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Have you ever heard of sustainable success? It starts with the ability to transform challenges into change and stress into success.
This means allowing growth and profitability in business and life while maintaining a healthy balance between what matters most, be it your family, hobbies and passions, work, or everything in between. That sounds pretty ideal to me.
I believe that if we allow stress to lead to burnout, we are destroying our chance for sustained success.
Physician burnout is not a new issue. Last year, 54% of physicians reported being burned out in the current healthcare climate. Of these, only 12% sought help for their depression, fatigue and hopelessness. This means the healthcare industry is facing a crisis of burned-out physicians who feel like they have nowhere to turn.
What causes burnout? To name just a few things: We experience long working hours, limited resources, bureaucratic tasks, a lack of autonomy and unrealistic expectations. These are the focus. But even more important is how these factors affect us – how we perceive and respond to these stresses. When we experience too much stress, burnout occurs.
While self-care is important, it may not be enough. As a preventive measure, tackling your stress with six strategies for sustained success can help keep your life goals on track.
Like so many other doctors now, I was feeling quite stressed at work. That ended when I learned how to harness my stress—how to get through the stress without burning out. Today we will identify stressors in our lives and develop a strategy for sustainable success.
Table of contents
Identify the stressors in your life
While managing stress is important, the general tips we've all heard don't always work. Getting more rest or exercise, setting aside time to meditate, or improving your diet can be effective, but if we don't have the time to do it, we end up in a dead end.
A better starting strategy is to identify our stressors. To name is to tame, and stress is no different. Identifying stressors helps us determine which stressors we need to convert into positive energy and which we need to eliminate – which stressors are productive and which are not.
Turn stress into success
You read that right: some stressors can be productive. They can actually help us take steps toward our goals by turning that fear into motivation.
Stress has a bad reputation. Not all stress is bad. Which stress is good stress? For one thing, stress that motivates you to do something you want is good. Stress that offers solid solutions is good. When you identify your stressors, you want to keep the good stress.
And what is bad stress? It is stress that makes you physically ill, prevents you from sleeping, or dominates your life, depriving you of any sense of happiness or fulfillment. It goes without saying that you need to do everything you can to use sustainable success strategies to eliminate bad stress from your life.
Learn six valuable strategies to help you prevent burnout and live a more fulfilling life by subscribing and tuning in to our podcast:
#200 Sustainable success: 6 ways not to burn out ft. Dr. Peter Kim
Possible benefits of stress
For the good stress you have, it's important to keep the benefits in mind. Because stress can motivate you to pursue what you want and because most life goals are challenging, the greatest potential of good stress is to achieve your dreams.
Good stress can also make you more resilient. As your stress tolerance increases, you are ready to take on new challenges. In this sense, from a neuroscientific perspective, good stress makes your brain function and improve. Dr. Daniela Kaufer, an associate professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, has argued, “We always think of stress as a really bad thing, but that's not the case for optimal attention and performance, both behavioral and cognitive.”
Find sustainable success
Most of us grow unbalanced, which leads to stress. What does that mean? If your life goals include increasing your income to build the life you want, then chances are that focusing on your job will result in a compromise where you neglect your passions or your family, resulting in Stress with these damaged relationships results. When stress increases, we are less fulfilled. And imbalance is not what we want, nor was it our original goal.
So how can we reduce, prevent or redirect stress? Let’s look at the six elements of sustainable success to learn more.
Create a long-term vision
When it comes to a long-term vision, you need to have a clear goal of what you want your life to look like. For me, the end goal was always to have enough income to do what I wanted. I didn't want a life where my vacation depended on my PTO approval.
When a clear long-term vision is stated and defined, you are more likely to fight for it. It helps you determine what actions to take regardless of what happens in the short term. Challenges become mere obstacles on the path to your long-term vision.
Responsible growth
You, like me, probably want to do so many things. We want to increase our income, maintain good relationships with our family and friends, pursue hobbies, and much more. These are not bad wishes at all. But the more we do, the more we wear ourselves out, which leads to burnout.
If growth interferes with some aspect of your life, it is not responsible growth. Have you ever heard a tech CEO say something like “I let the company grow too fast” when explaining why it filed for bankruptcy? The situation is similar for individuals. On the surface, growth seems like a great idea. But when we take on more than we can handle, the associated stressors lead to literal bankruptcy and sacrifice parts of our lives we otherwise wouldn't want to lose.
Building a solid foundation
One of the biggest stress reducers is building a solid foundation. This means working toward your goals slowly, step by step, in the right order, so you know you have something to fall back on if something goes wrong. Consider the danger of building a house without a foundation – as stressors increase, the whole thing will collapse. However, if you have a strong foundation, losing part of the facade does not mean that the entire structure will collapse.
As you look forward and prioritize growth, make sure you lay the foundation and responsibly build your life one piece at a time. This ensures a less stressful environment compared to the alternative.
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Work-life harmony
There's this idea of work-life balance, but let's think about that phrase. It assumes that our work and our personal lives are opposing forces. Don't let your work and your personal life be two completely separate things. Instead, strive for work-life harmony, where your work is an important part of your identity along with the other aspects of your life, such as your family, friends, and hobbies.
When you identify with your work, it gives you a greater sense of purpose and fulfillment and gives you the fuel to live the other parts of your life. When you have a great day with family, you leave energized and ready to face any problem. Why can't this also apply the other way around? When you have a great day at work because your job gives you meaning, you will return home ready to pass on that positive energy to your family. When you experience harmony in your life, everything works together and not in contradiction.
Continuous learning
After about seven to ten years, doctors reach their limits. As a senior physician, it seems like you're no longer growing. Her practice is up and running, but the challenge isn't quite there yet.
Before that, our entire experience in medicine was about achieving, striving for and pushing forward new milestones and continually learning. It turns out that life is more fun when we continually learn. When dissatisfaction creeps in, that's the signal telling you, “It's time to learn a new skill.” Maybe it's a new field or passion you want to develop, maybe it's a side hustle. It's up to you. But don't ignore this feeling of dissatisfaction. Instead, use it to motivate yourself to learn something new.
adaptability
Life doesn't always go as planned. When that happens, the most successful people know how to turn the unexpected into an opportunity and reorient themselves as they learn new things.
Without adaptability, we would wallow in the stress of what we have not achieved. But when we pivot, we set new goals, create a new purpose, and redirect the stress that would have otherwise held us back from our next big success.
Transform challenges into change and stress into success
Stress doesn't have to control you. Quite the opposite.
If you spend too much energy stressing over things you can't change, you'll remain unbalanced and leave no room for growth, even in the face of success. It leaves us dissatisfied. And as Tony Robbins said, “Success without fulfillment; This is the ultimate failure.”
Reduce bad stress and use your good stressors to motivate you to achieve your goals. Remember that everyone faces stress, but control over how you view and use it is entirely in your hands.
We here at Passive Income MD can help you achieve sustainable success and we hope to work with you at one of our many conferences soon. Until then, thank you for letting me be a part of your journey.
Peter Kim, MD, is the founder of Passive Income MD, creator of the Passive Real Estate Academy, and offers weekly training through his Monday podcast, the Passive Income MD Podcast. Join our community in the Passive Income Doc Facebook Group.
further reading
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
