Once you become a doctor, it marks a turning point at which most doctors start slipping backwards. There’s a reason!
Your burning passion and rugged determination for your medical career goals is not enough to overcome the barriers to your planned and expected maximum success in medical practice. It’s a reality that you shouldn’t have to face, and that you don’t deserve.
There are reasons why and what you can do about it. It’s one of the most distressing, yet understandable, factors leading to career failure. The meaning of failure as used here is the complete inability of over 95% of doctors to reach their maximum potential as a doctor.
It also includes your inability to create and maintain a medical practice that will ever reach the profitability potential it has the capacity to foster. In clearer terms, unless you are prepared to do what needs to be done to reach those highest levels of accomplishments, you will fail to a significant degree.
The inability refers to the absence of training and education that are required to rise above the others. As a result you are effectively programmed to fail by the institution that qualified you to be a doctor.
Consider a few factors that lead you to this unholy position:
You have not been provided with the essential tools to run your medical practice business efficiently and profitably. It means you have no business or marketing training or education.
A challenge to your intellect and common sense:
Is it possible in our present economic environment to create a successful, constantly growing, medical practice business when the doctor owner has no real knowledge about how to do that effectively without expert help?
A “no” answer indicates you are quite comfortable about extracting from your medical career just enough abundance and satisfaction to make do. In other words, you are a hostage to your circumstances.
A “yes” answer indicates that you have not yet matured in business far enough to recognize that all of your sheer-brilliance in medical knowledge is never enough to create a maximally productive medical practice business-just enough to get by with for a while.
You have “educational burnout” without even recognizing it. The evidence of this is obvious when you consider these issues:
- Why is it necessary to require doctors to complete CME hours for maintaining medical licensure?
- Why is it compulsory to recertify for specialty credentialing?
- Why is it that once you start medical practice there is no urgency or self-implied obligation to voluntarily maintain and continually update your medical knowledge?
- Why is it that the need to have a business education is such an unnecessary and objectionable necessity that is totally ignored by most doctors? Yes, you promised yourself there would be no more burning the midnight oil again.
What possible reason would medical education pundits have to neglect the need to provide a business as well as medical education to medical students? Could it be that they knew about the educational burnout phenomenon and didn’t want that to happen during your medical education and training? But was it OK if it came afterwords?
Your passion for practicing medicine gradually becomes crowded out of your mind. That’s because once you become aware of the fact that your medical career is not able to provide you with the higher goals you had in mind at the start and turned out to be only a pipedream in reality.
For those doctors who already have wealth and adequate funding, there seems to be no real concern about these kinds of issues. However, for most doctors that is not the case. My concern is about the latter.
The real life examples of how these arcane factors are born:
The sequence of ominous changes in your passion for your medical career is one of the most distressing, yet understandable, factors leading to career failure. It begins with graduation from medical school, sometimes even sooner. It’s something older doctors see in their rear view mirror.
Prestige, recognition, fulfillment, happiness and expectations in your medical career seldom increase with time but rather fade with time. As you proceed in your medical career goal setting beyond medical school, the bright lights, celebrations and spectacular accomplishments disappear in the sunset. It starts almost immediately on entering your medical practice.
The day you completed your internship, were you given a loud sendoff, glory and recognition that would shake the pillars of medicine? Did you deserve that? Absolutely… but it doesn’t happen.
The revelation suddenly hits you in the face that there will be no more public pats-on-the-back. From now on your dedication to your obligations and career success becomes an investment in personal satisfaction.
Your reward for completing a residency in your specialty is simply whittled down to a medical certificate of residency completion, not a rousing cheering crowd. Your self-esteem benefits, but your wallet suffers.
Either you are headed for private medical practice of some nature, or you are feeling the overpowering need for security by becoming an employed physician.
Right here at the end of all your formal medical training, you are at the highest level of your medical knowledge with the incredible skills and ambition to take-on any of medical practice challenges put in front of you. From here on you are on your own.
No one is there to push or inspire you further and higher, except yourself. Previously, you had back up. Now you don’t. Even your family that has not lived in your shoes themselves can’t really help you much in your medical career choices and goals.
The next step in your career is even more stressful. And it’s outrageously insulting to all new doctors. Why? Because you don’t deserve this second step of disappointment as your reward for years of sacrifice and struggle.
