I Left My Six-Figure Career As A Doctor After Learning 3 Things

in a world where success is often measured by degrees and titles what happens when a doctor decides to redefine their own definition of success in this video I'm going to reveal the unexpected lessons that forced me to re-evaluate everything I thought I knew and walk away from the conventional path these are the pivotal moments that led me to trade in my white coat and stethoscope for The Road Less Traveled now if you've watch me here on YouTube before then welcome back but if you are new to my channel then welcome I'm Dr Kim and I'm

an MD turned coach Wellness expert and entrepreneur now let's dive in so there were several events that happened that led me to finally walk away from my career as a family doctor and these events happened over the course of a few years toward the end of my 20 years in medicine and honestly it was the most difficult decision that I have ever had to make in large part because at that point so much of my identity was wrapped up in this career and the trouble of course was that on paper it seemed like I had

everything I was in a career that first of all was super competitive to get into and is something that I know that many people aspire to I remember when I got my admission letters to medical school my boyfriend of the time his dad said to me you're set for life Kim and that's honestly how it felt it felt like all my worries about was I going to be successful would I have a career that would make me happy would I have a career that would support me financially all of those worries were just gone and

everything was going to be fine unfortunately as I came to realize eventually everything was not fine and in fact my existential crisis began to Peak through at a fairly early stage there were definitely moments during med school that I felt a bit confused about whether this was actually the right path for me but I kind of talked it up to stress and you know the various life and death situations that I frequently found myself involved in especially as I moved up and started working more in the hospitals doing my practical rotations and then into internship

and residency the everyday experience of a resident is incredibly intense and difficult and so I granted myself some Grace just put my head down and got through it once I was practicing though it was then that I had a bit more space to really start to see things more clearly and one truth that came screaming through to me was just how broken the conventional Health Care system is I came to realize that I was caught in the middle of a very dysfunctional system on one hand I had gone into medicine to actually help people but

I was constantly Under Pressure to churn people through the system like a fast food restaurant and the emphasis was most definitely not on prevention or holistic well-being the focus of all my patient encounters was a transaction as quickly as possible see what had brought them in do my assessment to get to a diagnosis make some recommendations and then send them on their way so that the next person could be seen this was just how Primary Care was set up I came to realize and even though I was the physician in the situation I was not

in charge I had to answer to office managers administrators and my jampacked waiting room I tried working in a lot of different places to find a situation that might offer a different model but everywhere I worked it was the same basic problem the system functions under a fee for service model doctors get paid per encounter no incentivizing for prevention or deeper conversations or anything like that at one point I moved to a clinic that paid their Physicians by salary so I thought that would mean that I would get to get away from the fee for

service model and that maybe I could just do the job of helping people and maybe even on a deeper level but even there in order to qualify for our funding we had minimum patient quotas that we had to meet people in charge were literally counting how many patients we churned through the doors each day and we're evaluating our Effectiveness directly by that number nothing else seemed to matter in the end I worked in a lot of different places big city centers small rural towns different parts of the country University clinics but it was always the

same thing it was so disheartening and I mean Not only was it frustrating for me but I could clearly tell that it was frustrating for the patients that I was seeing they were fed up of being rushed out of feeling like I didn't have the time to listen to all their issues and this was making me feel even more unhappy it really made me question what purpose I was even serving in the first place I had gone into this to help people but I knew I wasn't helping them in these 10minute encounters where we were

barely scratching the surface of what they needed and I just constantly had this feeling of dissatisfaction the other part of this lesson that the system is broken is the total lack of attention paid to holistic well-being to prevention I became so fed up of just putting out fires and handing out Band-Aids I really wanted to help people to optimize their well-being to prevent illness in the first place not just wait until they feel sick and then come in to see me I only ever saw people once they were already sick or feeling unwell I wanted

to help people take control of their well-being and not get sick in the first place but that just wasn't part of the model one day in fact I was working at a clinic and I decided to keep track of how many encounters I had that were actually positive that I enjoyed that I felt like I had helped someone so I just kind of kept a little tally on a piece of paper after I came out of each appointment and just put a tick in one of two columns whether it was an overall positive or negative

