5 Ways to Reconnect with your Purpose

FIRST STEP: YOU HAVE TO WANT TO BE WELL TO DO WELL.

“I had to think out of the box...” I did all the “right” things: went to college, graduate school and medical school, got married, had children. Still, when I looked at my career, things just didn’t sit well. 

I was a successful and young pediatrician working for one of the top academic medical centers in the country, and I loved my patients, but I was miserable. When I looked around, my colleagues were overworked, tired, and burnt out, too. It was the end of training: Wasn’t I supposed to have found happiness and my dream job? 

I read books like Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, listened to self-help podcasts like Dreams in Drive and Therapy for Black Girls, subscribed to the best blogs, you name it.

I had some serious sit-downs with my husband and friends, ones where we spoke frankly about how our happiness was our responsibility. A quote from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters replayed in my mind. In one scene a healer is talking to a woman with severe pain and disfigurement. She asks the woman, “Do you want to be well?” and goes on to share that there is a lot of responsibility in being well. 

I took heed and began forging my path to wellness in my career—to harmony and balance in my life—so that I could be a better me to myself, a better partner to my spouse, a better mother, and a better pediatrician. 

Here are some of the things that resonated with me on this journey:

1. COMMIT TO GREATNESS.

Reset your vision of what could have been and what should be. 

I had spent a decade thinking about what my dream job would be. But when I distilled it down to its essence, I realized I wanted to do great work with children and families. I didn’t need a big hospital system or a fancy clinic to do that—in fact, they were getting in the way of my real, authentic work. 

I now do house calls and telemedicine for children and families in my area and it feels great meeting families where they are. In order to do the work I was called to do, I had to think out of the box and get out of the suffocating systems of old-school medicine. 

2. TAP INTO YOUR NETWORK. 

I have been with Mocha Moms, a support group for mothers of color, since my oldest was born in 2011. Over the years the group has shared so many stories of how other Mochas used entrepreneurship to orchestrate the lives that they and their families needed. 

I let these stories inspire and encourage me. I reached out to other physicians in my area and nationally, and learned that my story was not unique and that I was not alone. I forged great collaborations with other house-call doctors, local midwives, and other small-business owners, and now have a thriving network that I check in with regularly. 

3. KNOW THAT FINDING HARMONY IN CAREER AND LIFE IS AN ITERATIVE PROCESS WITH MANY STARTS AND STOPS. 

I am living this now. Forging a nontraditional path means experiencing things you never imagined. Sure, I don’t have a boss breathing down my neck telling me to check off a box on the computer system, but I still have a ton of paperwork. I remind myself daily that even when doing administrative tasks, I am working toward my vision and am improving children’s lives one home at a time. 

This process also requires you to let go of many of the harmful habits that have shaped who you are. Just like the woman in The Salt Eaters who for so long had been defined by her severe pain and disfigurement—to truly be well, she had to redefine herself. 

For those of us in high-stress fields and jobs, we have to redefine ourselves in a way that doesn’t use being exploited and constantly overworked as part of our defining characteristics. For me, that required and still requires self-reflection on what it means to be in service to others. Serving others does not mean being exploited or working crazy, unsustainable hours. It means being unwavering in my commitment to a life that allows me to serve sustainably and passionately for years to come. 

4. ALWAYS KEEP A PAYING SIDE HUSTLE. 

Entrepreneurship is ever-changing, but your rent, mortgage, and bills are not. 

Even though your work is fulfilling and exciting, until you are getting a regular and sustainable paycheck, you will need to keep some side hustles in rotation. 

5. FIND ALL OF THE WAYS TO BRING JOY INTO YOUR LIFE THAT YOU CAN. 

Check in with your sisterhood circle regularly. (I do that on my parenting group’s ladies-only GroupMe.) 

Check in and make time for loving relationships with your spouse or partner and commit to prioritizing your relationship with time and attention whenever you can. Try not to talk about your stressors for too long and also don’t talk about the kids on date night if you can! 

Spend time out in nature. Research shows that time spent outside improves health. 

Play outside with your kids. We try to take a family walk around the block every day and we use our local national parks for hiking as much as possible. 

As the healer in The Salt Eaters said, there is so much responsibility in being well and it ultimately rests with each one of us. Let’s be well!

Originally posted at: https://www.matermea.com/blog/5-ways-to-reconnect-with-your-purpose
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Photos courtesy of Leslie Kershaw: http://www.lesliekershaw.com/

My ideal medical practice - I opened up shop!

House call doctor tools of the trade. I have since gotten another rolling bag.

Over the last few years I have slowly been inching toward establishing my own practice. And this January, I did it, I incorporated my practice, Healthy Home Pediatrics! It is a house call based concierge, or direct primary care, practice serving Washington, DC and the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas.

In my first blog post as a new business owner, I wrote:

It feels so good to work hard for my own vision. For the last 5 years I have worked extremely hard for visions that were established by hospital administrators or the organizations that I worked for. Too often, these visions fell short of what I knew my colleagues and I were truly capable of and far short of what patients really wanted and needed.

During times like this, when I am venturing into the unknown, I often go back to one of my all time favorite books, The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. I have read this book countless times. In it, Coelho shares the story of a young shepherd boy who leaves home and goes in search of his dreams. Along the way he is tested and experiences both profound joy and deep disappointments. One of my favorite sections of the book shares a conversation with the boy, his heart, and the alchemist:

“People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

“Every second of the search is an encounter with God,” the boy told his heart. “When I have been truly searching for my treasure, every day has been luminous, because I’ve known that every hour was a part of the dream that I would find it. When I have been truly searching for my treasure, I’ve discovered things along the way that I never would have seen had I not had the courage to try things that seemed impossible for a shepherd to achieve.”

This is my dream. To practice medicine in the way that feels good to my heart, in a way that I know will help families and my community. To be unhindered by traditional systems such as hospital systems and clinic administrators. To collaborate directly with my patients and their families. To build sustainable relationships with families that help prevent disease and suffering. To be there for my patients when they need me.

Many thanks to KC and others for encouraging me and supporting me. A gentle nudge from her is what prompted this post. Even though it is scary, sharing such a personal detailed account on MiM, I want to share this new phase of my life because I have already received countless messages from colleagues, friends and family saying how much my business has inspired them to pursue their own dreams. I want to take you all on this new path with me. Let me know if there are particular topics about entrepreneurship and balancing work and life that you would like me to write about.

Thanks Mothers in Medicine for inspiring me!

Please follow my journey on social media:

https://www.facebook.com/pedsdrj

https://www.instagram.com/pedsdrj/

https://twitter.com/pedsdrj

What my toddler is teaching me about growth

In the last couple of weeks, my son has been learning to identify colors. Mama and Dada are bursting with pride that he's so verbal and learning new things so quickly (he's not quite two years old). For the first few days, he would try to identify a color and be right maybe ten percent of the time. When we'd gently correct him, his little brow would furrow for a fraction of a second, and then he'd try again. He's been persistent, and now a few weeks in, he names the colors of the flowers and the cars that we see walking around our neighborhood. And he's so excited when he gets it - just bursting with pride that he's learned something new.

I have a lot to learn from my son. He is curious and eager to learn, and he doesn't give up when he struggles. He's not embarrassed to admit that he doesn't know something, and why should he be? It's all new to him, and he's learning so much! He's having fun, even when he doesn't know the answer.

In just 7 short weeks, I'll be a brand new intern, and I will struggle. I will be wrong often. I will try my best and still fall short. Obviously, the stakes are drastically different for me than they are for him. But if I can approach the next phase of my training with half of my son's enthusiasm, joy and persistence in learning, I think I'll be ok.