The Delayed Gratification Trap
Are you stuck in the Marshmallow Experiment? Medical education and training can deliver rewards and satisfaction in terms of achievement, increasing competency and patient interaction, but it is also an exercise in significant sacrifice and delayed gratification. Such things as time, money, relationships, leisure activities are put on hold in service of becoming and growing as …
Building Your Tribe
“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” Marcel Proust Entrepreneur, investor and author, Tim Ferris, opens his fascinating book Tribe of Mentors with the quote above. Turning 40 and feeling at …
Ice Fishing
“Perhaps they are seeking the greatest attraction of ice fishing: peace and tranquility. Out on the ice the silence settles in. The world calms. Restoration begins.” Reading about ice fishing is not something that I would normally do, but I have moved to a part of the country where it is a not uncommon activity. …
Shifting Gear: Sportscars as a Metaphor for Everything
The incomparable Seth Godin brilliantly conceives of a provocative and succinct way to view “jobs, relationships and everything in between”. Ponder the four quadrants and decide which car you’re driving (or want to drive): fast and secure, hot rod, joy ride, or boring. Is it time to shift gear?
The Four-Fold Way
In shamanic traditions, it is believed that optimum health results from the equal interplay between four archetypes: the Warrior, the Healer, the Visionary, and the Teacher. Through her travels and research, the late Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., anthropologist, author, educator and corporate consultant, developed an appreciation of the universality and applicability of these archetypes to all humankind whatever …
charity:water
“2 billion people live without” safely managed drinking water services” (on site, available when needed and uncontaminated).” WHO Drinking-Water Fact Sheet Imagine a popular nightclub promoter deciding to turn his life around and channel his energies and passion into making a difference in the world? Scott Harrison has built one of the most successful and …
Do you have space in your life?
“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.” – Walt Whitman Do you start each day “hoping” to catch up, take charge, feel less stressed, appear less distracted, act more focused, etc.? Do you have the space to breathe, pause and reflect? Are you always simply waiting for the next hour, day or …
Escaping the Soul-Sucking Vortex of a Toxic Workplace
It’s likely that all of us have, at some point in our careers, worked in a toxic workplace. Workplaces where the leadership is either willfully ignorant or consciously complicit in implementing policies that create breeding grounds of cutthroat competitiveness, loneliness, exhaustion and misery. We have many rational reasons for staying in a toxic workplace. Professor …
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Healing the Hole of Loneliness in Medicine
“We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” Albert Schweitzer We focus a great deal on “hard skills” in medicine-medical knowledge, clinical skills and competency, surgical expertise. Yet, it is often the “soft skills” that grease the wheels of our life and work. One of our most powerful soft skills …