Doctors choose to love your job, decide to love what you do.
Last month I wrote about the joy of witnessing a doctor who is using their personal agency and finding clarity. Today I’m focusing on deciding. People who work with me have heard about this a lot because another way I talk about deciding, is CHOICE.
You get to choose how you live your life, and that includes how you work. And yes, there are consequences for all our choices, you can choose to accept them or not. If you resist the consequences, you will suffer, it will be painful. Resistance is also a choice!
A responsible, accountable adult can love their job, from the moment they recognise that they chose it.
Whilst ever they blame others for the problems in their job, I work too many hours, I don’t have what I need to do my job, there are too many patients… they cannot love their job. No matter how much they thought they would. Seth Godin explains this beautifully saying: do what you love, is not the same as loving your job.
Do what you love is surfing all day, reading thrillers into the night or cooking up a storm for your family every day of the week. Loving your job is focusing on the meaning it gives you, owning your decision to be there, improving the conditions at work. And you can change it any moment of any day. You can stop. Leave. All those “reasons” you have for not leaving = resistance.
Noone is coming to save you. Noone else gets to decide for you. You decide. And when you own the decision, whichever way you go, you will feel better. In medicine the sunk cost of years of study, missed opportunity to travel and play with your friends in your 20s, student debt, are all forms of resistance. If things are not working out for you, you get to change things, it’s your life. As Godin says, forgive your younger self. Make a new decision today.
If you decide to keep going as you are in your job, your relationship, your training program, whatever you are choosing, run an experiment.
For one week tell yourself every day
“I chose this job, it’s the best of the options for me at this time” and get about the task.
At the end of each day ask yourself “is this job still the best choice for me at this time?”
Write your answer on a run sheet like this:
Yes this is the best job for me at this time, this is my choice.
See if it evolves over the week. Maybe after a few days you’re even writing I love my choice and my job!!
That’s not really the goal though is it?
The goal is to feel more control over your life, to feel like the captain of your ship, because people who do feel some sense of control over their life, have more wellbeing. They even live longer! (Langer and Rodin
I love coaching people, it is privileged work to hold the container, to bear witness, to shine a light in a different direction, to be trusted to be in the process with the doctors I work with. Sometimes that means candor and challenging conversations, in service of clarity, momentum, learning. Sometimes that means naming resistance and inviting ownership.
It’s always worth it, because you get to own your life and who knows, maybe even to love what you do!
References
E Langer and J. Rodin (1976) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1011073/
Start by booking a call or sending me an email and let’s talk about how you or your team can experience the value and impact of professional coaching.
The Thriving Doctor
Sharee Johnson’s book The Thriving Doctor is available in all good bookstores or online.
Sharee has been coaching doctors since 2014, find out more about her work