Do you feel trapped in your medical career? Worried that leaving clinical medicine is basically throwing your degree away? A mindset shift may be just what you need, from physician author and coach, Dr. Chelsea Turgeon. Listen to discover how you can align your career goals with your values.
In this episode of The Career Rx we’ll discuss:
- How Dr. Chelsea Turgeon quit medicine, and now travels the world working remotely
- Ways to determine your deepest values in life – and what to do with that clarity
- Why career changes alone often don’t solve physicians’ struggle to find fulfillment
In this interview with Dr. Chelsea Turgeon, we take a closer look at the moments that defined her journey of ending her clinical medicine career to achieving her values of freedom, playfulness, spaciousness. She explains that values are the core motivation and core driver of what you really want. It all begins with asking yourself the right questions – start living your life for you.
Special announcement: My course, Industry Insider, is now accredited for up to 12 CME credits. Learn how to land an exciting and impactful role as a physician in the world of pharma, biotech, or medical devices, AND how to do that even if you think you’re not qualified, don’t have any connections, or concerned about a pay cut… I’ve got you covered!
In this Episode:
[3:17] How to trade external validation and the ‘achievement treadmill’ for internal fulfillment
[9:30] Identifying your real values, and how to know if you’re living them
[16:30] You don’t want to miss this exercise
[23:10] The full scoop on how Chelsea left residency entirely to pursue coaching
Please note: the information and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the guest speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the host, nor any of the host’s affiliated entities.
Links and Resources:
Life After Medicine Podcast
Five Days to Career Clarity https://coachchelsmd.com/clarity/
Follow Chelsea on Instagram: @coachchelsmd.
Industry Insider – 12 CME hours – learn exactly how to land a rewarding nonclinical career without a new degree, connections on the inside, prior experience, or a pay cut
The Branding Rx – 18 hours of CME, mastering digital strategies for advancing your career, building your business, and growing your professional brand
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TRANSCRIPT: Episode 100 – Success Stories: 3 Physicians Land Industry Jobs
Hey there, I’m Marjorie Stiegler and you’re listening to The Career Rx podcast, where we tackle the important things they don’t teach you in medical school. Like how to treat your career, like the business, it really is, with strategies to accelerate the kind of success that you want, because you deserve a career you love, and a career that loves you back. Are you ready? Let’s get into it.
So today on the show, I have the privilege of inviting my guest, Dr. Chelsea Turgeon, who is a career coach, and also the author of a book that I love. I love the name. It’s called, “How I Quit My Medical Career to Travel the World and Work Remotely”, who doesn’t love that? And host of the Life After Medicine podcast, she is a career and burnout coach for healthcare professionals. And I’m pretty excited to have her on the show today. Welcome, Chelsea.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I’m really happy to have you here. I mean, I have seen you around and in our sort of mutual circles. And I know that what I really appreciate about the posts that I see from you, is your focus, always always instead of like right to the solution on, you know, like getting to the problem, right? Like, what’s the what’s the matter? And how can we really deeply understand what’s making people unhappy or burned out.
And as you and I have talked about, so much of that is around values, and it’s, it’s really under explored. I think we both share that opinion, right? It’s almost impossible to help somebody as you and I both do figure out what to do next, if we don’t really know where they’re coming from. And interestingly, when you start talking to people, oftentimes, they don’t even really know where they’re coming from. Would you agree?
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re not really taught, especially in our medical training, we’re not really taught to even understand where we’re coming from. There’s a big focus on external validation and just kind of following the paths that are laid out for you. So even when you’re going through, like pre med and med school, you’re really focused on, “how do these activities look on my resume? How will they look getting into med school? How will it look for the people on these committees?”
And so we’re never asking ourselves, “does this bring me joy? Do I like doing this?” We’re asking, “will this impress other people? Will this get me to my next level?” And so it’s really a problem that starts very early on and so we’re just very much conditioned to not go In words, to not check in with what we want and what’s important to us, and to always be calibrating externally. And so I think you and I have both realized we need to bring it back to ourselves. But it just, it’s not really emphasized or taught early on.
