Still Waiting for Clarity? Here’s Why It’s Not Coming — and What to Do Instead

You’ve been waiting for the “aha moment,” the sign, the crystal-clear vision of what’s next... but all you’ve gotten is more second-guessing, more spinning, more stuck.

What if the clarity you’re waiting for is never coming the way you expect?

If you feel like you should know by now, but everything still feels foggy—this episode will help you finally understand why you’re stuck, and how to shift into aligned action.

You will learn:

• The 4 kinds of trust you actually need in order to move forward with purpose
• Why clarity isn’t a prerequisite—it’s a result of the right kind of action
• How to stop outsourcing your direction and start honoring what you already know deep down

Press play to stop waiting and start building the life that’s been calling you forward all along.

Register for Pivot Potentials Now >> https://coachchelsmd.com/summit/

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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: 0:30

In today's podcast, I am sharing with you a free masterclass that I did last Thursday all about how I built my life of freedom by following my unrealistic dreams. If you're listening to this in real time as the episode is coming out, so Memorial Day weekend, essentially, that means there's still time for you to jump into Pathway to Purpose. Enrollment is closing this weekend. We start Monday, May 26th. If these podcast episodes resonate with you, if you're feeling lost or like you're unsure, what's next? Pathway to purpose is absolutely the program for you.

Speaker 3: 1:07

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.

