How to Make A Career Change You Won’t Regret: The 5 Part Framework for Doctors in Burnout

Are you trying to figure out what’s next after medicine- but are worried about making (another) career choice that you regret. You’re not alone—many doctors experience burnout and struggle with the fear of making the wrong career move. But what if you could make a change with confidence, knowing you won’t regret your decision?

In this episode you’ll learn:

✅ The 5 part framework for making career decisions you don’t regret

✅ The mindset shifts that will help you break free from overthinking and analysis paralysis.

✅ Practical strategies for making career choices that you feel confident about.

Don’t stay stuck in burnout—press play now to learn how to make a confident career change you’ll never regret!

Pathway to Purpose is open for enrollment. Click here for more information, 

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

Speaker: 0:00

In this episode, you'll learn how to choose a career you won't regret.

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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.

Speaker: 0:29

Welcome back to another episode of Life After Medicine. In today's episode, you'll discover the five part framework for making decisions that you don't regret. The key to ending the second guessing and overthinking and analysis paralysis. And how to make choices that you feel confident about. Let's get to the show. Right now, you are sitting at a career crossroads of sorts, trying to figure out what's next. You see a lot of potential pathways, but nothing feels quite right. And you're unsure of how to find a fulfilling career that's a good fit for you. And part of that is, on some level, you're low key doubting yourself and your ability to make decisions at all because the decisions you've made so far have landed you here in a place where you're not happy, you're not fulfilled in your work, and so you're questioning if you even know how to figure out what's best for you. So what do you do? How do you choose a career that you don't regret? How do you make sure that your next career path is the right path? Is the one that sticks? That's what we're going to answer in this episode. And since regret is an emotion that comes from a lot of hindsight, I think the best people to consult about this are those who have nothing but hindsight, who have essentially their whole lives behind them. We are going to borrow the wisdom of the dying. And more specifically, we're going to consult the regrets of the dying from Bronnie Ware. Bronnie Ware was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book about the top five regrets of the dying. She spent a lot of time with people on their deathbed and started to notice patterns. We're going to use each of these regrets. To help us regret proof our career choices. So, let's dive in. Regret number one is, I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life others expected of me. So, to avoid this regret, we have to choose a career that is true to ourselves not solely because it's something others expect of us. We need to honor this pact to ourselves first. And I think this is something that comes up really clearly when you're dying. We had Dr. Katie Deming on our podcast about a year ago who had several moments with the dying as well and had her own experiences with people near their own death. And what she realized is, when we die, we're going out alone. We're by ourselves. We're the only ones that we need to answer to and be accountable to. And so that is true throughout the totality of our lives. When we're choosing a career, are we choosing one that is true to ourselves? Do we even know what that means? A lot of times we've spent so much time trying to contort ourselves to please other people, to fit into certain molds that we've lost sight of ourselves somewhere. We don't even know what being true to ourselves means. So I think of this as like, what is your desert island career? One of the questions I ask my clients is if no one would be mad at you, what would you do? And this can be very eye opening because We may not realize that we're making decisions based on other people's expectations, but it's there somewhere in the background. And if we ask ourselves this question, if no one would be mad at me, what would I choose? You might be surprised at what comes up. So take a moment and sit with that question. Do people expect you to be the smart one? To be the successful one? To be the devoted one who never quits or never gives up? To be the one who is always achieving and working? To be the one who's always on that straight and narrow path? What is it that you think other people expect of you? Because we don't even know. what is a life true to yourself? What is a career that's true to yourself? Where is it that you are betraying yourself in order to try to fit the mold of what you think other people want from you? In order to avoid this regret, we have to make sure that all of our decisions around a career are coming from an authentic place within us. And the way we do that is by learning how to connect to our intuition. So that we can follow it wherever it takes us. When you choose a career that is true to yourself and not something that others expect of you, you're going to avoid this first regret. The next regret is, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Now, to avoid this regret, It's not that we need to not work hard. We need to make sure that we are working because we want to and not because we have to or feel obligated. We need to make sure that when we're working, we're doing the things we want to be doing in the first place. If you're listening to this podcast episode, you are not someone who wants to eat bonbons on the beach for months and months on end. Maybe you want a vacation, totally get that. But at the end of the day, you have ambition. You have a drive, you have a fire inside of you. You don't want to just not work and not do anything and live a vacation lifestyle. But what we want to do is work the right way. Work in a way that is aligned. We never mind hard work when it's something we're deeply excited about. But when it's something that takes us away from what we really want to be doing, we mind. We also tend to not mind hard work when it's flexible, when we can do it on our own schedule. But when the hard work is rigid, locked in, and then we have to miss out on events and things with friends and family because of it, we mind. When the work is hard and we feel like we're, it's not really leading to anything or it's not adding something into the world when the work is hard and it feels like we're just going through the motions and we don't feel like we're connecting to people or helping people in the way that we want to, that's when we mind, but when we're doing work and then we see with our own eyes, the visible impact that's happening and when it feels like, Everything we're doing has a purpose and a meaning, that's when we don't mind. I'm going to interpret this result as not that like I wish I hadn't worked so hard, but I wish that I hadn't worked on things I didn't care about. I wish I hadn't worked so hard on things that didn't matter so much to me. I wish I hadn't forced myself to work when I didn't want to work. I wish I had a different relationship. With work and so to avoid this regret, we want to change our