What does a physician’s ideal life look like? [PODCAST]

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

“You are a physician. You have put in years of hard work and sacrifice getting here. Now what?

Does your life look and feel exactly how you imagined it would? If not, what does your ideal life look like?

Certainly, answers to this question are deeply personal, and will vary depending on the individual. As physicians, we need to engage in a process of self-discovery to create the lives we want and deserve. This requires each of us to examine our lives as they currently are, envision what they could be, and take inspired action to make the changes that are necessary to achieve our goals.

To start, you might ask yourself the following questions:

What aspects of my career and personal life do I find the most rewarding and fulfilling?

What aspects am I simply tolerating?

And what aspects actually make me feel unhappy, or unsettled?”

Gina Geis is a neonatologist and physician coach.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “The path toward your ideal life.”

This episode is sponsored by The Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX). The Nuance DAX solution makes it possible to forget the tech-toggling and reduces documentation burdens no matter how or where care is being provided. 

Did you enjoy today’s episode?

Please click here to leave a review for The Podcast by KevinMD. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to get notified when a new episode comes out!

Do you know someone who might enjoy this episode? Share this episode to anyone who wants to hear health care stories filled with information, insight, and inspiration.

Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have Gina Geis. She is a neonatologist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “The path toward your ideal life.” Gina, welcome to the show.

Gina Geis: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Gina Geis: Sure. So I’m a neonatologist. I also have a few extra roles in my career: I’m the vice chair for professional fulfillment at my organization, I’m also a bioethicist, and I’m a professional coach. Those roles have really evolved over the last 15 years of my career.

I started off in undergrad at Siena College and then did my medical training at Albany Medical College, which is where I am working now. When I reflect back, I think those were the formative years that gave me the foundation for a career in bioethics. It was a really heavily emphasized part of our curriculum. Then, when I went on to do my pediatric residency and my neonatology fellowship at UNC Chapel Hill, that’s when I had some really great mentorship in bioethics and understood that this could actually be a career path for me, with scholarship and so forth, if I stayed in academics.

So then I took my first attending job and realized at that point that I needed a little bit more formal training in bioethics. So I went back and did a second fellowship in bioethics at Harvard. Then ultimately, when I had the opportunity to come back to Albany Med as an attending years later, I went back and did a master’s in bioethics at the Alden March Bioethics Institute. I’ve just really valued all of those experiences, and I think they’ve really shaped who I am and the career that I’ve been able to build along the way.

Kevin Pho: Now, from a bioethics standpoint, have you seen any pandemic-related cases that have come up over the last few months?

Gina Geis: Yeah, so it’s been a really interesting discussion that we’ve had since March. We’ve been fortunate in upstate New York that the numbers had been fairly low, but when things were really gearing up, the bioethics institute was really charged with thinking about these issues critically and the impact it was going to have on our workforce and on our patients. We had to create an allocation strategy for ventilators if we thought that that was going to be a scarce resource, and it really fueled a lot of really interesting discussions and some thoughtful approaches to how we can best manage this.

Kevin Pho: So let’s get into your KevinMD article, “The path toward your ideal life.” Now, for those who haven’t read your article, can you walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Gina Geis: Sure. So I think my interest in this aspect of my career, which has really led to my roles as a professional coach and as vice chair for professional fulfillment, came from my bioethics background. For years as a bioethicist, I was going throughout the hospital and sitting down with trainees and faculty and staff and trying to get their experience. What I was finding was that some of these bioethical challenges were really impacting their burnout and leading to burnout. So I had made this link that bioethical challenges equal burnout.

The more I started to study burnout and to try to understand that concept, the more I realized how much broader of an issue it was than just the bioethics piece. So then I shifted my focus into more of an organizational understanding of the components of burnout and the key drivers, and from that I have tried to focus my efforts on making a meaningful impact in this field, for my colleagues, for the benefit of our patients, and for the future of our health as a profession.

This article was really about me trying to help physicians think early on about how much control they actually do have in their careers. Through my roles as a mentor or in my vice chair role, I’m often interfacing with physicians who really don’t even know where to begin to think about what their goals are. I think that the structure of our educational system really supports that. We have about 10 to 15 years of training that is really well prescribed for us. If you want to become a physician, you’ve got your four years of undergrad, and then your MCAT, and then medical school, residency, maybe a fellowship, and all of these years are just laid out there for you.

What happens when you’re finally done with all of that and you’re an attending is that you’ve deconditioned yourself to really think thoughtfully about what you want to do, why you started on this path so many years ago, and how you are going to make this your own. So when you get to that point and you start this role as an attending and people say, “Well, what do you want to do?” we’re really not even positioned to think about these things critically. So I was hoping that this article would start to carve out a framework for people to start thinking about those decisions and those choices, so that they can actually take control over their careers and create the type of life that they really want and deserve.

Kevin Pho: So tell us a little bit more about that framework. What kind of questions should physicians be asking themselves, especially early on in their careers?

Gina Geis: Yeah, so I think it’s about having that connection back to why you did this in the first place and what really initially motivated you, because many of us are making those choices very early on in our lives, when we haven’t even had a lot of lived experience, and some of those things really will hold true for you at the end of that training path. But it’s about reconnecting to that and making sure that you’re continuing to meet those needs and to scratch that itch that really drove you through all that hard work. Then it’s about understanding the vast possibilities that we have as physicians of how we could really structure our careers, and having ways of exploring those different paths so that we continue to grow and to challenge ourselves and to push ourselves, and we don’t become complacent in just one way of doing this.

