Read time: 2 minutes
Everybody wants to be great, but not everyone thinks they deserve to be.
Most think they need to ask for permission to live a normal life, let alone live the life they want.
Hopefully, your work dovetails with your desires to be all that you can be and facilitates the type of person that you want to live up to.
It takes an incredible amount of effort to find and maintain an optimal balance of work and life
Most of us will always try to achieve an optimal result, but with Sisyphean effort.
Can you afford to say no?
Unfortunately, the hospital/group you work for can disrupt your hard-fought work-life balance in an instant, by:
- increasing your clinical workload
- changing the electronic medical record, making every note take 20% longer to complete
- “asking” you to cover for colleagues because the group/hospital keeps staffing “lean”
If you live paycheck-to-paycheck, then you can’t say no.
And, if you can’t fathom asking for what you want or what you deserve, then you can’t say no.
If you are dependent on your employer to fulfill needs for your family then you are vulnerable to the whims of your employer.
Stop being reliant on a single point of failure – stop thinking that you must have a full-time clinical career to be a good physician.
You can say no and you can negotiate when necessary.
Consider asking for what you want, optimizing terms for yourself, or finding a more worthwhile contract physician job.
Capable of learning new things
If you are here, you are pretty smart and you must be pretty accomplished.
But everyone I talk to gets hung up on “all the things you have to do on your own that are so hard if you don’t work as a salaried employee with benefits!”
Nonsense!
You can figure all this out just like every other mom-and-pop small business out there has.
Consider that it is not very hard to find your own:
- health insurance
- retirement plan (solo 401k)
- malpractice insurance
- business structure (sole proprietor, LLC, etc.)
Literally every entrepreneur out there has to figure these things out on their own (or with the help of their accountant) and the vast majority make it all work out in the end.
Why do so many of our colleagues refuse to think they could possibly function without all of the above being handed to them?
Summary
Stop waiting for someone to give you permission to live the life you want and to work the way you want.
Stop thinking that your life would be so impossible if you had to find your own insurance. You’re an MD, NP, PA, RN for crying out loud!
Give yourself permission to be great:
- to not be a researcher
- to work fewer hours
- to have a non-clinical side jobs
- to start a passion project
- to have weekends off
- to work consistent hours
- to pick your kids up from school
- to never miss a family wedding again
This list is the antithesis of what we are taught, but nowhere near all that is out there.
You can always go back to clinical practice or to full-time again someday.
In the meantime, use your time wisely and only ask permission from yourself.
Whenever you’re ready, here are 2 ways I can help:
1) Let’s talk through what choosing your own path through medicine looks like. Over the phone, confidential, free:
https://calendly.com/tonyvullo/20min
2) Free Guides and Resources to Help You Reclaim Your Time and Autonomy:
Help Patients. Work Less.
Do More of Everything Else.
