That's all for now.
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Keep breathing and have a great rest of your day,
Dike
Dike Drummond MD
www.TheHappyMD.com
[Transcript]
Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors – Weekly Tip
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My new book Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors launching in ApriL The NEW ROADMAP to Stick the Landing on this Life of Purpose
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Doctors and Retirement and the Lego Metaphor
Hello again. Dr Dike Drummond, MD, here with the latest lesson from my new book, Physicians Unchained Retirement Mastery for Doctors. And today we're going to talk about you, the components of you.
The Lego Analogy
And I'm going to bring in an analogy, Legos.
You know, Legos, those little plastic blocks that stick together and make models and things like that. But if you remember, if you had kids especially, or if you ever had Legos when you were a kid, you usually buy them in a box that's supposed to make one thing, a car, a boat, a scene, and you go home, and you probably make that one thing once, and then pretty much all the Legos end up back in a bucket in the back of your closet, where about 18 of those different boxes all reside in a jumble around the bottom of the bucket.
You as a Collection of Pieces
Well, let's think about us humans as being made of various components and traits and preferences and awarenesses like Legos.
And think about it, when you were young, you had a lot of Legos. You had all sorts of different things that you liked and did, and then you got honed and honed by the educational process. And then bam, medical school, and you got shaped into a Lego assembly of Doctor.
The Missing Pieces
Now, I can tell you for a fact that there are pieces of you, pieces of your Legos, that never made it into the doctor configuration.
There are leftovers, okay, and you've been assembled in this Lego configuration now for decades, but you can probably remember some of these leftover parts.
Like, maybe when you were in college, you love photography and you have a 35 millimeter SLR at the top shelf of your closet. Still, maybe you liked performing, maybe you liked writing poetry.
Maybe you liked Jacques Cousteau and thought you were going to be Philippe Cousteau when you grew up in a marine biologist just like Jacques.
A lot of us in my age group had that fantasy, right?
Idle, Not Gone
However, for these decades in the doctor configuration, those parts of your personality, they're parts of you that have been off to the side, idle, not disappeared, not lost, just idle.
Breaking Down the Doctor Model
And one of the things that retirement allows you to do is to break the doctor model all the way down into its component parts and decide just who you want to be in your life after medicine.
And you can put the Legos back into a configuration that may have some resemblance to doctor and it may not.
Rebuilding Your Life
And you always have the ability to reach outside the pile of Doctor pieces to some of the older pieces, some of the pieces that maybe things that have been flirting with you, that you'd like to try out new hobbies, old loves, right?
And put it all back into a configuration that matches your needs and interests and desires.
Here in your life after medicine, nothing gets left behind.
Nothing Is Lost
The pieces are all there, and nothing gets left behind of your doctor configuration either.
It's just that you don't have to maintain that rigid configuration that was mostly reinforced by your employment contract.
Let's admit it.
Transcending the Doctor Identity
So what ends up happening when you retire is you can transcend the role and the configuration of the Legos that makes doctors.
You can transcend it, rise above it, and become something new and as different or as similar as you would like it to be.
But no pieces are left behind.
Identity Fusion and Fear
It's one of the challenges of having an identity fusion with the role of doctor.
You think, if you're fused with Doctor, what happens is, when you when you think about retirement, you think about an existential threat, you feel like you are coming to an end.
It's not you, it's just the doctor configuration of the Legos that was put in place decades ago.
Freedom to Build Again
Now you're free to build at will any arrangement that you want.
It's an opportunity you can grasp and make your own to live your ideal life after medicine and stick the landing on this life of purpose.
Closing
That's it for today.
Keep being the light worker you are.
Keep paying it forward as a helper and a healer, and I'll see you in the next video.
If you're seeing me on social media, you're not on my early bird list.
There'll be a place somewhere, probably in the comments for you to sign up.
So you get this email every week with new lessons, and you're the first to know when the book goes on sale in April of this year.
I'll see you in the next video.