092225 how mentorship changes everything and 2 conversations that shaped careers
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast. I'm Stacey Ishman. And today we're gonna be talking about when mentorship changes everything, two conversations that shaped careers. And I think we're also gonna be talking about the fact that I just realized I forgot to put my earrings on.
[00:00:17] But aside from that what I really wanna go into today is. Now in academic medicine is easy to say yes to everything. Projects, talks, committees, hoping it's all gonna add up, but instead, your career can look scattered and promotion committees don't know how to evaluate you. So what you really need is a story, and I've said this multiple times and please excuse me while I put my earrings on.
[00:00:40] Okay. Total side note. I read something the other day from a psychologist who was talking about the fact that it is not natural for us to all be looking at ourselves all the time. So these online meetings where you're seeing your picture in the corner and you're looking at your face or a podcast or your face is on the screen are unnatural in that they actually.
[00:00:59] Make [00:01:00] us overly concerned about how we look or how we present ourselves. I'm gonna tell you, I just did two other podcasts today and I didn't notice I wasn't wearing earrings. And now when I noticed it, all of a sudden I had to fix it. In any case, back to my story. But I will tell you ear, you can minimize the screen.
[00:01:14] And so I do highly recommend that 'cause I have found myself looking at myself, which makes me not present in whatever conversation I'm having. But back to mentorship and the story you need to have in order to be promoted. I'm sure you've all looked at somebody who it's so obvious what they're doing and they started off doing this and then they did that, and then they thought about this, and then they, that led to the next thing and all of a sudden it's a great story.
[00:01:36] It makes sense. You understand why they started talking about sleep and then they started about pediatric sleep and pediatric sleep apnea, and they were on the committee and then they ran the guideline and they wrote the papers and they did the clinical trial. Like it all seems like it was premeditated and they knew on the day that they walked into the world that this is what they were gonna do.
[00:01:54] Maybe that was my story, but I didn't know what I was gonna do and I knew I was interested in sleep, [00:02:00] but that was about where it ended. I didn't even think I knew how to create a research idea on my own. And it took me a couple years to figure out how that was gonna look. And then interesting people that walked in the room and the data sets that existed that made sense and make the connections so I could do the clinical multi-institutional trials.
[00:02:15] And so all of that stuff doesn't even have to add up from the first day. You just need to know what you're interested in so you can tell that story. Now with that in mind, I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about my story. And the mentor had changed my career and it's really the story I was just starting to tell just now, but I had a clear passion for sleep medicine.
[00:02:34] I just had scattered outputs. Like I literally had a paper on temporal bone fracture fractures and a paper on medical student education. And I was looking at allergic rhinitis. And so if you were sitting down and saying, what does Stacey care about? Let's figure out how we can promote her in her career.
[00:02:51] Who knows what I cared about. Like on paper, unless you were having a conversation with me, I looked like I was all over the place and I was presenting things at meetings that were on varied topics, [00:03:00] and so you couldn't look at me and say, oh, I should invite her to be on that panel on sleep medicine. You were like, I don't know.
[00:03:06] She seems like an interesting young person who is here. She's present, but I don't really know what she's interested in. I can't invite her to do anything. I wouldn't ask her to be a grand round speaker. I wouldn't put her on a panel. I don't even know if you could figure out what committee to put me on.
[00:03:18] I can tell you my chair put me on the compliance committee. And so I wrote a paper on billing, which was great. I was trying to turn my lemons into lemonade and it was good to learn how to bill from the beginning. Thank you, Lloyd. I didn't realize it. It didn't help anybody looking at my CV to say, oh she should be on the panel for sleep apnea.
[00:03:36] It wasn't clear. And so I have this fantastic friend and mentor. His name's David Brown, and he was working with me at the time, and he looked at what I was doing and he knew what I was interested in, and he said, what's your one word or phrase that people can understand what you're talking about?
