Wise Wednesdays

It was about 5 years ago when I declared my self-diagnosis: I don’t know how to relax. Of course, it wasn’t strictly true. I went on holiday, enjoyed good times with friends and family and loved reading interesting books by the sea. But I’d been on a treadmill of achievement and was starting to see the limitation. It was endless. A key moment came towards the end of my specialist training when I was being invited to step into the next part of my career. I had a viscerally felt realisation that I was being invited to build my own gilded cage. I had to course-correct and step onto a path that felt closer to the truth of who I am.. A downside of course-correction is that you may not know what you’re supposed to do - not immediately at least. It’s not a bad thing. It’s the start of a new journey. As Tony Robbins says: You’re confused? Congratulations! The natural reaction to not knowing what to do is to panic and think something is wrong leading to: searching for exter...

What do you do for a living when the best part of a million dollars has been invested in your education?...That’s a lot of education…For me, it was more than half of my life in fact. In a knowledge economy, you’d think I could do any job I wanted, right? But that’s not how I felt when it came to crunch time deciding on a long term job at the end of my specialist training. Nothing seemed to fit. I was like a grumpy kid who didn’t want to play with anyone…And I was so confused. Perhaps I was bored. Or just tired. I mean, that was a lot of exams, weekends working, nights on call, documents filled in, papers written…not to mention interviews, vivas, case scenarios even a good old anatomy steeplechase where you’re presented with body parts that you have to name bits of in a race against the clock…Pretty strange, thinking back. All that would easily warrant a year off doing nothing surely... But no, I was told it was time to decide what I was going to do until my retire...