Solocast: What is Enough?

In this episode, Dawn Baker contemplates the meaning of "enough". She shares her recent struggles with enough, and she gives ways you can figure out what is "enough" for you.

** If you need some guidance to figure out your enough, I have a couple open spots for 1:1 coaching clients this summer. Sign up for a phone conversation HERE to find out if coaching is for you. **

Relevant/mentioned Links:

Grow Your Wealthy Mindset Podcast 202 - Will Your Retirement Go as Planned?

Lean Out Podcast - Human being vs. human doing

Jennifer Wallace books - Never Enough, Mattering

Earn & Invest Podcast 739 – Ten Unexpected Joys of Retirement

Transcript

0:02

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 just got back from one of my weeks of working per diem, and I got up to the homestead and went into our greenhouse to check on the seedlings that I've been trying to nurture and grow so that we could transplant them into our elevated beds, and all the seedlings had died. Now, part of this is because we don't have a really good automatic watering system, especially for seedlings, and my daughter had a summer camp, and while I was gone, my husband and my daughter had to be down in town for five days straight. It is quite hot, and the seeds just shriveled up, and it made me feel a bit like a homestead failure A couple of years ago, we did really great with our garden. I was super excited to have multiple things grow, and it was that same year that we got the chickens, and I just felt like I was doing awesome as a homesteader. And then last year, our garden wasn't as good. Some of the things that I planted completely did not do anything. And we didn't have as big of a bounty of tomatoes as we had had the previous year and things like that. Now, this year is not getting off to a great start. I'm sure anyone who's listening that has grappled with work-life balance knows what I'm feeling, which is that you're not doing enough at work, you're not doing enough at home. And I thought it would be good today to do a solo cast on the idea of what is enough. The word enough brings about so many pertinent questions. Do you have enough? Are you doing enough? Are you enough? So we're going to explore enough and its multiple meanings because this is something that I've been grappling with recently Aside from my issues with being a wannabe homesteader, I have been dealing with the issue of enough when it comes to my clinical work. I'm fortunate to be in a position with my age, my financial situation, and the current stage of my career where I can say that the work that I'm doing in anesthesia is optional. And I realize that many people who are listening are not in this situation yet, but you may be in this situation in the near or maybe the far future. Over the last 10 years, I've had this gradual decrease in the amount of clinical work that I do, to the point where I was doing the minimum to feel comfortable with my skills and meet the requirements to maintain an active board status as an anesthesiologist. But then over the past two or so years, I've added back a little bit more work. We have so many projects on the homestead that require lots of capital, and I have had some good work opportunities, and I wanted to contribute more financially. And while I continue to do my non-clinical wellness work, like writing the book, speaking at conferences and retreats, doing coaching, and putting out this podcast, all of this takes a lot of time that then takes away from the time that I'm spending on our property. But just like I've discussed before, there are trade-offs with every decision, and lately, I've just have not been at home as much as I'd like to be. And on top of it, if you've been in clinical practice for a while, you'll understand this. When I have a crazy case, regardless of the outcome, it makes me question if I should just be done. I realize logically that these kinds of cases come and go during our career, regardless of how long you've been in it. But now that I'm in the later stages, I would say, of my anesthesia c-career, the crazy cases just get to me, and they happen to stress me out more than they used to. So what's been on my mind lately is this: When is it time for me to stop? If I stop my clinical work and decide that I stopped too early, it's much more difficult to start again because I'm in a procedural skills-driven field. The other thing is, have I done enough in the realm of anesthesia and/or in the realms of wellness and content creation and helping others with their work-life balance to feel fulfilled and satisfied with my contributions? And I'm more worried about having enough purpose and fulfillment than I am about having enough money after I stop. So my example here shows that there are tangible and intangible types of enough. Alisa Chung recently did an episode on her podcast, Grow Your Wealthy Mindset, and I will link that in the show notes. She talked about a study of the regrets of retirees, and most of the regrets noted by the people interviewed in the study were not related to dollar amounts asset allocations or drawdown strategies or anything like that. It was more like, "I didn't realize that two years into my retirement, my spouse would die, and all the plans that we had would turn on their heads." Or, "I wish I had known that I wouldn't be healthy enough to do all the traveling in retirement that I had planned for because now I have a disability." It was stuff like that, not the monetary stuff. This past spring, I attended and spoke at the twenty twenty-six White Coat Investor Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference, and some of the talks I attended discussed strategies for spending and drawing down on your investments in retirement. But one of the most eye-opening things that I learned is that very often people who've saved a lot of retirement money end up dying with way more money than they need. This is true even if they end up needing long-term care or having a long hospitalization at the end of their lives. The habits that helped these people accumulate a comfortable sum of money backfired on them once they were spending down because they were a little too conservative. They didn't know that they had enough, and they could have loosened the reins a little bit more. Being human, there's always this lingering thought that we don't have enough. And it makes sense really because our brains are evolutionarily wired to pay attention to scarcity. When food and resources were really scarce, this constant hum of worry served us and kept us vigilant. But now it's