How to Make a Career Change When Nothing Interests You: A Doctor’s Guide to Finding the Right Path

Are you searching LinkedIn hoping to find an alternative way to use your medical degree? But your eyes glaze over reading the roles and responsibilities of another clinical director position.

You’re not alone. Many doctors exploring career change find themselves stuck in the same loop. Scrolling job listings, feeling uninspired, and wondering if they’ll ever find work that is genuinely interesting.

In this episode you’ll discover:

• How to uncover your real interests—even if you feel completely uninspired.
• Why your current method for job searching is backwards- and what to do instead.
• A new way to approach your career change that unlocks more interesting opportunities.

Hit play now to stop forcing yourself into uninspiring career options and start discovering a path that actually excites you.

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

Chelsea: 0:00

In this episode, you will learn how to choose a career when nothing interests you.

0:05

welcome to life after medicine, the podcast, helping millennial health professionals find their purpose and turn it into their paycheck because you were meant for more than 15 minute patient visits under fluorescent lights. I'm your host, Chelsea Turgeon, a residency dropout turned six figure entrepreneur and world traveler together, we'll explore how you can make a difference without sacrificing your health and happiness.

Chelsea: 0:31

In this episode, we'll talk about how to start recovering your interests when you feel completely one dimensional and uninteresting, the problem with your current approach to choosing careers, and the real barrier that's keeping you from turning your interests into a career. Let's get to the show. So how to choose a career when nothing interests you. I mean, my first piece of advice is don't. Don't choose a career when nothing interests you because I've told my clients this, I tell you guys this so many times, you don't need a new career. You need the right career, so if nothing interests you, don't just try to pick something and settle for whatever because That's not what you need to do right now. what we need to do is actually get more curious about what's going on with the way you're trying to choose careers and with the way you're relating to your interests. So let's dive deeper into that. Why is nothing interesting to you right now? This happens for several different reasons. And this is something I've experienced before. I want to make it clear that just because nothing interests you right now, that doesn't mean this is a permanent state. This is a transient moment in time and the lack of interest is coming from something. So we'll pinpoint what that is, but you do have interests. You do have hobbies, passions, like you do have things you care about. Um, and It's okay if you feel maybe a little bit dead inside, maybe like a zombie right now, and you don't feel those interests, that doesn't mean they're not there, they're just dormant right now, so we're gonna figure out what's going on with your dormant interests, um, but I want to just be super clear about that because you're not broken. Like, no one I've ever met or worked with actually has no interests, no passions. It's just the way we're relating to it, approaching it, and kind of what's happening that's making it dormant right now. And, and the truth is like, I used to feel this way, which is wild to me now, because I have so many interests, like so many things I'm interested in, but I used to feel completely one dimensional when I was working in medicine. I had literally no life outside of wake up, go to work, come back home. Like I just felt like a completely one dimensional zombie. What happens when. You've dedicated so much time and energy to a certain career path. You just phase out other interests. Like you just don't have time or space for them. They get phased out and you're not engaging with them. And so they go away. Also when you're burnt out in general, you don't feel any interest. You don't feel any pulls toward things when you're burnt out, because again, you're just. kind of dead inside. So it doesn't feel like the only thing you're interested in is sleep. That just means you're burnt out. It doesn't mean that you don't have interests or you don't have hobbies. It's you're just burnt out. And so you're not going to like find your interests by sitting there and like thinking about them and beating yourself up for not having something that comes to mind right away. You're going to find. Your interests by just letting go of that need first and foremost, like let go of that entirely and just focus on recovering, focus on connecting back to yourself, you're not trying to seek out interests or figure them out. It's just allowing them to appear because you have connected back to yourself. So give yourself space. Relax, recover, like, go somewhere outside, walk around, it's fine, you're not broken, but you need to come back to yourself. So one of the main reasons you feel like nothing's interesting is because you're burnt out and Your whole life has been consumed with this one career. So other interests have been just kind of gradually phased out. So, so focusing first on just recovering from burnout, it doesn't need to be that you're trying to figure out your interests. Like just give yourself time and space to breathe, relax, recover and trust that things will start to appear more naturally. Once you feel more and more like yourself, cause I promise you, you did have interest. One thing you can start to think about, not that you need to go on a quest for your interests, but. What did you like to do when you were little? Before the world told you who you were supposed to be or how you're supposed to spend time? What did you like to do? What were the weird things that you did? My cousins and my sisters and I we'd make music videos. We would put on plays. Like we did a lot of like, yeah, dances, costumes. And I would write a script. Like I went through the book, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. And I took out. Every single piece of dialogue and wrote a script and a screenplay from it when I was like 12, like, that's so weird. Um, but I was interested