experience and at the end of the day only five out of 32 patient encounters that day were in the positive column five I mean it was more than zero so that was something but the vast majority of my working day was frustrating and unsatisfying at the end of the day I just stared at that paper and realized that something was deeply wrong and it needed to change but I had no idea how to change it and at that point there were still a lot of things keeping me in medicine things like the security the stability

the paycheck and as much as I hate to admit it the status right or wrong being a doctor is a well-respected profession and it was what I had wanted to do since I was 17 I had no idea who I would be without being a doctor plus there was the guilt factor I was well aware of the shortage of family doctors and so could I really just abandon the profession altogether just jump ship all those factors conspired to keep me in it grinding it out telling myself that it would get better somehow maybe something would

change and then my next lesson came came because I experienced a Health crisis of my own about a year after my second son was born I got really sick with a rare autoimmune condition and was basically bedridden for several weeks with severe inflammation in most of my joints and I had no idea if this was going to be my new reality or if I was going to get better and I won't go into too much detail here I might share some more details in another video in the future but the point was it really forced

me to evaluate what was important and what wasn't and what I realized was important was my health my boys and the people that I loved since I had been a teenager I had desperately wanted to have a career that made me feel happy and fulfilled plus successful but I realized that medicine was not giving me any of those things in fact the stress and burnout that I was struggling with had definitely contributed to the Health crisis that I was facing I had to stop fooling myself that somehow something would just improve on its own basically

it was a bad match it wasn't what I had signed signed up for and yes I could maybe devote the rest of my professional life to fighting the cause and trying to change the system or I could realize that I would very likely be fighting a losing game and I needed to take care of myself for me and my family and that it was okay for me to choose happiness basically I came to realize that life is too short I came to terms with my own mortality and finally understood that life is too short to

spend it in a career that does not bring genuine joy and satisfaction our time here on Earth is precious and living a life in alignment with my own happiness and fulfillment is so much more important than adhering to societal expectations or what other people wanted for me as I had started talking to people about my own dissatisfaction in medicine and kind of testing the waters with talk of maybe doing something else I was universally met with the same response why would you ever walk away why would you throw away all those years of education but

what I came to realize was that I didn't get that education to limit myself I didn't spend years in school just to trap myself in a box education is supposed to give you freedom and happiness and success not keep you stuck somewhere that is making you unhappy and unwell so at that point I gave myself permission to chart an exit path first things first I got myself well and how I healed myself from the autoimmune disease that had completely taken over will again probably be the subject of a future video but that was the first

thing and from there I needed a plan but my lessons were not complete yet because I still had something left to learn about what could fill the vacuum in my life that I knew would be created if I just left that was the final lesson because as much as I knew I needed to leave and find a new career I had no idea what that career would look like and I was terrified everything was focused on my exit strategy but there were practical reasons why I couldn't just walk out right then and there at this

point we had a mortgage we had two kids in school we had a lot of responsibilities and a bunch of reasons why I couldn't just walk away I was not prepared to just sell our house for example so as much as I was tempted to just Bol I knew I needed to be smarter and more strategic through my Explorations I had discovered the world of coaching and discovered that there were people out there who were running their own businesses mostly online and some of them seemed to be doing pretty well at least from what I

could tell from the outside but it was kind of hard to know it seemed a bit too good to be true to be honest and I wasn't sure that it would work for me but bit by bit I grew my side hustle on the side and I started doing not bad I didn't know if it could be enough for a full-blown career and the income that I would need but it was promising and most importantly I was really enjoying it coaching was everything that I had wanted for my career in medicine but there was no

such thing as coaching when I was choosing my career path in the late 80s so I was excited that I had discovered something I could do that that would both make a difference and also give me a sense of fulfillment but it still felt like a huge risk could I really make enough money could it really become my full-time career also I was aware of the sketchy reputation of people who went into business online I heard the jokes one of my friends another doctor laughed and mocked a mom at her kids school behind her back

because she was calling herself a life coach there was lots of eye rolling I heard a family member say that it was all a bunch of baloney and nobody actually made any real money doing things like that coaching was kind of in its early days especially online coaching nobody really knew what it was and in the reputable - tested old school world of conventional medicine doctors loved to make snide comments about people in the wellness industry or the online world or the coaching world but I kept chipping away kind of behind closed doors I scaled

