From Disillusioned to Fulfilled: How Private Practice Serves the People Providing the Care

We know that finding fulfilment is critical if we are to build successful and sustainable practices as well as attract and retain staff. But how do you do that, especially if you’re feeling disillusioned, disappointed or even enslaved by your work? In this episode, Jo shares how being more invested and curious can help you find more fulfilment and avoid burnout.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

If you know you need more support, please visit my website at https://jomuirhead.com

TRANSCRIPT:

Okay, and welcome to another episode of The Entrepreneurial Clinician. Hello, G’day. I am Jo Muirhead, the host of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you today something that I find rather interesting to talk about.

And that is the concept of fulfilment. How do we experience fulfilment in our work? It’s an incredibly important topic, and it’s one that I’m hoping in the next 20 minutes or so, that you will get some greater insight into why things are working for you or why things are not working for you. Particularly if you own a private practice, wanna start a private practice or work in a private practice?

So I’m Jo Muirhead, I’ve made that known and I was the queen of overwhelm. I was extremely, really, very excellent at overwhelm. You could ask me to do anything and I would say yes, I was one of those type A personalities where I was constantly trying to prove my worth by doing work and how much more work I could do.

So I wanted lots of feedback that told me that I was good and I was awesome and I was valuable and I had tied that into my worth by going, if I perform in this way, then I will get this recognition. And guess what happens one day all of that falls apart. Cause we just can’t function like that over and over and over again without it having some cost. So it had some cost for me, which will be the topic of future episodes, but today I wanna speak about fulfilment and I wanna give you a little bit of insight into fulfilment and how it turns up or becomes something that we can’t quite grasp when we start the entrepreneurial clinician journey. So, when I wrote my book, yes, I am still talking about the book, it was pre Covid times, okay? And I do think that Covid and Covid 19 and the pandemic and whatever words we’re gonna use has completely disrupted the way we think about work.

You only need to spend a little bit of the time on Instagram in the Reel section to look at the ways your potential employees are talking to each other about work, getting insights from them about what quiet quitting really means for them. When we may have an expectation that meeting your job description and your KPIs and the things that you get paid for, we might, as a business owner, have an expectation that that’s what you get paid a wage for. And you don’t get anything beyond that unless you demonstrate beyond that. Yet we have generations of younger people, younger than me, especially, who are going, but I don’t want anything beyond that. I’m here to do my job in the hours that you provide me with the resources that you get, you give me, and that’s all I’m going to do. So we have an incredible potential for disconnect between business owners, especially those of us who might be Generation Xs or Gen Ys where we feel like we’ve worked really hard, we’ve worked really hard to create these businesses, and these newbies should just be grateful that they have a job where the potential employees are walking around going, do you know the war for talent out there?

You should be grateful that I turned up every day. So I wanna speak into fulfilment because we as health professionals can’t begin to pretend for a moment that the way that we attract and retain good staff is by simply giving them more perks, more money, less time to work, because that is not what health professionals got into this for. If you’ve got an employee or if you yourself are just chasing the next dollar, then good luck to you because it’ll come a time when you can’t do that anymore. And then you will recognise that that is not what kept you in this field. So for most of us who got up and kept going throughout the years of the pandemic, throughout the years of the burnout through, when we’ve got limited resources that seem to be poorly aligned to social justice practices and even best practice medicine, what keeps us going? Well, there’s something about this work that helps us feel fulfilled. There’s something about this work that makes us get up every day and go, I wanna help people. I wanna make a difference in the lives of people. It is not, I’m going to turn up today and meet my KPIs. I can assure you, when I was managing a large national team where it was a billable hours environment, the quickest way I could lose everybody on my team was to talk about their billable hours.

So we’ve gotta learn to have a different conversation and I think the conversation we all need to start having and getting good at having and being prepared to have is this conversation around what is it about this work that fulfils you? Okay? So quite a lot of us get disillusioned. Put up your hand or go, hell yeah Jo if you have ever been disillusioned by your work? Some time ago I got to do a ride along with the New South Wales Ambulance Service for two weeks. I sat in <laugh> sometimes I just sat in the emergency for a whole shift waiting for the ambulance patient to be transferred to the hospital. Eight hours, still wasn’t transferred. But I got to spend two weeks daytime, night time, morning shift, afternoon shift. I was assessing the psychological demands of the role of ambulance officers in New South Wales was a really, really cool project.

But the thing that that stopped ambulance officers at that point in time, cause it was some time ago now, the thing that stopped them from falling in love and being in love with their job was being taken off the road for what they thought was stupid, incidental, inconsequential things. Ambulance officers at that point in time knew they were employed to save lives. They are critical care. They are first on the scene. There’s a huge adrenaline rush. They used to be known here in New South Wales as the most trusted profession. There’s a lot of status for ambulance officers or ambos as we call them here in Australia. But when I started talking to them about what the psychological triggers were for them, what the psychological ill health triggers were for them in their workplace, it wasn’t watching people die or turning up to mass casualty accidents or not being able to save a person.

