5 C's to consider with career dilemmas

I was recently musing about an A-Z of tips to help doctors with career dilemmas and I got stuck on C. Not because of a paucity of options, but rather the opposite – there are so many C’s which are applicable to career dilemmas (unlike Z – still struggling with that one).

So I’ve narrowed it down to my top 5:

Choice

Keep sight of your choices and be curious. When you’re working in a system which appears to be frankly malfunctioning, and you’ve got debts/mortgage/maybe school fees hanging over you, it is easy to feel trapped and all out of options. Or, at least, the options can feel limited to staying miserable with the status quo or leaving medicine and facing financial and identity misery instead.

Like many things in the world of medicine, career dilemma solutions are not black and white. In between these 2 options are a whole load of other choices.

But unless you make the first choice - to understand what is contributing to you feeling stuck, and then switch your focus from problem(s) to solution(s) – nothing will change (& this is, of course, a choice in itself).

?And you also want to focus your time and energy on the aspects of your career that you can influence - anything beyond that is an energy dump.

The interesting thing is, when you focus on what is within your ability to influence, the more you notice the choices that are open to you.

And choices come in all shapes and sizes, so don’t allow ‘all or nothing’ thinking to put you off making that first step.

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Courage

Lean into your courage. As a doctor, you have already demonstrated courage in so many ways (long before covid arrived on the scene). For example:

?? Your first days/weeks/months on the wards as a newly-qualified doctor

?? Having those difficult conversations with patients and relatives

?? Stepping up as you progress through your career

These are just a few examples – the fact is, you are no stranger to courage, whether you recognise it or not.

Which is great because, when it comes to solving career dilemmas, a dose of courage can be pretty handy.

So think about how you have applied courage in other situations in your life and use that as a starting point now.

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Commitment

Be proactive and commit. Nothing is going to change unless you do something about it, so you can either wait for things to happen to you, or you can commit to deciding what you want, and then take action to make that happen.

This involves taking consistent steps towards affecting a change. Career dilemmas are rarely an overnight fix; they require ongoing time and commitment. You will likely come up against obstacles along the way, imagined and real, and it is your commitment that will render them navigable.

Your commitment will also be evident to others, and that is when the world starts to respond to you in a subtly different way: connections are facilitated, opportunities surface, support becomes more readily available.

And, rather like courage, the good news is that you have plenty of evidence to demonstrate your ability to commit – you couldn’t have got into and through medical school without it, for starters – it’s more a question of whether or not you want to show the same level of commitment to your career path now, and only you can decide that. But, if you do decide to commit, the results are likely to surprise you!

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Comfort zone

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Your comfort zone will be familiar and feel like a relatively easy place to be. Good for recharging but spending all of your time here will limit your ability to learn new skills, gain confidence in new areas and progress in your career. Beyond that is your stretch zone, where you develop new skills and abilities; your comfort zone increases and opportunities open up. The panic zone is a stretch too far and best avoided.

Between your comfort and stretch zones is fear.

The good news is that it is courage that is needed to overcome fear, and we’ve just established that you’ve got a lot of that, so really the main things to get your head round here are:

?? It is normal to feel self-doubt – it does not mean that you should automatically press the STOP button.

?? Some of your concerns may be rational and need addressing, but a lot more are likely to be fear masquerading as genuine reasons to not act.

?? It is OK to feel uncomfortable – by definition you will feel this when you move out of your comfort zone – so rather than shying away from it, lean into it!

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Confidence

Build this up. I appreciate that can be easier said than done, but think of something in which you used to lack confidence, e.g. taking a medical history – how did you gain confidence with this? My guess is that you acquired it over time through repetition.

Confidence increases by doing. It can be helpful to identify what is getting in your way and also tackle this (it often comes down to pesky mind monkeys playing havoc up there in your head) but, once you’ve got straight on this, it is by taking action and doing that your confidence will increase.

Small steps, small pushes out of your comfort zone, slowly chipping away at that fear and simultaneously building confidence – equally as applicable to career dilemmas as it is to other situations in life.

?So, that’s just a few of the C’s! If you would like any support with managing your career dilemma, drop me a DM and let’s have a preliminary chat to work out if we’re a good fit.