Self Care When Retiring

In this episode of PodMD, Director of RWS (Rooms With Style), Caroline Chaplin will be discussing the topic of self care when retiring. We discuss the importance of self care when retiring as a medical specialist, what to consider, how to establish your likes/dislikes, how to find a sense of purpose and more.

• Transcript
  Please note this is a machine generated transcription and may contain some errors.
  *As always, all in this PodMD podcast is intended for health professionals and the comments are of a general nature. Information given is not intended as specific medical advice pertaining to any given patient. If you have a clinical issue with one of your patients please seek appropriate advice from a colleague with expertise in the area.

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  Today I’d like to welcome to the PodMD studio, the director of RWS, Caroline Chaplin. Today we’ll be discussing the topic of self care when retiring. Caroline, thanks for talking with us on PodMD today.

  Caroline: Thanks, Portia for having me.

  Question 1
  Today we’re talking about self care when retiring as a medical specialist. As discussed in our previous podcast, this could be because you’re closing your practice or you’re going into another role. But Caroline, what does self care mean for a doctor, and what have you experienced?

  Caroline: They’re both great questions Portia. Self care for doctors means mostly, in my experience, that they don’t do much. They’re programmed somewhat, and our listeners would be very well versed with this, for caring for everybody else. Whether it be your family at home, your patients, your referrers, and you forget about yourself and we see this obviously in relation to going and getting medical exams and so forth, regular medical testing. But in relation to self care, I’m more talking about your wellbeing as a human being. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

  Question 2
  What are the type of things that doctors need to consider when it comes to self care?

  Caroline: Well firstly, I guess what is it? What I like to think of in relation to self care is making some time for you and your own health and wellbeing, so that might be – I like to say, ‘everyday are you taking your meds?’ So you’re always telling everybody else to take their meds, but are you taking your meds. What that means for me is, M stands for mindfulness, are you doing something mindful? I’m not expecting that you’ve got time to run off to a yoga class for half an hour, that’s not always so easy for a doctor. But do you have time to do some breathing in the chair in between consulting cases. What can you do to be mindful and take some time out for you. Could that be some parasympathetic breathing. I know the hospitals are doing a lot more of this and encouraging their doctors to do this. So are you doing these techniques perhaps to wind down at night or first thing in the morning to set your intention for the day. So that’s my M. The E is exercise. So what type of exercise are you doing. Again, a lot of my doctors will say to me, I used to play soccer and I used to do this and I used to do that and I get that. I understand it’s a very difficult job, but in relation to exercise I tell you what I’d be a rich woman if I hadn’t bought so many exercise bands for my doctors over the years. There is kind of no excuses, you can do something in between consulting with patients, spend one minute. This might be whilst you’re recording your notes or looking at your AI notes whatever you’re doing, you might just do some exercises with a stretchy band and they’re all over the internet. You can work out what they are just to keep your shoulders mobile. Keep your legs moving and so forth. So that’s E for exercise, of course. Something cardiovascular. You know, there’s the HIT training that people are doing all the time these days. Tabata training is really good, there’s a free app. Download it onto your phone and literally in 5 minutes, you can be doing some cardiovascular exercise each day, and as you’d know better than me, studies are showing that this is having a great impact on people’s health. The next letter we’re up to is D, and you probably can guess that one, diet. Are you thinking about your own diet and what you’re eating. I just don’t mean restricting and always trying to lose weight. Are you having your 5 serves of vegetables each day. Do you even know what a serve is. I think that, maybe 2025 is the year to get yourself a personal coach and dietitian in this space. Somebody that you can contact all the time so you can be thinking about you. For many of my doctors I’m always bringing them, soup with 15 grams of protein for example, showing them the yoghurts are on the market, etcetera. These are the sorts of things that you can get a little bit of education about, and I think sometimes with doctors you start to think to yourself ‘hang on a minute, I should know all of this because I’m a doctor’, but no one’s expecting that you are also a nutritionist, so finding out a lot about it, it can really help and benefit you. The last one’s probably the trickiest for the doctors of all, it’s sleep. So are you getting enough sleep and so forth. So what are you doing to try and get sleep. Are you looking at some techniques to turn the lights down and get into a sleep phase. Are you taking some cherry juice at the end of the night, because it contains some melatonin, etcetera. There are a lot of things that you can do. I find that when doctors are starting to look towards retiring, they actually get quite anxious because what’s happened is the meds become more important than ever because they’ve started to stress about well, who am I? What am I? How will I matter? What am I going to do during this transitional period? So taking your meds is probably the first step I would always recommend in self care.

  Question 3
  Fantastic, but a really insightful way of remembering for doctors to really take into consideration some self care for themselves and to think about themselves for once. In terms of doctors knowing their personality, this can be really difficult. So how would you say that doctors can find this out and make good decisions based off this?

  Caroline: Well you make a good point? The personality thing is, if you don’t know who you are, you don’t know how you’re motivated. So one of the things when you’re winding down or closing up your practice is really to start thinking about who you are and what you like, what floats your boat, if you like. There are a lot of tests and things that we can do to find that out. Sometimes you know you’ve never given yourself the time to sit down and say, what do I really like? So for example, you might like we talked about soccer earlier, you might love playing indoor soccer, you go to your futsal every week, but what you actually like about it the most is that you feel significant. You’re good in the team and it makes you feel like you really matter. Often when work is removed from our lives, then suddenly there’s a massive void. Now I do notice that a lot of doctors don’t finish completely. They’ll go into something else, but it is important to consider, well, what do I need as a human being? What’s going to be missing? So it’s a lot about looking at the different pillars of your life and thinking what do I need in each one of those areas. No, I said.

