The Hidden Cost of "Put Your Head Down and Power Through" | 🔥 A millennials hot take on common career advice for doctors

Have you ever been told to "just push through" a toxic work situation? What if that advice is costing you more than you realize?

Through medical training- we condition ourselves (and eachother) to tolerate being overworked and mistreated. And this behavior and ethos has severe repercussions to the entire profession of medicine. 

In this episode, we break down the hidden costs of enduring toxicity and why staying silent might be the biggest mistake of all.

You'll learn:

• What makes a workplace "toxic"- i.e. how to determine if you are in a toxic environment.
• Things we've normalized in medicine- that are actually NOT ok to be experiencing at work. 
• The repercussions of "powering through" to your long term mental health, and to the medical profession as a whole

Pushing through isn’t the answer— listen to this episode to see  what you can do instead. 

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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 2: 0:29

In today's episode, you'll learn what type of treatment you should not be tolerating in the workplace.

Speaker 4: 0:37

Welcome to Life After Medicine, the podcast helping millennial health professionals leave the system and build a fulfilling career. I'm your host, Chelsea Turgeon, residency dropout turned six figure entrepreneur and world traveler. I'll help you discover your unique path to making an impact without the burnout because you were meant for more than 15 minute patient visits under fluorescent lights.

Speaker 2: 0:59

Welcome back to another segment of millennials hot take on common career advice, where I am out here challenging conventional wisdom. And my goal is to break you out of outdated thinking, call out bad advice that is keeping you stuck and share a new, more empowering perspective that will help you create a career. You actually want today's, today's hot take is in direct response to some pretty toxic advice that I have observed in a physician Facebook group. so I'm going to share very brief and vague context of The post just to keep it private and protect everyone's identities But because the thing is I'm commenting on a specific post and specific comments, but these are themes These are patterns. This is not the first time I've seen something like this. So it's not really just even this one post It's just the whole ethos in general So there was a trainee who commented in one of the physician Facebook groups this trainee is struggling in Residency and they provide details about their struggle which are not as relevant But just some of the general things are just feeling like they're in an unsupportive environment Experiencing what seems like a lot of interpersonal type conflict which the person labels as verbal abuse but the part that I really want to highlight is not really like what what's happening that sort of led to all of this is What I want to highlight is the person's lived experience of Their day to day and the things that to me are the most concerning are just the fact that they're going home in tears And they're finding It really hard to have motivation they're having so much stress that they're feeling overwhelmed. They're struggling with sleep. They're feeling depressed. They feel like they're in survival mode. And so really, regardless of what the external things are that are happening, the thing I want to highlight the most is just this person's lived emotional experience and how, how painful and distraught this person is in this moment. And their question was essentially about Like, how do you cope with this? How do you get through this? And also wondering like if other people have been in a similar environment and the thing that happened in the comments is something that happens in all of these comments in these Facebook groups. And so I'm not surprised and I'm still concerned and I'm still like, just, it's just frustrating that this is what occurs. The advice essentially is. Put your head down, get through until you graduate, right? Just the whole ethos is like, power through, this sucks, maybe like find a counselor, whatever. But just like, get through, like keep going. And my hot take around all of this, which, why is this even a hot take? It's more, it should be more of a public service announcement, but it feels like quite a hot take. My hot take is if you're in a toxic work environment, you don't need to power through I'm going to go ahead and just define toxic workplaces, any environment where you don't feel like you can be your best self. And so if it's feeling toxic for you, you don't need to push through that. So two, two things I want to really address one, like what is not normal and okay in any workplace. And then all of the problems inside of the put your head down and power through advice, things that are not Normal or okay to experience in any workplace. Going home in tears regularly. Feeling depressed, anxious, having trouble sleeping due to work. Being publicly shamed or bullied by higher ups. This is something we used to very much normalize I remember even almost like kind of laughing it off because you know you laugh through the pain, but we'd be like Oh, yeah, I got wrecked by my attending like I got wrecked I'm like I got publicly shamed or bullied is essentially what we're saying, but that was normal I'm not even saying that like the attending is at fault either Because I think there's a lot of it a lot of ingredients that come together to create a toxicity And I don't think that it's like one person is toxic or not, but I think having an experience of being publicly shamed or bullied is not okay. Not having a, an outlet to voice your concerns about treatment in the workplace is not okay. If you're experiencing any sort of interpersonal conflict, and there's no outlet for you to go to, there's no kind of neutral person that you can talk to who can support you or help you resolve the conflict or can help you manage or work through it. That's not okay. So if you're in a place where your concerns are consistently ignored, they're consistently dismissed and there's no real outlet. To address what's happening, that's not okay. I'm sure there's so many other signs that your work environment is toxic for you and that things are not okay. What I want to highlight first and foremost is like, if you're having this lived experience of feeling unsafe at work, feeling unsettled, you're feeling like the stress is so overwhelming that you can't sleep and that you're feeling depressed, if you're struggling with any of these mental health things related to work, your lived experience is the most important thing. And I'm not saying that if you experience any sort of discomfort or interpersonal conflict, you just need to label something toxic and leave. Um, because there's ways to work through conflict and it's not normal to be in a constant state of conflict and feeling unsafe in the workplace. Now obviously then people have the local residency is supposed to be hard. Training is supposed to be hard. But, and there is a massive difference between. Hard and soul crushing. I talk about this in my book, Residency Dropout, about like the right kind of hard and the wrong kind of hard. And it's the wrong kind of hard every single time. If you're feeling unsafe, if you're feeling depleted, if you feel like you're losing yourself, if you feel unwell, that's the wrong kind of hard the reason something is hard is because It's a challenge or stimulus to help you grow, but you can't grow through something that's quote unquote hard if you don't have any inner resources to grow. And the other big problem that I want to talk about is the advice that we get. We have to stop normalizing advice, like put your head down and power through. It normalizes abuse in medicine. It trains doctors to accept toxic work conditions for the rest of their careers. It, it teaches you that your wellbeing doesn't matter, which by the way, is the exact mindset that leads to corporate exploitation and toxic work environments after training. Essentially, it creates this conditioning within us. To tolerate mistreatment, to tolerate overwork, to tolerate systemic exploitation without questioning it. And then you wonder why we feel so overworked and disgruntled later on in practice, why we feel like we're being taken advantage of by different corporate systems. It's because we're training ourselves to be taken advantage of. We feel like we're being overworked and like just this cog in the wheel of a corporate system. We're training that into ourselves from an early phase. Anytime you're saying, put your head down, don't question it, power through, you're saying, you don't matter. Your well being doesn't matter. You should just keep going. And it's okay to be mistreated. It's okay to be used as almost like a commodity it just creates a system that doesn't respect you. You teach people how to treat you in every interaction. And if the way we're teaching trainees how to be treated is through just put your head down and work through the pain, that just. Trains everyone to treat doctors in that way, like, Oh, they'll just do it. They're going to be the person who just shows up anyways. What you tolerate continues. The more you tolerate mistreatment, the more you tolerate overwork, the more you tolerate systemic exploitation, the more you advise other people to tolerate it. The more all of this continues. And there's another consequence of just putting your head down and powering through. And that consequence is to your own self worth. There are countless clients that I have worked with that I,

