Welcome To The Career Rx Podcast with Marjorie Stiegler MD: Episode 1

The Career Rx: A Podcast for Doctors Who Want More (Episode #1)

Okay, okay – I get it, you guys love podcasts! I’ve been writing and sharing videos for years now, but today marks a new chapter or episode. Why? I’ve just launched The Career Rx Podcast and will be bringing you all the best professional tips for doctors in short audio episodes you can listen to anywhere.

And for those who prefer to read, it’s cool – I’ll include some detailed show notes and a transcript just for you!

The Career Rx podcast is about the important stuff they don’t teach you in medical school. About how to treat your career like the business it really is and how to be strategic about your success.

You deserve to love your work and whether that’s academic, private practice, nonclinical, or even entrepreneurial, this podcast will help you get ahead and do more of what you love.

**In This Episode of The Career Rx You’ll Learn:**

How The Career Rx can help you
Why there is a need for new career paths as a physician
A little about my background and how I can help you
Topics we’ll be talking about on upcoming episodes of The Career Rx

LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE:

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TRANSCRIPT AND SHOW NOTES

Welcome To The Career Rx

Hey there! Welcome to The Career Prescription (aka The Career Rx). I’m your host Marjorie Stiegler.

Every episode is inspired by questions from listeners just like you, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss a thing and of course, send me your questions so I can use them for a future episode.

Are you ready? Let’s get into it.

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This is the very first episode of The Career Rx podcast. I’m recording this live for the podcast and also on Facebook and YouTube!

Why am I doing these at the same time?

Well, because some of these episodes are coming from existing video content. I’m mentioning this as I’ve been doing this for a long time.

A lot of people have asked really great questions over the years and since I happen to have some of those questions already in place, I’m going to go ahead and republish them for you so you have all of this content in one place.

**How The Career Rx Can Help You**

The Career Rx has physicians in mind no matter where you are on your career path. You might be:

Trying to grow your private practice
Advancing your career in academics
Thinking about leaving clinical medicine to do something different
Staying in medicine but are interested in a side gig that you will find really fulfilling

I’m here to help you succeed with the above goals and much more, so please subscribe (Apple Podcast, Google Podcast) to get access to the latest podcast episodes.

The lessons in The Career Rx are relevant if you are a physician who wants something more, regardless of your specific career goals.

You either want success more quickly, you want it less painfully, or you want to do something a little bit different and you’re ready to look at some modern strategies.

All in all, The Career Rx is about loving what you do. If this is you, you’re in the right place!

Your Medical Career & Doing What You Love

As a physician, you have trained enough, sacrificed enough and you are smart enough, skilled enough. So, it always shocks me when people say “well, I’m just a doctor – I don’t know how to do anything else.”

That’s crazy! You know how to do a lot of things. You just don’t know that you know how to do a lot of things.

I am here to help you get to a place where you’re really doing what you love.

Following the kind of strategies and approaches that we can talk about in The Career Rx podcast will give you just that.

If you are first starting out as a doctor, have not paid your dues and you don’t have any authority or reputation, it’s easy to kind of feel like a cog in a wheel. That’s how a lot of people describe themselves. I feel like I’m a cog in a wheel. I’m just a warm body.

As a physician, I am heartbroken that people feel this way. I know I’ve felt that way too. People feel like they’re on this success treadmill, they’re like a hamster on a wheel and they just don’t understand how this career they felt so much passion for turned into such a draining day to day job and not really a career that they want.

This is where The Career Rx podcast can help you. When you work on the strategies I share you will separate yourself from that group of physicians who are having a difficult time. You’ll be able to define yourself as having skills that will put you in an entirely different space. You’ll have leverage for negotiation and outside opportunities coming to you.

Why Is There The Need For New Career Paths As A Physician?

Finding new and different opportunities in your career will give you options.

One of the things I hear the most from people who are burned out, considering some kind of exit or considering going part-time is that they feel like they don’t have the autonomy that they expected to have by now.

Many physicians are mid-career. They have families and they have lives.

You might be thinking…

When is the end of that tunnel where I’m supposed to be in charge?
How can I come and go when I want?
When can I take a vacation?
How can I attend something at my child’s school?
When can I play my next round of golf?

