We're going to have some fun in this episode because what we're going to do is step back, take a breath, escape the whirlwind for just a moment, and look at your life.

Look at the entirety of your life in a different way.

Look at it in terms of layers, like a layer cake.

Four layers of a life well lived.

And in this case, we're going to be talking about as a physician when you've chosen to be a lightworker, a helper, and a healer.

And each of these four layers become a realm in which you can practice leadership.

What do I mean by leadership?

Set a vision of a positive future, something that you build towards, and then exercise your free will to take the actions to reach that end point.

What are the four layers?

Job, practice, career, life.

Let's look at them one at a time.

And along the way, what we're going to be doing is checking for balance.

Because right now, I bet one of those four is dominating, and I bet you're not 100% okay with it.

Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Stop physician Burnout podcast, a physician leadership podcast where you will learn the skills so that we can join together and lead the charge to physician well being skills to earn the respect of your colleagues in the front line, skills to exercise true innocence, influence in the C suite, and take back your job, your practice, your career, and your life.

All of these tools have been proven effective in my 40,000 doctor physician coaching and training practice.

And if I know one thing, I know you're super busy.

So let's get started.

Leadership for me is setting a vision for a positive outcome in whatever it is that you're dealing with.

You might be dealing with the problem.

You might be dealing with planning.

You might be reflecting at the end of the year about what you'd like in the year ahead.

But leadership is setting a positive vision for the future in some area of your life and then motivating and taking the action steps to step towards that positive vision and overlap that vision with your reality as much as possible.

And when it comes to talking to physicians, and I've coached thousands and helped them recover from burnout, it helps to divide a doctor's life into layers, like a layer cake.

Layer number one is your job.

Layer number two, your practice.

Layer number three, your career.

Layer number four, your life.

Let's just go through them one at a time, and let's talk about where leadership can come in.

Now, if you're a employee physician, your job is a very interesting construct.

Because most doctors didn't negotiate the description of their job, they were given a boilerplate job description and asked to sign on to it.

And your job description as an employee is something that's created by your employer to meet the business design and the revenue model of your employer.

It's built on business goals.

It's not built to help you reach your goals, your job.

And so for the most part, going through your workday is a question of complying with the conditions of your job description.

Doesn't have to be that way, but in order for you to change the way your job feels, you would have to have a positive vision, which we call your ideal job description.

Take a piece of paper, put my ideal job description, put a date on it, and write down.

In an ideal world, if you had a magic wand, what kind of patients would you be seeing doing what kind of things for what kind of hours and what kind of pay with what kind of team and what kind of company, where in the world?

And that is your ideal job description.

And most doctors, unless I've talked to them, don't have this written down.

So what you're doing is just complying with and dealing with the job description that you played no role in designing.

That's a challenge.

And a lot of times what's really interesting is as we come through the medical education system, because of the intensity of the training experience, we can become fused with this job doctor.

And so you'll hear doctors, and you may have done this yourself.

You're at a party, and it's with a mixed group of people, and somebody comes up and say, what do you do for a living?

You say, I am a doctor.

We don't say, I work as a doctor as I see patients down to the hospital.

Typically, what happens is the doctor says, I am a doctor.

It can be dangerous to be fused that tightly, especially if what you mean by that is my job, my job.

So I encourage you to take that leadership role, build that positive vision of your ideal job description, and begin to take the baby steps, conversations with your boss, getting changes at work, the baby steps to march in that direction.

And then notice I distinguished between job and practice.

What's your practice?

Well, that, in my mind, is the art of medicine.

That's what you learn to do in your residency education, to interview and examine and diagnose and treat patients.

It's the magic that happens when you're alone in the room with the patient and their family behind a closed door, behind a pulled curtain.

It's the magic that happens so infrequently during the day because you're dealing with all of the conditions of your job.

But you know how satisfying it is to take care of your patients, to care for them, to help them heal when possible, to help ease their suffering when healing is not possible.

To be a doctor, there's your practice.

And ask yourself this, just real quick, what's dominant?

The job or the practice?

Which one?

If this was a prize fight, which one appears to be winning?

The third layer is your career.

And in my definition, your career is the arc of your jobs.

Over the course of your working life.

You probably won't take one position and stay in that position the whole time.

Doctor burnout is 100% over the course of a career.

Most of the time, your position that you take and the attitude you take at work early in your career will be very different than that.

When you're 50 or so and so, notice the arc of your career over your life.

And if you're still in the middle of your working life, looking across that arc, what appears to be the most enticing, rewarding, exciting next step for you in your career.

And are you working towards that at this point in time, or are you nice and satisfied and just carusing where you are now and then?

Of course, job, practice, career, all of this incurs, occurs within the totality of your life.

Not just any life.

The life of a person who chose to be a lightworker, chose to go to medical school to become a helper and a healer, chose to ally their practice.

You chose to ally your professional life with the forces of light in the universe.

As we battle the specific forces of darkness we all have to deal with in our practice.

Illness, suffering, death, dying and family members pained attempts to deal with those things.

So if you contemplate, perhaps for just a second, the end of your life, contemplate arriving at that point when the end is only a few breaths away at this point, contemplating that retrospective view on your life, how's it going?

Are there any pieces missing that you would want to accomplish?

And what I'll tell you is, if there seems to be things left that you want to accomplish between now and the time that you exit this mortal coil, I encourage you to get on it, to schedule it now, put it on your calendar, and promise yourself, if this is important to you in this lifetime, to knock that right out of the park, because we will never be more beautiful than we are today, and you and I will never be here again.

Job, practice, career.

Life.

Notice the balance between the four two before we wrap this up, is it out of balance?

Is one of these winning?

Are there some of these four realms taking a backseat to one?

And if you notice things are out of balance, is that okay with you?

Because now's the time to put things in balance, if that's what you're seeking, and to get on the important things that need to also occur in this life, in addition to the job and the practice in the career.

That's it for now.

I'll see you in the next podcast.

Until then, keep breathing and have a great rest of your.