Speaker 3: 9:57

It honestly breaks my heart to talk about this, but there's so many clients who have come to me broken. After powering through for so long

Speaker 2: 10:08

the damage this does to your mental health and your self worth is not just isolated and contained to that moment in time. Even if you do graduate and you make it through, it's like, at what cost did that have on you? I've had clients come to me after their power through moment broken, having to pick up the pieces of this traumatic experience of forcing themselves to get through something day in and day out, feeling like they're completely worthless, feeling just like a shell of a person, the amount of sessions I've sat through with these highly accomplished,

Speaker 3: 10:48

incredible women Who are sobbing because they don't feel

Speaker 2: 10:52

good enough because for years they tolerated treatment that told them they're not good enough. And so. It has to end. We don't need to accept mistreatment, suffering toxicity as the price of admission into this profession. We don't have to keep tolerating this. We don't need to put our heads down. And in fact, every time you put your head down and power through in the face of what feels like toxicity to you, you're becoming part of the problem. And so what I want you to take from this more than anything is stop putting your head down and powering through, find someone who can validate your lived experience and your emotions and find a way forward that values your self worth, that values your wellbeing, whatever that way forward is. And since this is a PSA, this is a message I would like to spread, so if this is a message that you felt is important, if you feel like someone else needs to hear this, go ahead and send this to them, because the only way that culture change happens is through sort of grassroots messages like this being spread, and so if you feel like this is an important message, Then send it to people, you know, in your profession, people who may need to hear this, maybe people who agree, maybe even your institution. This is something that absolutely needs to change and culture change has to start with us.