Academic Accelerator Course
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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.
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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.
Hello, and welcome back to the Medical Mentor Coaching Podcast.
I'm Stacey Ishman, and today we're going to be talking about thriving in academic medicine without losing your mind, part two. In last week's vlog and podcast, we talked about the importance of embracing your dual identity as a physician and as an academician. I have a hard time with that word.
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And building your clinical skills with practical tips that include creating a personal mission statement, finding role models and coaches, expanding your clinical skills with complex patient care, and documenting your outcomes. Now this week, I'd like to talk about developing your research skills and how to set goals. As physicians, we all know how to approach learning.
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I'm going to encourage you to approach your research life the same way you approach your clinical education. If you came from a strong background with advanced training and research, or a strong residency program that helped you develop these skills, this may be as simple as adding on whatever skills you think you're lacking currently. However, for those of you who did not have a strong background, it's important to find a place to start.
I recommend starting from a strategic research plan, and I will link to my previous blog regarding this in the show notes. However, today I'd really like to focus on skills. Now one of the easiest ways to develop skills is to look for workshops focusing on research methodology.
These are often offered through the medical school or a graduate school or school of public health. If you don't have access to these at your local institution, you can often find interesting topics presented at your national conferences or mentoring sessions or workshops that may be useful. So look at the offerings from your specialty society or the program at your end.
I've also found it extremely helpful to do things like full-day courses on great writing and publishing. Honestly, in the first year of my career, I participated in a number of these, but I was pretty overwhelmed just setting up my clinical and my research life. So the ones I took in my first year served as a foundation, but those that I took into my second and third years of practice are really when I established my clinical path and could focus more on research and building my career.
Now being in these workshops afforded me some expected and unexpected benefits. I expected to learn a lot about the path of putting together a research plan, how to carry it out, but the unexpected bonus was the number of other excited and motivated young faculty members I met through the experience. The opportunity to have informal conversations about how to navigate academic life and further our research was more valuable than the time I learned working my way through the agenda.
In fact, many of these folks have gone on to great work and remain great friends and colleagues. In addition, you never know who's going to come back in your life. At the beginning of my career, I took a great grant writing class with a woman named Susan Firth at Johns Hopkins where we were both working at the time.
She's a pediatric nephrologist and went on to become the chief scientific officer and the executive vice president at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia down the road. While I really enjoyed her teaching and encouragement in class, I didn't think we'd have any overlap. I'm focused on pediatric sleep apnea and I'm an otolaryngologist and sleep medicine physician.
But literally a couple decades later, while working on a sleep apnea grant, we lost one of our primary investigators and Susan was kind enough to step in and help us as we finished working on a trial. It was fantastic to have such an experienced researcher guiding us even though our topic area wasn't her primary area of interest. This brings me to my next point, which is to find great mentors in your own institution if you can.
Those who have a great record of successful research are most useful. These may be people in your department or who understand a similar area, but it may also be people who just focus on a methodology or a lab technique. You don't need to be studying the same area for them to be very useful for you.
In fact, working with people outside your specialty has been incredibly interesting for me. Their understanding of the literature or their way of looking at problems may be very different, which can be really, really helpful when you're stuck. I've also found multidisciplinary research to be some of the most satisfying and I've collaborated with colleagues that range from aerospace engineers to statisticians to cardiologists.
If all this seems a little intimidating, I suggest you start small. Consider collaborating with a colleague or on a project that's already started or look at ongoing projects in your department or the databases that are already available. Working with others is a great start and it highlights your willingness to collaborate.
I don't know of anyone who couldn't use a little help getting the research moved along. And as you gain confidence and spend time talking to like-minded individuals, it's giving you an opportunity to come up with your own projects. Once you know your area of interest, it may be useful to look at retrospective studies or case series and look at local, regional, or national data sets as you start to put together the data you need to prospectively evaluate your area of interest and your clinical questions.
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This approach also allows you to build your research portfolio while leveraging your clinical expertise. For those of you interested in working in the lab, check to see if there are projects that will overlap between your interests and those of your collaborators and mentors so that you can work on some of these things as you get your own lab set up. Lastly, I recommend familiarizing yourself with institutional resources.
There may be paper editing services or grant writing assistance. There may be somebody to help with institutional review board submissions or statistical consulting. It's also smart to see what kind of databases or clinical resources are available that you might tap into.
Now the last area I want to talk about is goal setting. Regardless of your area of interest, it's important to set realistic goals and reassess them regularly. I also recommend you set short and long-term goals that include both your clinical and your academic interests.
Now hopefully you've taken the time to create a personal mission statement and vision that includes your academic pursuits and your personal or clinical interests. If not, please look at my previous blog on strategic career planning and academic medicine. I'll include a link in the show notes.
I also recommend you use a framework like the one presented in the 12-week year by Brian Moran. I've benefited a lot from this book, which recommends that you focus on your overarching goal, then break it down into an annual goal, and then into even smaller goals that can be accomplished over a 12-week span. This will allow you to more quickly drive your actions towards your big overarching goals, but also make them more accessible in the short term.
And the mindset around realizing you have to accomplish in a week what you might have given yourself a month for is really, really powerful. Because instead of putting something off because you have more time, you really focus on doing things today. Now, as I've mentioned in a podcast about goal setting, which I'll also include in the show notes, the SMART framework can be a great place to start by setting up your goals.
SMART refers to goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. I also recommend you regularly reassess these goals and adjust them as needed. Things may change in your life or your career, and resources or colleagues may come and go.
Another book I really enjoyed recently is Dan Sullivan's The Gap and the Gain. What I've learned from this book is the value of measuring your progress against where you've been previously, which is known as the gain. This is important instead of focusing all your time on the difference between where you are and where other people might be, or your ultimate goal, which is the gap.
If you can stay in the gain and focus on competing against yourself, you'll be much happier and more productive. Time spent worrying about where others are in their journey or research is not particularly useful unless you're going to use that time to think about how to collaborate or build on the work that they have done. I also want to give you some practical tips to think about when you're doing your goal setting.
The first of these is to do regular self-assessments. I like to do them weekly to be sure that I'm on track and don't get so too far behind, but I've heard of people who do them three times a day. The second is to make sure you're ready to adjust your goals based on changing opportunities.
These can be internal like motivation or external like a change in grant funding. The third tip is to seek feedback from mentors and colleagues in order to inform your goal setting process, and even patients may be able to give you some good insight. The fourth is to celebrate your achievements no matter how small so that you can maintain motivation.
One word of caution, in my own life I found that when I use 12-week goals I oftentimes set too many goals for that time frame, so I'd caution you to be realistic. Try to stick to no more than three big goals over a 12-week frame, all of which work to your overarching aim or mission. Include a number of tactics every week to get there, and I recommend you have at least one personal goal during that time frame in addition to a professional goal.
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Now all these goals should match up with your overarching goals in your life and your career, and there's always some room for trial and error, but I encourage you to stay patient with yourself and try again if it doesn't work as well this week or today. I also want to remind you you don't need to wait for the end of a quarter to start 12-week goals. Every day is an opportunity to start, whether it's the end of the month, the end of a quarter, or just the end of a day.
Thank you for joining me this week. If you have any suggestions for topics you'd like to hear about, please message me on Instagram at sishmancoach or email me at staceysteyishmancoach at gmail.com. I look forward to talking to you again next week.
