Career and Life Planning Guidebook for Medical Residents

Reflection + Activity List your top three priorities, or guiding principles, in each of the following categories. The following are three priorities for my family life: 1: 2: 3: The following are three priorities for my career aspirations: 1: 2: 3: The following are three priorities for my financial goals: 1: 2: 3: life. If you have a mismatch between your goals and priorities, you become unhappy. What if spending evenings with your family is one of your priorities. Occasionally something may come up that prevents you from being home for dinner as planned. An important meeting or an emergency may extend your work day. If your family sees you at home most nights, they can tell this is your priority even when an occasional event prevents you from being at home. But what if you announce that your new goal is to be the highest producer in your clinic? To accomplish this, youwill extendyour clinic from5 p.m. to 8 p.m. to accommodate people who can’t get offwork earlier. What will your family feel about your priorities? How will you feel about themismatch between your goals and priorities? Beforeyouset goals, first establishyour life’spriorities. Then don’t ever set a goal or accept a responsibility that will conflict with these priorities. If you have firm priorities in place, you will find it easy to say ‘no’ to something that goes against one of your priorities. Have you ever really thought about what is important to you? Have you ever listed your true priorities? Today is the day. In this exercise you will need to listen to your heart to establish what is truly important in your life. There are many areas in which to establish priorities, but for this exercise, we will concentrate on only three of them. Now you have established the general direction you want your ship of life to sail. Next, let’s begin to define the specific things you need to do in order to get there and what couse you will be using on the map. Life, Money and Career Priorities 137 WWW.PHYSICIANCAREERPLANNING.COM