Confused About What’s Next? 3 Somatic Tools Doctors Can Use to Create Clarity During a Career Change.

Feel like you’re going through the motions in your career — uninspired, unfulfilled, and wondering if you're ever going to feel lit up by anything again?

On paper you have it all- but on the inside you feel disconnected, numb, and unsure what’s next. In this episode I teach you how to stop waiting for passion to magically appear — and how to start creating clarity and connection from within, starting with your body.

You’ll learn how to:

1. A simple framework for grounding your body and nervous system
2. Quick, doable practices to boost your energy naturally — without relying on caffeine, over-sleeping, or forcing yourself to “push through.”
3. how to use micro "presence triggers" to help you feel more connected, focused, and alive in your everyday life.

Press play now if you want to shift your internal state so you can FEEL something again.

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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

0:15

In today's episode, you'll learn how to shift your internal state so that you can access, clarity, and make more aligned decisions.

Speaker 4: 0:22

Welcome to Life After Medicine, the podcast helping millennial health professionals leave the system and build a fulfilling career. I'm your host, Chelsea Turin, 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.

0:44

Today's episode is an excerpt I'm taking from a free training I did inside my Facebook group called Activation Codes. And in the activation codes, I'm teaching you the formula to reignite your spark, feel inspired by your work and come back to life. And I'm doing this through three different. Trainings. Each one focuses on a different area. We have the body, the mind, and then the heart and soul. And each training, I'm revealing a specific code. And the code is essentially like a key part of the formula, a key ingredient or thing that you'd need to know in order to activate your spark and come back to life. And so today's code is about the body. And in today's. Episode you'll learn a simple framework for grounding your body and nervous system, quick doable practices to boost your energy naturally, and how to use these micro presence triggers to help you feel more focused, connected, and alive in your everyday life. It's such a practical, tangible training and I'm so excited to bring it to you. So let's dive right in.

