You always have the power to build a more Ideal Practice
What varies is your ability to see this fact - especially when physician burnout has you in Survival Mode. Once you have a clear target - your Ideal Job Description ... you can line up the steps to take your practice back with your Master Plan.
In the last video you learned how to make your Ideal Job Description - the bullseye that will focus your change efforts. In this lesson you will build another list - your Master Plan and pick your first change step to take your practice back.
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This is part 4 of our
Take Back Your Practice Video Training Series
Lesson 1: Lightworker vs. the Whirlwind is Here
Lesson 2: Origins of the Whirlwind and Your Way Forward is Here
Lesson 3: Building your Ideal Job Description is Here
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You can be confident here. We have used these tools to help hundreds of physicians recover from burnout since launching TheHappyMD.com in 2010
~ 70% of our coaching clients can recover from burnout without changing jobs - in situ.
~ 30% can quickly find a new and much better job using our Ideal Physician Job Search Formula Online Training
In This Lesson:
- How to use your Ideal Job Description to say NO more often
- How to build your Master Plan of changes to build your Ideal Job
- How to prioritize that list and pick your first action step
Downloadable Audio File Is Below
LISTEN HERE - just hit the orange PLAY Button
Or DOWNLOAD to play at your convenience with the Down Arrow in the Top Right of the frame below.
Stop Physician Burnout:
This Master Plan will Take Back Your Practice
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, Dr. Dike Drummond here with the latest in the series of brief lessons, I'm recording to share some of our 12 year history coaching hundreds of different doctors to recover from burnout. Because here in 2023, with burnout rates at 63%, and American physicians, it's really clear, like I showed you in lesson number one, that in the battle between the Lightworker and the Whirlwind, that the Whirlwind is winning, what do I mean?
Well, we're all Lightworkers.
At one point, we stood at that fork in the road, and we decided to become doctors to become helpers and healers, to ally our practice, to the forces of light in the universe. As we together battle forces of darkness like illness, suffering, death, dying, family members, crazed attempts to deal with those things.
And the modern medicine practice of medicine has become basically a whirlwind. As soon as you walk in, you're in the middle of your own little personal tornado. And right now, the whirlwind, the chaos, the overwhelm of the practice of medicine is winning, it's breaking our lightworker essence, you can tell by that 63% burnout rate.
So where does that whirlwind come from? That was our lesson number two, where we talked about the origin. So the whirlwind, most of it comes from the fact that you're probably an employee - 70% of American doctors are employees. And that means you have a job description that you've played no role in creating. As a matter of fact, the job description of an employee doctor is one that's driven by the business model and the revenue model of your employer. No wonder it grinds you into dust. No wonder it's stressful and chaotic.
We talked in the third video about the first step to actually take your practice back. Yep, you don't have to be burned out in order to get better using this practice optimization technique, because it's focused on your Ideal Practice Description.
Here's something I've learned from all of my coaching clients, everybody knows what they'd like to avoid. And you can avoid everything you don't want about your current practice, you can avoid everything you don't want, and you still won't get what you want. Because there's only one way to get what you want. And that's figure out what that is, and go get it.
So your assignment in the last video was put together as best you can, your Ideal Job Description, a written description of in an ideal world, if you could design a practice that's perfect for you.
- What kind of patients would you be seeing,
- doing what kind of things
- for what kind of hours
- and what kind of pay
- on what kind of team
- in what kind of organization
- where in the world?
It takes a while for that to bubble up. Write it down, even if you don't know how to make it happen. Share it with your significant other and a friend and see if they see anything that's missing on your description, because you've complained about it.
And hopefully, at this point, you've got a pretty good bead on your ideal practice, ideal job description. That makes some really wonderful things possible from this point forward.
Because now that you're clear on what you really want on what you would run towards, you have a target. It's like the bullseye in a target in an archery range. And you can begin to aim yourself and aim your practice at this bullseye. Because you know, it's your ideal practice that forms the center of the target.
Here's some things that now become possible, that you're focused on what you really want.
Number one, you can begin to say NO much more easily. Now you're going to have to practice saying no, because I know you're probably not very good at it. But you can now compare anybody who wants you to do anything, any committee or anything like that. You can compare it with your ideal job description, see if it's in the target. And if it's not, we can teach how to say no with some elegance and grace.
