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Do you currently feel unfulfilled and uninspired in your career?
Like you are stuck in a job you hate as a means to pay the bills, just going through the motions of life.
Do you keep feeling that there must be something more out there for you, but you don’t know exactly what that would be? Let alone how to start pursuing it.
Do you dream of actually enjoying your work and feeling like you are contributing to the world in a meaningful way?
You are not alone. I’ve been there.
During my career in medicine, I felt a nagging sense that I didn’t believe in the work I was doing. I constantly experienced Sunday night blues and dread about going into work. I felt inauthentic; like I had to wear this costume each day at work. The person I was didn’t seem to align with the kind of person who was a good doctor.
And looking back now, I can clearly see, I felt this way because I was doing work that was out of alignment with my core values.
Our values represent what is most important to us in life. The ideals and concepts we hold closest to our heart. They are what make us tick and drive most of our feelings and behavior.
The Consequences of Violating Your Core Values
Doing work we don’t believe in, that violates our core values, has some pretty serious consequences over time.
These are some of the ways it manifested for me.
#1 Don’t look up to authority figures in the profession
One time my program director was talking about why second year residents were so grumpy. She said “Well, you are stretched too thin and work really hard during your second year. You can’t be your best self under those circumstances.”
I had a gut cringe reaction to that. I rejected it on a soul level.
One of my core values was growth, and actively working to become your best self. How could I be a part of a profession that repeatedly asked me to be less than my best? A profession that placed a higher importance on working yourself to exhaustion than showing up as whole, happy and well-rested human being.
I didn’t agree with being asked to sacrifice my sleep, freedom, personal life, weekends, and overall sense of well being. It felt like a personal violation.
There was also always talk of “document this” or “document that”. All for the purposes of covering your ass against malpractice. It infiltrated rounds discussions and even informal patient care conversations with attendings.
Sure, this seemed like a practical thing to discuss, but I didn’t want to be a part of a profession where worrying about getting sued was so high up on my list of things to care about.
Plus when I looked around at the people further along the path than I was, everyone seemed to have these big bags under their eyes.
If I kept following the trajectory I was on, I didn’t like where I was going to end up. I didn’t admire who I would become. I didn’t agree with the teachings, philosophies and world views of the people I was supposed to emulate.
It just didn’t add up.
#2 Disagree with the culture of the profession
In medicine it was very much the culture to complain. We were all pretty miserable with our lives and most of the way we connected was through commiseration.
The physician work rooms and resident’s lounge were places we could go to vent about difficult patients, unforgiving attendings, and the impossibility of balancing all the competing demands on our time and energy. Many of our conversations were just a suffering contest of who had it worse.
This did not jive with me.
To me complaining has always felt so disempowering. Anytime I hear people telling a “woe is me” story, I want to jump in and help them fix it immediately. I want to problem solve and find a better way to do things.
But in medicine, it seemed that people didn’t necessarily want their lives to improve. They didn’t want to solve their problems. They just saw work as a necessary evil and were fine with hating it, complaining about it, and calling it a day.
Whereas now, most of the fellow life coaches and digital nomads I spend time with are full of appreciation and zest for life. There is a sense of energy, aliveness and personal empowerment that is so common in my profession. I truly feel that I have found my people.
#3 Eye rolling and sighing
You know in The Office, how Jim is constantly rolling his eyes at the camera? That is how my whole life felt in medicine.
I was constantly feeling fed up with everything I was asked to do. I was always so over it. I would catch myself repeatedly rolling my eyes and dramatically exhaling in exasperation.
Those are NOT signs of happiness or contentment.
Those are signs of frustration, resentment, annoyance and a whole host of other negative emotions. Signs that some of my core values and beliefs were being violated on the reg.
#4 Dread and inertia
Your subconscious is responsible for generating energy. If you are out of alignment with the work you are doing, on some deep unconscious level your body will try to prevent you from going forward by making you physically exhausted.
I felt so much inertia when it came to dragging myself out of bed and going into work. I would press snooze on my alarm clock until the very last possible minute, motivated only by the desire not to be too late.
I also had a hard time physically moving myself when I was at work. If I needed to do something that required standing up from the computer and walking into a patient’s room, it was a damn near impossible task. I felt like I was walking around with a weighted blanket on my shoulders.
Or like in one of those dreams where you are trying to run, but your legs aren’t working for some reason and you can’t seem to make any forward progress.
The best way I can think to describe it, is a sense of inertia. A body at rest wants to stay at rest.
Dread also came over me on a regular basis and compounded with the inertia. I dreaded Monday mornings going into work. I dreaded rounds. I felt a sense of anxious trepidation before each and every shift.
It was no way to live.
#5 Don’t care about the work
I honestly felt like the work I was doing wasn’t helping others in a way that was meaningful to me.
This can be a bit tricky to articulate and I may ruffle some feathers here. So hang tight while I try to explain.
To be clear, the work of a doctor is objectively very important to the proper functioning of society. Saving lives and taking care of the sick is noble and honorable work that I hold in high regard.
And even so, there was something about the work that felt empty for me.
Even when I performed a task that could be perceived as satisfying, like delivering a baby or giving someone 5 years of reliable birth control with one IUD insertion, none of those things really felt like they mattered.
Sure I was helping people, but I had this constant sense of…. “so what?” I just didn’t really care. I rarely felt emotionally moved by the impact I was supposedly having. It all felt pretty hollow to me.
I believe that our work CAN be both important and personally meaningful.
Frederick Buechner has a quote that says “vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” So if our deep gladness is missing and we are just sacrificing ourselves to meet the needs of the world, it is going to feel empty and hollow and will be ultimately unsustainable.
We won’t be able to live a fulfilling, happy life by ignoring the “deep gladness” half of the equation.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these scenarios above? Do you feel like you don’t quite agree with the culture at work? Do you feel a sense of uneasiness and dread about going into work? Or maybe just a general sense that something is off or missing and you can’t quite articulate it?
These are all potentially signs that the work you are doing is violating some of your core values, and it may be time to take a closer look at if your work is healthy and sustainable for you.
Many of us spend a significant amount of time each day at work, so wouldn’t if be nice if we could actually enjoy that time?
To quote Annie Dillard, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
So do you want to spend your days miserable just counting down the hours until you can go home? Or do you want something more for you life?
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