Speaker: 1:56

Code number one. To activate your spark, your body needs to be in a state of grounded. Energized presence. So I'm gonna explain each one and then give you some practices that can help for each of those, like grounded, energized, um, present. We'll do a little exercise at the end to, to get into that state together, because this is a whole nother important piece of like, I don't know if you've noticed, but when you make career decisions. Whatever state you're in when you're making that decision, the result of the decision perpetuates the state. So like, what I mean by that is let's say, let's go into desperate, like you're really desperate. Maybe you're desperate from finances so then you like panic and you get some kind of job that can, and when you're in that job, yes, it solved the immediate like problem of panic with finances. But as you're doing the job, you're continually in a state of anxiety and desperation as you do the job because it's like whatever state you're in as you make these big decisions. If you're making a decision from that state, it tends to perpetuate the state when you're living it out. The important part of that mean is that I want us to be in a state of grounded, energized presence so that from we can make all the decisions going forward, and you're gonna create more and more of that, so it creates that cycle upwards so grounded. When I think of grounded, it's like a centeredness You're in this kind of a state where things could come up and you're not gonna be like reactive and set off by them. It's like centered within yourself. You are ready for anything. You're not gonna just like crumble or flip out if something happens. It's almost like a gravity blanket that like holds you in place. In a good way. It's like the exact right weight, gravity blanket that like holds you centered, makes you feel safe, but it doesn't like weigh you down. Just the right amount of a gravity blanket that keeps you feeling safe, feeling centered, calm as you go about your day. So how do we get grounded? We need to find our centering practices and not just find them, but engage in them and do them, so I wanna give you just my simplest things that I do and the goal is to find essentially the smallest, effective dose of grounding that that works to keep you centered the simplest thing is being in nature and nature. I think of nature as, I mean, it can be like way out in the woods, you know, with no one around. But nature for me is if I'm around like green, like plant life, anything like alive. You might even have a little green oasis, like in your home, in your, wherever you live in your backyard, and that can be your nature, right? But it's just like being around alive, natural things is how I define nature it can really help to just like super engaged and immersed in the elements. So that could be, you know, taking your shoes off and just being barefoot, like in the dirt or the grass and like having like physical contact with the grass. It really does. Create this calming sensation. That can just help you feel centered and connected. And especially if you're doing it in a way that's super intentional and you're paying attention to like your feet on the ground, on the earth. And then you also were in the sunlight and you can feel the sun. It's just like your interactions with the natural elements is so helpful, and that's why being in the hospital, working all day is so difficult because you're just inside, right? It's like the quote says, it's like we're not meant to be inside day after day on a beautiful day. At the end of the day, you wanna have like almost your simplest version of like being in nature that grounds you. So for me right now, if it's like, I wanna keep it super simple, I either have plants, like, right, like I have plants that just exist and I'll just take a minute, be with them and I hear birds outside on my trees. Take a moment there. Or I can go upstairs. I have like three floors up. There's like a shared terrace so I can go out there, be in the sunlight, right? That's my simplest version. And then my next version is like going for a walk in the park and actually grounding there. And then my more and more complex version is like every weekend going out for a beautiful hike in real, real nature. you see how there's different levels, but you wanna have a very simple version of nature that you can just do and have and be and like ground into on a regular day-to-day basis. So that's one of my centering practices. The next one, and again, we can keep this as complex or simple as we want, but this is just also about grounding. Um, micro rituals is what I call them. Micro rituals are little tiny, uh, like a series of a few practices that are simple that I do to kind of bookend my day. So I've realized that's when I feel the most grounded is, and it's, I don't wanna call it a nighttime routine or a morning routine, because then that feels complex and daunting, but I, it's like a micro ritual. Um, so for me right now, my morning micro ritual is I wake up, I have created, I'm trying to use Alexa to become my, my executive function in life. And so I say like, good morning Alexa. And then she'll put on this playlist and. The playlist has a few different songs and I sort of have, like the thing I do to the first song is just, it's just a breathing, right? I've like trained myself when this song comes on. I close my eyes one hand on heart, one hand on belly, and I just like breathe and I just pay attention to my breath during the song. It's not a full meditation, it's not a full, like get rid of your thoughts. It's not like a full breath work. It's just like. Breathe to a song, it's, I like it to a song'cause it feels boring to me otherwise. So it's like, okay, breathe to a song. And then after I do that, it's like maybe two, three minutes of breathing. I already notice I feel better or just more centered in my body. And then I have this little manifestation journal that I'm using where I write down, I just like do the prompts on the manifestation journal. Whole thing is probably like six minutes total. Super micro. You could go even more micro than that. It could be like there's a cup of water. On my bed and I drink that first thing in the morning, like this big glass of water, or I, I just like have this one mantra that I say in the morning, or I just make my bed every morning. It can be so micro, but just having one thing you do in the morning that you do always, my evening one is really like, I'm, I'm trying to do a room reset. That doesn't always happen, but the thing I do is I just go by my bed. I like write my gratitude from the day, and then I read, write, evening ritual, micro ritual done. Having this book-ended practice can help you stay centered, can help you stay grounded and can keep you out of that state of just like anxiety, uncertainty, all of that, and being grounded and calm is really necessary for spark activation, so we have the grounding where we wanna put the gravity blanket on. Come into ourselves, center calm, steady. But then there's also the energy, right? We wanna have a little bit of pep and zing. It's not just like, we're not just like meditating on a mountaintop, it's part of it. But we also wanna have this like energized state as well. I think there's this idea that. Energy is like directly correlated to the food we're eating or the amount that we're sleeping. And obviously that's so important to like, you know, eat healthy foods, eat like whole nutritious foods, drink a lot of water, sleep, rest. Like all of those things are so important. But there's also times where it's like you're doing all of those and you're still exhausted there's a soul tired that happens where you're, no matter how much you sleep. You are still tired, like you wake up and you're still tired. And