Evolved Physician

Healthcare workers deserve healthy work. Every worker does.

American workers are currently agitating for more humanized work conditions. They're voting with their feet, leaving their current jobs in search of healthier and possibly happier work.

Yet not everyone believes work should include health or happiness. For many, work is purely functional, and the best work is simply work done well to reach a desired end. The thought is, “Employers don't exist to make you healthy or happy; they exist to provide a paycheck. Get happy on your own time.” Personal, cultural, and generational lenses certainly color the meaning of work. But a new consensus on healthy work is sorely needed.

If you are a stressed out, burning out physician or clinician, your work situation is wholly unique. As a health expert, you know the damage that acute and chronic stress wreaks upon the body. And as a care provider, your potential impairment from a stressful job can impact the health and well-being...

If you’re stressed out or burning out from your stressful job, you dread getting out of bed in the morning. When your feet hit the floor and you drag yourself into another damaging, poorly malleable day, you are saying “Yes” to something.

Our current healthcare delivery model reminds me of a Netflix series I just watched called Squid Games. These desperate people who were in huge amounts of debt (where the bad guys were gonna take their kidneys and eyeballs if they didn’t pay up) signed up to win an insane amount of cash at the completion of a game.

As you might expect, the game was horrifically violent. And at various intervals the players had the opportunity to stop and decide if they would continue enduring the game’s brutality or free themselves from it. The vast majority continued to play. They continued to say “Yes.”

It made me think of you as a job-stressed physician or clinician.

When you go to work, you're voting with your feet....

Physicians and clinicians do heroic things every day for their patients but often lack the courage to fix their own broken job situations. Flex your courage today for your best good!

If you’re stressed out and burning out, you know you need to change your work situation. But fear unfailingly sets in: “What if I ask for an accommodation and my admin fires me? If I leave medicine, who will I be? How will I pay my kids’ tuition?” Once fear hijacks you, you become paralyzed. You do nothing about your stressful job situation and the burnout worsens with time.

But you know what’s funny? How courageous you are when it comes to patient care.  

It takes courage to go see an angry, demanding patient. It takes courage to tell a patient they have cancer. Heck, it takes courage just to show up to work every day.

How is it that you have so much courage in your daily work, but when it comes to creating healthy work for yourself, for your best welfare, fear takes...

If your job is stressing you out, burning you out, what work would you do instead if money were no object?

Would your current work change if, in perpetuity, all your bills were paid, all your needs were met, and you always had plenty of extra cash to do what you wanted when you wanted?

You might dismiss this question as unrealistic and insipid.

Yet as seemingly ridiculous as it may seem, this question is a technique designed to stretch your mind to consider new possibilities. Coach stuff. A similar coaching conversation might go like this:

Coach: “So you hate your job, and you’d like to brainstorm ideas about what else you might do. Okay, I have one. What would it be like to run away and join the circus?”

Female Client: (laughing): “The circus?”

Coach: (seriously) “Yes, the circus.”

Client (still laughing, but playfully considering): “Okay. I might have to let my beard grow…that won’t be a problem; I’m...