Are you a physician who's looking to build your career and be recognized nationally, but is having trouble getting on the program or getting your articles published? Are you having difficulty finding mentors and coaches to help you get ahead quickly? Well, don't spin your wheels or lose out on your personal life. This is the podcast for you. I'm Stacey Ishman, and I'm the host of the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast.
I'm a full professor who's built clinical research and administrative programs while mentoring and coaching young academic physicians from medical school through their first 10 years of practice. It was not long ago I was in the same boat as many of you, struggling to be known for my area of expertise, feeling like my contributions were lost in the shuffle and unsure how to advance my career. I spent a lot of time juggling tasks that didn't quite align with my goals or bring me any joy, and I missed out on a lot of precious moments with my family.
But I've had my aha moment, and now I'm all about channeling my energy into activities that truly propel me forward and bring me happiness. Please join me on the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast as we dive into all things career advancement, finding your niche, and working towards that elusive work-life integration. Hello, and welcome back to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast.
Today I'm going to talk a little bit about focusing your area of expertise or your niche or niche or niche. I'm still working on that word. Anyway, whether you're just starting out in your career or you've been at it for a while, it's easy to get frustrated regarding how best to build your national reputation.
We ask ourselves, why aren't we being asked to be on the program? Are there things that I can do to increase the odds of that happening? Well, first of all, yes, there are. I'm going to be talking about my best tips and tricks today to help you get there. Now, in an ideal world, you'd have a mentor or a sponsor who's putting your name forward and knows your area of interest and really helps connect you in ways that are fundamentally useful.
But if you don't have that person, or even if you do and you just want to expand your reach, it's important to understand who you should be talking to and what you should be talking about. At the beginning of my own career, I had this feeling that I did not know how to create an idea for research. I knew I was great at executing, I knew I liked to write, and I had no concerns about whether or not I could carry out a study.
But I didn't think that I was good at coming up with an original idea. Because of this, I ended up looking for lots and lots of other people to collaborate with. And I usually picked people I liked and who were friends, so that was definitely fun and a great upside.
But it also led me to really being driven by the ideas of my friends and colleagues in the areas in which they wanted to be known. It didn't set me up for people to understand where my area of expertise was. I really enjoyed working on these projects, and I think they were useful for patients and for the field, but they didn't help with my story.
And when I say my story, I mean the clear path that my research and publications and presentations would tell somebody who had never talked to me. I think that in an ideal world, you should be able to see that my primary interest is in sleep surgery. And when you look at my publications after the first few that are a little scattered, you'll see that in my area of interest, I started working on big data evaluations to see what was going on nationally.
And then I did some retrospective work to understand the current state of the disease and to come up with some hypotheses. I then did some prospective and clinical trial work to understand if those hypotheses were accurate and in an attempt to move my understanding and that of my colleagues of the pediatric sleep apnea world forward. I used these findings to create further hypotheses and along the way, I continued to enjoy the benefits of collaboration and I figured out how to do this while maintaining my story.
So I worked with an aerospace engineer to look at airway modeling. I worked with allergists to look at the overlap between allergic rhinitis and snoring, but consistently in a way that continued to tell my story. And when I tell that story myself, I can show how it all weaves together.
As I explained what I looked at this and it told me that, that my hypothesis was correct. So I went on to ask the next question in the same vein or my findings suggested my original thoughts were completely wrong. And so I pivoted to get another theory and investigated that.
And as I worked with others, I got better at finding ways to tell both of our stories at the same time. Now, if I'd stayed on my original path, looking at an ear condition and then a presentation on medical education and then publish a QI paper on disparate subjects, it would be hard for someone to look at my body of work and say what they should invite me to speak about or be on a panel or why they would invite me for grand rounds. It would not be clear to them what I was interested in and where my expertise lies.
In my current job, coaching academic physicians, I look for people's stories before our first discovery call by looking at publishing topics and their presence on the web. I use the publication record to try and understand what they're interested in. And it's interesting to me, it doesn't always match up with what people want to be known for.
The last person I talked with, we had a great conversation about the area in which she wanted to be known, but then I pivoted and looked at what she was talking about on the web. And it was great, but didn't really match up with what she was talking about in her publications. And so it was clear that we needed to help focus what she was publishing, even if it was just to change the titles of some of those publications.
So they reflected really where her interests were and people understood what her story was. Now, luckily for me, the turning point to focus on my story came early in my career when I got fantastic advice from a dear friend named David Brown, who's now at the University of Michigan. He told me to focus my work on the area that I cared the most about.
