Finding peace of mind in uncertainty (part 2)

Last month , I reflected on feeling restless and, frankly, trapped despite achieving what I thought I wanted in my career. Here’s what happened next.

St Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco is bordered on its eastern edge by Golden Gate Park. As an internal medicine resident at St Mary’s, I often sought refuge in the park after a long day or overnight call, going for a run to leave behind the stresses of work. People often warned me, though, not to visit the park after dark, when unsavory characters would frequent its groves.

In fact, the guidance was broadly applicable to many parks I loved, like Central Park in New York or Bois de Boulogne in Paris, which was a short walk from my French family’s apartment during my year abroad . During the day—Amuse-toi bien! (Enjoy yourself!) After dark—N’y va jamais la nuit! (Never go there at night!)

A couple years after finishing my residency, on a brisk night in late winter, I found myself defying that advice as I walked through Kensington Gardens in London, on my way home to my flat in Notting Hill. It had already been dark for hours, but I was undaunted. Having a sense of serenity and freedom will do that for you.?

Like my days on the hospital wards in San Francisco, I’d been up since early morning and on my feet all day, but I couldn’t have felt more different. My body and spirit were abuzz, as if I’d made an exciting new discovery. And in a way, I had—months into my first ever non-clinical role.* This was in stark contrast to my days as a practicing physician, when I felt depleted even after a full night’s rest or even a week-long vacation.

I had just left Kensington Palace where my colleagues and I from St Bartholomew’s Hospital —commonly known as Barts—had held what was referred to as a “cultivation event.” We spent the evening graciously priming select members of the British aristocracy as well as high net-worth British entrepreneurs and corporate executives, with a singular call-to-action in mind.

The event had gone seamlessly, mostly due to the intensive preparation. Our small but indomitable team had spent weeks researching and learning about each invited guest. Every team member had been assigned a key role and set of directives, all within a carefully orchestrated system of purposeful introductions, conversations, and communication points. The strategy was designed to foster existing relationships, build new ones, and overall, strengthen interest in our cause, a ￡13 million campaign for a cutting-edge breast cancer center.

That event and the job as a whole represented independence from what I had long thought was an immutable life path.?

Three years earlier, my life was on the edge of getting turned upside down. I'd finally committed to taking action and leaving clinical medicine, facing the equivalent of the intense hills on training runs during my marathon training days . You see the daunting incline ahead and ready yourself for the physical and mental climb to get to the top.

I was a newly board-certified internist when I started working with an executive coach, herself a former nurse who had pivoted her career to coaching. We worked within a framework that I thought about in the following way:

Curate. I collected subjects and topics—from newspaper clippings, websites, photos, books, memories—that I found especially interesting or that I was curious to learn more about. Week after week, I tossed my items of interest in a shoebox, gathering ideas whether one came to me on a hike or while I was flipping through a magazine while getting my hair cut.

My coach encouraged me to curate freely—to think of it as a shopping spree, in which I relied more on gut instinct to select items that appealed to me, rather than stopping to think about matching items to a particular need.

Connect. Next came the hard work of active reflection. It was as if my next career steps lay in wait in a riddle. Why did I like the things I selected? What did they have in common? Could I group certain items into different buckets or themes? What patterns could I find??

Emerging from that exercise, my coach and I mapped these activities and characteristics to specific industries, functions, and work environments. We developed a short list of roles and career paths to research further.

Campaign. This next step involved “campaigning” and advocating for myself, seeking meetings, connections, and opportunities in my target areas of interest.

It was with this last step that I was forced to embrace uncertainty sooner than I’d expected. After working with my coach for a year, my husband and I had the opportunity to move to London for his job. I took it as a sign to wrap up my time in clinical medicine and make my transition a reality.

Once in London, I expanded my efforts by soliciting help from others. It was an imperfect plan—by design, my coach told me—as the plan would refine itself over time as I gathered more information. I began with a loose set of criteria: I wanted to stay in some aspect of healthcare; nonprofits were appealing because I wanted a mission-driven environment; and my curated interests suggested that I liked writing, creative problem-solving, relationship building, and storytelling-with-a-purpose.

For months I “campaigned,” meeting with anyone in the nonprofit sector who was willing to meet with me. I asked friends back in the US for introductions to their connections in London; other times, I would simply cold-call. Most meetings were informational, opportunities for me to learn about a wide range of nonprofits, roles, and functions. I also used the time to get people’s perspective on where they could see someone like me fitting into their organizations.?

At the end of each meeting, I asked my new contact if they knew of others who would be open to speaking with me. Almost without fail, that would lead to 2-3 introductions, and soon I had a sizable network of people and a broad understanding of the nonprofit landscape in London.?

Several months into my explorations, I zeroed in on “development,” an opaque job category that simply means you ask people for money for a good cause. And one day, just as I was beginning to wonder where my networking would take me, I met the head of corporate development at Barts. Before I even got a chance to ask him where he saw me fitting in, we were discussing whether I’d be interested in a role on his team.

Even just a few weeks into the job, I was captivated by the role and the work. Every day I was learning something new, striving to develop an ambitious strategy for raising funds from large corporations. My colleagues were my informal instructors, giving me opportunities to learn from seasoned experts in nonprofit work and in other domains such as major gifts, grants, and events.?

The role also gave me a crash course on how to be effective within a different culture. With the help of my colleagues and many mistakes along the way, I learned how to adapt my communication style, spelling, and even manners and use of jargon. At some point, several of us had to learn how to curtsy for members of the royal family, in preparation for a potential royal guest appearance at one of our cultivation events.

Each week, donor meeting, and event offered opportunities to hone my relationship-building skills and to tailor my approach and communication messages to each type of donor, whether corporate, aristocrat, or self-made entrepreneur—what I know now as audience segments in marketing. In fact, though I didn’t know it at the time, my role at Barts planted the seed that germinated into my marketing career.?

Marketing is the process of getting potential customers interested in your products or services. In development, while you have donors instead of customers, the goal is the same—to understand the rational and emotional drivers of how people make decisions to support a cause and at what financial level, just as a marketer needs to figure out what motivates people to buy one brand or product over another.

Such was the synchronicity that emerged from uncertainty after I left the practice of medicine behind.

The curate-connect-campaign approach sounds so simple and straightforward to me now, but throughout those first months of exploration, I was filled with self-doubt, frustration and anxiety about where I might (or might not) be headed.?

Many days, I felt like I did during a family trip to Costa Rica a few years ago, when we toured Selvatura Park in Monteverde via zipline. As I stepped off the platform for the longest zipline—1 kilometer and 600 feet above the forest floor (gulp!)—I felt a mix of exhilaration and terror of possibly plunging to the land below. I knew I was secured to the cable above, but it was still terrifying.

Flying through the air at 45 miles per hour, though, I took a deep breath and let each moment sink in. I also surrendered to the journey, not in a passive way but actively accepted that I’d committed to the steel-cable experience. I’d chosen to be there, just as I’d made a deliberate, conscious decision about leaving clinical medicine and embarking on an adventure of a different kind.?

From that initial transition—and every transition and reinvention since— to a life I never could have imagined at the start, I found peace of mind. When you’re finally doing work and contributing to the world in the way that you were meant to, peace of mind permeates everything, even amidst all the uncertainties. These days, as my marketing agency and I are working to help some of the most innovative companies in healthcare tell their stories and truly be seen—much as I had to do for myself—I often give thanks. For cultivation events, for the people who gave me a chance, for where it all began.

*I’ve written before about my first corporate job , but my job at Barts was my first ever non-clinical role.

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