Somebody has to be the first. Over the years, I’ve claimed this concept with varying levels of enthusiasm depending on my baseline mood. Ironically, it’s at the extremes of my spiritual well-being (super at peace or completely over it) when I tend to be most open to being an original. The execution is simply more well thought-out when I’m in a good head and heart space.
When I took a mental health sabbatical from clinical medicine a cool three and half years out of residency training, my decision came from a place of burnout. I was fully making it up on the fly, including my choice to take one hundred days off. That was based on absolutely nothing beyond the fact I’d not had that much time off since pre-school.
I wasn’t seeking to be groundbreaking. It was simply that the strategies that conformed with tradition weren’t working for me, so I decided to do something different. Back in 2008, physician wellness wasn’t buzzy. Outside of academia, breaks from work were for childbirth, severe child illness or parental death. Anything else was considered suspect.
Nowadays, I’m a bit more methodical in my approach to new endeavors. The most important thing is making sure I’ve got internal habits and external support in place to calm any chaos that might disrupt my peace. Anxiety and anger can get me started out of a bad situation. They rarely bring me to the proper final destination. That usually requires a level of intention born out of peace.
Another general policy is to plan my new endeavors based more on my needs than societal expectations. When I am designing a life that works best for me, I can’t worry too much about the masses beyond how I directly impact them. They’ll get on board or they won’t. Regardless of how valid it is, the more a novel approach strays from tradition, the more resistance some people will instinctively have to it. A lot of those traditions didn’t have people like me in mind when they were established, so I don’t necessarily hold them dear.
Last and not least, I don’t embark on new endeavors in my life with the thought my initial attempt will be the final version. It’s challenging enough to be first without the weight of being perfect when I do it. Instead, I have a systematic process for choosing the best approach to a new opportunity that includes trials and tweaks. That tweaking is an important element of the process.
Hopefully my willingness to be the first will help others realize it doesn’t have to be scary at the front. In fact, that can be where success with satisfaction exists.
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Dr Jattu Senesie is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist, certified success coach, physician satisfaction specialist and speaker. She blogs about issues of self care and well-being in an effort to help her fellow altruistic high achievers find satisfaction in their success as early in their careers as possible.