[00:03:51] It's like the idea of having an elevator pitch, right? I'm gonna walk in and I'm gonna tell you why my coaching business is gonna help young academic faculty be able [00:04:00] to take over the world and still get home on time and enjoy their life in a way that I wasn't able to do. What was that 15 seconds? I wasn't doing that for my academic career and talking about, hey, I'm a pediatric otolaryngologist who's interested in sleep medicine and I really care about how we take care of children or persistent sleep apnea.
[00:04:17] That's where I'm focusing my research. No, I was like, I'm doing billing and I'm doing medical student education and I'm working on a FE clinic. And all those things are true. But they didn't help somebody figure out when they would want to engage me in research or collaboration. So he said, you where you wanna go, but no one else can tell by looking at your work.
[00:04:36] So what's your one word? And at the time I picked the word sleep. And so what he challenged me to do was to put the word sleep in everything that I did going forward. And it honestly, it worked and so quickly it accelerated my recognition. It got invited to be on panels. I had a much clearer promotion story and that clarity.
[00:04:55] Was recognition. And and it didn't mean I had to stop collaborating. And I also wanna be clear about that. [00:05:00] So I had a colleague who I loved working with, she walked in the room and she said, Hey, let's work on something together about allergy. 'cause that was her area of expertise. And I said, great.
[00:05:08] Why don't we look at snoring or sleep disorder breathing in people with allergic rhinitis or the incidences of allergic rhinitis in kids with snoring. Or, we could think of seven other overlap options. I was talking to a friend who does otology and while that may not be the most natural mix, we said, great.
[00:05:23] Let's look at natural language acquisition in kids with cochlear implants and snoring versus non snoring. Or, I had a friend working in head and neck cancer. We talked about whether or not laryngeal cancer caused snoring or sleep apnea symptoms and whether that had any impact on quality, life, or outcomes.
[00:05:41] You can, there's a million things you can do, and so I right away started putting the word sleep in my abstracts. In my papers, in my grand rounds presentations in the topics I was doing in the committees that I was joining. And so it became quickly much more apparent what I was interested in and what the [00:06:00] impact of that would be.
[00:06:01] Now, the second story I wanna tell is about somebody who was coming to me for mentorship and for guidance. And so he loved coding. He really enjoyed the policy work, he liked the business of medicine, and he was in an academic job and he loved teaching. He didn't really care that much about writing a paper.
[00:06:17] He didn't get all excited about the scholarship. He didn't really have that much excitement about talking about the clinical work he was doing. He loved teaching people about it. He liked the patients. But this was not where his passion lied. And so what we talked about was, how do you turn a love of the business of medicine and things like coding and policy into an academic career.
[00:06:39] So there are absolutely academic opportunities for this. And then the conversation was. What if you did your next presentation on coding and quickly, he was actually doing coding presentations at his academy and in regional meetings and at his hospital, and he loved it and his passion was evident. You could see that this is really what he cared about and he was so good at [00:07:00] it.
[00:07:00] And there are committees. There is something called the the rock. It's a group where they actually figure out the relative value of rvu and it's. At the A MA, it's incredibly important. They help negotiate with the other specialties on how much things will be valued. And it wasn't long before he was working on.
[00:07:17] A committee within our academy that worked on the business of medicine, and that was the representative to that relative value committee at the A MA. He continues to do that work, has become an expert both in our specialty and outside our specialty and things around the business of medicine and the value of the care that we do.
[00:07:36] And he just did. Didn't have the ability to see that at the beginning of his career, how that could turn into an academic focus. And the result is that he joined that policy committee. He's on that a MA committee. He's working on coding, he's working on guidelines, and quite honestly he's doing national advocacy to help us in these areas.
[00:07:54] And his unique expertise has really filled a gap that was important. Led to national leader [00:08:00] leadership roles and quite honestly he's also moved on to being able to use those in an insurance company and moved his way up quickly in that area. And that passion and that institutional need led him to opportunities both within academic medicine and took him to areas outside academic medicine have really served him well and he is happy.
[00:08:18] Now, the broader lesson I want everybody to really understand here is that alignment between what you care about and what you're doing. It can lead to recognition, and that part's nice, but much more importantly, it can let you enjoy your everyday life and it can help other people actually give you opportunities to do the things that you care about.
