How Healthy Is Your Career?
Rajani Katta, MD
Clinical Professor of Dermatology, University of Texas Medical School, at Houston
“A fulfilling career is waiting for those brave enough to find it.”
— Richard Branson
Picture this: You show up for your annual check-up. The nurse measures your height and weight (so far so good). Then the physician walks in, glances at your chart, and announces, “Your BMI looks great, I’ll see you next year.” The physician then exits the room.
Can you imagine that scenario? I can’t. That’s because we know what a good check-up requires—and that’s not it. As physicians, we’re extremely intentional about checking vital signs and performing a detailed review of systems and social history. We ask about symptoms. We focus on early diagnosis and effective treatment.
That’s how we ensure good health. If you want a strong, healthy career, you need to approach it in the same manner as your health. I’ve thought about this issue often over the last few years, as I’ve worked with medical students who are starting to launch their careers. What advice would I give these young people? My main piece of advice is this: for a solidly flourishing career, you need to be intentional. Intentional about regular check-ups, and intentional about taking the actions needed to keep your career on track. That’s one of the reasons I’m such a fan of the annual (or semi-annual) career check-up.
What are you checking? Clearly more than just your paycheck (or grant dollars or number of publications). Just like you wouldn’t measure your health by just relying on your BMI, you can’t conclude that your career is going well just because you’re hitting your revenue targets or scoring a bunch of accepted PubMed-indexed manuscripts.
From my perspective: there are three main questions which form the foundation for a strong, healthy career. When you think about your career, do you feel: A sense of progress? Fulfilled? Energized? Let’s look at these three elements in more detail.
1. A sense of progress
What goals did you set for yourself last year, and are you on track to achieving these? Humans are wired for growth. As Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile writes in her book, The Progress Principle: “On the days when people are feeling happiest, proudest, and most motivated, the single most prominent event in those days is making progress in meaningful work.”
What does this mean to you? A career in medicine doesn’t easily provide the space or time to reflect on progress or goals, let alone the strategies needed to get there. That’s why it’s so important to pause and intentionally think about these big questions.
I love seeing the enthusiasm from my colleagues when it comes to their careers: they’re focused on learning new procedures, streamlining clinical processes, taking a deep dive into clinical research, educating online, and more. That enthusiasm and energy is infectious.
So if you didn’t have the time last year to reflect on this question, let me ask you now: What do you want your job and career to look like a year from now?
2. Fulfilled
Does your work in medicine allow you to fulfill your personal mission? I love the work of talking to my patients and helping them find solutions to allergen avoidance. On the other hand, I don’t enjoy completing paperwork, or doing pre-authorizations, or any of the multiple other tedious tasks that modern healthcare demands of us.
That work of helping my patients is my mission, and I feel incredibly blessed that I get to spend most of my clinical work hours doing just that.
In contrast, one of my colleagues told me that her corporate dermatology job scheduled so many patients per hour that she didn’t feel like she could spend the requisite time needed to counsel her patients well. She was seeking another position, because the job no longer served her personal mission of providing the kind of patient care she was committed to.
A sense of fulfillment is key to a healthy career in medicine. A study of academic physicians at the Mayo Clinic found that those who were able to spend at least 20% of their time on the specific work they found most meaningful had a far lower risk of burnout.
Do you experience significant fulfillment within your job? And does your career allow you the time and space for other activities that you find fulfilling?
3. Energized
It’s Monday morning, and you’re headed to work. On a scale from zero to ten: translate into exhausted to energized, where do you fall?
Although you might indeed be exhausted by the end of the day, but a strong career would allow you enough time, energy, and brainspace to find ways to recharge and restore. Especially in medicine, it’s so important to show up for our patients as our most competent and compassionate selves. That requires sometimes intense cognitive and emotional labor, and it certainly requires a lot of fuel.
During your career check-up, honestly ask yourself if you’re on the path to personal sustainability. If your job is draining and consistently interferes with good sleep, nutrition, exercise, and–especially important–close, sustaining relationships. If those things are true, your career path is simply not sustainable in the long run.
Let me ask you: is your career path sustainable?
We deserve our own career check-ups, done with the same level of commitment and attention that we provide our patients. I encourage you to take out your calendar today, schedule that check-up, and analyze the health of your career without delay.