That’s such a great point, I think people really lose touch or almost never have an opportunity to get in touch. Because you know, you started as such a young adult down this path, that it can be very hard for people to know, they haven’t done any living, they’ve only done a lot of living up to other people’s expectations. But before we dive into that, which, you know, I do want to talk about, which is why you’re on the show today. I mean, speaking of paths, why don’t you tell the audience about yours?
Yeah, absolutely. So I got the idea that I wanted to go to med school at a pretty early age, I was somewhere in high school. And once you start telling people, I think I’m going to be pre med and I want to be a doctor and I was always met with this reaction of, oh, wow, like, that means you must be really smart. And I’ve really fed on that. And this is all like kind of subconsciously, I wasn’t super aware of all of the ways that external expectations were impacting my decisions. But as I look back, in hindsight, I’m able to see very clearly, this is what was happening for me.
So I very much, you know, kind of put my stake in the ground, but I’m going to be a doctor and got met with a lot of positive validation and feedback, and then decided, great, people really appreciate me doing this, this is something where I get a lot of love and approval. So I’m going to continue down this path.
And for the next, you know, whatever, eight, nine years, I just very much set my sights on achievement and achieving the next goal and the next goal and getting these accolades and making that 4.0 GPA and being inducted into these honors societies and getting the scores on the standardized tests and getting into med school. And each time I kept thinking that this next achievement was going to make me feel better about myself in some way.
Although I couldn’t even articulate that at the time, I just felt this restless desire to achieve. And then each time, when I achieved something, for example, when I got into med school, I was excited for about a day. And then I was like, Oh, is that it? Is this what this is supposed to feel like? Okay, but then the toxic mentality I was in said, “that means you haven’t achieved enough. So get back on the horse, keep achieving, keep doing more.” And I was just operating in that way for a while and as you can tell, that’s just a recipe for burnout.
And so the burnout really hit me when I got into my residency program. And it was really at that point that it all started to, like the illusion started to crack for me, because I had gotten everything I thought I wanted. I matched at my top choice residency and one of the top five countries in the school for in the top five schools in the country for the program that I wanted to be in. And I made it, but I didn’t feel any different. And I actually started to feel really empty. And I hit this point of burnout around the very beginning of my second year of my OBGYN residency.
And I’ll say, now that I have this hindsight, it was more than just burnout. It wasn’t just that I was exhausted from working 80 hours a week and you know, 24 hour shifts, it was more than that. It was really a values misalignment when it comes to my career. Like I wasn’t, I wasn’t doing the work I was meant to be doing. It was a values misalignment, and it was a gifts misalignment. So essentially, I realized I was in the wrong career entirely. And I made the decision that seemed a little crazy at the time.
But I really like spent this time I spent some time getting in touch with my intuition around what I really wanted, what am I doing here on this earth, and I made the decision to leave my residency and I actually bought a one way ticket to South Korea, I taught English in person to like third graders for a year.
During that time, I figured out everything I could about online business, how to make money online, how to support myself, so I could work location independent and travel the world. And since then, I’ve built up my online business, it fully supports me, I’ve been traveling the world for about three years now and feel a sense of fulfillment, I feel a sense of like, I’m living in my gifts, I’m honoring my values and my work every day. And so that’s kind of where I’m at now.
I love it. That’s so great. And one of the things I find so unique about your story in particular, is so many people, so many physicians do not leave in the second year of training, they will finish the training, and then finish some requisite number of years in clinical or academic practice before they feel like it’s acceptable even to entertain the idea and but the whole time, they’re sort of unhappy, and they… so but it’s like it is just sort of this external expectations, and almost a psychological jail I think where people just do not feel like they can make a decision to do anything else.
And the more you’re in like, you know, now you’ve got student loans or you know, people will say to you as I’m sure people did what you went to medical school, and now you’re just leaving, right and people continue to say to me all the time as I retired from clinical work in 2017, “You’re not a doctor anymore?” That’s just not the case.
