“I Can’t Be Happy Unless I leave Clinical Medicine”

My Story

I am a neonatologist by training. After I graduated fellowship, I just had my first baby and I was ready to start a brand-new job. I signed on to stay at the institution I trained at. It was more time than I wanted, but I was so tied to my training institution that I couldn’t imagine leaving. 

Thanks to my mother-in-law, who essentially became our live-in nanny, things went smoother than they usually do. But I was away from my baby nearly all the time. I was either working full days and coming home to see her for just a couple of hours, or I worked overnight shifts. And that’s not to mention the other responsibilities of the job like research and projects. 

I realized three months in that I wasn’t sure I took the right job. I would even go in and stalk the schedule of the other institution I interviewed for on AmIOn. And it looked great. I thought it could work for me. And I second-guessed why I hadn’t taken that job in the first place. 

I thought I had to leave my current job for a different job to get the result of having the life I wanted. So I interviewed with the director of the new hospital that I was hoping to work at. It seemed like a great fit. I was ready to go.

When I took the job, I felt relieved. I loved my colleagues. I loved being back into the delivery units. I loved every second of it. 

But we will always find reasons why we can’t be happy. Just switching the circumstance alone will never improve everything. And even though my schedule was improved in terms of time, I noticed I had to work more on weekends and holidays. 

The truth is, there are trade-offs no matter what we do. But at the time, I didn’t realize it. About four years into that job, I started feeling like things weren’t right, and I heard a pretty big corporation was looking for a neonatologist. I’d have set hours. No weekends or holidays. An increased salary. 

I believed that a set schedule with no holidays and weekends was what I wanted. So I changed my circumstance yet again. I took the job. I thought this would be the thing that would finally make me happy. I started the job. It was a very steep learning curve.

Around this time, I found coaching. It was a huge epiphany for me. I learned that we really do have control over our thoughts and situations. I realized I couldn’t just keep trialing a bunch of different positions with the hope that I’d eventually be happy. I had to find contentment from within and then make the decision to move on if I wanted to.

I decided that I wanted to be a coach. I went to coach training. I started coaching as a side gig. I was loving it. I wasn’t sure where it would go, but I started to see that this could be what I do all the time. Yet I realized I couldn’t just jump straight into having my own business. I couldn’t just change the circumstance without first getting really clear on a few things: how I want to feel and what result I wanted.

What happened? The coaching felt natural and good. I kept going. I took more clients. I created programs. I gained a great group of women physicians. They saw progress. The momentum moved. It felt right. I got so busy with my business that I didn’t’ know what to do with my full-time job.

Ultimately, I made the decision to leave my full-time non-clinical job because I found happiness. I wasn’t running away from it. But I had found what was driving me. Things made sense. I found clarity. I made the decision that I wanted to go in a different direction. 

That’s how you have to make decisions and changes. It’s about doing it because you’re ready to move forward with an open mind and go for it. Not running away or changing something in hope that things will get better elsewhere.

You Can Find Happiness Today

At this point, you’ve probably figured out the lesson of my story. Just changing a circumstance and leaving medicine won’t make you happier. That happiness has to come from the work you do within. 

Think about it. Whatever circumstance you find yourself in, how can you find contentment today? No matter what’s going on at work, with your boss, with your colleagues, with your patients, how can you find some kind of contentment right now?

The answer is working on your thoughts, choosing what you want to believe so you can gain the feeling that you want to feel. 

I promise you can find contentment somehow right here, right now, today. The question is are you willing to do so? We often indulge in thoughts that keep us trapped. It’s difficult to let go of the thoughts that are protecting our ego, like “I’m right. This shouldn’t have happened to me.” 

But all that does is create more pressure. It holds us back. It prevents us from finding the contentment we’re really seeking. While you may choose to leave your current situation, the first step is having a conversation with yourself saying, “I can find contentment today from within. How will I do that?”. 

When this comes together, the amount of mental space you’ll create will blow your mind. Our chief complaint for today was, “I can't be happy unless I leave clinical medicine. I can’t find contentment in my current situation.” But you can.

How to Find Contentment Today

So let’s find contentment today for right here and now. We can do that by finding a belief that creates contentment. For me, content is soft blue. It radiates from my chest. It’s slow and smooth. When I feel content, I want to pause. I want to smell the roses. I want to be intentional and deliberate. I want to honor all of the amazing things that I have in front of me here and now. I want to enjoy my life. 

I generate all these things I want to do by feeling content. From there, I can work backward and find the thought that’s making me feel content. For me, it’s, “This journey is going exactly as it’s supposed to. Everything that I’ve done has led me to this point. I had to go through all of this to learn that contentment has been staring me in the face all along.” As a result, I believe that I’m living my life on purpose. 

I hope you can find that contentment for yourself, too.