Medical practice becomes your next teacher and mentor:
This new environment of medical practice has a bundle of harsh lessons to teach you. Of course, no one has discussed these things with you in any depth because they didn’t want to discourage you. These soft lies of omission leave scars. It leaves you naïve and vulnerable, which is much worse than giving you the truth to begin with.
This one thing is far more damaging to your medical career than you can believe. Every medical doctor is affected to a significant degree during his or her career as a result of being forced to adapt to the persistence of unexpected events that they could have prepared for if someone had told them what’s ahead.
Can you imagine how much stress in your practice over the years could have been prevented by knowing and preparing?
What are your options for avoiding or resolving these destructive factors regarding your medical practice career?
As with the activities and strategies required for success, there is no one simple laser-guided response for every person to follow to arrive at their personal highest level of achievement that they call “success.”
However, there is only one commonality found among the successful people that you may not care to hear about.
“It is a stronger, deeper, more unrelenting commitment to success far beyond what most ever marshal.”
(Source: No B.S. Marketing Letter, GKIC, Dan S. Kennedy, Nov. 2012)
This simple golden rule of success implies that we must reach a point in time when our minds become aware of the chain of events, predictable side effects, and consequences that are adherent to your decisions. Thus, it enables you to correctly ascertain whether a decision you make is complimentary to your objective, diverges from your objective or is in direct conflict with your objective.
Your decisions about your medical career are even more complex than any you have previously made. It involves making good decisions at the start but doesn’t exclude good decisions being made throughout your medical practice years.
For most doctors and other medical professionals who haven’t lost their desire to perform at maximum levels, it will often require one or more of the following:
1. You must know yourself:
What are your skills, talents, interests, activities that create satisfaction, biases, and toleration limits, among others? You need to spend a few hours quietly putting these attributes in order, even in priority. Sometimes it takes several sessions with other people (usually parents) who know you quite well and listening to what they see in you that you don’t see.
Many college graduates are unaware of who they really are inside, and what capacity they have to succeed. Therefore, they stumble along relying on their “above average” intelligence to keep them on track to a few objectives.
If you aren’t aware of what you need to do to be happy with your life and profession by the time you finish college, you are likely not to discover that later on. This factor becomes a life long millstone around your neck.
2. You must continue to set goals to be accomplished during your whole life:
Without goals, you lose your passion and determination. Over 95% of doctors are hamstrung because they either have no idea what they are really capable of accomplishing, or have fears that prevent them from moving to higher levels of accomplishment such as:
- Fear of being taken advantage of-easily led astray-analytical minded.
- Fear of not being a success-of failing.
- Fear of not fitting in-ostracized by peers-not a leader-hidesin the herd.
- Fear of lack of approval of peers and friends-always social, energetic and fun-loving are the cover-up features.
You don’t set goals because of these same fears. It’s why so many great people tell you to face you fears and go right on through them no matter what.
3. Don’t expect a blueprint for success:
Lee Milteer, professional highly regarded business mentor, says, “Success Is an Inside Job”. She teaches that you create your own success using the path from “visualization” to “mindset”. If you don’t understand that process, you need to find out how it works and trust it.
4. Create a laser focus on one primary objective:
When you dilute your path with multiple goals, you are multitasking and are constantly changing decisions. You have set yourself up for a watered-down life and career.
If you find you have chosen the wrong objective, then move to a new focus on another primary objective. Never focus on more than one.
5. Real success in your medical career often results from maintaining your family obligations:
Your level of success is corrupted when you neglect your family relationships. Divorce, broken homes, financial disasters, and lack of a religious heart results in not being able to fully enjoy your success when and if it arrives.
6. Make your personal integrity the basis of your career:
Your integrity creates your character that others see and respect. You maintain the principles you live by under all circumstances in your profession. When your “word” is unreliable, you corrupt everything around you one way or another. You then live off the garbage other people discard.
There are many more examples of solutions you probably have experienced and know the value of that may be just as important as the ones I’ve mentioned above. If you thought I was going to give you a 1-2-3-4-5 answer to gaining total control of your medical career, you haven’t been reading between the lines of this article well enough.
Business experts universally agree that medical doctors are set-up to fail. If you care to debate the point, you should start by reading what Michael Gerber, business expert and author, has confirmed by working with many doctors over many years. He presents that in his best selling book, The E-Myth: Physician. Give yourself a huge dose of reality! Then swallow it with a gracious flow of genius.
