[Permission to Pivot] The Myth of Realistic Thinking and Why Doctors Need to Dream BIG for their Career Change.

Are you holding back your dreams because they feel too unrealistic, childish, or impossible to achieve?

If you've ever dismissed your desires as "pipe dreams" or felt trapped by what seems "realistic," this episode is for you. 

We'll explore why limiting yourself to what’s feasible might be the very thing preventing you from finding a career that excites and fulfills you.

In this episode, you'll:

• Discover how giving yourself permission to dream beyond limitations can lead to a life full of adventure, freedom, and purpose.
• Learn practical strategies to pursue seemingly wild career aspirations while staying financially secure and responsible.
• Be inspired by real-life examples of transforming "impossible" visions into a fulfilling career that aligns with your values.

Tune in now to start believing in your wildest dreams and learn how to make them your reality—because you deserve a career that feels good on the inside.

Life After Medicine explores doctors' journey of finding purpose beyond their medical careers, addressing physician burnout, career changes, opportunities in non-clinical jobs for physicians and remote jobs within the healthcare system without being burned out, using medical training.

Life After Medicine explores doctors' journey of finding purpose beyond their medical careers, addressing physician burnout, career changes, opportunities in non-clinical jobs for physicians and remote jobs within the healthcare system without being burned out, using medical training.

Transcript

0:01

There's these words I keep hearing as I speak to you guys in my community, and maybe you've been using these words too. So as I share this, I want you to check in with yourself and be honest about how often you're using these words or thinking these thoughts. They're words like feasible, realistic, pipe dream, fantasy, childish. You say things like I don't know what options really are out there or what would be feasible for me. Or in a fantasy world, I'm a digital nomad traveling, but it feels just like that, a fantasy. Or I have these ideas of being a back county snowboard instructor, but it's just that, it's a pipe dream. And honestly, anytime I hear things like that, I get the ick. It feels so gross to me because it all comes from this idea that there's an expiration on childhood dreams. That we have to grow up. We are in the real world. We have to make decisions that are responsible, that are practical, that are realistic. And I am just not interested. And any of those ideas or any of those conversations, I'm here for the pipedreams. I'm here for the unrealistic life. I am here for the childish fantasies, and I'm also here to be so convicted by these dreams and by this vision. That I do what it takes to turn a pipe dream into a reality. So in this episode, I want to give you permission to dream, but not just dream from this idle place of like, Oh, wouldn't that be nice? But to dream from a place of here's what I want. And it sounds wild. But I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna give it a try. I'm gonna do some kind of crazy things to try to make it happen. Because it's only in allowing yourself to dream and then pursuing what feels like an unrealistic dream that you can get even close to the life you want. And the reason that You're struggling to, figure out what's next or find a career path you really want is because you don't allow yourself to entertain any ideas of a career that feel unrealistic or not practical. But those are the things that you actually want. You can't find work you enjoy if you don't give yourself permission to dream about what you might enjoy or what you actually want to do. If you keep yourself limited by this wall of what's practical or what's realistic or what's feasible, you're going to just hit this wall of limitation. Guys, it's 2024. There's those Waymo, Wago, self driving cars that you can hail. You just press a button on your phone and some robot car drives you around with no humans in it. There's 18 year olds who are just making millions on TikTok who are, by the way, nowhere near as smart as you or talented as you, they're just bold enough to dream and think that they can do it. And we are living in this. age of possibility, not just from technological things, but there's just so much possibility here. This isn't your grandma's job market anymore. The reason I'm living the life I am today is because I gave myself permission to dream. When I was in residency, I was taking my leave of absence because I was in this place of deep burnout where I couldn't even drag myself out of bed and I was trying to figure out like what What am I going to do? And I was on the Googles and I found this person who was like a physician burnout coach. And I did a free session with this person. And she asked me, well, if I had a magic wand and you could have anything you wanted for your career, what would that look like? And I was like, Ooh, magic wand for some reason that unlocked a lot for me. I just went with that. I was like, great magic wand could have anything. And what I wanted, it seemed really unrealistic at the time, but now that I'm looking at it, it's actually pretty simple. I had a magic wand, what I wanted was, I was like, I wanna wake up and have some time for self care. I wanna be able to do like a meditation or a morning routine. Like that felt so dreamy to me to have like a half hour, an hour in the morning where I could just have a slow morning and take care of myself and do the things I wanted. And then I wanted to go to a cafe. And in my magic wand vision, it was like this gorgeous cafe where I could open up my laptop and I was like, I don't really know what I'd be working on, but I know that I, I feel happy when I open up my laptop and when I type things in and I just feel really excited and energized and alive by it and I'm doing that and that's making me money somehow. I don't know what it is or what I'm doing. Like, I can't really see what's on the computer screen, but I just know I enjoy it and it's making me money. And that was about it. That was about the wildness of, and it felt really wild at the time. But that was the extent of what I wanted, and that felt, again, that felt so unrealistic because I was like, well, I trained to be a doctor, and that's not what I've seen doctors do, or doctors don't do that. They go to the hospital, they put on scrubs, they're, you know, working all the time, really long hours. They, they're rushed. They have bags under their eyes. Whereas the life I envisioned felt really spacious and it felt really light and it felt really free and like, oh, I can, it felt slow too. It felt like I could, like I wasn't trying to run to the cafe to get stuff done. I was just going to walk there and I was just going to enjoy and just sip on my coffee and work on my projects without feeling this constant time pressure over me. Um, when I told this coach that like, yeah, that's the magic wand dream. That's what I really want. I was almost laughing. I was like, yeah, but that's not realistic. That's not, I mean, that's not a real thing. I can't actually have that. And the thing is now that is exactly what I do every day. And it's even better because I'm not just doing it. From anywhere, like I'm doing it from cafes all over the world. I am having these incredible adventures. I've become part of some beautiful communities of people. Like the life I live now is that exact unrealistic dream times a hundred. But it's taken about six years to really get there. At the time it felt unrealistic. It felt unlikely. There were moments along the way that it felt downright impossible. It felt like this was never going to happen. But through it all, there was a part of me that kept dreaming, that kept believing. And even more than that, I kept becoming the person who gets to live This unrealistic dream life. So even if the thing you want feels like a fantasy, feels like, yeah, but that's never going to happen. It feels unrealistic. Doesn't quite feel feasible. Why not dream it anyways? Why not give it a try anyways? What do you actually have to lose? By dreaming and by going for the thing that you want, there's ways to pursue an unrealistic dream in a completely practical way. I have a podcast episode I did about that, so I'll link that in the show notes where it's like being unrealistic doesn't mean you have to be impractical because you can take this wild dream that you want and you can make sure that you are financially safe as you pursue it. You can make sure that you always know where your next paycheck is coming from along the way, but that doesn't mean you have to give up the dream entirely. You have to do something every day anyways. Why not try to make your wild, impossible, unrealistic dreams your reality? What do you actually have to lose? And I'll leave you with a Steve Jobs quote that I love. Remembering that you're going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.