But doctors don’t feel like they are in charge anymore. A lot of bureaucracy and administrators are kind of telling you what to do and that doesn’t feel good because you don’t feel respected, you don’t feel like you have any control and you don’t feel appreciated.

This illustrates a loss of identity and leads to so much burnout.

Doctors are taking home their work, they don’t know how to set boundaries effectively, and they’re so busy that they don’t have the mental space to take that step back that they need.

If this sounds familiar you may be well aware that you need to change things up, but you feel too busy to do it – and if you are too busy, there is no real plan.

**The Goal For The Career Rx Podcast:**

I want to help fellow physicians develop a plan that gets them doing the kind of work that they truly want to do without having to wait for a permission slip.

Let’s put you in a position where you know you’re in demand! A place where you can clearly articulate that to a variety of potential bosses, organizations, patients, customers or clients.

Hi, I’m Your Host Marjorie Stiegler, MD.

I’m a physician, an entrepreneur and an anesthesiologist by trade.

I went to Emory for medical school. I did my residency at mass general, then I went out to UCLA to be on the faculty. Then I came to North Carolina where my family is to be on the faculty and over the past 10+ years I have been working in the digital space.

How and why?

When I was in Los Angeles, my husband and I started a company (a maternity & athletic wear company). It had nothing at all to do with medicine. He was in business school, I was pregnant.

There was a void in the market today. There are a lot of options for that. But back then there really weren’t.

So we started a self-taught business. This was when social media was starting to take off, well before online influencers, way before you could plug and play and make your own website.

We learned how to do it all!

I also needed what I thought would be a safe space to experiment where nobody would be watching. Where I wouldn’t make a big mistake in front of actual customers. So what I did was create a physician website, a professional website for me and a professional social media site.

I started to explore it and use it as the sandbox.

I didn’t think anybody would be watching. So I figured I could make as many mistakes as I want and I’m sure I did. But I also learned a lot.

I learned that people were coming to my website and that started to have real tangible changes to my academic career for the better, in a really surprising way.

Over this natural evolution of my career, I had my primary medical and academic career, plus I had this side career growing where people wanted to understand what I was doing online and on social media and what that was doing for me.

What I’ve Been Up To:

For 8+ years, I have been doing online courses to teach other doctors skills to grow their business
8 years in the professional speaking industry… speaking at academic events and I’m a keynote speaker as a professional member of the national speakers association.
- Professional speaking is one of the most important things you can do to catapult your career and to increase your financial flexibility. So I’ll be talking about that throughout the podcast and whether or not you want to be a speaker, a lot of the lessons will be relevant to you.
Wrote a book called The Social Prescription: How Savvy Doctors Can Leverage Digital Platforms for Professional Success
I teach online courses and consult for organizations.
I stopped doing academics full time and have my own businesses. I have a position in the industry as a medical director. I, therefore, know a lot of people who are interested in transitioning out of clinical medicine, which I have successfully done. So, all of these goals that you want to achieve I’ve done to some degree.

Digital marketing experience and public speaking have helped me to have more financial flexibility for what I want to do academically and clinically.

This was a huge aha moment for me in the past. Was I on the brink of burning out? I was able to protect myself. I managed some negotiations and found ways to position myself for new opportunities.

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This experience informs what I choose to talk about and how I talk about it.

In some of these areas, I have my own personal experiences and I’m happy to share my professional experience and working knowledge.

**What We’ll Be Talking About on The Career Rx Podcast**

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What kinds of topics will we discuss?

What is Modern Digital Strategy?

This is the no permission slip needed ability to use websites, social media and other forms of content creation, like videos, podcasts and other platforms where you can write and publish your thinking. It could be in the form of articles or it can be in the form of comments and conversations that are highly visible and set you up to be a thought leader in your area.

Thought Leadership

When you become a thought leader in your area, you get all kinds of things that are CV worthy or pay worthy. When people find you online and they believe you to be a thought expert, they already see what you’re made of. They know you, they like you, they’ve seen your style, so it’s not a question about what kind of skills they’re hiring.

This is the core of why I think modern strategy revolves around the online space, why it’s so important.

Networking

We’re also going to talk about networking. There are some pretty basic ideas around networking that I don’t see deployed in the medical space very much.

