Finding your Purpose

I bet back in history when you were applying for medical or dental school you knew exactly what you wanted your purpose to be. Something along the lines of “helping people” in your chosen professional capacity. However, when was the last time you considered what your purpose is in life right now?

As time passes in our chosen careers its very easy to lose sight of the reason why we chose to do them? In our modern, busy lives we are juggling the patients, our staff, the business and not to mention all the technology! So it’s no surprise that we are not remembering all the warm and fuzzy reasons why we chose to be here. What started our passion?

Here are a few ways to reinvigorate your sense of purpose:

• How about you personally call the patient to check in on them to see how they’re doing after their visit? This will give you the opportunity to hear from them first hand and you will hear the compliments directly or if they need something more you will be the one to help them out. Your patient will love the personal interaction and you will benefit from hearing directly from the patient.

• Think about the tasks that you used to do when you first started being a doctor that you now don’t do because someone does it for you. Which of those do you miss? Maybe do one of these things a week to remind you of why you enjoy what you do.

• Consider what it is about your current role that you really enjoy. It’s not often we have chance to really analyse what we are doing as we so so busy living life. Once you have identified what makes you happy you’ll be able to recognise those moments day to day.

I had the fabulous opportunity to be a guest of Dr Errin Weisman on her podcast Doctor Me First. Dr Errin asked me to chose a word to talk about and I picked purpose. The Doctor Me First podcasts are all worth listening too with so many great physician guests and Dr Errin’s down to earth, relaxed conversation.