Episode 100! Freedom of Thought

In this episode, Dawn Baker celebrates #100 with you! She discusses her thoughts on the podcast and asks for your feedback on what to do next. She also discusses the topic of freedom of thought: how we're different from animals, and how you have more freedom than you realize.

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• Website - practicebalance.com
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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. I cannot believe this is the 100th episode of the Lean Out Podcast. I've loved podcasts since they started taking hold in the earlier, maybe mid two thousands, but I never thought I would do my own. I started my blog practice balance.com, out of the desire to share with others what I had learned about taking care of myself during a difficult time, reprioritizing my life vision after finding myself in a health scare and the mindset lessons from my own work-life balance journey. At some point though, I decided to branch out and try some public speaking. In retrospect, this is one of the steps I took in my own journey to lasting authentic confidence. It's part of the doing hard things element that I've talked about on the show before. So the first thing I did was ask to be on some friends podcasts. Through my blog, I had met some other physicians who were blogging and podcasting, and I had sat on a blogger's panel at a conference. This was the start of the now ubiquitous side hustle culture in medicine, and there weren't that many people doing it. At first it was scary because I didn't feel comfortable speaking off the cuff at all. I had only been doing some grand round talks and things like that. In fact, if someone said yes to having me on their show and then they didn't send me prep questions or topics to consider, I was always really nervous. But over time, I got used to that and was willing to go on shows when there was no agenda whatsoever. Appearing on some podcasts then helped me to gain confidence to apply for some speaking gigs. I got yeses and nos and I got one invitation to speak at a state medical society from a friend I had attended medical school with, and the rest is basically history. I'm now spoken at several CME conferences and coaching summits, both in person and virtual, and I've appeared on more than 40 podcasts. If you're interested in seeing the complete list of my appearances, you can find that@practicebalance.com slash about, and then of course, I started this podcast. Originally I thought it would just be an experiment. I used the interviews I had recorded to profile some women professionals in my book, which would require me to also do some of the intro and outro content, and I figured if I didn't enjoy doing it, I would just stop after the interviews that I had already done. But I actually liked it. The process of putting together the audio files and coming up with takeaways and unifying teams really feeds my need for creativity in what I do. There's some creativity in anesthesia, but it's mainly limited to how you communicate to patients and how you manage your anesthetic. Both of which are already using resources in front of you with the podcast, it's like I'm creating something from scratch and this is the same as I feel when I'm teaching a yoga class, and I love the ability to make things. I hope you're enjoying how this podcast has evolved. As you've probably noticed, I'm still doing a summary at the end of each interview with takeaways. It's fun to find common themes among guests, which are really a reminder to all of us, like challenging your fixed mindsets, how challenging it is to change an identity or encountering naysayers in how it's never really as bad as you anticipate. And then there are sometimes some unusual takeaways from the episodes like. Mastering the art of listening, not making assumptions about people, even just people on the street or patients or anyone, and how a lean out journey can really be gradual and can involve going back to your familiar workplace, maybe even multiple times. There were a couple of guests that talked about that. This year, I've mixed up the episodes to have some conversations and some solo cast episodes, and I've branched out into interviewing not only women professionals doing unique things in their fields, but also men and some people who have a particular expertise in a relevant area. For instance, we have a guest coming up on the show who's written an entire book about taking sabbaticals, something I highly recommend doing when you're in need of a work-life balance reset. So stay tuned for that episode. I'd love to know what you think of the show, what you like about it, and what you dislike about it. Do you like the takeaway sections or would you rather just hear the straight interview? Do you prefer the interview episodes or the solo cast episodes, or do you like the combination of both? Did you know that the interviews are published on YouTube? And does that matter to you? Would you watch them on YouTube? Please take a moment to go leave a review on iTunes for me so I can keep improving the show and help you get inspired to find your unique work-life balance. If you don't wanna leave a review for whatever reason, I'd still love to hear your feedback on the show. Sometimes people don't want to leave a review just to give a very specific or very critical piece of feedback, but I really want to know about it. So there is a new feature on my show notes that says, send us a text, and if you click that, it actually sends me a text message from an anonymous phone number. So check out that feature as well. Onto today's theme. This will be a solo cast about something I've been thinking about a lot lately, the ability and privilege to have freedom of thought. The other day I was taking a walk on the homestead, which I do frequently, and I happened to be by myself. I walk to the stream crossing that we call the cold pool because it's a deep section of the creek that runs through the property and there's a short waterfall feeding kind of a deep swimming hole, and sometimes my husband and my daughter go swimming there. But I have to admit that I have only dunked into about my knee level because the water is just way too cold for me. But it's the only place in the creek that you essentially can just kind of sit there and bob like you're in a hot tub, except obviously it's not hot. It's very cold. So this place is also where in the summer we happen to find a lot of brook trout hanging out frequently. When we