Speaker 2: 1:30

I'm gonna break down the four things to focus on so that you can take your exquisite risk, Exquisite risk, the definition I have is it's you're trusting your own knowing, even when it doesn't make logical sense. There's four things I wanna share that make this whole idea of taking your exquisite risk, taking your leap, not like this ambiguous thing. Because it doesn't have to feel like this blind leap into the unknown. It was, for me, it was absolutely a blind leap into the unknown for me. And that's the good news. It doesn't have to be that for you.'cause I've done it, been there and now I have a process that I can teach you and that I teach all of my clients that helps them really get through this. So what I have learned in my four years of coaching over 200 people in on this exact process is every dream you have asks you to build trust in four areas, in your desires, in yourself, in your growth potential, and in life. Whatever force of the universe you believe in, but like in life itself. When we build trust in these areas, that sort of facilitates us into taking our exquisite leap. Number one is trusting your desires. And this is really about like anchoring into your soul's purpose. Because right now you might have some idea that your desires are just like random, or your desires are not really fleshed out, or not something to to trust, not something to act on. The idea of trusting your desires, it's, it doesn't have to be ambiguous, right? I have actually broken it down for you guys. And this is what we do inside path to purpose. It looks like getting clear on three things. It's who you're here to be, what you're here to do, and how you're here to live. And I teach you exactly how to answer all of those and we get so clear on that within pathway to purpose. But the thing is, I didn't have this laid out exactly on my journey. I'm gonna walk you through how I did it. Messy, I didn't have someone teaching me a process. But what I did was I actually got clear on these things. I couldn't articulate them. But I had these bits of information that I understood. When I took my five week leave of absence, when I was really burnt out, I started doing this again. And there's certain things I was starting to do. I was journaling to my intuition, trying to ask like, what am I, what am I supposed to be doing? How am I supposed to be contributing? And what came out from my intuition, it, it was like love. I was like, okay, what does that mean? So I asked Love how, and then my intuition said Love on fire. And when I say those three words, that might not mean a lot to you, but at the time I had this understanding of what it meant. I was like, so does that mean I'm supposed to pursue these things that are like lighting a fire inside of me right now? The things I'm actually caring about, like the spirituality, the personal growth, the travel. Am I supposed to just pursue that? And I, I just felt this like, these chills, this like full body sense of like, oh my gosh, yes, that's actually what I'm supposed to do. Right? So I already started to have this sense like, what am I here to do that? And I don't know exactly what that is, right? I don't know what's on the laptop, but I know it's not this, I'm supposed to be doing the things I'm like really feeling lit up about feeling on fire about, and then how you're here to live. This came from my longings. We talked about this earlier, of like wanting more, right? And longings tend to be desires that feel kind of vague, but they're just like directional desires of like, I want more of this and less of that. So I was wanting to just be outside more. That's one thing that felt so clear to me. I wanted to travel. I wanted just more time and spaciousness. I wanted to be able to just go, like, I wanted to not have someone else in charge of my schedule. So I knew I needed a different style of day, a different style of week, a different structure for my schedule. It's not this rigid hospital, I don't want to be beholden to someone else for a schedule. I need to be able to have a more fluidity in my day-to-day. That felt really clear and true. Again, I didn't know exactly what that meant, but I didn't have to,'cause I just knew the direction. It was like, to me, the direction of that felt like remote work of some kind. Right? Work on a laptop, not work where I have to be somewhere at a certain time and place, and then who you're here to be. This is something that came to me in these just like glimmers, these little moments of resonance. I remember in college I found this quote, I, I loved Pinterest and my friends were all these like southern bells basically. And their Pinterest boards all had their wedding plans and like their baby's nurseries and just like all of that kind of stuff. And on my Pinterest board, they would make fun of me because I had all these quotes and I had these pictures of travel. So it's like, yeah, it was written on the walls where I was gonna be, but I didn't understand it yet at the time. Um, I. So I would always look at these quotes and I found this one quote that said, be a fountain, not a drain. I still remember like the visual of it. It was like green and yellow and it just was like these words and I just felt this sense of, oh, that's what I meant to be. I meant to be a fountain, right? I don't know what that means, but I was just like, that feels there's something correct about that. I'm meant to be this like beacon of light. I'm meant to be like uplifting to people. Didn't understand it, but vividly remember that, that click, that resonance there. I remember seeing Berna Brown's Ted Talk when I was in college and, and just feeling so obsessed of like, everything she's saying is incredible. I want to be her in some capacity. Like there's something about what she's doing that I also want to do. Again, don't know what that is. Um, when I was on my five week leave of absence, I was journaling and I was going into why, like why did I go into medicine in the first place? And one of the things that was really clear is I went into medicine'cause I wanna help people live healthier and happier lives. And I felt like health is the