not always a relevant thinking pattern. Having a scarcity mindset is tied with fear and comparison. And the thing with it is, it never stops unless you interrupt the thought pattern. You can challenge your thoughts that come from scarcity and reframe them. Like, "I don't have enough money right now," is a thought you might have, and you can come up with an alternative thought like, "I have the skills and intelligence and resources to make the money I need." Or maybe you have a thought, "I can't make a change at work because I don't have the support I need." Instead, you could think, "I can find the tools that will help me make this change." If you're a listener of this podcast, I'm almost 100% sure that you are meeting your basic needs and you've either developed or you are developing good habits related to paying off debts and paying yourself first by saving more money for the future before you allocate money to things that are maybe non-essential. So in this context, I think the more relevant question today is probably when will I feel like I've done enough to make a change or walk away from XYZ? It's pro-social to want to do more because as professionals, we live by a code of integrity, and we have a sense of duty to our patients, our clients, and our friends and family too. Many of the people that I coach are trying to either walk away from a specific role or take away some workdays or shifts so that they can feel more balanced, and this is hard to do if you have a constant worry about enoughness. So do you think you've done enough? Let's first talk about being enough. Are you enough? You may not feel worthy of making the change that you wanna make or working less or retiring at this point. But as I've talked about in my book and also before on this podcast, you are already enough. You are worthy just because you exist here on this planet. Y- again, you're already enough, And you have the ability to see enough in whatever way you want to see it. Jennifer Wallace talks about enoughness in her book Never Enough. She describes it as a concept of mattering. In fact, she has this whole new book called Mattering, which is an offshoot of the concept that she developed in Never Enough. And I have yet to read Mattering but I'll link it in the show notes for anyone who's interested. I did read Never Enough, and that book had a surprising amount of content about parenting and not letting your kids succumb to an achievement culture, like doing 10 extracurricular activities and applying to 10 million Ivy League schools and hiring an admissions college coach, and that kind of stuff. So if you're interested in that topic, you may want to read that book as well. We all matter to someone in our lives, whether it be family members, coworkers, patients, clients, hopefully you matter to yourself, and hopefully you matter to a higher power that you believe in as well. So let's shift gears and talk about how you can figure out defining enough for yourself. First, let go of comparisons. It's so easy nowadays to compare ourselves to everyone else. There will always be someone who has more, and there will always be someone who's doing more. But you have no idea what's going on beneath the surface level of all those posts and photos for the other person. So why compare what you're doing and how much you have to someone else? You can also figure out where your sense of enough is coming from. Whose standards or expectations are you trying to live up to, and are they realistic for you and the life you want right now? I told this story in my book, Lean Out, about realizing that as an anesthesiologist, and now more recently as a person who lives and works on a homestead, I really don't need a lot of fancy clothes. And I used to have this huge closet full of silk skirts, heels, sweaters, and the like. I loved fashion. I read fashion magazines. I kept up with the trends and all of that. And the closet that I had was really a throwback to the days of having to dress up for clinic and med school or even back to the days of working in corporate America. And one day, I realized this does not fit my current lifestyle at all. And now, with the exception of a small capsule wardrobe of business wear that I kind of recirculate repeatedly for conferences, my closet consists of casual things and no fancy shoes. So you can ask yourself another question, which is, will I have FOMO if I quit this thing or make this change? Jordan Grumet of Earn and Invest talked about this in one of his recent podcast episodes where he outlined the ten joys of being retired. And I will link the episode in the show notes if you're interested, because I really enjoyed it. He said he doesn't feel bad anymore about passing up on the random opportunity because he's had enough travel and adventure. He doesn't feel like he's gonna be missing out on the next fun thing. He said, quote, "I've made enough money. I've achieved enough things. I've created enough of a career. I've made enough friends." I loved this quote, and this is where I want to get to. Lastly, for tips for defining enough, remember to stay in the present moment. Right now is the only moment we really have control over. If you operate from a worry of not having enough in the future, you're destined to stay where you are and never make any changes. I tend to sometimes fall victim to this type of thinking, so I need to take my own advice. You don't have to have everything planned out and projected for years in advance. Trust that you're doing the practices now such that you will have enough money in the future, and trust that you know yourself well enough to address the question of if you're doing enough. So my plan right now is not to leave my clinical work. It's just to peel back to the minimum amount that I used to be doing. I'm not gonna be taking on extra travel assignments that cost me an entire day on either end like I have done this spring. And I'm also going to peel back on applying for certain opportunities like speaking engagements and hope that if it's the right fit for me, that the opportunity will present itself. My parting question, well, it's actually three questions for you today are: What if you already had enough? What if you've already done enough? What if you are enough? How would these realizations change your current life? Share your thoughts by sending me fan mail through the link in your podcast listening app, leaving a comment on the blog post associated with this episode at practicebalance.com, or sending me a DM on Instagram. I'm Practice Balance. 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