More Than Medicine: Embracing Your Multi-Passionate Self for a Thriving Healthcare Career
How to Thrive in Healthcare as a
Multi-passionate Introvert
Despite feeling stressed and overworked in your healthcare career, do you ever find yourself feeling….bored?
Working in medicine is a great privilege. If you look back on all you’ve accomplished, you’ll see that you’ve played a pivotal role in countless people’s lives.
Yet, has it started to feel mundane? If so, you’re likely a multi-passionate healthcare professional.
Multi-passionate individuals are curious, creative, and love to learn.
If you’re a multi-passionate healthcare professional, you find yourself drawn to a broad range of hobbies and passions. You likely possess a wide collection of talents and skills outside of medicine.
You probably cringe when someone asks you to name your one ideal career. Because who wants to be stuck doing just one thing for the rest of their life?
In medicine, your innate multi-passionate personality can feel stifled. As your role in healthcare becomes increasingly dictated by outside forces, it’s normal to feel the loss of your ability to be creative and innovative.
This effect may be compounded if your career has slowly taken over much of your world.
I’m here to remind you to encourage and celebrate your multi-passionate soul.
Why Should You Nurture Your Passions?
It can be challenging to be a multi-passionate healthcare professional. You have a deep desire to explore and experience new adventures, but that drive can feel incongruent with your daily obligations, especially when you feel like you’re already stretched too thin.
Nurturing your dreams and passions isn’t frivolous. Prioritizing your interests and all aspects of your personality has worthy and valuable benefits:
Maintaining Identity and Purpose: You are not your career. I’ll say that again. You are not your career.
Your role in healthcare is an important facet of you, but when that’s all you identify with, life can start to feel a bit gray. By giving airtime to all of your interests, you’re better able to recognize your multifaceted identity and unique purpose in this world.
Boosting Energy and Creativity: Pursuing new hobbies and passions that excite you creates momentum and disrupts the monotony of everyday routines. That newfound energy can expand and influence all aspects of your life.
By having diverse interests, you have a greater well to draw from. Your approach to problem-solving becomes more innovative, and skills developed in one hobby can transfer over to other areas of your life, including work.
All of this adds up to a palpable excitement that can spill over and positively influence those around you.
Combating Boredom and Stress: Stagnation can be the beginning of a slippery slope, leading to negative moods and overall life dissatisfaction. By enjoying hobbies and passions that stretch your mind and body in different ways, you can avoid the negative consequences of overuse on one end of the spectrum and disuse on the other.
As a multi-passionate healthcare professional, you need variety to avoid starving parts of yourself. But how do you create room for exploring your passions with a busy healthcare schedule? Here are some practical tips to get you started.
Explore Your Passions, Then Act
Even though you’re multi-passionate at heart, you may have lost touch with the what and how of accessing the diverse and vibrant life you crave.
Create a “Passions” List
The first step to getting back to honoring your multi-passionate nature is remembering all the things that give you that little flutter of delight in your stomach or chest.
Don’t edit yourself. Just get your creative juices flowing.
If you had an endless well of time, money, and energy, what interests would you love to pursue? Keep your list nearby and add to it often.
Know Your Why
Honoring and aligning with your needs and values is essential to feeling fulfilled in life.
Take a minute to create awareness of how each of your passions and interests satisfy a particular need or value for you. When you recognize the role each of your endeavors plays in your ability to create a whole, multifaceted life, you’re less likely to dismiss them as extraneous “nice-to-haves”.
Make the Time
Next, prioritize yourself. How much of your time is spent in service to others versus your own personal fulfillment? If the latter is woefully lacking, now is the time to be proactive.
Get creative with reclaiming time for yourself. If you’re an introvert, that includes being intentional about cultivating the conditions necessary for you to indulge in singular focus.
Consider doing a time audit. By tracking how you use your time over several days, you may be surprised how many minutes (or hours!) are wasted on mindless tasks that don’t bring you joy. Take that time back and spend it on something that matters to you.
And remember, saying “yes” to one thing often requires saying “no” to another. Be diligent about where you’re willing to spend your time.
Recognize That Small is Mighty
Don’t underestimate the satisfaction you can gain from engaging in hobbies for even a short period of time. If it’s been a while since you’ve actively pursued something outside of work, ease into it.
Don’t let your hobbies and passions become another to-do on your list. Allow them to be the glittering moments you look forward to in your day.
Ten minutes of engaging in something that feels fun and light at the beginning of your morning can set the tone for your day.
Giving yourself a small chunk of time during the day to engage in activities unrelated to work can be remarkably energizing. Likewise, getting creative in your approach to daily tasks can help you find novelty in the mundane.
Embrace Experimentation
Cultivate your curiosity. Don’t censor yourself, especially in the beginning. Online courses and workshops are great ways to explore your interests.
Engage in local groups or online communities to find others with similar interests. Loneliness is a present-day epidemic. Bonding over shared interests is a great way to meet people and foster a sense of belonging.
Combining your interests with volunteerism is a great way to find delight, satisfaction, and purpose all in one place.
Healthcare burnout is multifactorial. If you’re feeling stuck and stagnant in your career, you might be inclined to blame events at work. However, if you get a little curious, you might find it’s just as much about what’s not happening outside of work.
Multi-passionate introverts need variety to flourish.
Without a wide variety of activities and interests to stimulate your mind, you tend to feel bored, stale, and energy-depleted.
Recognizing this aspect of yourself gives you an extra tool to beat burnout.
It doesn’t require changing roles or leaving medicine. Your secret weapon against career dissatisfaction can be found in your passion for exploring, learning, and growing.
Want to learn more about how to make all the pieces fit as a multi-passionate introvert?
Create calm in the middle of your busy day with my free Mindful Minutes Toolkit.
You can access it for free here.
Ready for 1:1 support from someone who understands your introverted nature?
Learn more about working with me here.
Charity is a physician burnout coach helping introverts in healthcare escape feelings of apathy, irritability, and resentment brought on by the increasing demands and decreasing rewards of medicine.
She uses her 20 years of experience in clinical medicine combined with coaching to help introverts discover ways to be diligent, thoughtful clinicians while prioritizing their needs and protecting their energy. She wants you to know you don’t have to feel guilty for wanting a thriving life inside and outside of medicine.