relationship with work. We want to work at things we enjoy. We want to work because we want to, we want to work because it's something that's making us feel alive regret. Number three, I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. So, to avoid this regret, we need to make choices that allow us to express our feelings. And even more than that, what I will add in this context is make choices that don't just express our feelings or give us more space to express our feelings, but make choices that honor our feelings. Right now you have this gut sense of knowing that you're not in the right place. You feel this sense of dread in the pit of your stomach. You feel angry about certain aspects of the system. You feel like you're meant for more. You feel like you want to help people in a different way. You have these feelings and these knowings within you. But you're shoving it down somewhere. You're gaslighting yourself. You're saying, well, it's not so bad. Well, this is actually a noble profession. So people would kill to have this job. It's supposed to be really fulfilling. So it should be fulfilling for me. We don't trust our inner knowing enough to act on it. And that is going to lead to choices that we regret. So when we're making choices in our career, can you make choices that not only give you more time and space to express your feelings, but also can you make choices that honor your feelings, that honor your somatic cues. When you go to job interviews, instead of wondering, do they like me? Am I doing a good enough job? Can you turn it around and say, Does this space feel nourishing for me? Do these people feel aligned with me? Can you pay attention to what gives you energy? Where you feel chills and goosebumps? When you're looking over job descriptions, are you reading through the description and then trying to convince yourself, Well, I could do that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I could do that. Even though you're not, like, jumping up and down, thinking about doing it? Instead of trying to convince yourself to tolerate things, can you actually look for that little puppy dog energy you feel when you're like, Oh my gosh, I really want to do this thing. I'm so excited. I would love to do this. Can you wait for that feeling of, Wait, I can get paid for this? So to avoid regret number three, we need to make career choices that allow us to express our feelings and honor our feelings. Regret number four, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. To avoid this regret, we need to choose a career that helps us show up as the best version of ourselves for all of the people in our lives. One of the biggest complaints I hear from clients that I work with is that medicine is all consuming. And that's partially true, but what the real truth is, is that misalignment is all consuming. When you're in a career that is misaligned, that is the thing that is all consuming. That is the thing that drains your energy, that makes you preoccupied with solving and figuring out how to get out of this situation and figuring out what's next, and then you're so preoccupied and drained. That you're not able to be present for your loved ones. You're at work and your ideas are being suppressed and not listened to. You just don't feel like you're being valued or appreciated. And that creates bitterness and resentment. And then you go home and you snap at your loved ones and you're really easily irritated. When you're in a career that's misaligned, it has a deep impact on all of the different areas of your life. But when you choose a career that not only gives you more time and space to devote to other areas of your life, but it also, through that career, it actually makes you a better person. It makes you a person that you're proud of. You're choosing a career that brings you closer to who you want to be, so that you actually want to stay in touch with your friends. Because when you feel like you're not present, when you're not happy, when you're burnt out, even if you have time to stay in touch with friends or spend time with friends, you likely don't want to. But when you're in a career that allows you to be the best version of yourself, when you're in a career that brings you closer to who you really want to be, that makes you someone you're proud of, you want to be in touch with your friends. Regret number five. I wish that I had let myself be happier. What I want to point out is that it's let myself because you start to realize as you near the end of your life that happiness is a choice and it always was. It's not something we achieve once we've checked all the other boxes off. It's something we can allow ourselves to be and feel on a moment to moment basis. I went to see one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Abraham Hicks, at a conference in Amsterdam, two years ago. Even the fact that I can just say that is so cool. And I have so much gratitude that like, what? That's my life? Um, but one of the things they said is, you can't be more blessed than you already are, but you can let more of your blessings in. We can let ourselves be happier. So to avoid this regret, We need to make choices that prioritize joy now. Instead of making career choices that we think will make us happy because we're going to make this amount of money that's going to lead to a good savings account, which will let us pay back our loans, which will let us do this thing, and then in five years, then we can take a vacation, and then we'll be happy. No. We have to make choices that prioritize joy now. Now, that will increase joy this week, this month, not in the future. So when you're making a career choice, you have to put this joy filter on, this immediate joy filter. Because too many times I see people say, okay, well, I want to actually get this degree. And I'm going to spend like three years getting this degree so that then I can do this other job, which then I think that job will be the thing I want to do and that'll make me happy. But do you want to go through the process of getting the degree? Maybe you do. Prioritizing joy now, means that we're not doing things for years at a time that are a means to an end. Sure, sometimes we need to do things we don't want to do. So if we're spending huge chunks of our lives doing things we don't want to do as a means to an end, we're never going to arrive at happiness. So we must make choices that prioritize joy along the journey. If you want to choose a career that you don't regret, let's borrow. The wisdom and the regrets of the dying. Let's choose a career that is true to ourselves and not something that others expect of us. Let's make sure we're working because we want to and we enjoy it and not because we have to or feel obligated. Let's make choices that allow us to express and honor our feelings. Let's make choices that help us to live. To show up as the best version of ourselves for all of the people in our lives. And let's make choices that prioritize joy now. If you want to choose a career you don't regret, and if you want to discover your unique path to changing the world without sacrificing your health and happiness, right now we are enrolling for Pathway to Purpose, my 12 week group coaching program. To help you find the work you're meant to be doing. We officially start this spring cohort on March 2nd. So head to the link in the show notes for more information.