Guilt is Not A Compass: Finding Direction in Your Healthcare Career
Release Guilt to
Find Your Way in Your Healthcare Career
"Medical education is wasted on women."
That was an off-hand comment by one of my attendings in medical school. I don't think he was trying to be offensive, though it certainly came across that way. In his mind, he was just being logical.
Women work fewer hours and fewer years in their healthcare career, he explained. Ergo, medical education is wasted on them.
That glib comment danced around the corners of my mind for much of my career. It subtly influenced how I thought about my future goals and challenged the healthcare career I wanted to design for myself.
This isn't a blog about women in healthcare, per se. (Perhaps I'll explore that in a future blog.)
Instead, it's about how the seeds of guilt are sown, how they emerge, and then grow into a dense, thorny thicket that keeps you from honoring your priorities first in your healthcare career.
We'll explore how to let go of guilt so you can design your healthcare career to align with values that are important and meaningful to you.
After all, you've poured your whole self into medicine and invested significant time, effort, and energy. It seems only reasonable that there's room for YOU in your healthcare career.
Guilted: How Healthcare Professionals Fall Under Guilt's Spell
Do you remember the first time you were guilted into action during your healthcare career?
It could've been that you stayed for another shift even though you'd already been at work for twelve hours. Or you deprived yourself of food because a patient needed to be cared for ASAP. Maybe you dragged yourself to work despite physical exhaustion or illness because you didn't want to be the person who didn't show up.
In more recent years, it could've been because someone proclaimed you a "Healthcare Hero" and you somehow felt obligated to forgo your well-being and satisfaction to earn the title.
Regardless, it was likely a situation in which you felt putting your needs and priorities first was “bad”.
It’s important to understand how independent, intelligent introverts in healthcare can find themselves bending to guilt's desires.
Consider the following:
Professional and Cultural Norms
The stark effect of professional and cultural norms on healthcare professionals' well-being has become impossible to ignore in recent years.
While well-intentioned, the label "Healthcare Heroes" often contributes to the suggestion that healthcare professionals are expected to act selflessly at all times and has allowed guilt's effect to blossom.
As evidenced by lowered reimbursements, increasing rates of physical harm, concerning suicide rates, and an exodus of professionals from medicine, the burden of guilt has become too much.
To get to this point means healthcare professionals have endured for years in guilt-laced environments that offer little support in return for the sacrifice of time, energy, and effort.
Empathy and Obligation
Many introverts in healthcare are highly empathic. Studies show that empathy improves the quality of patient care.
Trouble comes when healthcare professionals find themselves with their empathy tap stuck wide open.
And when you are constantly steeped in the suffering and needs of others, guilt says you are selfish for creating distance or stepping away to preserve your well-being. Just the thought of considering your priorities first feels scandalous.
Not only that, when your identity revolves around your role as an empathic caregiver, any perceived shortcomings on your part allow guilt to become a judgment not on your performance but on your being.
You can feel guilty for making patients wait, guilty for not taking enough time with each patient, and guilty for not curing conditions in which the circumstances are out of your control.
The opportunities for guilt abound.
Conflict, Guilt, and Long-term Side Effects
Conflict is something most introverts avoid.
If you're one of them, you may be prone to saying yes to additional responsibilities even when you're overextended. Or going with the status quo even when you're not sure you agree with the plan.
Even more frustratingly, you may have been guilted into relaxing a boundary because your effort to honor yourself was met with push-back.
By giving in to guilt-driven requests and demands, introverted healthcare professionals can avoid external conflict at the cost of a potential increase in internal conflict.
The result is short-term relief in the form of people-pleasing and external validation. In medicine, these are just the types of actions that are rewarded and praised, leading to a false sense of accomplishment.
Unfortunately, what is initially the exception deserving of accolades slowly becomes the expectation over time.
Where does this leave you? More often than not, it's feeling emotionally and physically exhausted, exploited, underappreciated, and resentful.
Though guilt might help you escape external discomfort in the short term, it most certainly fuels internal conflict in the long run.
These are just a few ways introverts in healthcare can find themselves compelled to endlessly apologize for never quite being enough. And all the time you're struggling to do more and be more, your excitement and joy for medicine slowly fade away.
One day, you wake up and realize this is not what you had planned for your healthcare career. Somewhere, you took a hard right turn and ended up somewhere you didn't intend.
Guilt can be a powerful motivator. For healthcare professionals seeking meaningful and satisfying careers, that motivation propels you in the wrong direction.
Reorienting for Greater Healthcare Career Clarity
Healthcare professionals struggling with burnout and career dissatisfaction need a new compass - one that gives you the permission to follow your interests and consider your priorities first.
