The Reactive Life

Your world is full of distractions and it’s easy to get caught up in all the noise. It’s hard to focus on yourself due to all the time pressures, and it’s also hard to find the space to proactively set goals for the future with your significant other. As you start your career as an attending physician, merge into normal humanity, and often begin family life it is easy to live in a constant state of reactivity.

The only way you can truly be successful is if you have a clear goal in mind and then stay focused on reaching those goals.

Given the constant demands of modern medical life, the mental drain of each clinical day, and then the constant pressures of home life, it’s hard to carve out any time to stop, think, and reflect. In many regards, you are happy if make coherent decisions before you collapse into bed and surf through your e-mail and social feeds on your phone each night.

Get Away

To thoughtfully create any personal or professional goals most of you will have to intentionally retreat from the normalcy of everyday life. There are many ways that you can get away from all the noise and focus on what you need to do. One of the best ways is by creating a space for yourself and your significant other where there are no distractions. This will allow you to completely focus on your life and well-being without any interruptions or distractions coming your way.

Involve Your Spouse

I agree with the Prudent Plastic Surgeon that physician couples should share their finances and with that in mind, this goal-setting retreat should inclusively both members of the household. Of course, if you are single it’s a little less complicated, but the value of the retreat is still critical.

Early in our marriage my wife and I would tap into our parents and ask them to watch our kids for a 24-hour trip to downtown Chicago (2 hours away from our home) where we could indulge ourselves a bit, talk and dream together, set some goals, and actually create our annual budget (goals and finances often go hand in hand).

Use A Guide

Every year we use the same self-guided questionnaire that I developed for this annual retreat. It is called “Dare To Dream” and you get a free copy here.

It is so much fun to freely dream, talk, and connect about our lives and those of our family. We like to write down our answers to the questions, and then file them away with the year marked on it. It’s fascinating to look back at those documents, as they chronicle the step-by-step development of our lives. We also complete our personal annual budget during this time because our finances have to be organized to support our goals.

As the years have gone by and our finances have gotten more complex in connection to our family of 7, have had to gradually stretch out the time away to 48 hours, then eventually to 72 hours.

Expense It Out

Fast forward to the present, with 9 micro-businesses sprinkled in on top of all this, and it takes a full week for us to sort through our “Stillson Enterprise” and prayerfully discuss personal/family/business matters as well as create each of the associated budgets. The nice feature of this being a week away is that it is now covered as a business expense rather than a personal expense. As you hear me say all the time, this is just another nice aspect of having your own micro-professional corporation.

Retreat Preparation

As you prepare to get away, especially if this is a new process, you as a couple will find it helpful to spend some pre-retreat time in mindful reflection and prayer about your lives. My wife and I pray together nightly, so this is pretty easy to integrate into our natural flow (by the way, they are not long prayer sessions). I also like to run, so spending some time in prayerful meditation is natural in my day-to-day flow as well.

Regardless of your rituals and routines, take some time to prepare yourself for the retreat as it will make it more productive and enjoyable. For instance, this prep process would allow my wife and I to use the two-hour drive to Chicago to discuss the questions guide, and if we were really efficient—we would get the budget done before we got to Chicago. Then we could relax, take in the city, and casually continue to process and discuss any elements that needed extra time to develop a complete consensus together.

Often it is the physician half of the couple that often dominates and colors these conversations due to their all-consuming job requirements, but the truth of the matter is that each member of a couple is equally valuable and deserves full consideration of their needs and goals. Share decision-making with equally valued voices should lead to consensus decision-making that holistically takes into consideration each person in the relationship. This is especially true if the non-physician spouse has a career too, or happens to be a physician as well. For stay-at-home spouses and loved ones, there is the risk to be undervalued when paired with a physician. Their lives, goals, and well-being are no less valuable and their needs merit equal consideration with conjoined personal life and professional goals.

I know when we had 5 children under 5 (yes it is possible) I had the far easier job of going to the clinic and hospital each day! The relentless job of managing our home and family was an incredibly valuable role and task that was masterfully handled by my wife.

Although the roles may be different, each person needs equally considered and valued in this process.

Questions To Reflect On

Here are just a few questions that I would recommend you consider during this goal-setting retreat. I like to start with a look-back process that involves the past year as there are usually things to glean from this that will impact your conversations about the future.

• Review what you liked and disliked about the past year both personally and professionally. This requires some vulnerability but is a powerful exercise. I suggest you include reflections about your children, especially if they are in your home still.

• What do you and your spouse like and dislike about your current practice-professional environment? This topic always seemed to circulate around home-work balance for us since medical practice can easily consume any and all marginalized time, then start to steal from our home life. I can remember the days of doing 2 hours of EHR work at home after the kids were in bed just so I could be home for supper and spend time with them. Thankfully I have developed more resilient habits that keep the EHR and work separated from my home life much better now.

• How can your family be more connected with each other this year? What are the areas that need refining? One of the most important connection times that we have discovered as a family is prioritizing eating dinner together. The 30-60 minutes of looking at each other eye-eye allow each of us to connect over the events of the day. My kids in particular always enjoyed a HIPPA-compliant “patient of the day” social story that I would share. Sometimes it simply was like a parable to discuss life situations, but other times it was the diagnostic dilemma that I would invite them to help me solve. Yes, each of my kids has dutifully learned how to take a history on a fictitious patient and know how to come up with a differential diagnosis:). Beyond the dinner table, other ways to connect involve using texting or social media such as signals to check in throughout the day, and also creating a shared calendar that allowed everyone to know what is going on with the family.

• What do we enjoy doing as a family? Any special trips/activities this year? Use your high income and resources to create family experiences that all can partake in. Research shows experiences are far more meaningful than objects or things. Be creative, and look for things that can be a mixture of leisure and adventure.

• What do we want our lives to look like 10 years from now? This question will force you to think with the big picture in mind. The Physician on Fire views this as a critical element of his backward budgeting methodology. I happen to think he is right. Along the same lines, I like how the Physician Philosopher coaches us to manage what the end goal looks like with his life planning guide that focuses on the 3 Kinder questions.

Conclusion

When you do all of this together, you are making sure you and your partner are on the same page in life and with your finances. That unity will bring peace and fill your love tank in a way just about nothing else will.

By doing this heavy lifting together, you will put yourself and your household in a position to proactively accomplish your shared goals.