The concept of performance hinges on outcomes. Specific performance goals should be uniquely focused such that daily activities are able to define performance in all categories of one’s roles and responsibilities in an ongoing fashion. Being able to articulate professional desires, interests, and meaningful contributions through the completion of performance goals will solidify advancement within any organization.
The first year of being a medical educator will place demands on time and energy much differently than clinical practice. The timelines, deadlines, and opportunities will be endless and the tendency to add on tasks will be a critical factor in a new faculty member’s initiation. It is important to communicate with directors and chairs in developing a sense of how many activities one should commit to versus how much one can defer in order to keep a reasonable momentum.
From a productivity standpoint, one should become proficient with time management in their roles and responsibilities. Persistence in analyzing additional workload demands will require intentional communication with other faculty, directors, and chairs to maintain balance in one’s roles and responsibilities. This healthy balance is critical to ensure an equitable and sustainable commitment to the institution, the students, and most importantly, one’s self.
In seeking balance, it is imperative to pay attention to wellness, self-care, and mindfulness of how much is being added, or taken away, from your basic life needs. Determining this health balance is often difficult in highly demanding professions such as being a full-time clinician-educator. The importance of a healthy diet, regular exercise, and protected personal and family time will be even more important as one moves into being an educator.
Realizing activities that are sustainable, or non-sustainable, will take consistent reflection as to not only “what” you are doing but “how” you are doing it. Strategically planning productivity and setting boundaries on when you engage work and life tasks are important to long-term survival in any profession. As experienced clinicians, our tendency is to extend ourselves for the purpose of the mission and those we serve. Acknowledging this as a non-sustainable process will create more meaningful outcomes for yourself, your medical school, and particularly, the students.
Our collective experiences in the first year as clinician-educators have been associated with multiple conversations surrounding frustrations, barriers, and whether the whole process is sustainable. Many of us have moved into medical education with a long list of trade-offs. Some of the factors realized in transitioning to medical education, for most of us, involve decreased financial compensation, lack of control in practice, and loss of time flexibility.
Many of us have several years of clinical practice experience whereby we were used to functioning as the resource person for staff in either the hospital or the clinic environments. We were used to being available for questions such as “Doctor, how do you want us to address this?” in addition to questions such as “Doctor, we need to fix this problem, what are your thoughts?”. Moving into medical education finds one in the position of very few being interested in your thoughts as to solutions, innovations, and change in the first year.
It is important for the clinician-educator to realize what prompted a change to medical education in the first place. Our experience causes us to consider one of passion based on teaching and learning within an environment that builds future physicians. That passion is processed based on foundational internal motivations of a desire to be a part of something to which one feels called. It is felt to be a driving force that allows us to accept the trade-offs as we are devoted to the greater good to which our passions and desires guide us.
The last aspect of our “why” is based on the consideration of context regarding our “why”. In clinical practice, much of our energy was devoted to our patients. This is highly relational, personal, and emotional with some clinicians; thus, giving up patient interaction takes away an important part of our vitality. Clarifying how our relational, personal, and emotional tendencies translate to student interaction is quite a different discovery. While we desire to have meaningful relationships with students, the parameters and boundaries present in medical schools are guarded by more stringent cultural frameworks through various regulatory functions such as Title IX and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). We consider student relationships highly effective and rewarding; therefore, we work to function as teachers, preceptors, and mentors to our students in every way possible while maintaining the institution’s operational integrity.
The ability to define what drives our daily energy in being a clinician-educator requires us to readily access our “why” for being in medical education through mindfulness, awareness, and reflection. We have found the above steps paramount in modeling constructive behavior that keeps us positively motivated and actively engaged in our roles and responsibilities. The structure of our fundamental desires and motivations has to take precedence over the smaller “incidentals” that, when considered in the overall scheme of things, do not really matter. Our longevity in this endeavor requires dedication to finding our strengths, needs, and desires in developing sustainable approaches to our longevity in medical education.