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Hello, and welcome back to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast. I'm Stacey Ishman, and today we are going to be talking about envisioning your ideal career, or the power of defining your values and your mission. Now, at the beginning of my academic career, I was hyper focused on well, almost nothing.
I mean, I was all over the place. I said yes to way too many things, but after a couple years and some fantastic stage advice, I realized that I needed to focus everything I did on persistent pediatric sleep apnea in the area of my academic interest. And I know it sounds like, you know, I'm a left-thumb doctor.
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I was like in a very small niche, but it really was something I was passionate about, and I had an opportunity to grow over the last 20 years. And I became known for this fairly quickly, but it took some time for me to figure out exactly what I needed to be doing and how to focus that time. And it really helped that a couple years in, and this is probably when I got the clarity, not just the advice, was that I figured out that while I liked solving complex clinical problems, they were, you know, sort of not going to get me anywhere if I couldn't help people understand what I cared about and how I wanted to get there.
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And I've always had this continuous love of learning. I just realized I could focus it, and so I thought I started thinking about my values. What do those mean? What do I care for? And these change over time.
What they were in that first year, they're not the same today. And in fact, I had a huge shift a few years ago when I realized the part I loved the most about academic medicine was no longer the research and diving in and scholarship, which I had spent the first 20 years of my career absolutely focused on. But it was the people along the way that I got to help.
It was the medical students and the junior faculty and the residents and the fellows who I collaborated with and helped discover what they really had a passion for. I helped them publish. I helped them decide if they wanted to be academic or not.
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I helped them figure out which specialty was important to them. And that mentorship and that advising and that coaching, it really fed my heart. And so that's what I realized I wanted to spend the next 20 years doing.
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And so here I am having a podcast about how to envision your ideal career, which hopefully some of my experiences will help. But more excitingly, will hopefully help you figure out where you want to go with your career. Now, when I came to that aha moment about what I wanted to do next, I realized I hadn't clarified my values.
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I'm not even sure I could have defined values in terms of the most common ones in academic medicine. And so I needed a few minutes to figure it out. And I can tell you, I now walk around with them written down and what looks like this pretty beat up piece of paper because I do carry it around and I do look at it.
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And for me at this point, it is about joy and fulfillment, self-worth and independence, transparency and honesty, continual growth and learning and reliability and providing for my family. And I think you heard a lot of ands because I also had a hard time toning down to 10. So as you do an exercise where you come up with your top values, if you come up with three or seven, don't worry whether I said to do five.
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It's really something that's supposed to be helpful for you. Now, the reason it's helpful is it helps you keep your career aligned. You know when to say yes and you know when to say no, and that's so much easier when you know what's important to you.
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So if somebody comes to me and asks me to give a talk about the most common infectious disease components of sinusitis, it's probably not going to be on the list of things that I want to spend my energy on. It's an important topic and I can sponsor somebody else, hopefully. And then I can come back and say, look, I'm so passionate about talking about coaching these days.
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I would love for that to be something to talk about in your environment, if that's something that's interesting to you or your audience or to the Grand Rounds folks that we're speaking to. And so I've shifted what I can do over time and what I'm interested in. So it aligns with my interests and my values.
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Now, it also helps you build confidence because you actually understand why you're making your decisions. I know a lot of people talk about guilt in my group coaching course. We talk about it a lot.
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And I think what really is important is understanding what's healthy guilt from unhealthy guilt. Healthy guilt is when I say yes or no to something that I realize maybe is aligned or not aligned with my values. So I feel guilty about doing something that actually isn't something I really want to do.
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Or I feel like it's incongruity, incongruency in what I'm doing. But unhealthy guilt is, you know, I go ask somebody if they'll give this fantastic talk about confidence and they don't really want to talk about confidence. They want to talk about, you know, infectious disease in the sinuses.
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And so they feel a guilt for saying no to me. But really, that's not healthy guilt. It's OK to say no to things that don't fit with your values and your mission.
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And then it really helps clarify your brand. So if you want to get on stage, if you want to be invited to give talks or write papers or review things, you really want to make sure people understand your interests. And you're not doing a little bit of everything, which is what I did at the beginning of my career.
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Because your career will take off when people understand what you want to do and it's all aligned. So the first step I'm recommending is to define your core values, and this may be super simple. You might just be able to write it down.
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It wasn't super simple for me. I did look at some lists. James Clear has a beautiful one on some core values.
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Common ones for physicians include desire for excellence, autonomy, growth, family, service, mentorship, financial security. All of those super valuable. And if you're not sure, you can sit down and work with CHAT-TPT or one of the other AI engines and figure out maybe what makes sense.
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And if it doesn't sound right, go back and say, no, this makes more sense or this resonates. But remove that. And that's kind of how I ended up with a lot of ands, because there was a lot of things that resonated for me at the time.
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And there's some real life examples. I know people, one of the physicians I worked with really cared about service and mentorship. And so instead of worrying about chasing a lot of first author papers, what he really did was lean into advising and teaching.
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And he went on to actually get teaching awards. He became an associate dean because those are the things that really he valued and that he cared about and he became known for. So the other thing I think you should do is craft a mission and a vision statement.
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And this might feel a little hokey. We don't do it much in academic medicine. I was certainly not advised to do this at the beginning of my career.