It was when they couldn’t be on the road to even give it a go because they were stuck in some training room learning about a new policy that made no sense to them on the job. They got disillusioned. So I know for me, I’ve worked in various levels of government and <laugh> the complete inadequacy of leadership in every sphere of those government institutions made me go, I can’t be here. I’m totally disillusioned. Now, leadership in a government institution is not personal development leadership. It’s compliance management. Not a good fit for compliance management. That’s not how you get the best out of me. I became disillusioned in private practice when I was managing other businesses for other people. When I had my leadership team and my executive in my head around money, money, money, money, money. Get the team doing more, get the team doing more, get the team doing more.

I became disillusioned because I had these amazing, incredible people who just wanted to make the world a better place. And I must admit, at that point in time, back in the early two thousands, I did not handle that tension well. It has been a huge personal development thing for me to actually learn.

What was it that was going on for me that made me so disillusioned? And it got to the point where this leadership capacity problem, this inability to stay with a sense of fulfillment in my work, led me to think I can’t be a health professional. I seriously went, I obviously can’t do this. I am not cut out for it. This work makes me sick. Haha. That’s what I was telling myself. Therefore, I need to find something else to do. Well, you know what, that wasn’t the case. So I became really disappointed. I was disillusioned. I tried to get some education. I tried to do some leadership development. I tried to get more letters after my name. I started my Master’s degree in work health and safety three times. That was an expensive mistake in hell. I don’t wanna do anything about work, health and safety policy and procedure. Ugh, excuse me. So I thought if I was just educated some more, if I had different qualifications under my belt, then I would start to feel fulfilled again. And then I worked out. I was just completely disappointed. I was disappointed in myself because I didn’t seem to have what it took. But I was disappointed in the whole thing called health care. I was disappointed in government. I was disappointed in private practices. I was disappointed in health care services. It was like, none of this works. Well, at that point in time I was disappointed because I hadn’t found the way to make it work for me.

So then I got to a situation where I actually needed to put food on the table and I needed some skills to be able to do that. I was a single mum at the time. I needed to put food on the table. So I had to go and sell my knowledge and my skills to people who would pay for it. And funnily enough, I started to fall in love with the work. Again, I was my own boss doing things my own way. I took on the clients I wanted to work with and I had control over my workload. Now, it only took me six weeks before I got too busy and brought on my first associate and then I had to learn a whole heap of new stuff again. But that six week period, I still remember it really fondly. I was working with a client load of only 14 clients at that point in time and was still generating the type of income that I needed to fulfill my obligations and have stuff left over.

So I’d come from other businesses where I was expected to manage caseloads in excess of 50 people and still being made to feel like I wasn’t doing enough to experience this thing where I was only working with 14 people and I had energy left over. I had time left leftover <laugh>, I had money left over at the end of the pay period or the fortnightly period. It was a wonderful time. So I started to feel optimistic again going, Ooh, maybe this is what it’s meant to be for me. So I became quite optimistic going, I’m actually really good at this work. I’m really good at helping people. I’m really good at doing work the way I want it to be done.

So what do we magically say when we’re a health professional? And we go, Ooh, if I can just do it my way on my terms, we go, I’m building my own private practice. Ha-rah!

I’m very, very passionate about private practice. Private practice is a big ha-rah! We should be doing more private practice if we really wanna see a change in healthcare. But guess what? Within 12 months, my private practice made me feel like I was a slave to it. That’s six weeks that I talk about. I still remember it fondly. That was back in 2009. It’s only in 2020 did I experience the same levels of freedom and fulfillment. <laugh>? Yeah. What went on in the meantime? Well, I became enslaved by this business. I became enslaved by my private practice. I felt like I wasn’t working hard enough. I had to learn about leadership. I had to learn about marketing and sales. I wanted to build multiple streams of income. I had to work out what to do when my biggest customer just up and left because we had a falling out that kind of aligned my reputation in the industry.

I had to work out what I was gonna do when I had team members who just up and left got all this really great training from me and then just disappeared. I had to work out what to do when I had salaries to pay, but no income coming in. I was enslaved to this business, unlike so many clinicians who become entrepreneurial clinicians. I thought I had to work my way out of it. If I just see another client, if I just see another 10 clients, if I just see another 20 clients just continuing to exchange time for money, maybe I’ll put my rates up a little bit. Maybe I’ll do this really big project over here on top of everything else to get us back into cash flow positive that does not work. And it leaves us feeling like we’re enslaved to our business. It adds incredible emotional load.