back my hours in medicine as I scaled up my business bit by bit keeping one foot in the safe respectable sec pure world of my career as a doctor and just dipping my toe in the online World more and more and then the pandemic happened I'm not sure how much longer I might have stayed with one foot in each world but Co was the event that forced me to fully quit medicine and finally hang out my stethoscope during the first wave I made the decision that this was not the moment to jump ship as terrifying

as it was to go into work and struggle with the unknown of this disease because none of us knew what we were doing and and doing patient Encounters in full PPE that was quickly dwindling in Supply in spite of all of that there was a part of me that knew I would forever feel a sense of unredeem and guilt and regret if I completely abandoned the profession at the absolute worst time in history I had experience and skills that the world needed this was at the time when everyone was cheering and banging their pots and

pans at 7:00 p.m. every day remember that and I did feel a huge sense of Pride being a healthcare worker on the front line doing my small part to help the world navigate this absolutely terrifying event at the same time as being absolutely petrified for my own safety and my kids if I were to get sick and bring the virus home to my family anyway I made it through and did not get covid during the first wave and once we were through that first wave and then we went into the summer and things settled and

things in my part of the world anyway were starting to significantly improve and the numbers were definitely going down and we all had much better systems to deal with the virus and the vaccine was on the horizon so I knew that it was time it was finally time to step away I knew what I wanted to do my business was definitely growing and although it still felt like a huge risk because I didn't know if I would be able to grow it to the point where it could fully support me and my family you know

I really didn't know if it was a passing fat a flash in the pan that just wouldn't last you know medicine is blue chip stock and Recession Proof as a career could I say the same thing about the wild west of online entrepreneurship and this weird flaky thing called coaching definitely not but I knew I had to give it a chance as William fogner said you cannot swim for New Horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore my final lesson was all about self trust I needed to trust that I was

going to be able to figure this out I needed to believe in myself that I was going to make this work I had trusted myself before when I was younger and I made the Bold decision to aim for medical school to actually tell people that's what I wanted to do even though it meant potentially looking really stupid if I didn't get it and feel like a failure nobody in my family was a doctor my dad was an engineer but had never gone to University in the UK post war you could become an engineer without a

University degree by being an apprentice my grandfather had been a coal miner in Wales my mom got her University degree well after having kids just chipping away at it through night school so it was a pretty old thing for me to do to tell people that I was going to go to med school and become a doctor and it took a lot of self-trust so I had to make that bold move again to walk away from medicine and to step fully into my new career as a coach and an entrepreneur risk and all I had

to release any need for external validation or praise or the status of being a doctor and just be me again I knew that people would judge me for doing this weird thing especially my colleagues still inside the medical profession but I was over over it I needed to make my own choices live a life authentic to me and follow my own happiness so that was it I handed in my resignation I inactivated my medical license I canceled my malpractice insurance and I told everyone that I was leaving and on my very last day after my

very last patient encounter I walked out of the clinic got into my car and ugly cried for a solid 15 minutes I cried for the young idealistic 17-year-old with stars in her eyes who had dreamed of becoming a doctor and here I was at the age of 47 3 decades later at the end of the journey I would no longer see patients suture their wounds check their blood pressure deliver a baby write out a prescription look at an x-ray tell someone that they had cancer tell someone that they were pregnant with their first child all

of it was behind me so yeah I ugly cried for a long time it was possibly one of the most cathartic moments of my whole life but then I stopped crying and I started my car and I drove home and it was a sunny day and as I drove I turned up the music and opened the sunroof and started getting really excited for my next chapter and after that things got really really good in the years that have passed since I quit I have never been happier healthier or more fulfilled and the irony of walking

away from my sixf figure career I actually surpassed that income now as an entrepreneur something that I never dreamed possible but that shows the power of being in alignment and not settling for anything less than true fulfillment and trusting yourself to make it work so I would love to hear from you are you considering making a big change like the one that I made what's holding you back what are you struggling with let me know in the comments and also if you enjoyed this video then I think that you are going to love this video

that is coming up next on the screen where I talk about the five daily habits that can actually change your life I will see you there I moved to a clinic that paid their pH try that again I moved to Clinic that paid their F okay Physicians let's try that again oh my goodness so funny how I often just stumble over one particular word whatever okay um let's go