A Tale of Two Women

This episode is the next in a series sharing the chapters of the audiobook Lean Out: A Professional Woman's Guide to Finding Authentic Work-Life Balance. Chapter 1 compares and contrasts the work-life balance of two different professional women. Which one do you identify with more? 

Get in touch with Dawn:

• On Instagram @practicebalance
• On the web practicebalance.com
• Buy the book Lean Out

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the lean out podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Don baker. Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance? You've come to the right. Place. For inspiration. information. and a community. community. of like-minded. Professionals. Let's get to the show. Hello? Hello. Thanks for being here. As I'm recording this I'm in between two weeks back-to-back of clinical work, where I travel as an anesthesiologist. The day is that I go to work, usually involve pretty long hours. I go in really early in the morning and you never know exactly what time you're going to get out at night. It's very difficult to plan things. And that includes doing creative work. And usually at the end of the day, when I've been doing a lot of clinical work, you really just don't have a lot of brain space for creativity. And keeping with the kinds of things that I teach with self compassion self knowledge. And self care. I try to just take it easy. So I don't have any new interview for you this week, but what I would like to do is resurrect the idea I had originally with the podcast of also publishing. Each chapter from the lean out book. As a particular podcast episode. So that if you wanted to, you could listen to the mall as an audio book as part of the podcast for free. So last year I got to the introduction section and that was it. I never published any of the other chapters because I kind of just forgot. And so I'd like to revisit that idea and. This week, give you chapter one. It compares in contrast the work-life balance of two different professional women. Neither one has it all put together and has the quote unquote right. Work-life balance and that's part of the point. But at the same time, you need to really go into your work-life balance and examine it with eyes wide open. And that's one of the main premises of the book, which by the way, if you have read the book or if you are listening to these discreet chapters and are really liking what you're hearing, I would love it. If you would leave a review for me on Amazon, because it really helps other women professionals and people who might be interested in the book to find it easier when it gets pushed up in the search engines, by getting new and fresh reviews. So I appreciate that. And next time we'll be back with some new original episodes. but for now, I hope you enjoy chapter one of lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work life balance. Chapter One. A Tale of Two Women. Be Aware of the False Economy of Trying to Power Through. Greg McKeown. Dr. A has her highly skilled hands in everything, and she loves it. A well known physician in a niche area of surgery, she was just named vice chair of her department's research program. She already publishes cutting edge papers and gives talks all over the world, mentors multiple budding female leaders in the medical school and residency program, and always remembers to drop knowledge bombs and musings on Twitter several times a day. She and her husband, a psychologist and author, travel in different speaking circuits. They don't mind. They seem to get along better with some intermittent geographical distance. Their daughter attends the private elementary school theater for the local Ivy League prep school, though their six year old son struggles with a learning disability. Each child has a tutor, a music coach, and weekend sports practices. The family relies on two nannies. One for regular business hours, and another who works evenings and weekends or stays overnight, as necessary. Busyness is Dr. A's way of life. She feels more comfortable when enveloped in chaos. Thus, she wouldn't think to say no to a new opportunity. Why sell herself short when her career is thriving? Stillness is something she sees as a project for later. Much later. Dr. A might feel like she's achieved success, fulfillment, and even balance. She's solved many time deficits by outsourcing. The multiple nannies plus housekeepers and a meal service are part of her village. But is she moving through her days intentionally? Is she in tune with what really matters most to her? Eventually, life circumstances change. Systems and relationships break down. Sometimes they do so in an instant. Dr. B was always looking for something different. While surfing the cubicles of tech companies as an engineer, she had visions of the freedom a medical degree would afford her, to live and practice anywhere she wanted, as long as she chose the right specialty. She attended medical school and pursued a career in anesthesiology, which allowed her to travel and rock climb, a significant passion of hers. Without an ongoing patient roster looming over her head. She loved learning so many new things in medical school and the autonomy of internship was so intoxicating that she worked hard enough to receive the intern of the year award. The leaders of her residency program pegged her to be the next chief resident on the way to fulfilling Dr. B's original dream. She got sidetracked. Her extensive engineering background helped her quickly and easily understand the ultrasound images. and physics of perioperative echocardiography, a very specialized subfield of anesthesiology. Her supervisors praised her innate skill, and this tempted her to do more. She designed a research project around the subject, presented it at multiple conferences, and pushed to certify her skills by signing up for the National Perioperative Echocardiography Board Exam. Even before graduation. At the same time, her performance in other areas of work started to suffer. She found herself depressed and unable to get out of bed without at least a few cups of coffee. Her general lack of energy and interest overshadowed her passions outside of medicine, travel, rock climbing, fitness, and spending time with the love of her life. She and her husband were also having trouble conceiving, causing even more strain on their relationship. She learned of the term burnout and thought, Maybe this is me. She saw a doctor and was started on an SSRI, then two. She continued to struggle while performing procedures and was ridiculed by some of her faculty, but she kept her head down and swallowed her tears, trying to do everything. She still forced herself to get up before five o'clock a. m. to do workouts prior to her OR shifts, and she continued to go through the motions with rock climbing despite significant fatigue. She made every attempt to show a happy face at work. All the while, hiding the shame of knowing