All this sounds completely logical. And I was lucky enough to know what my area of focus was for me. He knew that what I was working on and writing about was really encompassing multiple topics.
And his advice was to select one word or phrase to reflect my primary interest and make sure I included that word in everything that I did. Now, for me, my one word was sleep, and I made sure to include this in the title of everything for at least the first few years going forward. Now, in some ways, this did limit what I was able to participate in, as I had already mentioned how much I like collaboration.
But in other ways, this approach made me get a little more creative. So today I'm going to talk to you about a step-by-step way of thinking through this. The process really starts with understanding yourself.
So the most important part of this is to figure out where your passion lies and where your expertise already exists or where you want it to be. I want you to take a moment and think about what topics really ignite your curiosity or what research you find is the most interesting. Do you love basic science and the logical way the research is laid out? Or outcomes research, regardless of the particular topic? You may find you love to create meta-analyses or guidelines, or you may have a QI interest and really want to do rapid sequence evaluations of questions using PDSA cycles.
And maybe the business of medicine intrigues you, or healthcare utilization keeps coming up. But regardless of the topic, once you've figured out your core interest, I'd also challenge you to look and see if it aligns with what you're presenting and what you're publishing, or maybe even the patients that you're seeing. This may be a good time to enlist a friend or a colleague or a mentor or coach, because they can help you get a little outside perspective as you look at where you're putting your time and energy.
From this exploration, I really suggest making sure you have a good idea of the one or two words or phrases that you want to be the focus of your story, so you can help the world understand who you are and where your interests lie, and when they should invite you to be on the program. Once you know this, consistency really is key. So for at least a couple of years, I think it's important not to stray too much from your niche.
Sorry. You want people to be able to look at your record of work and figure out where your interest lies without a conversation. I am oftentimes asked, do you know anybody with a particular interest in this or somebody you can present on some particular topic? And if there's someone I can clearly point to, I often do.
But if I don't have someone in mind, I'll often carry out a quick literature search and look at an interesting article backed by a clear record of publication in that area of focus to put a name forward. You also want to be able to tell your story for a promotion board. The flow should be clear.
That's what I'm doing, and this is how it flows into the next sector, and this will allow others to see your area of expertise. It also naturally helps you create a national reputation if you're very consistent in presenting your area. I also recommend that you say no to those things that don't really fit this focus for at least those first couple of years.
This can be especially hard if a boss or a friend or a mentor asked you to do something, but I think the most important part is for you to be focusing on what's really going to move your career forward the best and most efficiently, and it's completely reasonable for you to let others know where you are focusing and ask them to help you find opportunities in those areas. I have a great mentor and sponsor who was a mentor for years. He gave me great advice, and after several years, I asked why he never sponsored me for things, and he just didn't realize that that's what I was looking for, so feel free to ask for people to sponsor you too.
Ask your mentors for what you're looking for. Now, you can also take off-topic requests as an opportunity to sponsor others. Sponsor a colleague who has an interest in that area or may even be more qualified to take on that project.
Now, I also mentioned being creative with opportunities, so when you think about working with friends, sometimes you don't work on all the same topic area. This is an opportunity to think about how to fit your two areas of interest together. A couple of examples in my own career include a collaboration with a friend who was working in medical student education.
This is an area I'm also very interested in, and so when it came up, I really wanted to find a way to combine our interests, and so what we did was an objective, structured clinical examination or an OSCE, his interest, on patients with obstructive sleep apnea, mine. Similarly, I mentioned in my blog from May 16, 2024, that you could put together even more disparate topics like hearing and sleep. In that case, we thought about an investigation of language acquisition in children undergoing cochlear implantation and comparing those with and without snoring, and we didn't end up doing that project, but I still like the idea and appreciate the work to bridge our interests.
I also think that when you're working away through all of us, it's important to tell your sponsors and mentors that this is what you're working on. In that way, they can put your name forward and suggest connections with other people in your area. This often naturally turns into learning and collaboration and mentorship, which takes me to my last thought, which is that you should plan to have multiple mentors in your life and hopefully multiple sponsors.
By giving them a clear understanding of where your interests lie, they can do the best job connecting you to people and experiences that would be the most useful.
I sincerely thank you for listening all the way to the end, and I hope you subscribe with me and join me on this journey.
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Thank you for listening, and I look forward to talking to you soon.
