Are you interested in pursuing a non-clinical career, but you fear losing your identity as a physician?

Is being a physician not just what you DO, but who you ARE?

Then how do you leave who you are?

Let’s start with how the physician identity is formed.

The path to a physician identity is forged over many years. Your journey from medical student to attending required creating habits, routines, behaviors, and skills to do the challenging and rewarding job of caring for patients.

And, unlike many other careers, you don’t get to take a break from being a doctor. If you’re on a plane, or in a park relaxing, and there’s a distress call for a physician, you feel the call to respond.

And so, the physician behaviors are etched into your being and form the physician identity. This is natural and expected.

What if the identity becomes restrictive?

I loved my career in Medicine until I didn’t. I was so enmeshed in my physician identity that the thought of leaving clinical care felt like self-betrayal.

For you, the identity might not fit anymore because the practice of medicine no longer fits, or you want to retire, or you’re forced to leave clinical medicine through termination or illness.
Whatever your reason for leaving, when you loosen the grip of the physician identity, you open to new possibilities.

4 steps to loosen the grip of the physician identity.

1. Recognize resistance.

As you start to think about leaving, your physician identity will resist. This manifests in a variety of ways:

You might feel “something is wrong” with you, or you procrastinate exploring other options, or you tolerate a situation that’s no longer rewarding, or you convince yourself that you can’t let all the years of hard work “go to waste.”

Recognize this as resistance to change.

2. Appreciate the physician identity.

How has your physician identity served you? What has it helped you accomplish?

Maybe it helped you become a dedicated and competent clinician, provided a comfortable income, enabled you to make a difference in patient’s lives, and more.

3. What new identity do you want to try on?

Do you want to try a different career, or give more bandwidth to an existing identity, like being a mom, daughter, or partner?

Who do you want to become now?

What skills and behaviors do you want to take with you?

What values do you want to honor?

What gifts do you want to use?

4. Move into your new identity.

To move into a new identity requires taking on the habits, behaviors, and skills of that identity.

Be patient with yourself. This takes time and it’s not a linear process.

In my experience, the more time and investment I made in my new career identity, the more the physician identity faded. I gradually became “retired endocrinologist/physician career coach/meditator/lover of walks in nature/digital nomad/….” And I’m still evolving.

Last words:

To become a physician, you developed the habits, behaviors, and skills of a competent and caring physician. You took on a physician identity.

To loosen the grip of this identity and expand into another, appreciate how the physician identity has served you, define who you now want to become, what you want to do, and choose the habits and behaviors that will support development of that identity.

No matter what you choose to do next, part of you will always be a physician.