so this can happen in our career as well, that we're more afraid of losing a stable job, a stable income, even if we're not super fulfilled. We're not really like satisfied. We're not really joyful in it. We feel more afraid of losing it, of losing that stable job and that stable income then. The excitement of potentially gaining a career we enjoy. There's also uncertainty in the mix there too, right? There's this known entity that we're afraid to lose, even if we don't love it, and then there's this unknown entity that we might be able to gain, but it's still a gain and we're afraid of losing. So there's a known loss and an unknown gain, and it just feels too scary. And so this is a cognitive bias that almost all of us have. you're not wrong for having it. You're not pathologic for having it because this is something we like evolved into. It's something that we all pretty much psychologically have, but it doesn't really help us in. C the current society in modern day times. Like it was something we evolved with, something that helped us maybe in the hunter gatherer days, but is something that is not as effective. Now, this also has to do with the sunk cost fallacy. So sunk costs is essentially, there are costs that have already been incurred. They cannot be recovered. So no matter what you do, you cannot recover the costs. And then the fallacy happens when. Continuing to go along that path that you incurred the cost to start along, continuing to go along that path is causing you to become worse off or is harming you in some way. However, you can continue to go along that path because of the cost that you already incurred. So then it becomes this sort of logical fallacy. Essentially the way this would work for medical school, for, medical training for example, would be, I already spent so much time and energy training into this, right? I already spent so much money, time, energy, identity, just, I've invested a lot into this and so I need to keep going with this endeavor, even though I don't love it. And the idea is that if I keep going, That maybe one of these days it'll make the cost I sunk worthwhile. Maybe they'll, there'll be a point in the future where it all salvages, it's all gonna be worth it. Everything is gonna feel better, and I'll be like, oh, I'm so glad I stuck with it. So glad I paid those dues. However, that is rarely the case. I've never really talked to anybody. Personally who's gone through that who went through a period of, the whole time they were like, okay, it'll be worth it when it'll be worth it, when it'll be worth it when, and then it finally was worth it. I've never talked to somebody who that's been the case, right? And so really what that comes down to, if we sent costs, it's like this logical fallacy because if we acted rationally, we would accept that everything we've already sunk into it is gone. No, you are not gonna get that back no matter what. It's already gone, already done. And then the only logical thing to do going forward is to factor in future costs and benefits and take those into account because regardless of what was already invested, you can't get it back. And so the only kind of costs and benefits you should be weighing when you're thinking about whether to continue. Is the future, but most of us don't do that. Most of us are looking at everything we've already spent into it. So we've got a arrival fallacy. We've got loss aversion, which also has to do with sunk cost fallacy. So all of these factors, all of these cognitive biases and all of these psychological phenomenon I describe all of these to explain why it feels so freaking scary to start all over. So once we have a better understanding of what the psychology is around all of this, then we can start to think about how to reframe these ideas, right? Because most of them, I've said fallacy aversion I didn't the loss aversion is a cognitive bias, right? So fallacy bias, right? So once we're making decisions from that place, maybe we have this idea that. I don't really wanna make decisions from a place of fallacy or cognitive bias, so how can we start to think about it differently? And it's so funny because we think when we're thinking through career decisions, we're doing it from this really logical place and we're so pragmatic and we're weighing the pros and cons, but we are doing it through these severe cognitive biases that are actually making the whole thing wildly irrational and emotional and really not an effective decision making model. Like the way that we tend to make decisions is using our brain, which has all these biases. Which are not really helpful for making decisions, which is very interesting to think about. Okay, so I have a couple reframes to help you guys start to think about some of these things differently. Number one, because this, needs to be said, you are never actually starting over. Let's be clear. There is nothing anyone can do to take your degree away from you, right? They're not gonna take your degree away. Now, it is possible if at some point you're not practicing for a certain amount of time. Your board certification lapses or you license your lapses or whatever, and that goes away. Sure. But that doesn't take away from the fact that you were, had your license for this amount of time. You were board certified for this amount of time. Like no one can take away any past experience that you've had because you've had it already. No one can take away any past education. That you've had? No one's asked for my diploma yet for med school. No one's oh, you're not allowed to call yourself an MD anymore. Oh, you started over. That's gone. No one's asked for it back. I still have it. It's fine. No one can take away the skills, the education, the things that you've learned. The experiences that you've had and the person that you've become through this whole process. And so you are never truly starting over. You're already coming at whatever your next thing is from this place of more knowledge, more skills, more experience than you did out of high school, right? No matter what, even if you're going to something totally different, I had a client who was an ophthalmologist, and it was so funny, she wrote this blog post I don't think she published it, but it's 10 random transferable skills from somebody who she did like really microsurgery as an ophthalmologist, and so she had these like certain skills. That she was like, I didn't even realize I had this. So she went to a shooting range with one of her friends and she was able to, I am a great