How deep mindset work helped me find the courage to make my career transition [PODCAST]

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“I’ve been semi-retired in clinical medicine for almost four years now. Initially, I found myself coaching burned out physicians: Helping them recover, finding careers they love, and even starting their own businesses outside the box. However, as I listened to my inner voice, I was led back to my healing roots, and that opened up a career opportunity I would have never imagined to have.

Let me back up a bit. I’m a regular old family doc by training. Well, that’s the way things began, anyway. I remember choosing the specialty the summer after the first year. I worked with a rural family doc who was a full spectrum doc. For those of you who are family medicine like me, you know what this means. He did everything! For me, that was fascinating. However, as you know, what we see as med students is often a sliver of the real world as it pertains to practice. As I progressed, I discovered integrative and functional medicine, and that is where my real love settled as a family physician. However, after seven years of having a private practice (even one where I set my own hours and ran my own ship) became less than fulfilling after a while. I felt like I had outgrown that purpose.”

Maiysha Clairborne is an integrative family physician and is the co-author of Conscious Anti-Racism: Tools for Self-Discovery, Accountability and Meaningful Change.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “How deep mindset work helped me find the courage to make my career transition.”

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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 Maiysha Clairborne. She is an integrative family physician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “How deep mindset work helped me find the courage to make my career transition.” Maiysha, welcome to the show.

Maiysha Clairborne: Thank you so much, Kevin. It’s just a pleasure to be in the space with you and also to be able to contribute to your platform. I’ve always loved being a contributor, and I appreciate that you allow my voice to be heard. So thank you so much.

Kevin Pho: You are indeed a longtime contributor. You’ve contributed dozens and dozens of KevinMD articles imparting your insight and wisdom, and thanks for being on the show. We’ll get into your latest article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Maiysha Clairborne: Absolutely. Well, my story is full of twists and turns, but the nutshell version is that I have always been the kind of doctor who’s been outside the box. When I graduated from residency, I knew that I wasn’t going to take the normal path. I’ve shared this with many people: I burned out, actually, in residency, before it was a thing, before we had terminology for it, and quite honestly, it nearly took my life.

And so what I learned from that experience is that, for myself personally, I was going to need to create a career that worked for me. And I did that through locum tenens, I did that through going into integrative medicine, starting my own practice. And even then, once I got into practice, there came a point where I knew there was going to be something bigger, something more. I didn’t dislike the medicine that I practiced; I just felt like I could be doing more. And so that is when I made the decision to actually step out of clinical medicine. I sold my integrative medicine practice of 10 years, and I started working with burned-out physicians, no less, and I think that’s how I came up on your platform, Kevin.

And even from that point, I had already been trained as a coach, I had already been trained as a hypnotherapist, as a practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming, and I decided, “You know what? I want to teach this work.” So for me, all of that came with lots of doubts and fear and beliefs about myself, and having spent all this money to go to medical school, but yet now I’m going to leave. And it was doing the kind of work that I now teach, it was doing that work, that allowed me to really get over the guilt and the shame of not feeling as happy as I felt like I should be, making the money I was making as a doctor, right? And of stepping into a whole new place that, number one, was an unknown industry at the time that I stepped into it, but number two, was sometimes looked at funny. People were like, “What’s hypnosis? What’s NLP? What’s this that you’re doing?”

So there was a lot of work that I had to do for myself to give myself permission that it was OK to step outside the box, it was OK to do medicine differently, and it was OK to do something other than medicine. And that’s sort of how I came to be. I did the work, I loved doing the work, so I decided to teach the work.

Kevin Pho: Now, stepping away from clinical medicine, for a lot of physicians, like you said, is a huge, huge decision, considering the investment and time that you put into it. How long did it take you before you were comfortable with that decision? You mentioned that it was a little bit of a process.

Maiysha Clairborne: Well, the thought came up five years before I made the transition. So I thought to myself, and then I thought, “Well, maybe I won’t step all the way out. Maybe I’ll step into something and have my feet in both.” And I’ll tell you when I got really flat about it: when I had my son in 2014. For me, I’m a late mom. I’m 46, so I had my son at 39. I went on maternity leave, I had cross coverage with my practice, and I did not miss it one bit. In fact, I lamented going back. And that was when I knew. That’s when I got really flat, like, “OK, I can make this transition.” Now, did I still have to deal with the emotions of leaving? Yes, I did. But that’s when I became very certain that that was the path that I was going to take.

Kevin Pho: All right, so let’s talk a little bit more about that. In your recent KevinMD article, it’s titled “How deep mindset work helped me find the courage to make my career transition.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Maiysha Clairborne: Well, as I shared earlier, there was a lot of guilt and shame and fear and emotions around deciding to leave clinical medicine. And for me, number one, there was guilt and shame about it, but number two, stepping into an industry that was unfamiliar, I had a lot of inner voices going on: “You’re not good enough. You’re not smart enough. This is too woo.” You know, you talk about woo. “This is too woo. Will my voice even matter?” It took a lot for me to even write my first article for you. I had to battle those voices.

And so the deep work that I speak about, that work with the unconscious mind, helped me to get to what’s the source of that. What is this? It’s because it didn’t start in medical school; it actually started when I was a child. Something happened, I made a decision about myself, and then I spent my life building evidence for that thing about myself, called “My voice doesn’t matter,” or whatever that is. I spent my life building evidence for that. So I had to go and do the deep work to get to the source of that conversation. And when I was able to let go of that, it freed me up to be able to step into a new career, even with the fear, even with a little bit of nervousness and butterflies in my stomach. It gave me the courage to do that, and that’s what this article is about.