she was suffering. And she continued her echocardiography research in her spare time. Dr. B's energy levels worsened to the point where any sort of exercise became a chore that required a 30 minute nap afterward. She underwent blood tests and studies, but there was no clear cut answer to what was happening besides depression and burnout. Her doctors had at least figured out the source of her infertility. Hypothalamic amenorrhea with resultant ovarian failure. It was all stress induced, they said. Months after the diagnostic odyssey began, Dr. B was forced by a very persistent reproductive endocrinologist to step into an MRI scanner on Easter Sunday. There it was, white as truth, on the black screen, a prominent tumor sitting in the middle of her brain. It was the size of an arcade gumball, but it had sprouted tentacles that wrapped around her optic chiasm. A subsequent vision test showed profound peripheral vision loss. And now it all made sense. I am Dr. B. A week after my diagnosis, I was on the table undergoing brain surgery with the head neurosurgeon at the hospital where I trained. One of my faculty professors served as my anesthesiologist. I barely remember wheeling away from the perioperative holding area on a gurney in a midazolam induced haze. With a hallway of familiar faces turning to look, as I was rolled to the operating room. The next thing I knew I was a patient in the neuro ICU, lying next to patients I had just recently taken care of. Everything was now clear. I had fallen completely out of balance to the point of not even knowing that I was seriously ill. I was blind to myself, literally and figuratively, while trying to be everything to everyone. I was too busy to get an MRI. My internal orchestra continued to play a blazingly loud, dizzying number with cymbals crashing, and then it abruptly fell flat to silence. It was like one of those modern commissioned symphonies, the ones that seem really cool at first but become increasingly uncomfortable to listen to. After sufficient recovery, I was inspired to closely examine the path I had taken to get there. I was forced into stillness and convalescence. But during that time, I regained the original vision of what I had wanted to do with my life, both inside and outside my profession. More than a decade later, I'm living my authentic work life balance. If none of this had ever happened to me, where would I be now? A reframe. Let's try this again. Dr. B is a mother and a part time anesthesiologist. Loves taking care of her patients undergoing general bread and butter surgeries. She declined a fellowship and canceled her echocardiography boards in favor of gaining broad-based clinical experience, and more importantly moving on with her unique vision for her life. Knowing what matters most to them, she and her husband lived simply so they could afford in vitro fertilization, a necessity for building their family because of the removal of her entire pituitary gland. After years of fertility treatments, they were blessed with a daughter. Aligned with her original dream of freedom, she now controls her own schedule by taking care of patients as a locum tenens, as needed daily or filling coverage physician. Her other work, writing, public speaking, and coaching on wellness and work life balance. gives her great fulfillment, as does spending lots of time with her family. They recently moved to a large off grid homestead in the mountains, where they enjoyed the simple pleasures of nature and a slow paced lifestyle. A dichotomy. There are many ways women professionals can design their lives to include meaningful work, family, personal growth, and any other endeavors. Both Dr. A and today's Dr. B represent two ends of a broad spectrum. However, they both started their journeys with one thing in common. an intense need to achieve. Where does this come from? Why is it plaguing women professionals to the point of physical and mental ailments? And despite far reaching ramifications that we will discuss in this book, why is it so celebrated by our modern culture? There are entire Facebook groups, retreats, and conferences dedicated to women like Dr. A, who inevitably end up crowdsourcing or seeking assistance in figuring out how to improve their work life balance. What is normally offered or suggested are ways to further outsource, au pairs, meal prep services, virtual assistants, and mother's helpers. While these resources can be helpful, they will not fix a fundamental mismatch of roles and responsibilities to values and desires. So, many women are prodding along, staying afloat in the chaos. Then, when one little factor changes, all of a sudden, the melody played by their orchestra takes a dissonant turn. You don't have to suffer a major crisis like I did to realize that you are living your life around achievement, instead of designing your life the way you want it to be. Which one of these women are you most like? Which one's life is more appealing to you? Or does the life you envision for yourself look completely different? Exercise. Take a good look. Get out a piece of paper and write an assessment of your overall health. How are you really doing? What's going well? What would you like to have more of in your life? Some categories to list for your assessment include physical and mental health, spiritual connection, relationships, personal growth, finances. Notice there's no category for work accomplishments. Where does work fit within these categories I've given you? For example, maybe your work improves your finances, but detracts from your mental health. Or maybe your work provides personal growth, but decreases your spiritual time. So, if you haven't been following me, since, before I wrote the book lean out and started this podcast, you may not have known that I had a health scare that really woke me up to wanting to pay attention to my work-life balance and to figure out how to get off that treadmill of achievement and live in alignment with what I really wanted and my true values. I'm feeling very grateful today and reflective because on the day that I'm recording this, that happens to be Easter Sunday as well. And in 2015 on Easter, I found out after years of infertility treatments, Of the initial infertility workup. That is where I found the pituitary tumor that I had that was causing all sorts of problems. And then also had a miscarriage, um, just lots of fits and starts. I found out on that Easter Sunday that I was pregnant with my daughter Aspen. And so I'm just sitting here and feeling super grateful and hoping that you enjoyed this chapter and that it's helping you to reflect on your life and on how you want to be living your life with purpose. Thanks a lot for listening and we'll see you next time. Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast. If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services. You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker. Have a great day and we'll see you next time