How feeling confused, frustrated, and being unsatisfied led me to a fulfilling career path.
I thought I was going to be a doctor for the rest of my life, and then in 2017 my professional life took a drastic turn.
Can the confusing, frustrating, and unsatisfactory parts of your life and career deliver you your life's best gifts? It sure did for me and it can for you too!
Career Transition
This is a chapter on my personal story, specifically on my career transition. I thought I was going to be a doctor for the rest of my life. But then at age 33 I “ditched” that career and started a brand new one.
Sounds reckless doesn’t it?
I promise, it wasn’t. But to my colleagues, friends, and family, it may have looked that way. After-all, why would I give up my medical career; a prestigious; secure; respected profession?
Why would I walk away from the safety of the title ‘doctor’?
I left medicine pretty early on and self-awareness had a lot to do with it.
To give you context, I left my medical career pretty early on ( 5 years in) not after spending 20 years in it. What I “walked away” from was once my dream career of becoming a psychiatrist - which is the field I was working in when I evolved into my career as a coach.
To put it shortly, I realized my dream had evolved while I was working in Psychiatry.
Contrary to how it looked to the world, It was not a reckless decision but a thought provoking; mindset shifting one.
It wasn’t a reckless decision; although to many it appeared that way. It wasn’t a decision I made lightly; considering the amount of time, money, and energy I had invested in my career ( We’re talking 10 years of education, not including high-school).
It most definitely wasn’t an easy decision to make but a necessary one for me. So listen to me hard when I say this: The decisions that matter are not going to be easy 99% of the times.
But you do need to decide to find out what happens next.
Decisions that truly matter in life, will challenge you to the core.
For me, it was hard. Painful. Confusing. Regardless, I still went through with it.
Because you know what was even more painful? The uneasy feeling I constantly felt when on the job, including but not limited to:
Constantly feeling like I wasn’t really making a difference or an impact. This made it clear to me that doing that is important for me in life and career.
I was running through my days like a zombie. It made me realize how I don’t wish to live another day like that. I say this while I recognize the place of privilege I was in. I didn’t have any kids, or a mortgage to worry about, and have a deeply supportive partner - I took advantage of this privilege and made one of the hardest decisions in my life so far.
I hated redundancy. I loved the challenge of every patient case being different, until it all started feeling redundant because of the limitations of care available to serve the service users.
I hated giving band-aid solutions. I wanted to offer so much more. It made me realize how much I hated offering a “conveyor belt” medical care to my patients. It wasn’t practical to spend more than 15 minutes with follow ups because it meant making others wait in the waiting room longer, but inside I knew 15 minutes were not enough to facilitate care and healing in the way I wanted to.
I wanted so much more than a job that paid me an exchange of the hours I put in. I wanted to deliver and get paid more. I wanted to make a difference in others' lives and in mine while doing that. I wanted more freedom on my time.
I hated looking for resources for patients, that did not even exist in the “system”.
I hated being in that position of saying “ I’m sorry, I can’t do anything more.” (Not a sentence I ever have to think about saying now to my clients).
Do you ever feel like you're meant to do more?
I felt like there was more I could do to enhance people’s lives than prescribed medications.
(Please note, I fully support and understand the important of medication. Modern medication can save lives and help bring functionality to many affected my mental health illnesses.)
What gaps or lacks do you currently see in your life and biz?
I noticed that the medications I had authority to prescribe, neither generated positivity, nor did they eradicate fear from my patients lives. And yet, negative emotions and fear ruled people’s lives.
I thought hard about why and how do fear and negativity holds us back so much?
Why and how do we become obstacles in our own way?
I got a real good look into this myself, when I found myself cornered into a dark place for months. That dark place shook my beliefs around my career path, it made me question the choices I had been making up until then. I felt a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual uneasiness at the thought of continuing my career path as it was at the time. The day or two off after being on-call for 12-24 hours straight were spent completely zoned out into a blur that I still can’t remember.
Even though things felt confusing, I opened myself up to asking myself some straight and tough questions ( answers to which scared the heck out of me). To cut the story short, there was anxiety with physiological symptoms in addition to the emotional and mental symptoms, deep sadness, and a sense of betrayal I felt to myself the more I tried to side with continuing on with the medical path.
My two saving graces.
I turned to the two things that always gave me my answers: Science and Spirituality. I committed to go deep into doing inner work and outer work to create a better life, to become a better human; a happier one. Most importantly, to get back to my purpose in a way that made drove me with joy instead of obligation. I committed to being in integrity mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Befriend your discomfort, commit to your decisions, and back them with intentional actions.
Once I got clear on my decision, albeit a challenging one, I knew I had committed to creating a liberating and deeply satisfying career. That commitment led me to my first action: quitting my doctor job.
With this new realization, I wanted to be in a position to help people shift out of this uneasiness in life and take back their freedom. And so I began my journey into coaching and consulting. I evolved from coaching people on their mental wellbeing to coaching service based entrepreneurs into creating successful, impactful, and liberating lives through their business.
I learned that it's best not to let the discomfort be your enemy. Befriend it, and it might just reveal your life’s biggest gifts to you.
Ditch the need for validation by making sure your mind, body, and soul are all working in harmony.
When you take a bold decision in your life, there are high chances you will have little to no support. But there is a way through this. Bringing alignment across my Mind-Body-Soul was key for me. It also kept me from drowning in the muddy waters and stick to my plan. It kept me from giving up and let me show up outside even when some parts of me were struggling on the inside.
If you are also someone who wants a life of freedom, it’s going to take some emotional labour to get there. But if you let your Mind, Body, and Soul support you through alignment across all three domains, there is no way you could ever fail.
Through this alignment you can build an inspired foundation, form intelligent plans, and recognize the intentional actions you need to take to overcome any hurdles in life and make ANYTHING successful.
If you're currently in a dilemma to transition out of a career to start a business, or to bring a change in your business or may be trying to figure out a way to make your business work better, then sitting on it for months isn’t going to help. That’s not what I did. I got real with myself, I opened myself to real, straight and difficult questions to figure out the way forward. Then, I took action on it.
Taking intentional action is the ONLY thing that will actually bring change, but it can be hard to take actions when you don’t know which ones matter the most. May be the first one can be you talking to someone who’s done it before you?
I am inviting you to a complimentary call with me to strategize about your next best action(s). I’d love to share with you what I know and give you some direction, and discuss what support I have available for you. These chats are always insightful and you’ll walk away with a little more direction than you might have now.
You can book a complimentary call here: Clarity Call.
Thanks for being awesome and reading this blog about a chapter of my personal life.
Love and truth always,
Harjot Mann, MD