Making a major change in your life is easier when you take care of yourself properly during the transition. When I made the change from being a physician to an entrepreneur, I learned some hard lessons that I’d like to share with you to make your entrepreneurial journey easier.
Compassion can become self-compassion
When you’re a physician one of the most important skills you have is compassion for others. It helps you make people feel better, because you care for them as a person, not just about beating a disease or a condition.
You also find yourself becoming drained by the compassion you give. It leads to being overwhelmed and that’s not healthy. But if you look carefully around you, you suddenly realise that the other people in your shoes have similar challenges.
The good news is that you already hold the solution to this problem, you can turn the compassion you have for others on yourself without losing anything. You quickly start to stop beating yourself up when things go wrong, you stop being so focused on being perfect and start focusing on getting things done.
Self-care is caring for everything
Doctors are meant to meet the needs of other people before they examine their own needs. This leads to stretching yourself too thinly and it’s easy to carry this habit into entrepreneurial life.
Prioritising self-care, on the other hand, lets you set a new standard for others, you’re leading by example for your clients, patients, colleagues, etc.
Once you cater to your own mental, emotional, spiritual and physical needs, your interactions with others bloom.
Come with a growth mindset
Everyone knows it’s hard to become a doctor, but it’s also hard to be a doctor, you have to work a hundred hours a week, because it’s expected and because it’s profitable.
When you become an entrepreneur, you need to start with the mindset that you can work less and still succeed. For example, you can give a speech (paid for) that you video and release on YouTube where you earn money for each view. You can use the ideas as the basis for a blog post that brings people to your website to buy, you can take your blog posts and build a book from them and sell that and so on.
It’s easier to have a growth mindset when you work on your mindfulness and learn to find fulfilment rather than focusing on hours spent at your desk.
You have to be a deep listener
One of the great things about coming from medicine is that doctors are, generally speaking, pretty good listeners already. But if you’re going into business, you need to be better.
You have the time to learn to listen properly, to read between the lines of what people are saying and to give valuable feedback to those speaking to you, so that you can better understand them.
As an entrepreneur, you can learn to hear what’s not being said as well as what is and help others see the big picture rather than the smaller one when you listen deeply.
You must nurture relationships
Once you’ve mastered the self-care side of things, it allows you to be more human to forge connections with your clients and always show up ready to serve.
One thing I found to be particularly effective in creating strong relationships was to be able to share stories of your own journey to help others to see who you are and to relate to you, and, of course, to listen to the stories of others in return.
Final thoughts
Every entrepreneur will face unique challenges and not every journey is as extreme as going from doctor’s work to business coaching, but the principles I discovered are valuable to every would-be entrepreneur. They are a sturdy foundation for any business.
