In the last few weeks, I finished a few books that I wanted to share.
| 90 Seconds to a Life You Love. How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. By Joan Rosenberg, PhD The Disease to Please. By Harriet Braiker, PhD Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. By Anna Lembke, MD The Good Enough Job. Reclaiming Life from Work. By Simone Stolzoff |
[All were great reads/ listens. I have mentioned the first book a few times: 90 Seconds to a Life You Love a few times. Hop over here if you missed this post.]
I’m going to skip over the middle two for now… otherwise this would turn into a novel.
I wanted to share a snippet about the last one: The Good Enough Job. Reclaiming Life from Work by Simone Stolzoff.
The title pays a bit of homage to the 1950s psychoanalyst and Pediatrician Dr Winnicott who proposed the notion of the “good enough” parent as opposed to a perfect parent– believing that an approach of sufficiency (offering support but also space) over perfection would benefit both parent and child.
The Good Enough concept has been showing up for me a lot lately, and I wanted to share it with you in case it resonated.
In The Good Enough Job, Reclaiming Life from Work, Stolzoff hit on something for me that I knew but had never verbalized until this week. One of my frustrations with working in Medicine over the last several years (for those of you who don’t know, I’m an ER doc outside of my work as a Life Coach) is it has lacked the meaning and purpose I had imagined in many of my day to day interactions with patients. With the stress of Covid, the politicization of vaccines, and the subsequent decrease in trust in the medical field, patients and private equity firms alike now expect medicine to be run like a Burger King: Have it Your Way, where patient satisfaction and profits are often higher priorities than quality patient care.
I digress… bottom line: this all started to suck the life and meaning out of a job I once felt incredibly passionate about.
Stozoff offered this:
“…the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering. Studies show that an “obsessive passion” for work leads to higher rates of burnout and work-related stress… Research aside, we know intuitively that sky-high expectations are a recipe for disappointment. When we expect work to help us self-actualize–to constantly motivate and fulfill us– settling for anything less can feel like a failure... Tethering your sense of self-worth to your career is a perilous game.”
“… The question, then, is how to balance the pursuit of meaningful work with the risk of letting your job subsume who you are… Compared to perfection, “good enough” is a more forgiving ideal… it is an invitation to choose what sufficiency means– to define your relationship to your work without letting it define you.“
“A life completely consumed by work crowds out other aspects of ourselves. In the words of psychotherapist Esther Perez, too many people bring the best of themselves to work, and bring the leftovers home. When we give all of our energy to our professional lives, we deprive the other identities that exist within each of us– spouse, parent, sibling, neighbor, friend, citizen, artist, traveler– of the nutrients to grow.”
The Good Enough Job. Reclaiming Life from Work. By Simone Stolzoff
The book has a lot of other nuggets, too; it’s worth a listen or a read.
A few days after listening, I finally put something together. I have a rather passionate personality. I’ll dive in head first… maybe without fully knowing the waters I’m about to swim into. This passion can be great, but it can also be all-consuming. And I love a LOT of things. [The ER doc is known as the Jack of All Trades, Master of None… well, I may have some similarities in my non-medicine life, too.]
In many ways, detaching my sole meaning/ purpose/ self-worth from medicine a few years ago was a tremendous gift.
The job could have consumed all my time and who I was.
Instead, I get to be a spouse, mother, coach, friend, neighbor, baker, runner, reader, and traveler. And, to be honest, I think this gives me a lot more meaning and purpose than any job ever could.
Heidi