I’m referring to the modern ways to network and even what I like to call “reverse networking”, which is basically to catch the eye of specific targets (people that you want to become interested in you) and help them to want to do that so that you’re not always chasing people down.

Social Media Platforms

We’ll talk a lot about specific social media platforms and what their functions are. I’ll share some use cases around them for professional use (no, not for watching cat videos) and also some of their limitations.

Branding and Marketing as Communication Tools

This is really, really important. If you’re reading this, you are probably already on board and maybe know me a little bit, but you’ve got to know that when I talk about marketing and branding, I am not talking about making stuff up.

I am talking about putting your most genuine, authentic, best self forward in a way that other people can understand.

Some examples:

Do you have a strong elevator pitch?
What do you do?
What do you bring to the table that is unique?

These are very important details to know about you and your brand.

The specifics of our brands are different for everybody. When a potential employer or colleague really understands what you are all about, finding the right career opportunities and collaborations will be that much easier.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We’ll also be talking about the actual nuts and bolts of that online space. For example:

What is search engine optimization?
How do you do it?
Do you intend to outsource it?
How do you make sure that who you’re hiring is doing the right thing by you?
SEO basics like link building strategy and website ranking.

It’s really important to understand how the internet works. If you don’t know how the internet and internet algorithms work (really the same thing for social media), then you can be online but you’re basically invisible as people won’t be able to find you.

So you’ve got to know specifically how to use SEO in a way that gets you and your business seen.

Conversions

How do you get conversions and what kind of conversions to look at. It could be:

Reading an article of yours
Signing up for a newsletter
Watching a video
Emailing you
Buying something

It could be anything, whatever action you want someone to take.

Podcasting

We’ll talk a little bit about podcasting and what I learned from doing this podcast, plus what I’ve learned being a guest on other people’s podcasts.

Publishing Courses and Books

We’ll also cover books and self-publishing. I have published both ways with a publisher and self-publishing. We’ll also discuss creating online courses.

Content Amplification

Creating multiple online tactics to deliver information to your target audience.

This can supplement either a blog post or speaking engagement to give your audience the support they need to really explore the topic area further. This way you can give them something more, something deeper. And it can also be a way to add to your bottom line if that’s what you choose to do with it.

Effectiveness, Efficiency and Time Management

I’m well aware that most people think they’re too busy to deploy any of this, but I promise you, you are not.

It takes a little bit of borrowing. You’ve got to borrow a little bit of this to do a little bit of that, but the dividends are so huge.

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All of these topics come from people who have asked a question.

I’ve got a gigantic list of the questions that I keep track of. These questions come to me through a lot of channels – through my social media channels, my email, talking to people at conferences, etc.

So, I capture these questions and then I write about them, speak about them or I do a video about them. And now, I’ll be talking about them in The Career Rx podcast.

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If you have questions about how you might deploy any of these strategies or how they relate to your career, drop me an email.

I obviously can’t answer everybody and I can’t necessarily make an episode out of every question, but a lot of people have the same question and when I find the same questions coming again and again or I find a really unusual and interesting question, then it makes for a great episode, a great video, great blog posts or a great podcast episode.

My Ask to You

Please subscribe to the podcast: Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify
Tell your friends about The Career Rx so it can be found by people who need it
Leave a review of the podcast

I love hearing from you. Your success stories, your questions, your thoughts.

Understanding what you need and how I can help you is what really lights me up and that’s the reason that I’m doing this.

If you are a physician, I want you to know that you have done so very much to have earned your autonomy, your passion and your fulfillment in your career.

You shouldn’t feel stuck and you shouldn’t feel like you have to wait for permission or to clock in a certain number of hours or to feel you have finally paid your dues to be happy and fulfilled in life.

That is an unreasonable expectation. It’s not the case at all.

Using the lessons I’ll be sharing will help you to put yourself on a track to identify that success you want and to get there faster.

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Thanks for joining me on this episode of The Career Rx.

Please be sure to subscribe and leave me a review on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast or whatever podcast player you’re using to listen today. Also, be sure to send me your questions so that I can answer them and give you a shout out on a future episode.

Bye for now,

Marjorie