Episode 27: Crafting Your Future Vision (for Mortals)

Is this the time of year where you are planning for the future?

In this episode, I explore a fresh perspective on planning, inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Learn how to:

• Embrace uncertainty and focus on what truly matters.
• Build habits that support the person you want to become.
• Find the freedom that comes from embracing the reality that we don’t have control over the future.

Resources & Mentions:

• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
• My book: The Purposeful MD-Creating the Life You Love Without Guilt [https://www.thepurposefulmd.com/book]
• Purposeful MD Podcast Episode 2 

[Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1WmHWU4y1jkubLWRdRPj0n?  si=RoFDz6LGTFqIQQb_2jvryQ]

[Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2-make-your-new-years-resolutions-stick/id1723782268?i=1000641648239]

Transcript

0:08

Welcome to the PurposefulMD Podcast. As a physician, you've sacrificed so much of your life for other people. Your patients, your family, your friends, and your colleagues. What would it feel like to spend time doing what you enjoy, and to live without guilt? I'm your host, Dr. Laura Suttin, a family physician, certified coach and business owner. If you're a medical professional on a journey towards your most purposeful life, a life with more time and energy and ultimately more joy, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome to another episode of the PurposefulMD Podcast. I'm Dr. Laura Suttin, and today we're going to be talking a little bit about crafting your future vision. And so as I'm recording this, it's the end of the year. It's a time where a lot of us are doing yearly planning. And as I was sitting down to do my yearly planning, working with my coach and then prepping for this episode, I was really thinking about how I wanted to frame the episode and what sort of kind of words of wisdom I wanted to share with you. I've been through a lot of different types of yearly planning and they, they all have their benefits. I googled yearly planning, vision setting, and just about everybody has a construct to use. And it's really interesting just if you just, if you step back and think about it, that planning for the future is something that is unique to us as humans. Other animals don't plan. My dog, doesn't plan for the future. It's really something that we as humans do. And going back to my Episode 2, when I talk about New Year's resolutions, I mentioned that we don't have to wait until the new year to plan, right? We don't have to wait til it's a Monday or first of the year, first of the month to plan and set goals. Really the New Year's resolution and New Year's planning is an arbitrary construct that is created by the calendar. I'll put a link to that episode. I talk about New Year's resolutions and why they often fail. Just real briefly, a lot of times we think that will magically be some sort of different future version of ourselves. And we think that this version of ourselves is going to have the motivation and the drive to get everything done that we want to get done. And that just doesn't happen because as we don't change our thinking, then our habits don't change. So I'll put a link to that and you can go back and listen to it. I recorded it about a year ago. But this time of year does really happen to be a convenient time for us to set goals. And if you, like me, have a reduced work schedule this time of year, it can be really helpful to reflect and get clear on your values and what you might want to accomplish in the next year. So in prepping for this episode, I really had an outline planned. But, over the past couple weeks, I started reading this book called, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Berkman. Now, let me say that I have no affiliation with this book. But when I started reading this book, I scrapped my plan, and I'll go into a little bit about why, cause this book really changed my thinking about time management and about looking towards the future. I'll tell you that I resisted reading this book initially. The book came out, I believe in 2022, and it's a very popular book. I, of course, have heard of it and I resisted reading it at first because I thought, well, that's kind of depressing, right, time management for mortals. But it kept popping up in circles that I am a part of and kind of books that I thought I might want to read. So, since I wrote my own book on time management earlier this year, I decided to go ahead and read it. And the book is very, very interesting and really had a big impact on how I think about goal setting and how I think about my day to day life. So again, just briefly in the book, the author talks about how time is something that we think we have. The way that we talk about time, we have time, we spend time, but really time isn't something that we have, it's something that we are. And in reality, tomorrow's never promised. We plan for the future, but we don't really have a lot of control over it, unfortunately. And again, since we as humans plan and we like to look to the future, we imagine that in the future, we're going to be some sort of idealized version of ourselves. And we're going to be this version of ourselves that is going to have it all figured out. But this future doesn't really ever come. Right. This is a lot of what we as physicians in our lives really think about as the arrival fallacy that, well, once I become a resident, once I become an attending, once I become a private practice owner, whatever that looks like. And we think that we're going to have this, a magic version of ourselves in the future. And it just really doesn't happen, because so much of what happens in our lives is outside of our control. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. So if we step back and think about this, instead of being very constricting and think, well, just screw everything and why, why do anything at all? That message is actually really freeing. If we can face this reality that we actually have so little control of our lives. And again, it's about facing reality. A lot of us have heard the phrase, what we resist persists. And if we resist the reality, resist what's actually going on, then it just is a recipe for frustration. So I have valued security and certainty a lot of my life. And this has become really clear to me over the past few years, especially this year going on my own and being an entrepreneur. There's so much about that that is unknown. In fact, just about everything that I've experienced in the past seven months has been unknown for me. So I'm going to read you this quote. And again, this quote is from Oliver Berkman's Time Management for Mortals."You realize that you never really needed the feeling of complete security you'd previously felt so desperate to attain. This is a liberation. Once you no longer need to convince yourself that the world isn't filled with uncertainty and tragedy, you're free to focus on doing what you can to help. And once you no longer need to convince yourself that you'll do everything that needs doing, you're free to focus on doing a few things that count". And this is so just really enlightening for me. It just had such a big impact on me. Reminds me of this parable that I first heard when I was in high school, and it's two people walking on the beach, and they come upon thousands and thousands of starfish that have been washed up ashore, and the starfish are going to die unless they are back into the ocean. And one of the people ah starts throwing the starfish back into the ocean one by one. And the other person says, you know you're never gonna be able to throw all those starfish back into the ocean. You'll, you'll never be able to make a big difference. You'll never be able to get through all of this. And the other person, the one who's throwing the starfish, as he throws the next starfish, he says, well, I just made a difference to that one person. And again, that just is so impactful for me thinking about I can't do everything, but I can do something. And I can really have a huge impact on my little corner of the world. And if I string together days of some things that can make a difference, maybe not to the world at large, but to me for sure. And this comes really clear to me when I'm coaching a lot of us as physicians, a lot of the clients that I coach kind of have this mentality that If I'm going to do something with my life, anything I do has to be meaningful to somebody else. It has to be giving and sacrificing to other people. And it can be really helpful to think about doing something that maybe isn't necessarily quote unquote helpful to other people, but is meaningful and helpful to us. We spend so much of our lives trying to make sure that we're being useful and kind to other people, but we don't stop to ask if we're being useful and kind to ourselves. Now, this doesn't give us free reign to be unkind. It just means that we have to add ourself to the mix and ask ourself, what do I want? Another big lesson in the book, and again, this is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Bergman is about tolerating discomfort. This is something I've definitely been working on. Bergman in the book kind of lumps together discomfort and boredom, and I'm a Gen Xer. I'm no stranger to boredom. There was a lot of times I was bored when I was growing up. Again, this is not a bad thing. I don't think boredom is a bad thing. This is where our minds wander, right? When do we come up with our best ideas? Maybe when we're in the shower or we're driving or running or doing something that is where our mind is, is free and undistracted. And when we distract ourselves, it's really just a way to try to move away from that discomfort. The discomfort, again, it's uncomfortable. So we distract ourselves. Even if we're working on something that we want to be working on, whether that's a project or spending time with our family. And what Berkman says is the discomfort comes from not knowing what the future holds. And that's scary. Because a lot of my life and a lot of people around me that I know that are like me, we've tried to control time. We've tried to control the future, control the outcome, but we really can't because again, so much of what happens is outside of our control. And that can be really, really difficult for us to try to wrap our brains around. That's also why when things happen that we don't expect or we don't like, we get really frustrated because it wasn't part of our plan. So when we distract ourselves, it's really just a way that we try to trick ourselves into thinking that we can control time or control how we feel, or even that we should feel happy all the time, that we should feel good all the time and entertained all the time. But that's not what life is about. And life is going to be about different things for different people. Maybe for you, it's about your clinical practice or your family or community service or connection or working with others. And life isn't always going to be pleasurable. Sometimes it's going to be hard. Anybody who has other people in their life knows that it's just not always pleasant. There's conflicts with family, colleagues, patients, co workers, and that's just part of life. There's no promise that life is going to be easy or without pain or that we should be even feeling great all the time. I think that's a message that social media and Berkman talks about this in the book too, that we get this. This notion that everybody is feeling happy and great all the time. And if we only follow this one person or like this post or download this app or, or buy this book or whatever, buy this course that our life is gonna be great and then we won't have to deal with the distractions and problems around us. And I know I've definitely fallen victim to this. We feel like we don't have to deal with the discomfort. And that discomfort comes up in everyday life. Life can be really uncomfortable. So this has been just a huge lesson for me, one that I'm still wrestling with. And I think it's going to have a big impact on me and my business going forward. It can really be daunting when we think about the future and think about, again, some idealized version of ourselves. But it can actually be really freeing to think about looking just at today or the next day. How can we use the moments that we have, because all we really ever have is the present. How can we use today? How can we use now to move us towards the type of