foundation to a happier life. And then I asked myself, well, are there other ways I can do that? And I just felt like there has to be, I didn't have a clear answer there. And then I asked myself, are you living a happier, healthier life right now? And it was a very clear, no, not just, no, I'm not living like that. Not just know in a shameful way like you messed up kid. No, as in I'm not doing that. And that's a problem because I need to be doing that. Like part of my work is being a model of what I'm here to help people with. Like I'm supposed to be someone who leads by example. So these are all examples of these moments of resonance that I didn't know how to make sense of logically, but you can see how now as we're doing this, Steve Jobs connect the dots looking backwards, you can see, oh yeah, obviously this was adding up, but it's hard to see when you're in the moment. So understanding these three core things, who you're here to be, what you're here to do, how you're here to live, that's the whole process. I call it like connecting to your purpose, anchoring into your purpose. When you know these three things, you actually can trust your desires because you see that they aren't random. You see that they're all part of this kind of like map that you have, right? Those are the three, purpose coordinates. When we understand what your purpose coordinates are, you have a direction. That's what we are doing within Pathway to Purpose. But part of that, we'll go to number two. The other thing you have to do is you have to trust yourself. And what that means is you're taking action before you're ready, before you have it all figured out. So sometimes when you have these scattered ideas, what this means is we need to do an experiment, we need to try something. And it's not something, an experiment that we do from student mode where, oh, I'm gonna take a course, or I'm gonna like learn about something or I'm gonna research. Right? We actually have to take some kind of action to test something out. So I've had clients who started this accountability group because she, I don't remember what her question was, but she was like, I think I wanna just help, help women in some way. I don't know exactly. Um, but she just brought some of her friends together and created this accountability group and it was like a focus on wellness. And she didn't know, like, do I wanna be a coach? Do I wanna be, I don't know, like a teacher in something. But she just started this group and she learned so much from like, what she actually wanted her role to be. What are the things she actually got lit up helping people with? I've had one client right now, she's going through a networking event.'cause she realized she wants to be a connector of people. She wants to build bridges, um, of relationships to people. There's times where we've done everything we can do in our head, right? Number one is like trusting your desires. That's a lot more, not even just in our head, but it's introspective. It's, it's turning inwards. It's connecting to self. There's stillness happening with it. As we're tuning in, number two, as we're trusting ourself, like we're taking action, we're doing experiments, we're testing things out, we're seeing, and the thing about this is we have to take action. Before we feel like we know what we're doing before we have the answers, because you're not actually trusting your inner knowing if you're not acting on it. In a relationship, you don't just trust someone because they say like, I'm trustworthy. You can trust me. How do you trust someone? It's built over time, right? They do actions over time that show you they're trustworthy. They show up consistently, and then you're like, okay, yeah, I trust you. We have to do this for ourselves. We have to take action. And this builds trust, but it also builds clarity. So what did this look like for me? So for me, I resigned from residency, right? I didn't exactly know what I was gonna do. My laptop screen was still blurry. I was like, I don't know what's on the laptop. But I know it's not, I'm not going to a hospital, so I gotta resign here. Right? So I took action. Like I, it was clear to me it's not medicine. I didn't have my next thing, but I resigned. Right? Another action. I got a job teaching English in South Korea. This was a bridge, a career bridge for me that I created. I got a way to pay the bills and support myself financially. Gave myself space to figure out my next thing. I started a blog. I initially thought I wanted to be a travel blogger, so I bought a domain name. I took a course, but I didn't just like passively consume, I was taking action. Like I published a blog post every single week. My first like two or three years until I started my podcast. I didn't know like what my niche was. I didn't know who my audience was. I didn't know like what I'm supposed to be talking about. I just wrote a post every week, and I started figuring all of that out. I also figured out, I don't actually like travel blogging. I love writing. I don't like writing about travel, but I couldn't have known that in my head. I knew that by taking action, right? Let's say you go to this ice cream shop and there's like wild flavors there. There's like tamarind, mango. And you don't just look at the flavors and you're like asking the, the ice cream person, oh, what would that taste like? Is it sweet? Is it salty? Is it tangy? Like, you're not just doing that. You're like, Hey, can I try it? Can I try a sample? And then you try it and then you're like, I get it. I get what that tastes like. Right? But if she just described it to you, you'd be like, I don't. I can kind of get it, but I'm not quite there, right? So it's like you, you need to do something to take action to get more clarity on it, and that's what we do. Um, another thing I did, I signed up for a coaching certification, but I wasn't just like signing up and being a student. I literally coached every single English teacher on the little island I lived on. I had challenged myself to do a hundred hours of free coaching. So just anyone who spoke English on that island, I was like, Hey, do you got anything in your life? Do you