[00:08:37] So hopefully the next person who asked me to do a committee is to do a guideline on sleep or to work, in some capacity. So that sleep is my primary focus. And then since that time I've. I've been the president of the International Surgical Society. I'm working on a guideline on sleep. I've done a consensus sleep statement on sleep endoscopy.
[00:08:56] I'm helping other groups on guidelines in these kinds of [00:09:00] areas. I worked with the American Thoracic Society talk about persistent pediatric sleep apnea, but the reason I got the opportunity to do the things that I have a passion about is because I made it clear what the area was that I cared about and allowed other people to actually then say, great, here's the gap.
[00:09:16] We wanna give that to you. So if somebody reads my cv, there's a story and I will tell you, when I get a new client in my one-on-one coaching, I usually look at their PubMed. And what I'm looking for is to see if I can figure out their story without them telling me. So if it's clear that like the word sleep isn't everything and it went on to being pediatric sleep apnea and then it was more sophisticated or specific, excuse me, to persistent sleep apnea in children, I understand the story there.
[00:09:43] I can see what makes sense and. It's easy for me to see how I can tell that story to a promotion committee, but it's not uncommon for me to look at a CV that looks like mine did at the beginning where I'm like, oh, she did a temporal bone fracture paper, and then she talked about allergies, and then this one's on allergic rhinitis, and [00:10:00] here's something on medical student education, and here's something on sleep.
[00:10:02] And I don't really know what she's interested in. And there's an opportunity to have that conversation. And I'm gonna tell one more story, which I love. I was in the sleep area. I was asked to do a panel on sleep apnea by a junior faculty member, and she did an amazing job. She was so organized, she made it easy for me.
[00:10:20] She did all the slides. She sent it out ahead of time. She solicited questions on cases we might wanna add, but all I could do was show up. And I look good. She made me look good. I answered great questions. We had really interesting topics to talk about. I could talk about my own patients if I wanted to add a patient story.
[00:10:36] I was so impressed that afterwards I said, what can I do to help you? I really think you've done an amazing job. You're somebody I'd love to give opportunities to. What are you interested in? And what she was interested in was being known for pediatric ear disease. And the first thing I said was, okay, this was an amazing job.
[00:10:51] You have a great gift. You have great skill. You have to stop giving this mini seminar, this panel. Like you should never give this again. And she was like, what? [00:11:00] It was great. She did a great job. But what you need to be doing is the same thing. On whatever your topic is in pediatric years, what are your burning questions?
[00:11:07] What do you wanna know about? Who do you want on that panel? Who do you want to think? How can I help you? You did a great job. And so she went on to create, the next one that was about pediatric ear disease and to invite the people and I said, okay, great. I'll let me help you find some of those people because this is clearly what you should be doing.
[00:11:24] You do a great job at it, but let's do it in the area that you care about. So people know that this is your niche. And it's absolutely her niche these days, but some of us just don't realize at the beginning of our career that we have the opportunity to create that narrative. To find the people who can help give us the next opportunity that we're looking for by raising our hand and making sure people understand what we're interested in.
[00:11:45] So I just wanna really reinforce success is not about doing more, it's about doing the right things consistently. So I want you to audit your PubMed, look at your CV, and see if they reflect your goals. So [00:12:00] if you are working with this on your own, talk to your peers. Make sure they know what you wanna do.
[00:12:04] Talk to your mentors, talk to your sponsors. They can help you find these opportunities. And if you need a coach, please reach out and give me a call. Or if you wanna look for departmental coaching so we can help your whole group get on the right path and figure these questions out, please talk to your chair so we can have some conversations about that.
[00:12:22] Now. In the meantime please share this with somebody who think might benefit from this information. And please rate review and subscribe to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube. Now, if you wanna get in touch with me to share feedback or ask questions or let me know if there's something you're interested in doing please
[00:12:41] dM me @sishmancoach on instagram or message me on LinkedIn. I look forward to talking to you next week, and I hope this was helpful.
