I Thought Medical School Would be the Hard Part….

Does anyone remember the movie, Gross Anatomy, from 1989? Cocky “regular joe” Matthew Modine gets into medical school, underwhelms his overly nerdy, hard-working friends to be the rock-star of the class? Anyone?

If you do, you recall the blood-sweat-tears theme throughout, learning anatomy, learning how to take a history, long hours, and the “it’ll all be worth it in the end-ness.”

Medical School was hard.

Residency was hard.

But I would argue that unlearning the things that made you such a good student and resident are harder still.

How do you learn to take care of yourself and set limits when your training required you to have none? Or worse, you were labeled “soft” or “lazy” for having mandated duty hours that your superiors didn’t have (which let’s be honest wasn’t right, good or ok either), and internalized the message that you needed to be tougher?

We have to learn to take care of ourselves, which necessarily requires setting boundaries, prioritizing your needs (amongst EVERYONE else’s needs that explode on you constantly), and reframing your ideas of what makes you an excellent physician (it never was about you sacrificing yourself, but man can we believe that!).

There are too many *asks* of you all the time. Too many calls, portal messages, requests, forms, etc. There is too little support for most of us. There are endless numbers of sick patients who need your help, as well as those with “just a quick question.” And there are too many damn patient-satisfaction scores that imagine healthcare is like the latest “must have” on Amazon, leading you to believe that more gold stars are needed, always.

One of my friends and fellow coaches, Dr Tonya Caylor, shared this gem with me:

“To set boundaries you will have to say “No” to good people"

Wow.

If you had the *right* number of patients, support staff and resources available, you might be able to do more, see more, help more. But most of us don’t have that. And most of us get paid relatively less and less to provide high-quality care with inadequate resources to people who would benefit from our help.

But we have to learn to leave something IN the tank, AND learn to REFILL the tank.

It’s the only way.

Big medicine isn’t going to do this work for us. But you also don’t have to do this alone. Let’s talk!