How do you make important decisions? Do you go by your gut, some sort of defined process, or perhaps a combination of the two? When we’re offered an opportunity to participate in something that seems amazing, it’s almost always associated with a cost. That cost is time. Every ‘yes’ is accompanied by even more ‘no’s’.
In today’s episode, we take a look inside a real coaching session that addresses just this scenario. Our client is a physician who wants to develop a decision-making process so that he can derive meaning from his professional life and not take on projects or jobs that on the surface sound intriguing but may end up draining rather than fueling him.
Client Bio
Josh Russell MD is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urgent Care Medicine and is double board certified in Palliative Care and Emergency Medicine. Apart from his clinical practice, he is a writer, educator, entrepreneur, and trivia enthusiast.
Kickassery
Want to re-spark the joy in your practice, get home on time, or just unstick what’s feeling stuck? Start here to learn more about 1 on 1 coaching. You’ll be glad you did.
Episode highlights and session notes
General topic for the session:
Derive meaning from my professional life.
Why is this important right now?
“I overextend myself in a lot of different capacities. I’m just enthusiastic about a lot of things and fall prey to the planning fallacy where I think I can take on a lot more than I can and then I end up a bit over-committed. So if I can figure out what is the most meaningful for me to pursue then, or at least some heuristic of determining what the likelihood of deriving meaning from it is, then I think I’ll be the most satisfied.
And I’ll also be less at risk for taking on projects that are. Not gonna be meaningful or not gonna be rewarding.
Session goal:
Develop a screening question or questions for when I get excited about a project or opportunity so that I can decide whether it’s a hell yes or a no. Here’s what it looked like in real-time…
Question: What are the common threads in the projects in your life that have had longevity and durable joy?
- Personal growth
- Opportunity for creativity
- Continually progressing
- Build on what you’ve built so far
- Relationships, collaboration 1+1=3
- Be surrounded by fellow creatives
- Financially rewarding in a way your time is valued
- Physically sustainable (don’t want to travel)
- Service
- Teaching
- It’s got to be fun or at least have the opportunity for that
Question: What are the common threads in the projects in your life that have NOT had longevity and durable joy but seemed exciting when you said yes?
- Uncompensated
- Totally unsolicited
- Extra clinical shifts
- Extra unwanted stress – need to have insight on what the job is like
- Intuition, spidey sense that this is going to suck
- Doing it just for external merit.
- Distract from other things passionately working on, will this create a lot of no’s
The Josh Russell Hell Yes or No Screening Questionnaire
- If no one knew you did it would you still do it?
- If I had $10 million in the bank, would I take on this project or opportunity if I didn’t get paid?
- Is this opportunity getting me closer to my idealized version of myself or a path to being a miserable son of a bitch (based on past experience)?
- Will this take disproportionate time that leads to family neglect?
- Take stock of bandwidth. Do I have room for this or will I have to throw something out?
- If I were asking myself advice on what to do, listen to how is it being described, am I being fooled by fools gold?
- What are the potential upsides and downsides/risk-benefit beyond just opportunity costs to the other projects I’m working on??
- Take a beat and don’t answer right away. Sleep on it!
Lon Setnik says
Rob and Josh, thank you for putting yourselves out there for the world to learn from and with! I’m going to give some thoughts to: 1) help me characterize what I think and 2) maybe help you or others explore.
– I’m going back to fill out my “hell yes or no” template. This was such a useful activity. Rob, I could really see the value of going through coaching, not sure I can do this on my own, but your prompts (if you are sitting across from yourself with a job offer, let’s go through this list, how will it work for you? And what else?) were fantastic at helping crystallize Josh’s thinking and move from idea to action.
– I’m reading “Saving Time” by Jenny O’dell right now, she has some frameworks for thinking about time that are orthogonal or even skew to our modern “zero-sum” thinking about time. A question from her book is, “What is at a right angle to clock time?” which for me makes me think about seeing time completely differently. I think this book is a helpful lens to add to “Four-thousand weeks” to create a better prism for viewing our experiences and life stories. One risk is that we see time as a tradeoff between x and y, her ideas are “what is z?” I think that means for me, how does my work, hobby, etc. actually augment my home life, relationships, community engagement? What do I learn in my other activities that makes me a better clinician? Can I look at my life as a flywheel to spin, not a pie to divide? and, “Is an hour of clinical work = an hour of wandering in the woods? In what ways yes, in what ways no?” For me, when I am in the back yard looking at my trees, I’ve started to ask, “What would this tree view as useful from its perspective? What is its time scale, and how do I relate to it?”
– Another writer to consider here is Nassim Taleb in “Antifragile: things that gain from disorder.” You can never do only one thing, meaning each decision has the direct and indirect consequences, and in complex systems over time, secondary and tertiary effects dominate, not the primary goals of the action. So, how do I create an “antifragile” existence for me and my family, how do I predict the secondary effects of my actions and decisions? What have I learned from the disruption of COVID and the next, predictably unpredictable disruption, knowing that “things that have never happened before happen all the time.”
For me, as I write, I’m thinking one more question to throw on my list will be, “If I do this or make this type of decision habitually for a long time, what will be the predictable long-term effects on my life buckets (career, health, community, family, finances) and does this support or diminish my (our?) antifragile existence?”
Hope that’s as useful for you as it was for me! Thanks again,
Lon
Lon Setnik, MD, FACEP, MHPE
Associate Director, Clinical Programs
Center for Medical Simulation
Boston, MA
Concord Hospital Emergency Medical Associates
Concord Hospital, Concord, NH