This month marks the ninth anniversary of my transition out of clinical medicine. I reflect on my time as a clinician every year around this time to see if any new epiphany will fall upon me that I can share with those coming behind me. My biggest retirement insight remains that I would have prioritized my peace above any particular outcome.
That simple mindset shift would have led me to do many things differently at each stage of my medical career. It definitely would have altered how I considered my first attending job. After training, I would have approached my first job as a continued learning experience rather than a lifetime commitment.
Like many physicians on the cusp of thirty when finishing residency, I was convinced I needed to find my forever job immediately out of training. Since I was already almost a decade behind folks who entered the workforce directly from college, I put a lot of pressure on choosing the perfect first attending position. What I failed to realize is I didn’t really have the necessary information about life as an ob/gyn in private practice to be confident I would find the best fit right away.
Let me be completely honest. Working in private practice was not as meaningful and satisfying a daily endeavor as I expected when I started this path. The administrative tasks and short appointment times sucked a lot of the joy from the process of serving and connecting. The constantly decreasing insurance reimbursements made me question the point of that loss of joy. That being the case, it wasn’t the best strategy to center meaning and satisfaction in my life on the practice of medicine.
My commitment to making a standard private practice position work by any means necessary limited my perspective on all the ways I could have thrived as a clinician. With all the different settings to practice clinical medicine, it made no good sense to struggle to stay in an environment where I was always a little bit miserable.
It probably would have served me better in the long run to spend my early years focusing as much on how to integrate my personal and professional priorities as I did on patient care. Instead, I got better at taking care of my patients and more negligent at honoring my own peace and priorities. The silver lining of all this is I now get to share my missteps with others to help them broaden their view of what is possible.
So, would I still take that first job? Yes. I liked my patients. I still like my former co-workers. Most importantly for the nerdy altruist in me, I learned a lot about providing quality women’s reproductive healthcare. The issue is I was also given a lot of life lessons I refused to learn until I left. That’s on me, not the job.
Now I know any situation that steals my peace is not compatible with my sustained sense of satisfaction. Success without satisfaction is not true success to me. That’s the mindset I invite those coming behind me in medical training to consider for themselves, see if it resonates and act accordingly.
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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.