You also may find that you're over committed to a whole bunch of responsibilities right now that don't have anything to do with your ideal job or ideal practice description. That's really common. So the other thing you can do is use this description to begin to decommit from things that don't make any sense. Again, you have to practice it. There's a script, we've got trainings for that.
And the real key right now is you can begin to stop tolerating the reality of your current practice your current job, if it's not perfect for you, you can begin to stop tolerating and move in the direction of your ideal practice. Now that you know where it is.
Now, I call this a spiritual archery range because from the standpoint of spirit, you've got a target, right? And you've got an archer firing an arrow. Think about it for just a second.
Who is the archer who's the one firing this Arrow of your practice or your job? Well, it's, it's you, right? What is the arrow? The arrow is you.
What's the target? The target is you and your ideal practice.
This is everything you need to start honing down on a practice in a job that's better for you. All we need to do is make one more list. So here's the assignment for this lesson. It's called the MASTER PLAN.
So just like your ideal job description is a written list. Master Planning is as well. So I encourage you to take a piece of paper, write my master plan, put a date on it, because this is the beginning point of this, of this improvement in your practice or your job. And this list is a lot easier than your ideal practice description.
Because this list is everything you would want to change, in order to make your current practice more like your ideal practice. These are all the things you don't like the original list, I stopped you from making upfront. So write it all down.
And it's really important that you get all of these things out of your head, more is better. So write down every single thing, every single item that you would want to change about this practice, in order to bridge the gap to your ideal practice.
Once again, when you've been working on this for a couple of days, and you think you got it licked, please show this list to your significant other, your partner, or a good colleague, I would say and a good colleague, and have them tell you is there anything that you've left off the list because they've heard you complaining about it before.
And once you've gotten all of that out of your head, and on paper, that makes the magic step of using a list possible, you can begin to prioritize, you can begin to look at this list of things you could change. And any one of these changes would move you more towards your ideal practice. Step you out of Einstein's insanity trap, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Any one of these action steps would make a difference.
And here's where I want to warn you about and ask you to step out of some of your doctor programming. Because here's what doctors always do. They look at a list. And they want to pick the biggest hairiest most audacious thing, the great big gorilla in the room and want to jump all over that and fix that first. And I'm going to tell you right now is that's not a good idea.
Just like if you were going to get in shape, I wouldn't expect you to go into the gym and grab the biggest barbell off the rack and attempt to do a full set of curls, you would just hurt yourself.
So what I want you to do to begin to exercise your change muscles, is look at this list of your master plan of changes that would build a more ideal practice and choose the smallest and the easiest, and the simplest to execute on.
It's matter of fact, I encourage you, rather than choosing something new to start doing, take a look at this list and see if there isn't something you can STOP DOING. That will get you closer to your ideal practice. And because you stopped doing something, it also frees up some bandwidth for future efforts to move towards the ideal.
But right now, this lesson wants you to build your master list, the changes you would make in order to build a more ideal practice.
And what I've noticed in my 10 years of practice with physicians is that about 70% of doctors, over the course of about six to nine months, are able to recover from their burnout without changing jobs. Now, these are people who are coached. So I'm assuming there are people who are able to do the same thing and recover from burnout on their own, although it may take longer and be a little bit more stop and start. But 70% of people are able to find the happiness and the overlap that they seek by making steady changes towards the ideal over the course about six to nine months.
The other 30% basically have to get a new job in order to recover from their burnout to get the satisfaction that they're looking for. And that's why we created the Ideal Physician Job Search Formula Online Training to teach exactly how to stay in charge of your job search and base it on a search for your ideal job in the first place.
So I've got one more lesson for you about what happens when you take one of the items off your master plan and you give it a shot. You take a shot at making things better, and it doesn't work out as well.
I want to help you do in the last video is to reframe the idea of what is failure. What is failure? What does it mean? And I'll tell you that anything that happens in the course of your trip towards your ideal practice, doesn't matter how bad it blows up. It's not failure. Let's talk about that in the next lesson.
Until then, get working on that master plan, and I'll see you in the next video.
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