that's the part of the energy that we really wanna work on today. Um, because there are things, and I'd love to hear if you've ever experienced this, have you ever like, been tired, but then maybe you got a message from somebody that like you had a crush on and you were like, I'm wide awake now. I'm like, I'm so excited. Or you, um, maybe even got like a phone call or an email with this opportunity. That was like you were so excited about, and again, that lit you up and you're like, oh my gosh, I thought I needed to rest, but now I'm gonna stay up all night doing this thing. Or have you noticed how. Negative thinking really sucks the life out of you, right? You're around people who are complaining all day, or you're the one complaining we've all been there. Or you just have this constant soundtrack of like, you're not good enough. It's never gonna work out in your head, and that just drains you, right? All of that is also exhausting. So it's like there's all of these things that are just beyond the physical parts of energy, um, that we want to start paying attention to and activating and obviously purpose is something that's really an important part of that, and that's something that we work on within my programs within Pathway to Purpose. It's like we, we do that and that's one of my favorite things to, to see is like when my clients are like, oh my gosh, they've activated their spark. They're like lit up from within and I just like, I see it and it's so beautiful. And there are other simpler things we can do today to get that process started. So how do we create energy? Two ways that I have found so helpful. Movement and music. Have you noticed the moments when you feel alive, there's some form of movement. I have always noticed this when I'm like riding a bike or like running or at a dance class. You are just dancing around my apartment. It's like I feel alive when I'm moving. And it doesn't have to be fast movement, and it doesn't have to be cardio intensive, but it's like there's something about a movement that connects you to life. That's something I want you guys to, to just tune into. How does my body and soul wanna move for me, it's dancing, ugh, always dancing. Um, but also walking. It gives me a sense of aliveness, running, hiking, all of those things. But it's like, how can we incorporate movement that makes you feel alive into your day to day? And then music is also really important. Music has the power to energize you, to change your state. I have these very intentionally curated playlists for all different things, right? I have a playlist for, um, it's like high vibe in the morning where it's like, this is what gets me into a state in the morning where I feel like just grateful and happy, I have music to create that state of gratitude. I have music where like when I'm running to help me keep going. So it's like mu music that creates power within me. Um, I have music that creates confidence. I have like my CEO playlist where I'm like, all right, I need to get into my CEO energy and like. Businesswoman vibes. I have music for that. You can use music very intentionally to create different states and then same with movement. And so two things I want you to notice. Pay attention to think about. What kind of movement do you want to try today? Like what kind of movement do you want to experiment with to create energy? And then what kind of music do you want to use to, to create the steak that you want? There was a point where I had to ban myself from listening to Taylor Swift songs because I was like, I'm just perpetuating sadness over this guy because I just keep listening to the sad songs. Right. And so where in your life do you keep listening to the sad songs or, you know, whether that's metaphorically or for real, like surrounding yourself with stimuli that kind of continues to perpetuate that state as opposed to breaking it and being like, no, let's just. Turn on some, shake it off instead of, you know, all the, what's it better, man, or all too well. Like, no, let's just change. Change the vibe, change the mood, and give yourself a new state through music. So that's number two, the energized piece, music and movement. Using those really intentionally to activate yourself and get your body into that place where you have some of that natural energy. And then the final one is present. So the something I've been saying to clients very frequently, recently, like almost in every session I'm saying, be where your feet are, be present. Your spark is not something that can exist in the future. It can only exist right here, right now. You can only relate to it and notice it and engage with it. From this moment, I have a whole thing where I talk about your purpose leaves clues, but you can't notice the clues if you're not paying attention and, and you're not present. It's like we're in these mental control towers. We're, we're living from the neck up. We are in our heads circling around, worrying about the future, ruminating on the past, but then we're missing all of the information and clues that are trying to get your attention right here, right now, present. So how do we start working on this? One of my favorite ways to do this is through what I call presence triggers, so it's creating presence, triggers throughout your day. Presence. Triggers are things that you just regularly do throughout your day. That can be this easy, like, oh yeah. Come back to here. My favorite presence trigger is washing your hands. cause we do it multiple times a day. And it involves our senses every time I'm washing my hands, can I just actually be present? Right? Like the water coming onto my hands is like, oh yeah, I'm supposed to be present now. Um, and then like, what is the temperature of the water? Can you feel the temperature? Can you smell the soap? I have smelled so many soaps now because I do this, like, I'm so into soaps. I love going to bathrooms with like nice hotels and places.'cause I'm like, I bet their soap's gonna smell so good because I'm like actively smelling it'cause I'm using this presence trigger. I'm just like. Really present. As present as I can be, and like using that moment to like tune into my senses and to just kind of come back and that's it. You use that trigger to just become present in that moment. I'm here, I'm washing my hands here. I am present. So let's re regroup and revisit all of this so far to activate your spark code code number one, your body needs to be in a state of grounded, energized presence. To get grounded, we want to find those regular centering practices that create safety and calm, energized. We want to start to create energy through movement and music and using those really intentionally. And then presence. We wanna find presence trigger throughout the day to just come back to ground it.

17:01

So there you have it. My loves. If you are feeling soul, tired, exhausted, like you're just going through the motions, the answer is actually so much more simple than you think. It's to come back to your body, to shift your state, to root yourself in this grounded, energized presence because of the clarity, the next steps, all of those things that you're chasing, they're actually already available, but they're here only in this moment and only when you're fully present and open. So the first step to activating that spark and feeling that sense of excited aliveness again, is coming back into the body. Rooting yourself in that grounded, energized presence. If you loved this training and want to feel this lit up from within, feeling where you're excited about your new direction, and you actually wake up and look forward to your day. This is exactly the work we do inside of Pathway to Purpose, and we are currently enrolling now. So head to coach chelsea md.com/pathway to purpose to learn more.