So I think some of the questions that you really want to ask yourself are: What are the types of things that you’re doing in your day that give you the most joy and give you the most fulfillment? If somebody gave you a four-hour block in the middle of your day, with all the projects and the things that you’re involved in, what are those things that you grab off of your desk first? What really lights you up? What’s the thing that you’re most excited about doing?

Then also think about it, maybe at that two- or three-year mark after being an attending. Let’s look at it like a process map of all the things that you are doing. What does that diversity say about you and your career? Did any of those seem to really tell a story, or is it a random, haphazard pattern of things that you’re involved in? Because I think in the beginning there’s this sense of service, and you’re just excited to be done, and people are needing things to be done, and you’re saying yes to what’s coming your way. But you don’t necessarily build in the time to reflect on how much you enjoyed that, or what skill set you are really bringing to that project, and how much enjoyment you are getting out of it. So if you just keep saying yes, yes, yes to all of those things, then you’ve lost this ability to say, “How does this integrate into my career and into my life, and into where I want to be a few years from now?”

So I often do exercises with junior faculty and some of my coach trainees about trying to really dissect and diagnose who you are as a career professional, and asking, “Is this really the story you want to be telling?”

Kevin Pho: So I think you’re absolutely right that the pathway to become a doctor is very linear. It’s very structured. Now, you talk about some other paths that are available. Through your coaching experience and through your mentorship, what are some of the specific alternative paths that physicians can take?

Gina Geis: Yeah, so I think even within an organization that you work in, there are so many different opportunities: leadership paths, scholarship, teaching, patient advocacy. I work in our state’s capital, so there are opportunities to really partner with legislation and help write legislation, and to be part of homegrown programs like family advisory councils, partnering with patients and families to actually change our health care system. I think that there are endless opportunities to be able to engage in those different activities and to really make a difference beyond the patient care that we do, that we love and are so passionate about.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Gina Geis. She’s a neonatologist and a physician coach, and she wrote the KevinMD article “The path toward your ideal life.” Now, if you’re a physician just starting out, what kind of resources do they have available to them? Should they be seeking out life coaches? Should they be seeking out mentors? Because I know a lot of doctors just don’t have access to those resources. Where should they look?

Gina Geis: Yeah, so I think it’s important to be part of a community of something bigger, and I think it can be really helpful to have those supports in place as early as possible. So certainly think about the types of institutions that you’re working in, and as you’re looking for a job, really try to explore what those resources are internally, because I think that helps build that natural support system around you that you’re going to interface with on a daily basis.

But there are a lot of external resources that you can take advantage of. Coaching is one that I found later on in my career, and it has been such a huge benefit to me, to the point where, when I realized that there weren’t as many coaches who were really comfortable coaching physicians and understood the nature of what we do, I felt like that was a gap that I wanted to be able to try to help fill. So I went back and got trained as a professional coach, and I’m doing that too.

The process of coaching, and how it differs a little bit from mentoring, I think has been really eye-opening to me. Mentoring is a process that I’ve been very familiar with. I’ve had wonderful mentors and continue to have wonderful mentors, and I’ve been a mentor to a lot of people, and I think that there’s so much value in those relationships. This coaching piece is just a very different skill set and a very different offering of service to physicians and perfect health care professionals that can really augment those relationships. It isn’t tied so much to you finding someone who’s more experienced than you, who’s done exactly what it is that you’re trying to do, and who is going to be able to share that lived experience, which is the framework for that mentoring relationship.

Coaching is somebody who can be trained in asking the right questions so that you can build your own internal resources, and with that, the growth potential is so much greater. When I work with a physician for a short period of time in coaching, the growth is exponential during that period of time, because they’re building up all of those resources and they’re just taking flight. Whereas when I’m in a mentoring relationship, it’s often a much slower process, and it’s about the relationship and cultivating that relationship over time. So I think that these are wonderful resources that physicians can take advantage of every day, some within your organization and maybe some without.

Kevin Pho: And my final question, Gina: Do you have a take-home message that you want to share with the KevinMD audience?

Gina Geis: My take-home message would be that every physician out there has the ability to really create the exact life and career that they want and deserve. By nature of being a professional, one of the cornerstones of being a professional is this idea that we self-govern, right? That we are the experts in this field, and so therefore we should be able to have a say in how this goes. The health care landscape over the years has changed pretty dramatically, and often physicians are feeling like they don’t have that control, that they don’t have that say, and that that power is being taken away from them. That disempowerment can create a lot of apathy and a lack of drive to really do more with their career and to reach that professional fulfillment.

So I think what I’ve learned the most throughout this period of time is that you really can take control. You really can effect change. You can create positions for yourself. You can continue to advance your professional development, and with that comes this empowering sense of endless opportunity, and that’s such an enriching environment. So I really want people to understand that they can do that any day, from the first day that they’re in training all the way through the last day of their career and beyond. It’s up to you to decide when you’re ready to take that plunge.

Kevin Pho: And how can people find you?

Gina Geis: They can find me on my website at ginageismd.com. I’m also at Albany Medical College, and they can find me through there as well.

Kevin Pho: Gina, thank you so much for sharing your insight. Thanks again for being on the show.

Gina Geis: Thanks for having me.

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes