Balance Between Personal and Professional Lives

Slide program that provides ten steps to create a balance between personal and professional lives

1. 10 Suggestions to Create
Balance and Enjoyment in
Your Personal and
Professional Life
Neil Baum
New Orleans, LA

2. Why we have trouble with
balance?
•Medical school
•Post-graduate training
•Practice
•We take our work home
•We are seldom “off”
•We don’t take the time to recharge our
batteries

3. #1 Be a student
•You are never done learning
•Medicine is a journey not a
destination

5. Be a student

6. Podcasting

11. Take home message
•Always find time to be a student for your
entire career

12. 2.Be ethical
•Hippocratic Oath - do no harm
•Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to
have your action on the front page
of the paper on told on 60 minutes
•Ethic courses (?)

13. Story of the Jehovah’s
Witness

14. Story of Dr. Seybold

15. 2. Be ethical
•Use good judgment
•At the end of the day, just do what’s
right and in the best interest of the
patient

16. 3.Set priorities-God, Family,
and Practice
•Rabbi Harold Kushner

17. Set Priorities
•“I never met a man (doctor) on his\her
death bed who said ‘I wish I would have
spent one more day at the office (seen
one more patient)’”
Rabbi Harold Kushner

18. 4. Learn to say no

19. Just say no
•There is no faster road to burn-out
than taking on too many projects and
accepting too many responsibilities.

20. The “magic” questions
•Will the obligation enhance my
career?
•Will the commitment take away from
my time with my family and friends?
•Will this obligation lead to balance or
imbalance in my life?

21. Take home message…
It is not a sin to say "no".

22. 5. Make a difference
•You have incredible education
and skills
•Are you making a difference
in this world?

23. Three doctors who made a
difference

24. Dr. Bill Krissoff

25. Example of Dr. Bill Krissoff
•"Both my sons were hugely affected by
the events of 9/11, and Nate was proud
to serve in the Marines, as Austin is,"
•Closed his Truckee practice, leaving his
Reno home, relocating to San Diego
and taking on a brand new persona,
that of Navy Lt. Commander
•Will serve as a Navy surgeon for three
years.

26. Dr. Paul Farmer

27. Dr. Paul Farmer
•Pioneered novel, community-
based treatment strategies for
AIDS and tuberculosis
(including multidrug-resistant
tuberculosis) in three
underdeveloped countries

29. Dr. Ian Jackson

30. David Lopez Jackson

31. David’s Story

32. David Lopez Jackson
A baby abandoned in the Amazonian
jungle of Peru suffering horrific
facial disfigurement.
Performed >100 operations on the
child
Then adopted him

33. What difference are you
making?
•The Dash
•By Linda Ellis

34. 19XX - 20XX
•What will your dash say about you?

35. 6. Control your finances
•Many students, residents,
fellows have debt ~$225,000
•Start saving early

36. Medical School Debt Load of
Graduate Doctors 1992-2007*
If debt levels increase for future
physicians and income levels remain
the same, the amount of gross income
of future physicians devoted to debt
service will increase as well.
* Private Practice Management, 3\09

37. Take home message…
•Don’t confuse your net-
worth with with your self-
worth

38. Michael Jackson

39. Was he happy?
He weighed less than 133 lbs. He was 5'10"
His stomach was empty except for a few pills
He was bald...nothing but 'peach fuzz'
He had unexplained bruising on his knees and
on the fronts of both shins
His hips, thighs and shoulders were riddled
with needle wounds- result of injections of
narcotic painkillers given three times a day
for years

40. Bottom line on finances
•Achieving balance in your
life is far more important than
the balance in your check
book

41. 7. Find a lifetime partner
•Can’t do this alone
•Have someone who is on
the same page\team

42. 8. Who are your associates?
•If you are older, hang out
with young people
•If you are younger, have
older friends

43. My neighbors

45. 9. Exceed patients’ expectations
•Find out what patients want
and give them more of it
•Find out what the patients
don’t want and avoid it.

46. Always ask…
•Would you go to a doctor like you?
•Story of the bathroom

47. 10. Have fun!
•Take your practice seriously-
not yourself
•Medicine is the most enjoyable
profession and it can be the
most fun and rewarding

48. Finally advice from Chris
Gardner…Pursuit of Happiness

49. Pursuit of Happiness
“Always pursue happiness…just start
right where you are.”
Chris Gardner

50. From Da Whiz
•Always pursue BALANCE…just start
right where you are!

51. •Have fun:Take your profession-job seriously but
not yourself
•Will Rogers, we are all here for a spell, get all
good laughs you can.
•Inject a dose of humor into your daily activities:
Book
•Learn to tell a joke, you have 5 senses, learn to
engage 6
th
sense, sense of humor
•
• Laughter and stress are incompatible.
MSG: You can’t be experiencing stress and
laughter at the same time. If you want to
lighten up a stressful situation find something
to laugh about.

52. •Be a disciplined doer and a decider, not a procrastinator. Nothing adds
more anxiety to our lives than having deadlines and commitments that
we are having trouble meeting. If you have several projects looming in
the future,break them down into smaller projects and make a calendar
marking off the completion of these little projects. That way you won't
be left with a huge project with only days to complete. Discipline can
bring balance to the busy professional: clean out your inbox, fill up your
outbox, complete your medical records before the delinquency notice
arrives, and look for an endpoint to your day. There will be a new set of
mail, results, and problems tomorrow and a clean slate creates a
balanced perspective. Confront those challenging decisions: a
professional who can decide in a few minutes to recommend radical
extirpative cancer operation to a relative stranger ought to be able to
decide about the new 3 year lease with a few day's reflection.

53. •
4) " ".
Learnto say no  There is no fasterroadto burnoutthantaking ontoo manyprojects
.
andaccepting too manyresponsibilities  The nexttime youare calledto joinahospital
, ,
committee to become amemberofaboardinthe community orto acceptaninvitationfor
: ?
anevening dinneraskyourselfthese questions  Willthe obligationenhance mycareer  
?
Willthe commitmenttake awayfrommytime withmyfamilyandfriends  Willthis
? '
obligationleadto balance orimbalance inmylife  Ifthe answeris thatyouarent
,
furthering yourcareerandifitdistracts fromyourfamilytime thenyoushouldprobably
. " ".
turndownthese requests  Rememberitis notasinto say no

57. •A day without a smile is like a
day without sunshine!
•And a day without sunshine is
like.....night!!!

59. Average of 5 M.D.s\day*
•patients seen\day20
•phone calls returned20
•e-mails\day 17
•prescriptions\day42
•review labs and x-ray31
•review specialist
reports 14
*Ann Intern Med 2007;147:693-698

60. •Work-Mare