Stop going through the motions and actually have the life you dreamed of [PODCAST]

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“Try incorporating the three small practices of your choice into your day-to-day for two weeks and watch your experience of your life transform.

You have worked far too hard to just go through the motions forever. Starting today, you can begin to enjoy all that you’ve created with this simple infusion of pleasure.”

Allison Anderson is a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist and life coach.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Want to stop going through the motions and actually have the life you dreamed of? Try this.”

The Podcast by KevinMD is brought to you by the Nuance Dragon Ambient eXperience.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Rate and review the show at kevinmd.com/rate. Subscribe at kevinmd.com/podcast. Today on the show we have Allison Anderson. She’s a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist and life coach. Her KevinMD article is titled “Want to stop going through the motions and actually have the life you dreamed of? Try this.” Allison, welcome to the show.

Allison Anderson: Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. I’m really honored to be here.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get to the article in a little bit. First off, briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Allison Anderson: So I am a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist, actually at the hospital where I was born, ironically, for the last seven years. I am currently switching practices. I got an offer in Southern California, near where I did my fellowship, so I’m in the process of a move to a new private practice group there, and it’s really exciting.

Along the way in my medical career, I also got involved in life coaching. About five or six years ago, I heard of this physician coach. She’s actually a weight loss coach, and she’s really big in the life coaching circles, and she was a great example of what’s possible in the coaching world. So I drew a lot of inspiration from her, and I became a client of life coaching and have been ever since. Because it was so transformational in my life, I decided to become a certified coach as well. I finished my certification earlier this year, and in addition to my clinical cardiothoracic anesthesia practice, I also coach my fellow women physicians, primarily on their marriages. So that’s kind of what I have going on.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that life coaching was transformational. Give us an example of how that was.

Allison Anderson: Yeah. So for me, it really centered on my experience of my marriage. At the time, pretty much throughout medical school, residency, all my training, and the early part of my private practice career, I was married to my first husband, and I had a really volatile relationship with him that caused a lot of stress in my personal life. It resulted in a lot of overworking for me in my professional life, which, as you can imagine, is a great way to burn yourself out really early on.

So when I found coaching, the sort of mindset shifts that I experienced because of the very simple thought work that is embraced by this coaching modality that I’m trained in really changed the way I was experiencing my life, my professional life, and my personal life. For me, it actually ended up that I found the truth of what I really wanted, which was not to be married to that person anymore.

So I think that if I hadn’t found coaching, I might have found myself in a position that I see a lot of my fellow women physicians in, which is that they just stay stuck in a marriage that they actually don’t want to be in, or they don’t take steps to figure out how to make it great. For me, it ended up that I got divorced from that person, and then I had coaching to have my back along the way as I navigated being a single mom of three daughters, how to balance that with my career, and how to navigate the dating world. Now I’m married again to the man of my dreams, the best partner I could have imagined, and I think that has a lot to do with the way my mindset has changed because of coaching.

Kevin Pho: So talk us through a typical week and how you plan coaching with what you do as a cardiac anesthesiologist.

Allison Anderson: Yeah. So I’m a little bit extra and hyperachieving, as I’m sure a lot of us are, so my weeks are pretty packed. I generally work most days, Monday through Friday, at the hospital. Because I’m in the transition between practices right now, my schedule is a little bit different currently, but in general I work mostly Monday through Friday at the hospital. I take some amount of call. Obviously, for cardiac surgery, that’s a big deal; you always have to have someone on call. So I have my day job doing that.

I have been fortunate to be in a practice, currently for all of these years and in the one I’m joining, where I have a lot of weekend time free. So my coaching practice is actually something that I work on a lot on the weekends. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like something that I really enjoy, so it’s been a really fun creative outlet versus sort of the structure of medicine. I do a lot of my client sessions either after work or on weekends. Those are all via Zoom, so it’s pretty easy to fit them in. I do a lot of my creative work, my website work, and my podcast recording (I also have a podcast), all in my free time, either after work, sometimes between cases if there’s a cancellation, or on the weekends.

