If you are unhappy working in medicine, your first inclination may be to escape as quickly as possible. You may be thinking that “the grass is greener on the other side”. But here’s the hard truth: pursuing a career change won’t necessarily make you happy.
Now don’t get me wrong, changing careers might be part of your bigger journey towards career fulfillment, but a career change by itself isn’t the answer.
Here’s why: you take yourself with you wherever you go. If you change careers, you will likely take your patterns of hustle, people pleasing and perfectionism with you.
Until you do the inner work of deconstructing why you are unhappy in the first place and deciding what it is you really want from your career, changing careers will be a superficial and temporary fix.
In this episode I discuss WHY changing your career won’t make you happy, how I took my patterns of hustle with me to South Korea causing another burnout, and four things that actually will bring you closer to lasting career fulfillment.
This is a powerful and informative solo episode, and I can’t wait for you to dive in. Tune in by listening to the audio above or by searching for “life after medicine” wherever you listen to podcasts.
Why a career change won’t make you happy
The reason that changing careers won’t necessarily make you happy, is that it’s external and superficial. You’ll find that wherever you go, you take yourself with you. You take your patterns, your patterns of hustling, of overworking, of people pleasing, of saying yes, when you really want to say no. If you change careers, thinking that’s going to bring you all the peace, happiness and joy, you may be disappointed with the results.
Sure, changing careers might make things a little bit better, but still, you have to do the inner work. You must deconstruct you’re unhappy in the first place and determine what is it that you really want in your career.
When you don’t do the inner work
When you don’t do the inner work, you end up jumping into your next career or job and taking all of your old patterns with you.
One good example of this is if you have an addictive personality, and you give up smoking or drinking.
You said, “Okay, I’m going to stop smoking cigarettes.” You successfully stop smoking which is great, but then you replace it with Diet Coke.
Obviously, Diet Coke is healthier for you than smoking cigarettes, so you are making progress. However, you haven’t addressed what is causing you to reach for these addictions. What is going on underneath? You haven’t really done the deeper work.
Some people try to find career fulfillment through the process of elimination. They say “okay, I’m unhappy, let me just try another job and see if that’s better”. This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s going to take up alot more time to reach career fulfillment because you are superficially experimenting. You’re not taking the time to get down to the root of the problem. You don’t understand why you are really unhappy and so you don’t know what it is that really needs to change. The moral of all of these stories is that like changing careers itself is not the solution.
A career change wasn’t the solution for me.
Here is something that is very important for you to know: My story is NOT that I was unhappy, I left medicine a,nd now I’m happy. t
That is a very simplified version, and if you tell it like that, it’s actually incorrect because you’re missing the details. I want to walk you through what really happened.
Yes, leaving medicine was the right thing for me personally. But it wasn’t that changing careers from a doctor to a teacher made me happy all of a sudden.
When I was in South Korea, I did spend a lot of time recreating my old patterns of overworking and hustling which lead to a mini burnout.
Having more time was the real answer
The real solution for me and the reason I was able to experience career fulfillment is because leaving medicine gave me time and space. I went from working 80 hours a week as a doctor to working less than 40hrs / week as a teacher. I had all my evenings and weekends totally free. I used this time to reflect and get clear on my values. I used this time to heal my patterns of hustling and overachieving. I used this time to begin exploring what it is I want to do and who I want to be in the world.
It’s important for you to understand this nuance. It wasn’t that I was unhappy, I left medicine and all my problems went away. It was that I left medicine and that gave me the time and space to get clear on what would truly make me happy.
If a career change won’t work… what will?
I want to clarify, the goal is not to be happy all the time. I think that’s the biggest point that I want to make. I understand it’s not just you’re unhappy, here’s what will make you happy. Following these guidelines that I am going to share and trying to create happiness from this place, is going to be much more sustainable for you. So, what is it that will help you to create sustainable, lasting happiness in your career?
Taking responsibility for your own happiness
Taking responsibility for your own happiness and recognizing you are the source of your happiness is an important first step. You can’t expect someone else or something else to make you happy. Even if you’re in the perfect job, but you’re not getting enough sleep and you’re burnt out, you’re still not going to feel happy in your career. You are relying on external things for your happiness.
Creating a career that’s aligned with your values
Usually when we’re unhappy in our career, one of the main reasons that we feel unfulfilled or unsatisfied can be because the career is violating our values. It’s important to be creating a career that is in alignment with your values. To do that, you must know what your values are. Your values are essentially what is most important to you. They are where you want to spend your time and energy. They are what motivate and drive you. Once you know your values, then you need to figure out how to bring your career into alignment with your values.
Bringing mindfulness and presence into everyday
Mindfulness is another key ingredient to being happy and fulfilled in your career and in life. Mindfulness is about being present in the current moment like being absorbed in your work or immersed in what you’re doing, or just being fully present. Happiness is something that happens in the present. So, to experience those emotions and enjoy your work, you need to be in the moment. Bringing mindfulness into the moments will help you bring greater enjoyment to it.
Approaching your career from a place of wholeness
This is ongoing work. Many of us have an overachiever wound that we got from childhood. One of the ways we cope with the pain from childhood is to achieve. We think that if we can achieve more successes, more promotions, more income, more status, more awards, we will finally feel good enough. When we start to let it go of this and approach our career from a place of wholeness, that’s when real fulfillment comes in.
Oh the day I quit, it’s going to be so amazing. I don’t have to deal with that boss anymore or that work anymore, it is amazing….😎😎👨🏫👨🏫👨🏫… But it may be only a day, a week or maybe a month before you adapt back and new problems bubble up. It’s a phenomenon in psychology known as hedonic adaptation — people have a general tendency to return to a set level of happiness despite life’s ups and downs. That’s also related to your bank account money .. if you compare having millions or other person has thousands…🙏🙏👨🏫👨🏫😎😎