shot. I had the best aim. I could just get right in that bullseye. And I've never done it before and it's just because I'm used to those tiny micro, the microsurgery and the fine motor skills. And so she's I was great at it. And then she started painting. She just took up, I think oil painting had never done that before either. But because again, the fine motor skills and the hand control, she was able to, Create these beautiful paintings and now she's selling pet portraits for people. That's not the main thing she's doing, but that is something she's doing. And these are skills that she gained through her training that she didn't really realize. And I think maybe golf was something else that she was good at. So it was really interesting to see how she actually had all these skills and experiences from her training that translated into these really random skills, but that actually turned out to be useful. And so this is just one example of how. Skills that you have, experiences that you have, they're going to translate. You're not starting over. No matter what you're doing, even if you're not in the surgical field, the skills that you have are wildly relatable to anything else that you want to do, even if you can't see it at the time, so you're never actually starting over. And then the other thing I wanna talk about is that starting over and like being a beginner, that doesn't mean you have to go through this period of misery again. So most of us, when we think about starting over, we're like, oh man, like I think someone said earlier, oh, I'll have to go through this education again. I might have to go into debt. I'm gonna have to go through this period of, working really hard and studying and being treated like crap and doing long hours and just being miserable. And that's because we come from this background of this medical hierarchy. Where it's way worse for the beginners and for the people at the bottom, and we treat them with less respect and they have to work harder and longer, and they have to earn all of these things. They have to. It's like this pay your dues mentality and this medical hierarchy. We come from that background and so we think that if we're a beginner again in another field, we're gonna be starting in that sort of environment again. Where we're gonna be at the bottom of a totem pole. We have to pay our dues and work our way up. But guess what? You do not have to choose a career where that's the environment that you're gonna be in. That does not have to be the case. And that is actually a very unhealthy model for careers and for workplace environments in the first place. And so that's what we're used to. And so we think that's the case all across the board. And yeah, there are plenty of other industries where that's the case. I've had friends in finance, I've had friends who are corporate lawyers and architects who have that. There is a similar mentality. But the cool thing is there's plenty of careers where that does not exist, where you get to be a beginner, and yet you're probably gonna be working harder to learn new things and to adapt to a new environment. I'm not pretending that it's not hard work. When I was starting my business, there was a lot of work I had to do, but nobody was treating me like crap because I was at the bottom. Nobody was disrespecting me because I was new. Or because I was like lower, in my income level, like I would join masterminds and nobody was treating me badly because I was a beginner. And so I want you guys to really know that does not have to be the case. And again, that doesn't mean that's not gonna be work involved and skills to learn and education to go through. But if the reason you're pivoting in the first place is to find work that you enjoy and do a career that is a more authentic reflection of who you are and use your gifts and talents, it's gonna be joyful work. It's gonna be the right kind of hard, and when I say joyful work, that probably might not even make sense to you guys right now. But it is a real thing. It is a thing where you're in the zone, you're in this like immersive flow state experience and you are learning and growing at this pace, and things are starting to click and yeah, you're maybe working longer hours, but it's okay because you feel fulfilled in it. So just because you're starting over does not mean you have to go through a period of being hazed. That you have to go to the bottom of a totem pole, that you have to work your way up a hierarchy or that you have to pay your dues. You do not have to choose a career where that is the case. And that's really important. okay, the next reframe. So I wanna give you three reframes and I feel like I still have so many more reframes too, but I'll just do three for now so that it's digestible. The third one is that our careers do not have to be a race to the finish line. And so this has again, has to do with the arrival fallacy. So we talked about this idea of the arrival fallacy and yeah. Okay, that makes sense. We're gonna race to the finish line because when we arrive, things are gonna be so much better. So I'm gonna hold my breath and I'm gonna run as fast as I can and put my head down and buckle down. Who says that phrase. I was just gonna buckle down and power through and I'm gonna get there. And then once I get there, I can breathe and things will finally be okay. So of course we're racing if we think that's the way it works. Have you ever been really unhappy, holding your breath, powering through racing to a finish line, arrived at the finish line, and felt very significant, substantial happiness that lasted for a long time. That lasted anywhere near the amount of time you were racing to the finish line? Yeah. On Match Day, I was really excited for a few hours. I worked four years to get there. I worked four years to have three to four hours of happiness, and then I felt empty again. When you checked all the boxes, you're normally left with this sense of, oh, like maybe you're not miserable. Maybe you're not empty, but you're probably like is that it? Is that all there is? And it's not worth it. And so then it's okay, maybe I was at the wrong finish line. Have you seen that there's a meme or something going around where it's like you climbed. You climb the ladder I don't, we don't really use this as much, but like climbing the corporate ladder, you climb the ladder, you got all the way to the top only to realize the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. Whoops. This isn't where I meant to be. I'm supposed to be against