112. Implementing your personal wellness strategy step one - Escape Einstein's Insanity Trap

In this episode, you'll discover the tools you need to actually implement your own personal burnout prevention strategy in the midst of the whirlwind of a busy doctor's existence. In the last episode, number 111, I showed you the Ideal Practice Generator process.

Here's how you actually implement those steps in the midst of your busy life. This is where the rubber meets the road and you fundamentally change your reality to a healthier and more balanced place. Ready? Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Stop Physician Burnout podcast, a physician leadership podcast where you will learn the skills so that we can join together and lead the charge to physician well being. Skills to earn the respect of your colleagues in the front lines.

Skills to exercise true influence in the C suite and take back your job, your practice, your career and your life. All of these tools have been proven effective in my 40,000 doctor physician coaching and training practice.

And if I know one thing, I know you're super busy. So let's get started. So in the last episode, number 111, we talked about the four parts of the Ideal Practice Generator process.

It was developed in our 40,000 doctor coaching and training practice. The first step is to focus on what you want, not what you don't want, and develop an ideal job description. Write it down on paper.

My ideal job description. Put a date on it, and write down all the aspects of a job you would love. Your ideal job, a job that you would run towards. That's step one.

Get it out of your head. It takes a couple of weeks. Now, where do you take on this kind of work?

Well, the first thing you have to do is step out of the whirlwind of your busy life to find a quiet place, make it special, get a nice journal and a pen of your favorite beverage, cup of tea or whatever it might be, and step out of your whirlwind. Take a big breath with me right now and as you exhale, just release anything that doesn't need to be here right now.

And step out of the whirlwind of all the demands that are placed on a doctor.

Because the only place to do this work of planning for a better life, a better practice, a better job, a better career is from outside that whirlwind. So make sure that you take your doctor hat off. Go ahead and put your hand on your head and take that hat off. Now. Say it with me.

I'm taking my doctor hat off. Now step out of your whirlwind to do this work. And what I'M going to teach you is something that comes from the entrepreneur community.

Entrepreneurs are also people whose lives can be dominated by their entrepreneurial job, the way they make a living in business for themselves.

And there's a saying in the entrepreneur world that is absolutely equally valid for all physicians who are working on creating a better practice experience. And it goes like this. You have to work both on your job as well as in your job.

Because if all you do is work in your job, always doing what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. So you have to have a way to take a break.

Take a break from the whirlwind of things coming at you as a physician at work and the hangover of responsibility and liability and things that may go missing in the test results. You know, all the things that can go wrong in your practice that follows you home sometimes.

Take that breath, step out of that whirlwind and get busy on your ideal job description. Because that becomes a target that you aim yourself and your practice at. Step two, create that ven of happiness. You know what this job feels like.

You can imagine what your ideal job would feel like if those are two circles of a Venn diagram. How much overlap is there?

Then the third step is to make that master plan all the things you would change, a master list everything out of your head of all the things that you would change and any one of them would move you from your current job to a more ideal job. And then the key is to just pick one action and go pick one action and take that new action and see what new result you get.

And what I know is that there's a. There's a famous quote.

A life unexamined is not worth living if all you do is work in your practice following someone else's job description that was written without your ideal practice in mind.

If all you do is what you've been told to do to fulfill your job description, just like a good resident, I might add, if all you are is a good resident, you'll always burn out. Because what are the odds that your job description description is actually your ideal job description?

Remember, it was written for the purposes of your employer, not to make you happy. So here's where, outside the whirlwind with your ideal job description and your master plan, taking baby steps towards your ideal practice.

Here is where you make your practice your own. Now, I realize I'm going pretty fast here.

Working with me here in a podcast is closing down 14 years and 40,000 doctors worth of experience into just a few minutes. So please feel free to listen to the podcast again and slow it down even because you can control the speed on a lot of replay devices. Take notes.

Start building your own ideal practice description. Notice it's focused on you and your needs, so it will always be perfectly aligned with you.

And remember, your ideal practice description is always changing because your life is always changing. The profession is always changing.

So the key is to have a regular rhythm of stepping out of the whirlwind to evaluate your ideal job description and see if you're on track to pick a new baby step, new action that you're going to take to try and move closer to your ideal practice.

And the best way to do that is with a regular time that you step out of your whirlwind, grab your journal, look at your ideal job description, write down maybe something that you're grateful for, and plan your next step. A great place to do that is in about a half hour on the weekend. I call it your power half hour and I even have a worksheet that gets gratitude.

Planning your action step, reviewing the actions you took in the previous step, even reviewing your squeegee breath practice and your trigger. By the way, all these things that I'm talking about are covered in our Burnout Proof online Workshop online video training 86 videos.

Only four of them are more than eight minutes long that teach all of these tools and the entire Ideal practice generator process. 37 hours of CME and I've got a special link in the show notes that will give you lifetime Access for only $125. How good is that?

So check that out and consider getting yourself access to the training videos so that you can do this all at your own pace.

I guarantee it'll work for you once you step out of the whirlwind and learn to work on your practice instead of just in it and have a regular rhythm, a regular cadence, a regular movement in and out of your practice, work on it and make it better. Then go back and work in it and see how the changes that you hope will make a difference pan out.

So in the show notes I have a link to the Power half hour weekend planning process for physicians. I also have $125 sale link to the Burnout Proof online workshop. I encourage you to grab these resources.

It's thousands and thousands of doctors worth of in the real world, success in creating a more ideal practice and a lot more sense of fulfillment, satisfaction and that you're really making the difference you hoped to make when you went to medical school in the first place. That's it for today. In the next podcast, we're going to talk about corporate burnout prevention strategy, the coal mine strategy.

Now that you're working on your canary strategy, I'll be with you then. Until then, keep breathing and have a great rest of your day.