wanna work on, can I help you? Again, I didn't know my niche. I didn't know what kind of coach I wanted to be. I just started coaching people and through that I learned my niche through that, I built my programs through that. I like, I just figured out what I actually wanted, right? So this is the second place you have to trust. You have to trust yourself. Like the way you build trust in yourself is by taking action before you have it figured out. I didn't wait till I felt ready. I didn't wait till I knew exactly what I was gonna do. I was like, let me take the little thing I have. What do I know? Great. Let me act on it. And that's how trust is earned. Like, you earn trust by doing, not by thinking. The other thing I had to trust. Number three, this is so important. It is. I had to trust my growth, had to trust my potential like the person I was right out of residency would not have been able to be running a six figure business, would not have been able to coach people at the level I coach people on now. Like that actually would not have been possible at that moment. That doesn't mean I wasn't capable of it, but I actually, there was a lot of growth that I, that needed to happen. And so there's like a nuance of start before you're ready, but then also know that there's things that you need to grow and like mature into to become the person who actually holds the dreams that you want. There's reality checks of like where you need to uplevel, where you need to like rise, where you need to upskill. Like where do you need to actually grow so you can hold the dreams? That doesn't mean don't take action, right? Very clear. Like, let's have nuances here, but it just means know that there's gonna be a long game. And just because sometimes we can have this voice that's like, we call it imposter syndrome, oh, but who am I to do that? Maybe there's truth to that right now. Like maybe right now you are not able to do the things you think you wanna do, but that, that doesn't mean you can't become the person. And that's so important. Like we, what Tony Robin says, it's like we, um, overestimate what we can do in a year, but underestimate what we can do in a decade. We will get up in our head, like if we don't have the skills right now, or we're not, I don't know, we're not like emotionally mature enough to handle fear or like there's things that we don't have right now. We can become that person, right? If we have a dream, if we have something we wanna do, I. We're worried and we're doubting, like, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it, but can you trust your potential? Can you trust your ability to grow into that person? That's a really important piece of it. It's, we can get so intimidated and like hold ourselves back because we're not there yet. But then if we do that, we never get there. So we, you have to, on some level, like decide to become the person who has the things you want. You have to decide that like, this thing I want is more important than any of my, the bullshit in my head that tells me I can't have it or can't do it or can't be it. And then you have to refuse to be the one standing in your way. So then you're like, well, who do I need to become? And then you just start becoming that person, right? It's like this decision you make. It's this mindset, but it's also backed up with actions. I'm constantly looking at what are the things I say I want and am I being the person who's congruent with having that right now? Is the way that I'm showing up congruent with having the things that I want? Usually there's some kind of gap and some kind of disconnect and that's okay. We don't beat ourselves up, but we just grow into it. We just identify what is the gap? Where do I need to level up? And we do it. There's like a level of grace of like, it's okay. And there's a level of like brutal honesty of like, I'm not gonna just let myself stay in this state of like holding myself back. It is like just reality check, where am I not being the person I need to be and how do I become that person? You trust your growth. This is developing a growth mindset, right? A lot of us, especially if we are struggling with perfectionism, we are in a fixed mindset. Our mindset is so fixed, we do not believe in our growth potential. Maybe we don't realize that, but we feel like if, if we're bad at something, it's who we are. We don't feel like we can get better. We can grow. You have to build a growth mindset here. So things I did just early on in my journey was I stopped drinking. Because I started to realize alcohol was something for me that was like this comfort zone behavior. It was something I did if I felt like a little social anxiety or if I, you know, I would use it as a comfort zone to like easy hack some dopamine, it was stunting my growth and I felt it. And I was like, this is me staying in my comfort zone. It's not me challenging myself to grow. And if I have my business and brand is based on growing, like I have to stop it, right? So I stopped drinking and that was big process for me. That was like, took a lot, like I worked with a coach. I read a lot of books. I actually had to do that to become the person I am now. I did a lot of mindset work, a lot of reprogramming, like creating a whole new identity. There's like the Alter Ego effect book. And so I just like created my whole new identity of like my six figure CEO self. And I just like worked every day on like becoming this person. Every time I did this, every time I'm like choosing growth, choosing my new identity, choosing who I wanna become, choosing that I'm gonna become the person who holds my dreams. Like I'm gonna rise to that. I, I just started to trust myself and trust my capacity and trust. Like I can grow into anything. I can hold anything. When you see yourself improving, like becoming that person, you're like, I, I actually can do this. It doesn't matter if I'm not there yet. I trust my growth and that's huge. Number four is trusting life, right? So we're going through the four things We have to trust, the trust we need to like anchor into, if we wanna take this exquisite risk, if we wanna say yes to our unrealistic dreams.