person that we want to be? The book also talks about doing activities just for the sake of doing them. And I talk about this in my book as well. I talk about hobbies. I talk about play and why these activities are valuable in and of themselves. They don't have to be a means to an end. We don't have to do something because it's going to lead us to be more productive or it's going to create something, but just because we want to do it. And what comes up for me as I'm starting to run again after a few months is. I don't have a goal in mind. I don't have a race in mind coming up. I may in the future, but right now I'm going to run because I like to run and it feels good. And it's okay to do activities just for those reasons. So with all of these concepts that have been rolling around in my head and all of these concepts that I just described, I'm going to outline a few questions for you that you can answer for yourself. I'll share my answers with you after I go through the questions about as you're looking forward to 2025, as you're planning for the future, think of these questions, do some journaling, and I'd love to hear from you if this has been helpful. So the questions that I'm going to ask you and that I've answered for myself is, what type of person do I want to become? Another way to ask this is, what qualities or traits do I want to nurture? So you can pause this, journal your answers to that question. Think about this if you're driving. What came up for me as I'm answering this question for myself is, I want to nurture the qualities and traits that lead me to serve other people in the form of coaching, speaking, consulting. I also have a skill and trait of curiosity. I like learning new things. And right now I'm leaning into things that improve my physical and mental health. So journaling, meditation, I want to lean more into cooking. It's something that I've always had a challenge with becoming a habit. And it's something that I really want to lean into more so that I'm not eating takeout food as much just because I enjoy creating something out of nothing. And so I'm going to be leaning into that. And I'm putting that out into the world because I'm hoping that you all can help me stay accountable. So the second question is what discomfort do I need to lean into? Again, you can pause here, jot down your answers to the question. For me, the discomfort that I need to lean into is the discomfort of not knowing how things are going to turn out. I don't know if people are going to listen to this podcast. I don't know if it's going to resonate with people. I don't know what is going to happen in my business. I don't know what's going to happen with my family. To use cooking as an example, I don't know what's going to happen to my next meal. I might ruin it. It might come out horrible. I don't know what's going to happen. And that's okay. That's okay. And the more I can really lean into that discomfort, then the more I can realize that I'm doing something just for the sake of doing it. And it's, again, I can't control the outcome a lot of the times, but I can control the process. I can control what I'm doing. The third question is what habits will support the above and how I answer that for myself is being consistent of taking action. So I have this habit of letting my feelings dictate what actions I take and what I've been working on with my coach and leaning into is taking action every day, regardless of the immediate outcome. Again, I might not know kind of that immediate reward that that meal that I cook. That might not turn out very well, and that's okay. I don't know what that's going to look like. That run that I go on might not be immediately rewarding. It might hurt and that's okay. That next step I take in my business, again, maybe no immediate reward, but it's those daily actions that are going to get me there. So taking action regardless of any immediate reward and regardless of how I feel. So those are the habits that will support that leaning into the discomfort moving me forward. And then what habits do not support the above. So I love this question because a lot of moving into a new future, a new year, Doing things differently is about not doing things that may be counter to where you want to get to. So the way that I answer this question is, my consumption of social media, I will tell you I've cut drastically back on my consumption of social media over the past few months, and it has really freed up a lot of headspace for me, which is great. I still use social media for my business, but my consumption of it has definitely slowed. So that's something that's a habit for me that doesn't support my, my goals and becoming the person that I want to become. Another habit that doesn't support me is getting lost in negative thought patterns. And this happens to all of us, even coaches. And that's again, why I work with coaches and have a lot of support from friends and colleagues who can help me to break free from those negative thought patterns. And also when I find myself getting lost in them, I can actively notice it and challenge those thoughts. See if there is a different thought that I can choose that would help, help establish and, um, make me more likely to do the behaviors that I want to do again, doing those behaviors, regardless of how I feel. I hope this has been helpful for you. I'd love to hear what came up for you as you're listening to this, as you're journaling, as you're going through those questions. Drop me an email. Laura, it's L A U R A@ThePurposefulMD.com so that's ThePurposefulMD, all one word. com. I'd love to hear from you. And if this podcast was helpful for you, please share it with somebody who could use it as well. Happy holidays and we'll see you in 2025. While I am a physician, the information presented in this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your own healthcare provider before making any significant changes to your lifestyle or routine. By listening to this podcast, you are not creating a physician patient relationship. Thank you for listening to The Purposeful MD Podcast. If you like what you hear, please rate and review the show. Please also visit my website, www.thepurposefulmd.com for free downloads or to discuss working with me as your coach.