Make changes that push you toward professional satisfaction and enthusiasm.

There comes a time (and sometimes many times) in one’s professional life when you get the “blahs.” This can be sourced to acute fatigue, as when you work through a practice emergency. It can happen a few years from retirement when you are not sure you can carry on. It can even happen early in your career when the crush of training, young family responsibilities and financial pressures can be too much to bear.

What we are talking about here doesn’t really rise to the severity of burnout. You do not need a dramatic life change, just a little relief and refreshment.

A first step is to purposefully take the time to identify things that make you feel both happy (satisfied, fulfilled, energized) and unhappy in your work life. Develop two written lists — one for each of these two feelings — along with all the possible ways to increase “happy” and decrease “unhappy.” Sometimes making a small change or two is enough to shift the overall balance from the dominance of one feeling to the other. Write down what you might do to spend more time and focus on the happy items and less time on the unhappy ones.

Here are eight examples of how to make a change that pushes you out of the blahs and into professional satisfaction and enthusiasm again.

1. REDUCE THE TIME YOU SPEND DOING THINGS YOU LIKE LESS.

If you are a practice owner, you may have more control over your schedule or the services you provide, and making a change to reduce the time you spend performing these tasks just takes some planning. Examples might include performing LASIK, spending time at a distant satellite or wasting time in unproductive meetings.

As an associate/employee, it may be harder to make this change, but approach practice leaders with a professional, practical plan and a willingness to be flexible with implementation. In either case, merely having a small measure of added control over how you spend your time can shift your feelings and reaction to the less-pleasant aspects of medical practice.

2. TUNE YOURSELF UP PHYSICALLY.

If you are feeling blah, it can be difficult to find the motivation to do this. But intellectually, you know improving your physical self will likely help to boost your whole mindset. This includes an improved diet, increased exercise, improved sleep hygiene and all the rest. Even starting just one of these could be the jump-start you need for feeling better.

To help you get started and find the discipline needed to stick with a new self-improvement program long enough to recognize the benefits, find some inspiration and assistance. It could be a friend who wants to do the same thing alongside you, or hiring a trainer, coach or dietician that could help you muster the necessary commitment.

3. REDUCE OR CHANGE YOUR WORK HOURS.

Find a temporal relief valve to improve how you feel about your work. As with health improvement, small changes can go a long way. With assistance from your practice’s management staff, review how productive (or unproductive) you are within each day and throughout the week. If you are super productive early in the day but fade after lunch, perhaps adding patients to your morning session, subtracting them from your afternoon, and getting out even 30 or 45 minutes early may cure the blahs. You could find that you are working fewer hours and earning the same income or more, because staffing hours can be trimmed a bit.

4. TAKE ACTION WITH DIFFICULT STAFF MEMBERS.

We’ve worked with practice owners who don’t want to go to work in the morning because they dislike working with a particular employee they see each day. The physician feels obligated to keep the person employed due to years of loyalty or knowing about a difficult situation in their personal life. It feels like being stuck. The easiest thing is to do nothing. But there are ways around these situations. Some advice:

• Work with the management team to review the options.
• Consider re-assigning or terminating any problematic employee.
• Understand that the anticipation of taking a step like this is often worse than executing the actual event.

Consider that sometimes the employee may actually be relieved by the change, because they were staying for all the wrong reasons, too (and acting out ... and making you miserable in the process.)

5. VISIT A VANGUARD PRACTICE OR FIND A PEER-MENTOR.

Rediscover what originally inspired your early career path. This could be a visit to a non-competitive practice, a friend from residency or someone you met at a conference. You could observe how they perform a surgical procedure or how they run their highly successful practice. See how inspirational practices do what they do, and copy that back in your own practice setting.

6. SHAKE UP THE MANAGEMENT TEAM WITH A RETREAT.

Maybe everyone on your team has the blahs and needs a shake-up. Consider a retreat, a pre-planned meeting — often with a hired consultant/facilitator — that provides the opportunity for practice leadership to spend time together developing annual practice goals, improving management skills and enhancing teamwork performance. Spend this time getting new ideas flowing, identifying issues and making improvements. Identify the common goals of providing excellent care to your patients, and implement new strategies and tactics while being reminded of how much fun it can be to work together.

7. CHANGE JOBS.

Sometimes taking the most extreme action is obliged. Get yourself to a new environment, with new people and new ways of doing things.

8. MAKE SMALLER CHANGES.

If the above ideas feel like overly large steps to start with, consider some of these suggestions:

• Take breaks during the day. It’s essential to give yourself regular breaks, even if it’s just for a few minutes at a time. Take a walk around the building, do some stretching exercises, or grab a healthy snack. This can help refresh your mind and body and give you a burst of energy.
• Connect with colleagues. Socializing with your team can help break up the monotony of the workday and provide a sense of community. For example, eat lunch with your team daily.
• Set achievable goals. Setting small, achievable goals for the day can help you feel more productive and motivated. Try breaking down your tasks into smaller steps and crossing them off your to-do list as you complete them.
• Change your routine. If you’re feeling bored with your work, try mixing things up. If you normally exercise after work, switch to a morning workout. Take a different route to work, try a new coffee shop, or listen to different music on your daily commute.
• Seek out new challenges. Learn something new. OM

Corinne Z. Wohl, MHSA, COE, is president of C. Wohl & Associates, Inc., a practice management consulting firm. Corinne earned her Masters of Health Services Administration degree at The George Washington University and has over 30 years of hospital, physician practice management and management consulting experience. Her latest book, co-authored with John Pinto, is “UP: Taking Ophthalmic Administrators and Their Management Teams to the Next Level of Skill, Performance and Career Satisfaction.” For information on how to purchase this book or other inquiries, she can be reached at czwohl@gmail.com or 609-410-2932.

John Pinto is the founder of J. Pinto & Associates, Inc., an ophthalmic practice consulting firm established in 1979. He is the most published author in the world on the subject of ophthalmic management and economics. The firm serves organizations worldwide, ranging from solo practices to high-volume market leaders, teaching centers and medical product companies, providing strategic planning, financial benchmarking and analysis, operations enhancement, and marketing counsel. He can be reached at pintoinc@aol.com or 619-223-2233.