And then I have my three daughters, so most evenings are dedicated to them and my husband. When we have more to do, that’s when we do more. So that’s what I always think about.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s talk about your KevinMD article, titled “Want to stop going through the motions and actually have the life you dreamed of? Try this.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read your article, just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it.

Allison Anderson: Yeah. So this article is informed mostly by my coaching work, but also by my personal experience professionally, in my medical life. What I find is that so many of us, women especially in medicine, but really all of us, go through the motions forever, and we’re really good at delaying gratification. I think we learned that through our medical training really early on. We think, “OK, once I finish medical school, then things will be better in my life, just better overall.” “OK, once I finish residency and I’m an attending, everything will be better.” It’s that arrival fallacy thing, where we think that once we accomplish a certain goal, suddenly everything will magically be great in our lives.

But what that means is that we’re really good at putting off our enjoyment of our life, and we stay in that pattern even when we’ve accomplished whatever the goal was that we originally intended. So we finish our training, we become an attending, and then we still just go through the motions, and we rinse and repeat every day. We think, “OK, well, I’ll start enjoying my life when my debt from medical school is paid off. I’ll enjoy it when I get a vacation. I’ll enjoy it when my marriage is better. I’ll enjoy it when the kids grow up. I’ll enjoy it when I lose weight.” Whatever it is, we put off our enjoyment, and I think that contributes a lot to our burnout overall. I think that keeps us stuck in this place where we’re not fully present at work because we’re thinking about stresses at home, and then we’re not fully present at home because we’re thinking about work. And sometimes we’re overworking, like I did, to avoid our stresses at home.

So for me, it’s really important to intentionally infuse my daily life with pleasure, with enjoyment. In the article, I give sort of some simple ways to think about how to amp up your daily enjoyment or pleasure in your life. I divide it into three categories: There are physical or sensory pleasures, there’s intellectual pleasure, and then there’s spiritual or creative pleasure. I highly recommend to my clients, my friends, anyone I talk to, and myself that we all pick at least one thing from each of those categories to intentionally focus on each day, so that we can actually enjoy our life right now and not wait until “someday when.”

Examples of that might be, as far as physical or sensory pleasures, maybe go outside and be in nature and really enjoy that. As far as intellectual pleasures, maybe instead of just listening to the news that you don’t actually really enjoy, put on a podcast, like one of ours, and get some intellectual stimulation and enjoyment from that. As far as spiritual or creative pleasures, for some people that could be something like meditation. It could be art. It could be creating something, like a business or a website or a podcast. I just think it’s really important to intentionally focus on those things so that we don’t feel like we’re just stuck on the treadmill of life every single day. We’ve created these amazing careers, so we should probably enjoy the rest of our life too, I think.

Kevin Pho: So I’m sure you get a lot of physicians who say, “How can I intentionally incorporate pleasure in my life, like what you suggested?” Because they’re seeing patients all day, in the hospital all day, they come back home, and they have to handle their kids and family. So how do you intentionally incorporate pleasure? Can you share a case study, a scenario, or an example of how someone can incorporate some of the ideas you mentioned?

Allison Anderson: Yeah. So one really great way, which one of my clients actually does regularly now that we’ve had this discussion, is during any type of break you get at work. Some people might have a lunch break. If they have a clinic, maybe they get an actual lunch break. Anesthesiologists usually don’t, but there is at least a five- or ten-minute period between cases sometime in the day. Same with any type of practice; there’s got to be five or ten minutes that you have to yourself. So you can hit all of those areas of pleasure or enjoyment all at once, simply by going outside during your lunch break, sitting in the sun, or taking a little walk. Maybe you listen to music while you do it. Maybe you write something down in your journal, or you write for creative writing purposes. Maybe you listen to something else that’s stimulating. You can do that in five or ten minutes in the middle of your day, and it really serves to break it up and center you and ground you back into your life and why you’re even working so hard.