Yeah. And so just to that point, I was met with so many interesting conversations, because after I made my decision to leave, I turned in my resignation. I decided to still work for 90 days afterwards, I just kind of worked out a part time deal with my program director. And then during that time, I spent a lot of time scrubbing in one on one on surgeries with these private practice attendings.
And so each person who I scrubbed in with I, we had, like, you know, this hour of one on one time to talk about, so what do you think and what’s really going through your head, and it was so interesting to have those different conversations, and a lot of people would say things to me like, “well, that’s a lot of years to waste, you know, you’re really throwing it away”, or, or they’d say things like, “well, why don’t you just you want to travel? Why don’t you just be a radiologist, then you can look at X rays from the beach?” And I’m like, none of that is it.
And it’s just so interesting that people are really interested in giving you their opinions. But I was just coming from a place of being so grounded in clarity around what I wanted, and who I knew I was and what I was meant to do in the world. But none of it bothered me. And I thought of it as kind of amusing like, oh, that’s so interesting that everyone has opinions about what I’m doing. And I just, yeah, it’s like, you really have to decide who are you living for.
Yeah, like, are you living for everyone else? Is that working for you? Because I had done that for a long time. And it wasn’t working for me, you know, I had had the approval of everyone. You know, if you took a poll, when I was at that point, in residency, everyone would be like, thumbs up, Chelsea’s doing great. But it didn’t make me feel differently on the inside. So it was just kind of an awakening of like, “what is the point of living for other people?”
And what is the point? Yeah, so that brings us I think, to the topic today at hand, and you and I have both done some work in this space. And this isn’t anything that I’m teaching these days, but I, I pre COVID, I had a retreat. And during this retreat, a four day retreat for women physicians who are wanting something different out of their lives, the first thing that we did was really dive into a values assessment and what I found was so remarkable about doing that exercise, is that a lot of people either just, frankly, don’t know what their values are.
And they will just sort of endorse every value like “yeah, that sounds good. Yes, yes, yes.” They’re like, “I like, you know, this, I like this, I like this.” Or once they did have their list, it didn’t match up at all, with what they did on a daily or weekly or long term basis. So let me kick it to you as the expert on the show here today. Let’s start off, I guess, by being sure we’re all talking about the same thing and explaining to the audience what are values.
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And I love hearing all of your experiences working with values, because it’s really interesting and really rewarding work to go deep with people and help them explore this topic. So I think of values as what is most important to you, what you hold to be the most important, and it’s where you want to spend your time, it’s where you want to spend your energy.
It’s what drives you, it’s what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning. And so it’s really just this core motivation and this core driver of what you really want. And I don’t think we really choose our values, as much as they kind of choose us like, they’re kind of within us. And it’s our job to really explore and figure out what they are.
And so can you give some examples of what what types of like, what are just some words, what would you describe some values?
Yeah, so I’ll give you what some of my values are. So big ones, for me are: freedom and autonomy. And to me that means and, and another important thing is like you can pick the word. But then you need to understand what it means, right? So if you say freedom, that could mean different things to so many different people. And so one thing I really do with my clients is I get them to get super clear and drill down on what does that look like to live freedom on a daily basis? At the end of the day? How would you know that you lived freedom? What would that entail? Right?
So for me, when I get super specific, it looks like, freedom looks like, I get to decide my own schedule. I get to say yes to the things I want to do. No one tells me like you can’t do that. So for example, I’m hiking Machu Picchu in two weeks. And I did have some, like client calls and some things scheduled, but I was able to move them around and I was able to, you know, rearrange some things. And that’s because I have this freedom.
I have this flexibility to be able to do the things I want to do and I get to say yes to things that are important to me. And work doesn’t really get in the way of me doing the things I want to do. So that’s freedom.