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But the mission is what and why you want to do something. So I really wanted to make sure that we cured or improve the lives of patients with pediatric sleep apnea and that I could make their care better. And then the vision was, what does that look like in five to 10 years? And I wanted to be able to say that I had a body of literature that made sense, that built upon itself, where I learned something, that I was teaching other people to carry that mission forward, that I had a group of patients that I had taught and learned from along the way.
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And at this point, it looks different. So my mission at this point is really to empower early career academic physicians, design fulfilling, impactful careers by giving them high yield coaching and mentorship. And my vision is really to sort of lead a movement that defines success in academic medicine that includes both having a great life that you enjoy, building a career that makes sense from the beginning, and having a clinical impact in whatever way you want to have an impact.
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Now, one of the examples I can give you is I worked with this fantastic woman who was amazing to work with. As a junior faculty member, she asked me to be on this panel for pediatric sleep apnea, fit my vision, fit my mission, and she made it so easy. She gave me the questions ahead of time.
She built scenarios. She was really great at hosting this. And as we finished, I said, you know, I was invested.
What are you doing? What do you want to be? How do you want to get there? What can I do to help you? And it turned out she cared about pediatric ear disease. And so we had a fantastic conversation about pivoting. Like, if that's what you care about, then you should have people on this panel talking about the topic you care about, seeing what an amazing collaborator you are, building the relationships with people that you want to write about pediatric ear disease with.
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And so she went on to do that, and is now absolutely well-known for that, and is on stages, and is writing papers, and is known for that niche. So it's not hard, but it does sometimes take somebody from the outside to tell you that you need to focus your time and your energy on the area you care about most. Luckily, I had somebody who did that for me, and I try and do that for people going forward.
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Now, the last thing I want you to do after you have a mission and a vision statement is to really audit your life. And if you're just starting your career, this is great. You can say, what does my schedule look like? Like, am I spending as much time in the clinic as I think I need, or the OR, or on scholarship, or playing, you know, squash, or going to yoga? Like, how have I set up my life so that it fits the vision that I have, and that the time blocks actually meet with what I say my priorities are? So audit your calendar and think about it.
And then it might be as simple as, you know, I'm going to give a talk. Does it fit with my mission? Am I giving talks in the area I care about? Are your publications showing people what your academic brand is, and why they should invite you to come talk at their institution? And are the committees and the meetings that you're going to serving your values? So it may be that somebody asked you to be on the compliance committee, and that makes great sense if really service to the department is important to you. I can tell you, I sat on the compliance committee.
I didn't think that was what I wanted to do, but I learned how to bill. And I gave something where I taught Chinese how to do it, and the faculty members. And then, quite honestly, we wrote a paper on their pre-post understanding of it, so that I could help with my scholarship.
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Although, again, this was in that period. It was a little all over the place. So maybe it would have been better to create something that was more along sleep lines.
So I could have really shown people, here's how to do sleep billing, and how to optimize that, and at least use it as an example. But go ahead and audit your career and your life, and see if what you're doing in your calendar aligns with what you think you want to be doing with your life. And so, for me, I really made a plan as I thought about coaching and mentorship, and I took my time and my energy and said, where do I want to spend it? I made sure that my calendar had slots in it for me to do that.
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And I found sponsors who aligned with my mission. I found peers and mentors who could help me with my goals. I signed up for a business coach to help me set up my business, because I wasn't trained to do that off the bat.
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And I developed my signature lectures so that they talked about time management and aligning your career. I created a course that was intended to help people do exactly what I'm talking about now, which is envisioning your ideal career, set up your clinical time, set up your research plan, and have a promotion plan. From the very beginning, and I called it the academic Kickstarter course, and it's something that I think really helps show people the framework that helps you get to where you want to go.
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So, what I think you should do next, if you're interested in doing more work in this way is to write down your top 5 values and use a list. If you're not sure, look it up, use a chat and then define your mission and your vision statements. What do you want to be known for? Why do you want to get it? Then get there.
And how do you want to get there? Where should it be in 5 to 10 years? And then audit your current calendar and your current projects, make sure they align and decide what to keep, tweak, or release. And my final thoughts that the biggest myth in academic medicine is you have to say yes to everything to get promoted. But the truth is, if you say yes to the right things, they really help you move along quickly.
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So, if you get asked to be on the compliance committee, what you really want is to be on the curriculum committee, then tell people that. And it may be that they need some service first, and that that's going to come next if you do it. But you're not going to get there if you don't ask for it up front, and you're not going to actually figure out what to ask for if you don't figure out what you want.
So, spend the time. Now, if I can do anything for you, if you need some help, please get in touch with me. We do have groups, and we have an academic Kickstarter course kicking off soon.
We would love to work with you. But if that isn't what you need right now, and you're going to do it on your own, please send me a note or a DM. I would love to hear how it goes.
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I look forward to talking to you again. Please rate, review, and follow the Medical Mentor Coaching podcast. And follow us on your favorite app.
I know we're on Apple and Spotify, or subscribe here on the YouTube channel. And if you want to get in touch with me to share feedback or questions, or you're interested in some free resources, please let me know. And DM me @sishmancoach on Instagram, or message me on LinkedIn at Medical Mentor Coaching or Stacey Ishman, or email me at [email protected], or contact me on my website at www.medicalmentorcoaching.com. And all that will be in the show notes below.
Thank you so much.