Finding your way back to meaningful work and career clarity requires breaking free of the misleading magnetic north of guilt and reorienting to your True North.
So, the question is: how can you start trusting yourself as True North?
Connection Starts With You
First up is creating or re-establishing a connection with yourself.
Education and training in healthcare frequently teaches you to disengage from yourself. There's a set path with set expectations. It's all laid out for you. You just have to make it through the challenges set out along the trail for you, and the finish line is yours.
The problem is reaching the finish line is highly anti-climactic if you've left parts of yourself on the trail. Reaching the peak isn't met with a feeling of victory. Instead, you're left wondering, "How in the heck am I going to get down from here?"
Re-engaging with your needs on the physical, mental, spiritual, and energetic levels is a great place to start.
Two questions can help you start reconnecting with yourself and creating awareness.
What am I feeling right now?
What do I need at this moment?
The more difficulty these questions are to answer, the more time you need to give yourself with this simple practice. Check in several times per day. Get to know yourself again.
Awareness is the first step toward clarity and change.
Your Values Matter
Next, it's time to start dropping guilt-driven values and lift up your own.
Values misalignment in your career can impact your work performance and job satisfaction. It can also contribute to mental and physical stress as you futilely attempt to merge actions and beliefs that don't play well together.
Take some time to identify and prioritize the values that define the core of who you are. As you consider how to redefine your healthcare career, think about how those values apply in all areas of your life, especially at work.
When you require yourself to compromise your values the moment you clock in each day, you're setting yourself up for chronic frustration, disappointment, and stress.
If you're feeling a vague sense of discomfort at work but are unsure why, look to your values. You'll likely find a disconnect between your work and how you want to be in the world. Acknowledging your priorities first is cruicial for creating congruence between your values and actions.
Once you've created awareness and identified your values, you’re ready explore what creates meaning for you.
Meaningful Work is Engaged Work
I suspect you entered medicine with the idea of positively impacting others' lives. What you might not have anticipated was the negative impact your healthcare career would have on your well-being.
A healthcare career defined by guilt leaves you feeling disengaged and resentful. When you connect with your needs, wants, and beliefs, you can intentionally start designing a “best-fit” livelihood.
Recognizing that you will never love any job 100% of the time, the goal is to maximize the amount of time you spend doing tasks that align with your values and connect you to a sense of purpose.
Start tracking which aspects of your work feel worthwhile and fulfilling. Stay true to yourself and give credence to the tasks that are meaningful to you - not to what you've been told should be meaningful. RVUs and patient volume may not hold the same meaning as persuading a scared child to laugh or taking time to listen to a lonely elderly patient.
For the more mundane tasks, consider which ones may carry hidden meaning and which ones are dead ends. For example, completing insurance paperwork may be painful but still meaningful if it means getting your patient the care she needs. On the other hand, being required to comply with compliance tasks that have no impact on patient care are less likely to be meaningful.
Knowing this information can help you start shaping what you spend your time on and for how long. If you can find tasks that are meaningful and energizing, you've hit the jackpot.
Follow Your Energy
No blog for introverts in healthcare is complete without a call to honor your energy!
When you're contemplating career clarity, guilt will always drain your energy. But feeling low energy at or after work isn't always a sign that you've strayed from your values and meaning.
In healthcare, some of the most meaningful tasks come with significant demands on your energy. Contributing to people's health care is deeply personal. We also know patient care is profoundly enhanced by the well-boundaried empathy of introverts in healthcare. To be fully present, you must tend to your energy.
What becomes essential is knowing how to manage and allow for energy fluctuations. This becomes easier when you let yourself be guided by your inner knowing rather than being guilted into situations that push you past your energetic threshold.
Let self-connection, values-alignment, meaning-making, and energy generation act as the cardinal directions of your compass. Alongside this priorities-first approach, add curiosity, play, and creativity to keep you company as you explore your way to a more satisfying healthcare career.
Last But Not Least: From Guilted to Gilded
If you want to create a life and career that feels like a luxury rather than an obligation, letting go of guilt as your compass is vital.
Connecting with your needs and wants, aligning with your values, seeking meaning-filled tasks, and effectively managing your energy lets you be intentional and proactive in your healthcare career. And that will always feel better than functioning in constant reactivity to guilt.
A throw-away comment during my training contributed to years of me feeling guilty about what I wanted for my career. Guilt didn't make me a better physician. Instead, it held me back and kept me feeling small. When I changed my compass, I was able to play to my strengths and show up with renewed energy.
Nothing was wasted, and much was gained.
Would you like more tools for goal setting that aligns with your introverted nature?
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Charity is a physician and 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.