Playfulness is another one that’s important to me and like lightheartedness. So I love to laugh. It’s really important to me to laugh and I spend so much time with my clients. Like we have so much fun on our client calls. So playfulness, laughter, not taking myself so seriously, that’s really important. Spaciousness is another big one for me. So having, not being overscheduled, having just time and space throughout my day to kind of move around and do the different things I want to do. So those are some examples.
I can see that and then as I’m thinking about, you know, I’m just thinking about, it’s been a long time for me now longer than for you. But when I think about medical school, and I think about training, it does strike me that that’s not compatible with a lot of what you just described. I mean, when I think about autonomy and flexibility and freedom, I mean, medical school and medical training is basically the opposite of that.
Yeah. And so what’s interesting is I did a lot better in first and second year where we didn’t have to go to class, and we could watch the lectures online. And, there were only certain things within our schedule that we had to show up to do. That’s how my school was structured. And then third and fourth year when we were really expected to be in the hospital.
And it was a more rigid structure, that’s when I really was like, this is not going to work for me. But you know, first and second year, I didn’t realize that because I was able to kind of go do my own thing and study in my own way and have more of that freedom.
And it’s interesting, because a lot of the advice that you got from people while you were scrubbing in sounds like they were trying to suggest ways that you might continue to practice medicine, but also meet those values, like be the radiologist reading films on the beach. Seems like it might fulfill the need for spaciousness and freedom. But it might not. I mean, and it’s interesting that for some, the only right path is a medical path. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. And so it’s like, my interest at the time wasn’t like, How can I salvage my medical degree at all costs, and find a way to use my medical degree to meet my values? I wasn’t coming from that place I was coming from, “let’s pretend I’m starting over, what would I actually want to do with my life?” And just come from that place.
And to me, that felt so much more freeing than if you put these you let your past dictate and restrict what you do in your future. That doesn’t mean like, I still use so much of what I learned in med school, so much of who I became during that process. But I never felt the need to, to kind of strangle myself by holding on to that.
Strangle yourself, that’s really powerful. Yeah, I think a lot of people do feel that. So for you listeners who might be feeling unhappy, maybe just not fully fulfilled. I know a lot of people describe it in different ways. Some people have just overt burnout for sure. Some people just feel a little itchy, like they want to do something else. And some people just feel maybe bored or a little bit stagnant.
So if there are listeners out there who are somewhere in that space, listening to you thinking, “Oh, my gosh, I wish I could”, which is probably what they’re saying. “I wish I could do what Chelsea did, but I can’t for whatever reason”, which I’ll just editorialize that those reasons, are false reasons. They can all be managed. But so if someone’s sitting there feeling this way, how would you start with them? What would you say?
Yeah, so my first step is always to start by asking yourself, what do I want? And then that question freaks people out for so many reasons. Because they’re like, “Well, I don’t know, what I want, or all I can come up with is are these generic terms around what I want.” And so what’s important is to give yourself time and space to know that you haven’t really been asking these questions before, you haven’t been doing this, “inner work” to get clear on what you want.
So it might feel a little weird at first, and you might come up with a lot of like, I don’t know it was. But that’s, that’s part of the process of giving yourself patience through all of that, and then coming into your value.
So your values are one of the most important pieces, when it comes to determining the work that you are, that’s going to be most fulfilling to you, essentially, I like to use your values as like a compass, they can categorically eliminate certain types of work, and they can really guide you, they can help you understand why you’re so burnt out.
So like when we looked at my values, and then we looked at the medical system, you were able to even see and just this conversation, oh, that’s a mismatch, that’s not going to work that’s not going to be sustainable. So it gives you a lot of clarity and light bulb moments as to why you’re not maybe happy, why you’re feeling itchy, restless, why you’re feeling burnt out. And then it also gives you guidance and direction as to what’s going to be a match for you going forward. And so that’s kind of why it’s important to do the values work.
And I think one of the first questions that we see a lot of people asking in the Facebook groups and in the circles that we operate in is what are my options as of this as of that, what are my options? And that’s not where I would encourage you to start, I would encourage you to start by looking at your values.
And so then you might ask, okay, great, I mean, I’m gonna look at my values. How do we do that? What does that even look like? And I walk people through a workshop within my program where we go through a couple of questions. And so I would encourage you too, if you’re listening to this, maybe use this time to press pause and free-write on these questions as they come up.
So the first one that I asked people is, “what is really important to you about your career?” And I encourage you to just free-write anything that comes up from that. It could be, you know, “it’s important to me that I enjoy it. It’s important to me that it doesn’t dictate my whole life, that it doesn’t, you know, prevent me from having time with my family.” And yeah, so when I asked that career question, Marjorie, did anything come up for you?
I mean, I was thinking about it, not from my own perspective, but just thinking about what people… because some people might really feel like, what’s important in their career is that they’re, you know, best using their skills, or their gifts. Some people might feel like what’s most important in their career is that they achieve certain external expectations, and that is actually important to them, which I think is, right.
It’s an interesting distinction amongst some people, right? If that is, so many of us are stuck there. But if that is actually coming from within something that’s truly important to you, then it’s truly important to you and you should pursue it. I mean, there’s just so many different things.
Yeah. And so I would invite you to, again, like not judge, anything that comes up for you and try to calibrate it too. “Is this truly coming from within? Is this really important to me”? And the way I try to tell people to do that, and it can, it can work differently for different people. But I’ll, I’ll say like, pretend you’re on a desert island, there’s literally no one else you have the answer to what would be important to you?
And that doesn’t mean that’s going to be your main value that carries into this reality. But it can be a way to give you some insights into your heart and soul when no one else is around to influence you. What actually matters to you?
Yeah, I love that. I think it can be really, really helpful to think about times, I guess, to imagine yourself on a desert island, but also to think about times that you felt especially impactful or really internally gratified at work and what was happening there. I don’t know. Do you agree? Is that is that?
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so you can do that you can do that in that positive way. And then in the opposite way. So like thinking of times where you felt really satisfied and fulfilled, what was going on in that moment? Like, specifically, what values do you think were being met? Maybe you felt really satisfied when you were getting to educate a patient on, this is the pathway of hypertension.
And this is, you know, you’re really like, you know, drawing out a diagram and explaining to them, and so what do you think what value could have been met, it could be connection, because you’re getting to take time and really connect with the patient, it could be maybe like education, or teaching, maybe that’s something and that can also have to do with being in your gifts, and maybe teaching, it’s your gift, but you also value passing on knowledge. And that’s something that’s really important to you, are you in, value patient empowerment, and you want them to understand, so there can be a lot of different things.
And it doesn’t really matter the words that you use, it just matters that it captures the what was happening and the feeling that you had, but then you can do it in the opposite way to have like, times you felt particularly frustrated, or resentful, or you had a sense of like, This doesn’t feel right, something feels like you just kind of had an icky feeling inside of you. And so in those situations, what values do you think were being violated?
So for me, for example, every time I had to work a 24 hour shift, I just felt this sense of like, this is not right, I am not okay with this. And the value, some of the… could have been many different values, but I think one of them was I really value growth, and becoming your best self.
So like, maybe call it like self actualization, or some version of like really valuing who I am and how I’m showing up in the world. And when I’m running myself ragged, and working myself into the ground and staying up longer than any human should ever stay up, that doesn’t allow me to be my best self, if that violates that value. So yeah, you can kind of take it in those two different ways.
I think that’s really great, because what you’ve just described, and hopefully, you know, my listeners, if you didn’t get this, like press, pause, rewind. But when you think about a time and you think about a set of circumstances, or an action or an activity, that was either really good or really bad, then that could be interpreted in many different ways. So if we had 10 doctors in a room, and we talked about you, even if it was the same event, so your example of you know, teaching a patient about hypertension, might serve a different, it might serve 10 different values.
And so it’s super important to figure out which one of those because when you think about what to go, do next or do differently, you will be guided, as you said, like a compass, by you know, how are you going to implement, you know, something that does serve your values or honors your values in a way that’s, it’s not cookie cutter, it’s not the same, and you can’t make assumptions that because somebody else enjoyed an activity, or an experience that they did so for the same reason that you did, right? Yeah.