It adds to our sense of burnout and it just repeats the cycle of being disappointed, leading us back to being disillusioned again. Cause if you fail at a private practice where it’s just yourself, you’ve got nobody left to blame but you. So what are we gonna do? We’re really, really good at being critical with ourselves, aren’t we? I have a very, very active inner critic. She’s nasty. She doesn’t have a name yet. We should name her. Oh. So we go, well then I have to go back to what I was doing before. Or I have to be a florist, or I have to go and get a case management job. Or I have to go and work for an insurance company. Or I need to go and have babies, or I need to pack everything up and go and live in Byron Bay and grow hydroponic tomatoes. It’s an inside joke for anyone who’s been in my community for any length of time.

So how do we get outta this nasty cycle or going up and down this <laugh>, these levels of disillusioned to being enslaved and then back down again? Well, the thing we need to do is become invested. And I’m not just talking about financial investment. I’m actually talking about the type of investment where I am gonna make this work. I’m going to find out what works for me. So it’s one of the reasons why I am fairly anti seven step systems. Yes, I get that we need systems and we need processes, but before we need systems and processes, we need principles and we need strategy principles. Not P A L S. P L E S. Principles.

What are the principles that govern the way you work? How do you know what work is good for you? How do you know how to get the best out of yourself? Start getting invested in answering those questions and take yourself on that type of personal professional development journey. And you will start seeing yourself reaching for a sense of fulfillment that is no longer out of your grasp, that’s actually ready and waiting for you to take a hold of. And I’m not saying this to be Anthony Robbins, rah rah rah, I am saying this right now to say, because it’s right there. You just don’t know how to reach it because you’ve got so much other junk cluttering up your vision right now.

So when we’re invested, we’re curious. When we’re invested, we’re not living from a place of insecurity or knee-jerk reaction or fear. When we’re invested, we know that the buck stops with us. I am the person who gets to work this out. I am the person who is in control of this situation, don’t always like what’s going on, but it stops with me.

I’m not waiting on a boss to give me praise. I’m not waiting on somebody else to tell me I’m doing a good job, not waiting for my next paycheck. I am in control of all of that, which means I’m control of my workload, which means I’m in control of my workflow. These are keys if we wanna keep burnout at bay. That’s why it’s so hard to do it in a hospital because you haven’t got control of your workload there. And some people thrive in that environment. I was not one of them. Take my hat off to the emergency nurses or any nurse listening to this podcast. You are an outstanding breed of person. Thank you for what you do cause I can’t do what you do. So once we start looking at being invested, which sometimes means putting time out there, I need to learn about this, about myself, going away, going on a retreat, spending time in an intensive, learning about yourself, the stuff that makes you get excited, not because it gets everybody else excited, but because it gets you excited.

The stuff that keeps you going, the stuff that makes you go, this is how I put food on the table every week. And how I can put food on the table for 30 other people in this business. Because once we are self-determined, we then can be in flow. And once we understand our own resilience and resilience activators, we know who we are. We know who we serve, and we know how we work best. And a big part of this is knowing what we say no to. So fulfilled for me is about self-determination. It means I have built the things into my world and into my day where I have the opportunity to be in flow and don’t wait for all the yuck stuff to be done. So I’m in flow, I create flow in the way I do my work. So right now, I’m not taking on any clinical clients because I’m still recovering from breast cancer treatment and me talking to people about injury and illness.

I’m just not ready for that yet. But I can talk to my coaching clients. I wake up in the morning excited about when I’m gonna be talking to my coaching clients about, for me that is a new level of fulfilment because I can reach the people who need help through my coaching clients, by you gorgeous person listening to this. When I help you do the work that you wanna do in a way that works for you, then you and I together are reaching the people who need the help because I can’t serve every single client that needs my help. And right now I don’t wanna serve any clinical clients cause I don’t think I’d be that helpful. So we can go from disillusioned to fulfilled. And I think this process of fulfillment is something that we have to constantly look at.

I would be looking at that in my planning every 12 months. I do. And make my ladies in the Daring Dozen mastermind that I host. We do this every 12 months in our planning. It’s like what’s gonna fulfill us? What’s fulfilling us? What’s changing? What do we need to be aware of? What’s changing in me? Does anyone who has studied anything to do with stage of life and psychology and developmental milestones throughout the lifespan knows that the way you feel experience fulfillment in your twenties is gonna be very different to the way you experience fulfillment in your fifties? I can say that cause I’ve been there and I’ve done that.

So I would love to know from you today, what has been a standout from this podcast? What is something that you’ve gone heck, Jo, that was insightful and powerful. I wanna take that away and do some thinking on it. I wanna talk about it in the Future-Proofing Health Professionals Facebook group. Let me know. You can join the Facebook group, you can send an email, you can write it somewhere that I can see it. There’s a lots of different ways that you can find me. But what I would love most of all for you today is write a review. Give this a rating and share this episode with somebody else. Somebody else who needs to have this conversation around fulfillment in their work.

So I’m Jo Muirhead, the host of the Entrepreneurial Clinician, <laugh>, God, that’s a mouthful, the host of the Entrepreneurial Clinician Podcast. And I look forward to talking to you again very soon.