Kevin Pho: Now, tell me about some of the specific things that you did to overcome those voices, because, as you said, this is a transition that’s outside the box. There is no guide; there is no playbook. Tell me some of the things that you did or found that helped you ease that transition.

Maiysha Clairborne: For me, from the mindset standpoint, I definitely had help, right? We can’t do this by ourselves. I learned that a long time ago. So I had a guide, I had a coach, I had a person that I did this work with, this NLP, this unconscious mind work, which is why I decided to learn it.

From a structure standpoint, though, there’s planning, right? So when I made the choice that I was going to move out of clinical medicine, I created a timeline. So I had to first create the timeline. What did it look like? Then, for me, I already knew what I was going to do. Some docs don’t even know what they’re stepping into, so that might be the first step: “Well, what does the ideal look like for you? Do you want to go clinically adjacent?” Even if you want to step out of your job into a different job, you look at what the ideal job is, because I don’t advocate that every doctor should step out of clinical medicine. If it’s for you, it’s for you. It just wasn’t for me after a certain amount of time.

So you’ve got to look at what your vision is, what your ideal would look like. And then once you get what your ideal will look like, you want to create a timeline for yourself: “By this time, I’m going to be making that transition.” And what that does is it almost creates a false deadline, in a way, so then you can start putting steps in place between now and that time, and taking little actions at a time to move toward that goal. And I totally advocate, if you don’t know what the steps are, to get a guide.

Kevin Pho: So now that you made the decision to transition out of clinical medicine and you set up your coaching practice, tell me about those initial first few months: growing that practice, finding clients. What was it like?

Maiysha Clairborne: It was scary. One of the things that I did is I found different mentors in different industries. So I found a sales mentor, I found a marketing mentor, right? I found a business mentor. And they helped me to set up my systems. And so when I would coach my clients, I would always tell them, “You want to systemize things, especially if you still have one foot in clinical medicine.” I don’t advocate for people saying, “I’m going to start a business,” and quitting their job. Oh, no way. You want to have a transition period, either a bridge job or a plan of how much you need to be making in order to be comfortable to transition out, or at least pull back hours. So then, in that time, you want to systemize things, because you’re busy out there being a doctor. You don’t want to have to be worried about going and running after people. And that’s what I did.

So those first few months, they were scary, because, number one, I still was like, “Oh, is this real? Am I really now no longer in medical practice and doing coaching full time? Is this going to work?” Even though, in the back of my mind, from source, from higher power, I’ve never been allowed to be put out on the street, right? I’m blessed in that way. But yeah, it was scary, and I kept taking the actions that I was trained in, and I kept my guides with me, and it just kept growing. I kept putting myself out there. I kept using my voice, even the voice that in the past I thought didn’t matter. I kept seeing the evidence that it did matter.

Kevin Pho: Now, how did you go about finding all these mentors? And do these mentors have any background in medicine, and were they aware of some of the issues that physicians face specifically?

Maiysha Clairborne: Well, for me, they didn’t, because I came out of the time before there were a lot of physician coaches, especially in business and marketing. So the programs that I chose were outside of medicine, and because I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life, I knew that I could map what I already knew onto the marketing techniques that they were teaching me. I do advocate. There are so many physician business and marketing coaches that are out there now that are really, really good in our space, so I do recommend that you find someone who kind of understands, and who has proof that they have helped other people, by the way, because there is that.

But how I found them is by referral. Some of my nonmedical people had coaches, and I just asked, “Who’s out there? Who’s good? Who produces results?” And that’s how I came to find my mentors. Now, in the space, there are lots of groups that we have where you can ask, and people will give you a barrage of great names of physician coaches. But by referral. And then when you find a mentor that’s right for you, number one, you want to interview multiple mentors, and I think I wrote an article about that one time. Interview multiple mentors, make sure that they’ve produced results, and then make sure that they feel good to you as well. Don’t ignore the feeling.

Kevin Pho: Now that you made the transition into coaching from clinical medicine, has it been what you expected?

Maiysha Clairborne: Oh, it’s been better. It’s been even better. For me, I call it clinically adjacent, because I still do the work of healing; I just do it differently. And I love seeing my colleagues and the people that I coach get the light bulb and go off and do wonderful things, and find peace of mind, and find their passion and purpose. I love that. It’s even better for me than what it was in medicine.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Maiysha Clairborne. She is an integrative family physician, and she wrote the KevinMD article “How deep mindset work helped me find the courage to make my career transition.” Maiysha, if there’s something that you know now that you wish you did back when you started your coaching practice, what would that one thing be?

Maiysha Clairborne: Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. I think in our industry we’re taught to do it all by ourselves. We’re taught, we’re in this sort of a space of competition sometimes. But what I’ve found in the maturity of my businesses is that the best thing for your business is to play with others, to collaborate with others. That’s why podcasts are so great, because you get to talk and collaborate with people, and that helps to grow your space.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Maiysha Clairborne: I think if there’s any message that I want to leave, it is just to find your tribe. Don’t go at this alone. If it’s a mentor, if it’s a committed listener, find your tribe. And give yourself permission to step outside the box, even if it’s within the practice of medicine and you want to do it differently. Give yourself permission to do that.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, time, and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Maiysha Clairborne: Thank you for having me. I so appreciate it. It was fun.

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