And so from a coaching perspective, you have to help people uncover that right? Rather than having your narrative right layered on top of their experience. I’m sure that’s something that is probably easy to do. To want to like to apply your own narrative.
Yeah, absolutely. No, I very much distance myself as much as possible of like, you know, my path is not everyone else’s path. My values are not everyone else’s values, and really trying to understand from my client’s perspective, what those experiences meant to them, and really letting them describe it in their own words.
And a lot of what I do is I just ask them questions and try to reflect back to them what I’m hearing, so that I can help them interpret like I can help them be the ones to interpret it through guiding them through a series of questions.
Yeah, that’s fantastic. Can we take a little sidebar to talk about your, like entrance into the coaching world? Like, what? How did you decide that that’s what you wanted to do? And tell people to a little bit about like, your training or credentials, if you like? Yeah, absolutely.
And so the interesting thing is, I think I was always meant to be a coach, like, the fact that this career path exists is incredible, because I feel like it was so designed perfectly for me and but I had no idea that this is a thing back when I was going through my regular schooling. So I was always interested in psychology, that I majored in psychology and undergrad, that was always my, my thought is that I’m gonna go into med school and do psychiatry, but then I kind of started to realize I shadowed in psychiatry, and that wasn’t something… I didn’t feel like I could connect with the patients.
I felt like we were more in psychiatry, I was, you’re kind of like, not above the patients, but you’re not really viewing them as equals in the same way. Because you’re, you’re always trying to like, observe, oh, they’re having these, like, you know, thought patterns, or they’re doing this. And so I never felt the psychiatry felt very connected to the patients. So psych psychology itself was always something that fascinated me.
And I thought I wanted to do psychiatry, but then it just kind of got derailed with how that would work in reality, so then I did OB GYN, but then when I was making my decision to leave residency, I started to come back to what are the things I enjoy doing?
What actually resonates with me? And the interesting thing is, I made my decision to resign on a Friday, on a Monday there was this like email in my inbox about a free life coach challenge, it was some kind of like, 30 day challenge about like, do you want to be a life coach? And I was like, I don’t know, what is that maybe. So I signed up for this free email challenge. And I loved it every single day, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m learning so many things.” And I just really became fascinated with this whole field, as a concept of, I can use my interests of personal growth and psychology and human behavior, and motivation, and all of those things that have always fascinated me, I’ve always been reading books about those things.
And then my gifts of connecting with people and, and helping them and helping them to shift perspectives and see things differently. And I can use that all together to make money. This sounds incredible.
So I actually signed up for a coach training program called Mentor Masterclass. It’s not super well known, but it’s a year long embodiment coach training program. I signed up for that, like before I even left the hospital. So I started doing that right away, I wasn’t sure exactly what that would look like, career wise, but it was like, immediately spoke to me.
That’s fantastic. And you know, as I’m hearing you talking about the alignment of your gifts, you know, what you know, that you’re good at and how and your interests. And then you know, what the sentence that you said was, you know, I can put this together and that together, and I can use it to make money.
Which is so interesting, because in my mind, I was about to finish that sentence for you with like, I can use that to make a difference in people’s lives. But that’s what, that’s what ideal work is, right? Yeah, you get to do that and make money.
Right? Right. And all of that, like make money and make a difference and, and have my meet my values have freedom, and I believe a version of that exists for everyone, right? Obviously, like, the interests are going to be different, the values are going to be different, the gifts are going to be different.
But when you explore all of those different elements, there’s going to be an intersection that allows you to have a fulfilling career that makes money that makes a difference that uses your gifts that meets your values. And the whole fun and games of what I get to do with people is help them figure out what that is.