another wall. And so the reason that we are trying to race to this finish line, I just need us to realize there's no need to race. Because the finish line is not any better than the destination to get there. And it's gonna maybe sound a little cheesy, but there really is no destination. There really is only the journey and the moments that we have and like the present. So if we're racing to a finish line, we're missing the whole point. So you don't have to be scared about starting over. Because it doesn't mean you're falling behind. It just means you're moving onto your own pathway and you get to start experiencing relief and joy and fulfillment the moment you step onto your pathway no matter where you are. On the road. For me, the moment I turned in my resignation for residency, and I bought this course to become a travel blogger, and I signed up for this life coaching certification program, I did all of that within a month's time. I wasn't making money from it yet. I wasn't actively coaching or travel blogging or anything yet, but I was already feeling this sense of oh, this is where I'm meant to be. And so you get to experience all of that. All along the way, none of that has to wait until you get to a finish line. So starting over doesn't have to be scary because it doesn't mean that you're pushing happiness further and further away from you. The moment you start over onto a path where you really wanna be on that path, happiness is there for you. It's right there. It's not there all the time, but there are way more moments where it's there than it, than not. When you're on a path that is authentic to you. So the idea of starting over, it doesn't have to delay gratification at all. It actually brings it closer to you the moment you start over into something that you want to be doing. One of the quotes that I love, and I didn't write down who wrote it, but it's not mine. It's from someone else. Direction is so much more important than speed. Many are going nowhere fast. So if you're trying to get to the wrong wall race, to the wrong finish line, and you're doing it really fast, it's not gonna be satisfying. But if you are even really slowly moving some steps in a direction that is right for you, you're gonna feel all the joy, all the fulfillment, all the satisfaction. So the speed is actually, it doesn't matter. What matters is the direction. These are all really important reframes and I imagine that they're very different ways of looking at things than maybe that you're used to. Where maybe a reframe, you're like, it's not totally clicking. Because these are totally different ways of looking at things, and so maybe it'll take some time for your brain to com comprehend it. Not that you're slow in any way. It's just gotta let this land a little bit. So the reframes, you're never actually starting over because you're always taking your skills, your experience. Your life. You know who you've become. You're always taking that with you. Starting over and being a beginner does not have to mean going through a period of misery does not mean you have to go to the bottom of a totem pole and be treated like crap, because not every career path has that sort of hierarchy or a pay your dues mentality. Number three is our careers are not a race to the finish line because direction is so much more important than speed. So what reframe is landing the most for you guys? Can you gamify life a little bit and maybe not take it all so seriously? I think that was another thing I heard at the beginning that I meant to address too, is this idea of right and wrong, and this really stringent, rigid mentality when it comes to career. And could we make it a little bit more playful, a little bit more like a game with a little bit less consequences? What could that look like? I also wanna share with you that if you have enjoyed what we're talking about right now, and if you are ready to give yourself permission to pivot, I would love to help you guys get started in the right direction. We talked about direction is so much more important than speed. I'd love to help calibrate your direction for you. So I'm doing these free 15 minute. Career triage calls, and it's essentially me diagnosing and giving you some direction for your career. So it's just a, quick little 15 minute call. The idea is we define your main career struggles and assess your readiness for change, and then I will direct you to resources that I think could be helpful for your career journey. So if you're interested in doing one of those career triage calls, you can send me a message and I'll send you a link to book the call so yeah, those are just 15 minute calls to help you just Get started on the path that is right for you, just to see, give you a snapshot of what's going on with your career. What is it that you probably need the most, and how can we get you started on that? The idea that you have to go through a period of misery is just, it's not true. I'm telling you, I've been through like some serious lows in my business. And all of it was so much better than anything in med school. Like even when I was like, oh, is this gonna work out? Or How am I ever gonna make money? Even when I was going through all of that, I still had this sense of oh, this is still better than med, med school and medicine. So people, entrepreneurship is hard and people talk about that a lot. And people who've never done medicine, they talk about how hard entrepreneurship is and they're right. But like it's an exhilarating hard, it would be a hard Learning to ski or like learning something that, learning some sort of skill like horseback riding or something where it's yeah, it's hard, but it's not, you're not, your soul's not dying on the inside. It makes a huge difference. So I just want to say a big thank you it is so wonderful this is the second part of the Permission to pivot series. We still have two more. Let me know if you wanna hop on one of those free 15 minute career triage calls, would love to help get you in that right direction as well. So I'm sending you all so much love and I'll see you next week. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Life After Medicine Podcast. Make sure to leave a review and subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. If you wanna continue the conversation, share your takeaways, and connect with other like-minded healthcare workers, then come join us in the Life After Medicine Facebook group. The link to join the group is in the show notes. I can't wait to connect with you further.