The Clash asked a very important question, “Should I stay, or should I go?”

  If you are like more than 90 percent of physicians, your work environment may be a significant or even the sole source of your burnout. Unlike Mr. Jerome, for the typical physician, there is not much sitting around. You always seem to have plenty of work to do. As a urologist, I get five or more job offers a day from around the country. I never have to worry about having a job. It’s whether I can thrive in my work environment. 

For most jobs, it boils down to…

• What You Give:

What you give to medicine may include your licensing and training, your intelligence, your work ethic, your time, your billing expertise, your diligence, your empathy, your compassion, your nighttime hours, your weekend hours, the possibility of contracting an infectious or deadly disease, the possibility of being sued or shot by a patient, your marriage, your relationships with important people in your life, your patience, your leadership, your blood, your health, your soul, and your life. Whew! What a list! 

• What You Get:

What you get can include the unbelievable satisfaction and joy of helping another human being in a small or a lifesaving way, income, prestige, status, investment opportunities, stress, ulcers, fabulously poor health, free lunch or no lunch, sleep deprivation, a crash course in business, an on-the-job MBA with variable results, management and marketing education, a crash course in how to use an Excel spreadsheet to calculate your compensation or lack thereof, a divorce, suicidal ideation, and of course, BURNOUT. Right off the bat, I am not sure what any of us get as physicians is worth what we give. 

• How You Get Out: 

How you get out can include working for more than thirty years and retiring, “slowing down” and moving to a part- time track, becoming employed versus owning, exiting clinical medicine and working in medically related fields, leaving medicine entirely and choosing a new career, suicide, or what most physicians do and what I like to call the slow burn. This is when you are trapped in a work/compensation environment partially of your creation or acceptance, hate it, but now would require blowing up your entire life to change it, or so you think.

Let’s tilt the scales in our favor. You have more control, discretion, and influence over your environments than you think. 

On today’s video, I’m sharing why your work environment is a gigantic determinant of your burnout & how to determine if you should, stay or go.