Yeah, that’s, that’s really fantastic. And I do absolutely endorse, you know, having done some of that inner work before, because when people come to me all the time, with an a specific end in mind, you know, how can I get how can I become this? How can I get that job? And I can help folks do that. But a lot of times, it’s clear from the beginning, that they need some work with somebody like you first, in order to really be clear on what they want, so that, you know, people that I help get what they think they want. They really do want to and therefore then they like it and they stay.
Yeah, no. And that’s what I tell people. I’m like, you don’t need a new job, because most of the people I work with already have a job. So it’s not just that you need a new job, you need the right job. And in order to figure out what that is. We have to do the inner work and sometimes people get impatient with it and they’re like, okay, but what’s the job this is going to be but how does this translate into a career and it’s like, we have to pause for a minute and have the patience to go inwards.
So one of the quotes I really like to live by is that, “direction is so much more important than speed, because many people are going nowhere fast.” And so that’s what I help people do is calibrate that direction. So that when they get to their destination, it’s the right destination for them.
Yeah, I think that’s really powerful. And it resonates with me, because a lot of students and people who come to me there, they do feel very impatient, right? They want to get something different. They want it to happen, like right now. And I don’t think that they’ve necessarily been able to do even the surface work.
I’m not even talking like deep soul seeking work here. But just like the basic work to understand what a career like this or like that would be about to know if they would even like it. I think people are just that well, because they’re so unhappy. They really just want to jump ship quickly, which you know, emotionally I understand that.
Right. And sometimes that is what needs to happen. So for me, for example, I needed to get out of residency, I couldn’t spend time doing soul searching, while I’m working 80 hours a week, that is not compatible, that doesn’t work. And so sometimes the answer is to jump ship into something that I call a “bridge job”, which is a way to support yourself financially, get you out of a dire situation, and ideally give you time and space to reflect and get clear on what you want.
So my bridge job was teaching, I know that’s super non traditional, and not something that most practicing physicians would jump into. But it did give me… I had every single weekend off, which was insane to me, I had, I was done working at like 2pm. So it gave me a lot of time and space to do that inner work. And it was an imbalance. I was in an environment where I wasn’t so miserable, that I couldn’t function.
Yeah, that’s so true. So not everybody can quit their job or do something in a bridge. But I mean, it’s really important to at least entertain the idea of like, “how can I create some space, some physical space, some actual time space, to think about what’s really, really important in order to take the next action, instead of just taking an action and hoping it works out well?”
I really feel that and I think my audience will too. Before we wrap up today, Chelsea, do you want to? First of all, is there anything else about values that we missed that you’d like to share?
I think we covered a lot of what I came here to talk about. Awesome, great questions. Yeah.
Good, good. How about if you will tell my audience where they can find you, because I know many people listening would probably really benefit from having this kind of conversation. So tell people, where can they find you? And what can they find when they get there?
Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re listening to this, you’re obviously a podcast listener. So I also have a podcast and I’d love to have you come join me over there. It’s the Life After Medicine podcast. And it is designed for healthcare professionals to help you create a fulfilling, and non-traditional career as a healthcare professional. So I’d love to have you come there, we do interviews, we do solo shows, all with the idea of helping you figure out what really fulfills you and how you can go after that.
I also have a free mini course that I would love to share with all of you. It’s called, “Five Days to Career Clarity.” And it basically gives you these very short, they’re like five to seven minute videos each of the five days with like three to five journaling prompts. And it walks you through a five step process to help you do some of this inner work in a digestible way to help you get clear on what you want. And then figure out your next steps from there. And so you can find that at https://coachchelsmd.com/clarity/ and on Instagram at the handle @coachchelsmd.
Fantastic. So I’ll put the link to that mini course in the show notes, and also a link to the podcast so people can just hop on over to the show notes. If you want to be sure to get that right. And I love the idea of the mini course because it does feel very digestible, right?
So even people who don’t think they have a spare moment, probably could fit that in. Maybe it takes more than five days to work through it, but they probably fit it in. I love that idea. So thank you for mentioning that. I think a lot of people may love to just start there. And thank you so much for being on the show with me today. This was a really great conversation.
Such a fun conversation. Thanks for having me on here.
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