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Dike
Dike Drummond MD
www.TheHappyMD.com
[Transcript]
Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors – Weekly Tip
Who took my Locus of Control and how do I get it back?
Hello, Dr Dike Drummond, here with the latest physician retirement tip from my new book, Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about who's in charge.
The Locus of Control
Now, if you're approaching retirement age, it's been 30–40 years since you were the boss of you. What am I talking about? Well, I'm talking about a concept called the locus of control.
If you have an internal locus of control, you believe that you are in charge of your life. You are in control of your person, sort of like this. There it is. Locus of control. Is that star in your heart? Yeah.
External locus of control means that something or someone else has control of you. Think puppet on a string like this. Look where the locus of control is. It's in the puppeteer's chest. You’re kind of sad because you're on strings, right?
Medical Training and Surrendering Control
Well, the doctor's life is a fantastic pendulum when it comes to the locus of control.
Because at the very first day of medical school, when you walk through the door for the first time, you hand over your locus of control to the faculty, to the institution, to the curriculum of whatever medical education institution that you pass through. You give it to them.
They're completely in control for the seven to sixteen years that it takes you to pass through the bowels of the medical education system and pop out the other side, and then you're boarded and have learned over the course of time to be a really good resident.
You put the patient first. You do whatever you're told. You never complain, because that's just the way you get through medical school.
And you don't have to survive medical school in one piece. As long as you drag yourself across the finish line, you can be missing one eye and three fingers off your left hand. But what do they call the person who graduates last in their medical school class? Yeah—doctor.
From Resident to Employee
And you know, when you're done with medical school, they don't give you your locus of control back.
No. The faculty hands your locus of control to your first employer, especially if you're an employed physician. The employer now takes your locus of control. A new puppeteer, right?
They put you under contract where you're obligated to fulfill the clauses of the contract—production quotas, EHR, schedule, all that kind of stuff. You had nothing to do with designing your job description. You had nothing to do with your production quotas.
You sign the contract.
And what employers like better than anything else is good residents. Because again, you do what you're told, and you don't complain, and you don't expect a lot because you never got it yet.
By the way, another term for locus of control is free will.
The Gilded Cage
So the difference, though, between residency and practice is you get paid pretty well. You get paid pretty darn well.
And as much as we might rail against the bean counters in management, we're counting beans too, right?
So your contract, and the obligations of your contract, and the fact that they control your contract, controls your life. You're actually in a gilded cage—a cage.
If you stay in the cage, you make some money. You're wearing golden handcuffs, right?
You're handcuffed by the money you make in your physician career, because you're very specialized. There's not a lot of things you can do that will earn the same amount of money that don't take a long time to migrate over to.
After 30–40 years of this, it becomes difficult to imagine not being a resident, not being an employee. What would you do if you weren't seeing patients?
Retirement and Taking Control Back
These are questions that we're going to answer in the book, because retirement is a place where you can take back your locus of control.
But you're not used to using it.
You're not used to doing things in your own self-interest, to putting yourself first.
So we have a number of tools that will help you step up into retirement and will help you gradually, over time, create a portfolio of things that you do, people that you hang out with, experiences and activities that turn you on, that rhyme with your core values, and that will give you a fulfilling life after medicine.
Life After Medicine
And the whole process of building your life after medicine is so much easier than grinding your way through a crap job for a crap boss for another year.
Trust me on that.
It is highly likely that in the future, you will look forward to these days of life after medicine as your favorite chapter in your life—where you got to express the fullness of who you are, without the gilded cage, without the golden handcuffs, in an environment where you took back your locus of control.
Look at that smile.
Closing
That's it for today.
If you're watching me on social media, you're not on our early bird list. There's a link somewhere on this page that can get you to sign up so you get these as email lessons once a week, and you'll be the first to know when the book is available.
If you came to this video because of an email link, you're already on the list. Congratulations.
I'll see you next week.
Until then, keep being the light worker, the helper and healer that you are. Keep paying it forward and making a difference.
Happy holidays. Keep breathing. Have a great rest of your day.