Academic Accelerator Course
While you may know that the benefit of coaching for physicians includes decreased burnout, improvement in job fulfillment, enhanced self-compassion, and better sleep, our mission is to help academic physicians create a path to their personal vision of success. The Academic Accelerator course will help you envision your ideal career, then help you make it happen. Let me help you create a path to your version of success.
As an extra bonus, I'll include access to our Finances 101 module for those who sign up through the waitlist. Please keep your eyes open for the Academic Accelerator course, which will be launching soon.
Podcast
It was not long ago that 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, and I missed out on a lot of precious moments with my family. But I've had my a-ha moment, and now I'm all about channeling my energy into activities that truly propel me forward and bring me happiness. 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. Please join me as we dive into all things career advancement, finding your niche, and working towards that elusive work-life integration.
I'm Stacey Ishman, and today we're going to be talking about thriving in academic medicine without losing your mind.
As I started to write this, I realized I had enough to say about this that it's actually now a two-part blog on this topic. So this first section is really based on a great comment I got from somebody who'd been reading the blog, who was interested in understanding how to embrace the requisite dual identities that are required to be a successful academic physician. Namely, they were talking about the duality of being a clinically busy surgeon, in the case of my colleague, and a productive academician.
Now, you don't have to be a surgeon necessarily to understand this duality, but this just happened to be the case for my colleague. At the beginning of our careers, it may be hard not to want to take on every big case and really build your clinical practice. There is a physical component to this where you get more comfortable, where you get more muscle memory, and there may be some ego involved as you prove yourself as the new physician in town.
There's also an opportunity to learn and grow and figure out who you want to be as a clinician. I've said it before and I'll say it again. At the beginning of my career, I didn't even know how I liked to drape the drapes or what workup I liked in clinic.
I just knew the way about 10 different people did it, or maybe 20. None of which really told me the way I thought would feel the most genuine to me. Now, at the same time, you will probably never have as much free time as you do at the beginning of your career.
So if you can prioritize it, take this time to come up with your academic niche and really understand your goals, both clinically and academically. It'll really help you build both your research life and your clinical life. This is a great opportunity.
Now, there's a number of ways to approach this and I wish I could say I did all this correctly at the beginning of my career, but I didn't. One of the first things I really love is the idea of creating a personal mission statement, something that incorporates both your clinical and academic goals. Now, it took me several years to really get to this point, but if you can think about this up front or even before you start your academic career, it can be great.
Now, if you haven't done this, it's never too late. I know people who've done this 20 years into a career and really come up with a new area where their passions and their clinical interests align. Now, this can be a one-liner or a full page, depending on how much detail you want to go into.
When I first tried to do this myself, I did a lot of mental flogging and tried to figure out my core values, but when I tried to replicate this recently, I went to one of the AI language generation modules and used a prompt, which was super helpful and much easier, because even if the prompt didn't give me the right answer, it did give me something to edit, and sometimes the easiest way to figure out what you want is spend some time thinking about what you do not want. So, in this case, I went to an AI engine and wrote a prompt that sounded like this. Write a research mission statement for your specialty, interested in improving your research topic for your population with your specific disease.
Now, I know that was a lot of hypotheticals, so here is my actual example. Write a research mission statement for a pediatric otolaryngologist interested in improving patient outcomes for children with persistent pediatric obstructive sleep apnea. If you want to give an AI engine a little more direction, you can also specify sections or topics that you want to include, like purposes or goals, core values, collaborations, outcomes, or even long-term vision.
As well, you can give formatting tips, like include four sections with practical tips at the end of each section, an introductory paragraph at the beginning, and a summary paragraph at the end. One of the things I really want to emphasize, too, is the duality in roles is what makes academic surgery and medicine uniquely rewarding and impactful. Just as you're focusing your academic life, you want to focus your clinical life, and in an ideal world, hopefully these can overlap.
Now, you may collect outcomes from your practice or contribute samples to your research lab or just learn from your patients and turn these observations into great clinical questions and great clinical studies. This may also be a great time to look for role models who are good at this balancing act and can also be useful. You also might want to consider a coach if you have a natural tendency towards one or the other, if you really are great at the clinical but need some help with the research or vice versa.