It could be small things, like when you get home, you do a little ritual to disconnect from your workday and go into your day at home. I have some clients, and myself, who like to sit in the car for about five minutes and just do some breathing work or some meditation to separate myself from whatever happened in the day. It might have been crazy, was probably stressful, and was definitely hard, taking care of cardiac surgery patients. I leave that behind, and then I’m ready to go into my evening with my husband and my kids without being dragged down by all the responsibilities. It gives me sort of a touch point to be present again.

Kevin Pho: So when you talk to some of your clients and they successfully incorporate some of these ideas of incorporating pleasure and enjoyment into their routine, and of trying to break from that arrival fallacy, how long does it normally take for them to break that mindset, or to change that mindset?

Allison Anderson: Yeah, so that can be pretty variable, but it’s really surprising how quickly these changes can actually make an impact. I have a lot of people tell me that after just a week or two, they notice that their experience of their life is different, just by doing these very simple things in the day, because this doesn’t have to be time-consuming, right? The point is not, “Oh, I have to wait until I have a week off of work so I can actually try to get back to myself and enjoy.” These are like five minutes at a time, little breaks in the day.

So I have had lots of people say that within one to two weeks, if they do that consistently, they really notice that they feel less stressed, less burned out, more present, more patient, and happier, and that they’re overall enjoying their life a lot more. Their experience of their life changes, so it can be quick. Now, that default pattern is always going to be in the background, because we’ve practiced delaying gratification for so long. We’re really good at it, so it’s normal for us to slide back into that. But that’s why we have to intentionally remind ourselves that we want to create more pleasure in our life, we want to purposefully enjoy it now, and be present with those decisions and implement them every day.

Kevin Pho: So tell us a success story. It could be a case study; it could be one of your clients, where someone has moved the needle by deliberately doing this.

Allison Anderson: Yeah. So I have one particular client that comes to mind. This is an interesting one, but she implemented this little routine when she came home from work, and it might have been a natural extension of the very intense COVID period, where we would all come home, or most of us, I think, would come home from the hospital and not let anybody in the family get near us. We would go and immediately take a shower, wash off all the COVID cooties and all the things, because we didn’t really know what we were dealing with, and we were all in that state of really trying to protect our families from what we were experiencing at work.

So I have one client who started doing that shower routine immediately after work during COVID, and she then intentionally switched it: She takes a cold shower as soon as she gets home, and while she’s in the shower, she really pays attention to every sensory detail. She notices the feeling of the water. She notices the feeling of the soap on her skin. It literally takes five minutes, but she gives herself that space to disconnect from whatever happened during the day and prime herself for what’s going to happen the rest of the evening.

She says that just by doing that, she feels a lot more present, both in her work life and her home life, and she’s been a lot more patient with her kids and her husband, because she’s created this moment of enjoyment for herself where she doesn’t feel like she’s just running on the hamster wheel from work to home responsibilities. So that’s one that comes to mind right off the bat.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking about Allison Anderson. She’s a cardiothoracic anesthesiologist and life coach. We’re talking about her KevinMD article, titled “Want to stop going through the motions and actually have the life you dreamed of? Try this.” Allison, what are some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Allison Anderson: I think my biggest take-home is that we’ve all worked way too hard creating our careers, and life is far too short to just rinse and repeat forever. What is the point of that, really? So I would love for us all to start enjoying our lives now. We get burned out, we aren’t present in our jobs, we aren’t enjoying our life at home, and I just don’t think there’s any need for that.

I think that it can be as small as taking a few minutes in the morning to listen to your favorite music. I think it can be as simple as doing three minutes of just breathing and meditation in the evening before bed. All of these little intentional changes can really uplevel your entire experience of your life, and then that makes us better doctors, and it makes us better parents, and it makes us better partners and better friends, and better in all of the ways, and we enjoy our lives more. So my take-home message is really, let’s stop going through the motions, and let’s enjoy the amazing lives that we’ve created now, because we deserve it.

Kevin Pho: Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Allison Anderson: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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