in it, right? So what were the things that you were interested in back in the day when you had time to play and explore and create when you had a whole summer worth of nothingness to do, what were you interested in then? But again, not putting pressure on yourself to like, find it or revive it, but that's just something that you can think about. Number two the reason you're feeling like nothing interests you is you're doing it backwards. You're doing this whole career thing backwards, which most people do. Um, but you're essentially starting with careers that you think are feasible options. And so you're kind of typing something into Google, like, I don't know, like non clinical careers, and then you're going through a list of options, and then maybe you're looking at job postings related to those options, and you read the job descriptions and the job postings, and like, Those are not interesting to you, it's because you're going at it in the wrong order. You're starting with, okay, feasible career options. And from that, what is interesting to me? As opposed to like, just what is actually interesting to me? And how can I build a career around that? That's a whole nother question. You're starting with just what are the options, quote, unquote, and then you're looking at the options other people give you and you're weighing, am I interested in this option or not, as opposed to connecting to just your pure unadulterated interest, right? So. First, we need to recover from burnout. We need to reconnect to ourselves because otherwise any interest is going to feel out of reach. But then it's like, we need to look at how are we actually approaching this career search? Like, why don't I find anything interesting? Well, because I'm looking at jobs that are not interesting, that just makes sense. Right. The other thing that happens is like you do have interests. But you're disqualifying them from becoming careers. This is something people tell me all the time. I would love to be a student. I would love to just research things and be a perpetual student. But that's not a career. And Okay, so I have an interest in learning, but I'm telling myself I can't use that in the workforce somehow. Okay. That's interesting. That's interesting. That you think that. Um, or I, I would love to teach yoga or I'd love to teach people how to recover from trauma or I'd love to like write or do poetry or whatever. But yeah, I can't make a career from that. So then it's like, well, What are you trying to do? What are you trying to do here? Like, are you trying to just choose a source of income to make you money right now? Or are you trying to build a career that you love and are inspired by? And that is gonna just take time. Like, some of those interests that we've talked about Sure. Maybe you don't make a career immediately, but that doesn't mean they couldn't eventually become a career. Like a career is anytime you're adding value into the world, you can receive money in exchange for that. It might take time to build the value to learn how to communicate the value, but there's no like rules around what makes a career. It's just. What do you like? How can you bring value into the world and then communicate the value and then receive money in exchange for that? And so it's like we're just talking about two different things like yeah Maybe there's nothing that like deeply interests you that you could make money from and make it to a career right away But like, do you want the right of way or do you want the long game? Do you need to find a way to make money right now? Okay, then can you find that? And then can you actually pursue your interests in a way that can build them into a career? Like, why do, why do we need such a short game around this? Because, I mean, we all went into medicine for years and years and years of training, so I don't know why we think that. Our next thing is like such a short game that like, Oh, I can't find something that interests me immediately. So that's not going to work. So there's all of these confused ideas about what makes a career. And so the thing is you do have interest. you're just dismissing them, you're telling yourself, well, that's not something I see on a job board right away, or that's not something that easily translates into a job I can apply for right now that can make money. You do have interests, but you're just dismissing them. This is where it comes back to, what's important to you? What do you actually want in a career? Do you want a career that you really enjoy? That is inspiring. That energizes you where you can contribute to the world and make a difference. And then you can do that. You can build that, but it needs to be built. It doesn't exist right now. That's not something you're going to find on a job board that somebody hands you, but it doesn't mean it can't be developed. What if you stopped trying to force your interest to either be something right away that can be monetized, or it could never happen? Like, that's a very all or nothing approach, what if we took a middle ground of like, I actually do have this interest, and wouldn't it be cool if I could build a career from this? And it's not something that I can see a path to making a full time income right away, but I'm really interested in pursuing it and exploring it and seeing what could happen if I, if I go for it. And then you can talk about making money. In the meantime, if that's something that you need to do, but we just have very confused ideas of how to pursue a career path. So, so bottom line, how to choose a career when nothing interests you. Don't, don't do that. Don't choose a career when nothing interests you. I mean, unless you want an uninteresting career, or if you want to be bored, or if you want to just not enjoy your work, then sure, do that. But if you want a career that is interesting to you, then, then it's time to recover from burnout, reconnect to yourself, reconnect to your interests, and dismantle the ideas you currently have about why you can't turn those interests into a career that you actually love. If you want to do that work, I'm the person for you, because that's what we do in my world. We take your interests and we turn them into a career you actually love and it's my favorite work in the whole world.