And if nothing else, they can serve as someone with an outside perspective to help you lean into your strengths and develop your weaknesses. A few practical tips that I suggest include creating a personal mission statement, as I mentioned above with my AI prompt, as well as purposely looking at how well your clinical work and your research can be complementary and reinforcing. It also talks about developing your clinical skills and it's very tempting in your first couple years of practice to really build your skill set and prove your worth.
I think you really need to do this, and this may include things like courses or skills training, may use simulators or cadaver labs, or just remote learning. It can be opportunities that are local or national meetings that offer exactly what you're looking for. But you may also decide you want to observe some colleagues and these can be the most fun because they give you an opportunity to socialize with friends and colleagues and to even make new friends.
They also may look like a request to spend time with a leader in a field who you don't know very well but are excited to learn from and really are looking forward to having a connection with. Now these opportunities can come up based on recommendations from a mentor or sponsor but can also come up more organically. A number of years ago I was going to a European pediatric otolaryngology meeting in Amsterdam.
While most of my colleagues were wandering around the red light district, I took the opportunity to join an esteemed colleague who was a pioneer in drug-induced sleep endoscopy. I spent the afternoon observing in his hospital, watching as his fellows and colleagues performed drug-induced sleep endoscopy in a non-surgical space, something I hadn't seen before. And I got to see how he carried out a specific sleep surgery that I'd been struggling with.
And while we didn't know each other well, when I first asked him if we could spend some time together after a meal and a day in his operating room, I felt like I knew him much better. He's remained a friend and a collaborator for the last 20 years. And in fact, I did learn a better way to carry out that surgery by bending my needle differently.
And I used this experience to really translate doing drug-induced sleep endoscopy in a procedure room to moving it into the MRI induction room at my last place of employment. Now this wasn't something being done at the time and it certainly wasn't being done for children, but it made a lot of sense based on what I learned and it gave me a lot of confidence to try something new. And it's funny because my colleagues at the time thought I was crazy for going to a hospital in the middle of Amsterdam while everybody else was out enjoying themselves.
But this experience cemented my interest in drug-induced sleep endoscopy, in pediatric sleep apnea. My friendship with colleagues and friends has led me back to that same lovely city this past year to speak the retirement of my dear colleague. But I digress.
I think it's also really important to look at some other aspects of your clinical career and one of these is to measure your outcomes. Now this is also important on the research side, but on the clinical side by regularly looking at your numbers you become a better physician. You also better understand your complications and hopefully you learn how to build a better mousetrap.
This also allows your data to answer clinical questions or research questions. And now at the beginning of your career you may have a great idea of exactly what you want to ask, but for me I wasn't entirely sure. I knew I had a topic area I cared about and I knew there were some outcome measures that we thought were important, but I didn't really know all the right questions or understand the correlations and relationships I'd be thinking about in the future.
So I started by using standardized assessments that I thought were important. And as I moved further along in my career I learned to layer on some additional questions or questionnaires as I came up with those questions. Now the reason I say this, and I realize I just said questions like five times, but I didn't know the right answers.
I didn't know what to ask. And so if you know this at the beginning of your career, great, but if not just have some natural curiosity and start measuring something. The outcomes you measure may turn into improved patient protocols or state-of-the-art outcome studies, but either way, as Atul Gawande always says, measure something.
Pick something you care about or pick something your mentor cares about. And if you realize down the road it's not the right thing, change it.
Next week I'm going to be talking about two additional topics that I think are critical to thriving in academic medicine, which include optimizing your research skills and setting goals.
If you found this useful, please subscribe, rate, review, and follow on Apple or Spotify.
And if you want to get in touch with me to share feedback or give me some great ideas on what to talk about next, contact me on the website at medicalmentorcoaching.com.
In addition, we have a free checklist on how to optimize your time at national meetings or build your national reputation, which you can find there, too.
I look forward to talking to you next week on the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast.