all take walks together, everyone's talking and maybe walking kind of loudly, and when you come to that spot and peer in, the fish tend to just scatter. It's fun to see them, but it's only for like a glimpse. Well, on this particular day, I'm thinking of, as I said, I was by myself, so I walked up really quietly and slowly to see if I could see the fish without scaring them off. And there were a couple fish in there near the surface, just slowly kind of swimming around and I stood there for several minutes watching them in awe, just taking in the beauty of the scene. It was extremely meditative with the sounds and the sights and the clear, fresh air. One of the fish was nice and big, and it was spotted like a rainbow trout and maybe almost about a foot long. And the other one was a little bit smaller and they were doing something interesting. They were coming up to the surface and putting their lips on the water and then diving back down. And it was almost like they were dancing with each other. They were just kind of intertwining in this movement. And the thought that came to my mind was, they're playing. And as I watched, I then realized something. They were coming to the surface and putting their lips there to catch the little bugs that were swimming right above the surface. This whole dance like movement was basically just them eating bugs. They were just doing what fish do, not some anthropomorphized activity that was made up in my mind. And this got me thinking, this is how we're different from fish and many other animals. We interpret things. We have deeper thoughts than just impulse action. There's this story told by David Foster Wallace in a famous commencement speech, and it starts like this. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the opposite way who nods at them and says, morning boys, how's the water? And the two fish just kind of nod and swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks at the other and says, what the hell is water? He goes on in his speech to talk about how people can interpret the exact same experience or environment in completely different ways. And he also touches on the concept of freedom. Near the end, the freedom to learn how to think because this was a graduation speech after all, and how awareness is available to all of us as opposed to just going through the default setting, the unconsciousness of swimming through water and not even knowing what it is. The reason I'm sharing this parable is the fact that it has fish in it, and it points out how our world is completely different from animals, and what makes it different is the meaning we ascribe to all our surroundings, all the words, and the actions of others we encounter. I mean, really, can you imagine living life completely in a default setting yet in some aspects we do do that. That's what the treadmill of achievement is. Freedom is one of my core values, and part of that is thought freedom. We as humans have the privilege of freedom of thought, the ability to interpret and to solve problems. If you look up definitions of freedom of thought, it often says something like the fundamental right to form and hold opinions without interference. We have the ability to think what we want, yet our thoughts can become a trap and lead us to not feeling free. You may have a thought that has turned into an unwritten rule that your career has to look a certain way or you're not successful, or that you can't leave a certain job, for example. This is the kind of thinking that leads to people feeling stuck. So many limiting beliefs keep us on the treadmill of achievement. It's hard to even list everything. Some notable ones that come to mind are fixed beliefs about your abilities. Also call it a fixed mindset guilt that you leave patients and colleagues in some sort of irreplaceable lurch if you change your work-life balance. Beliefs about backlash you might get from friends, family, or coworkers for making a change they don't approve of. And the list goes on and on. Well, guess what? You are perfectly capable of scrapping that thought and thinking differently. That's the freedom part. It's estimated that we have thousands of thoughts per day, but not all those thoughts are necessarily true. There's bound to be some that are misinterpretations, some false beliefs and other things. When you realize that not all your thoughts are truths, this in itself is very liberating. So developing your ability to analyze your thoughts is one way to nurture your freedom of thought. The other big way is to practice mindfulness. When you consistently practice even for a few minutes a day, something changes inside you. And I know this from personal experience, you cultivate the ability to become an observer of your own thoughts. You can then pause for a moment and see a thought and consider it before taking action. Instead of lashing out at something, someone says, that feels hurtful with mindfulness, you're able to think for a moment before doing that and maybe turn it around to a more calm and measured response. Both these techniques for thought freedom are taught in my confidence course. And don't forget that you can get$100 off by using the coupon code pod POD, if you'd like to go deeper in your learning and practice. The last thing I wanna mention about thought freedom is the freedom to express your thoughts. Think about love. You are free to love whoever and whatever attracts you. And this is a wonderful thing. There's room for everyone and for everyone's specific passions. If you're into doing something that's far off the golden path of your profession and you want to spend some of your precious time on that thing, even if it means spending less time at your job or doing your job differently, then you have the ability to do that. This is why we're here on this podcast. The freedom to be yourself in various environments, both personal and professional, is an important part of living a balanced life. One that's free from burnout. If you feel like you're always wearing a mask to fit in. The emptiness will eventually eat you up until something gives like your physical or your mental health. So I challenge you to consider this. If you're involved with something that doesn't allow you to be your authentic self, consider how you can leave that situation. Maybe it's work, maybe it's a relationship. You will feel freer and more fulfilled as a result. Thank you so much for listening today and for your support over the past 100 episodes. Until 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