  Question 4
  And Caroline, on that kind of note, what are those pillars and how are they going to determine what their likes and dislikes are moving forward so that they can have that sense of purpose?

  Caroline: Well what I do is part of our mentoring coaching is, do some tests with you to work that out for you. But a lot of doctors and a lot of people have the need for control, so they’ll have one of the pillars is certainty. Another pillar that’s opposed to that is variety. So you might be someone who has a high need for certainty, but you also need lots of variety. In your life. And where does this rank? There’s six pillars, another one is significance and that doesn’t mean necessarily you’re egotistical by any means, it just means you need to matter in some in some form, whether it be at home or at work or whatever, love and connection, so do you feel true love and connection for some people, they need a little bit of love and connection, but that’s the kind of last one for them. And then there’s growth and contribution. So when we do a test on you, we look at that and we order those things. Give you a case in point. Just recently I did this with a doctor who’s looking to retire and he was looking to retire over the next 12 months. So we did the test and the two needs that he came up with as his number one core pillars and needs was one significance, the need to feel significant and two growth. And I said, all right, what are your plans for your retirement? What are you going to do? And he pretty much said ‘I’m just going to look forward to taking my foot off the gas and having a cup of tea’. I said, well, you are going to go bloody mad. Because there’s nothing there for you and your core pillars there or core needs, you’re not satisfying them. So what I suggest is you stay at work until you’ve got a plan. Now this person we went on to do some personal coaching with, but what we came up with was okay. What do you like about being significant now? He had a big corporate job in medicine. He wasn’t from a private practice. This particular individual really liked the buzz of people knocking on his door and coming to him and needing his advice. So we ended up looking at different boards that he could be a part of and so forth, rather than getting his significance by volunteering at the animal welfare shelter where he probably wouldn’t get it from or whatever else that somebody else might just absolutely love to do. Also there was no growth strategy for him. So just because someone’s getting older and looking towards retiring, one, if they’re going in a different direction to a different role, then that might be all the growth they need. But if not, and they are actually retiring or winding down, closing their practice, suddenly the buzz has gone from being everyday I’m busy, the phone’s ringing. Have you not felt this yourself in normal life anyway, when you go on holidays and suddenly there’s no calls. I find that I’ll get it loads of emails and then nothing and I feel glad for the rest for a few days and then I feel ohh God I need this. My two pillars that I need are contribution and growth, so if I’m not feeling that growth and I’m not feeling like ohh let’s make up something, let’s do it, a new service for the doctors or whatever. So it’s just about doing a test first I guess knowing what that is, some people have never really given themselves time to work out what their personality needs are. There is also another test that we do on personality traits and what you like in anything that you do. So for example, and what you kind of core needs are in this area too would be things like for example, my top one is humour, so anything that I go into I need to be around people that can have a joke, have a laugh and I know that if I’m not feeling balanced in myself, then I can look at that and say what am I missing? I need a regular night out with girlfriends that to get that laugh or I need to hire people at RWS who are funny and have got good humour or whatever it might be, because I know I need that and conversely I need to know what they need. So when you look to close your practice and wind down, you’ve got to be mindful that suddenly all these things stop. Say for example your need is certainty. Well, suddenly now you may not feel like you have that certainty, you might have done a really good financial plan and I encourage you to listen to the Oxlade podcast on financial planning for doctors when they’re retiring, but you may not have it plan in place and you might think what’s happening to my cash flow. The decision to close your practice might be somewhat taken out of your hands. Maybe you’ve got some health concerns. I have a doctor who has been winding down her practice considerably because she’s had terrible hip problems and just can’t sit for long periods, so sometimes these things are forced upon us and that’s OK we can make other life choices, but it’s a lot about the planning. What can we do to make sure that we understand ourselves as a human being and we make sure that we put into our day, our week, our month, our year ahead, those variables so that we’re ticking that box and we’re very aware of what makes us happy.

  Question 5
  That’s really insightful, Caroline and I think that that’s something that a lot of individuals do forget about and kind of don’t really consider when taking in planning for these events in lives and it’s a big, drastic change as well. So it’s really important to understand yourself before you make these decisions. In terms of practical tips, did you have any ideas of closing your practice or looking to retire, was there anything that kind of stood out to you?

  Caroline: Well in relation to self care do the meds I gave you that technique already, so I would be doing your meds and working out what that means for you, and how am I going to incorporate that into my day. I’d definitely look at getting the nutritionists. It’s time to look after you a little bit more as well. Just making sure that you’ve got time to meal prep and all of those sorts of things that you’ve always wished that you could do. Giving yourself permission is something else as well. Always remember someone saying to me once when I was pregnant with my first child. There’s no medals for this. Give yourself permission to be on the couch and put your feet up. And I stuck to that. That statement gave me permission to do that, and so that can be something else. Granting ourselves the permission because as doctors, I think you’ve always been responsible to somebody else and to something else. Now how to be a bit more responsible for your own care and that can be quite a journey. So I would also recommend you get some mentoring and coaching. I’d love you to come to me and I’ll help you through it. I really enjoy it. I suppose I just told you before that I like the growth and the contribution in my mind that’s giving back to the medical fraternity, and I understand the journey that you’re on and that you’re moving towards as well. Alternatively, go and see a councillor or get at some sort of life coach. Get a personal trainer. Whatever it is that you need. Firstly we need to establish you as a human being. What do you need? Because Portia, what you need is different to what I need and to what Doctor Jones needs. Everybody’s different. So I do see some strong trends though that doctors have a high need for significance, that comes across a lot. If that’s the need, then how we’re going to put that into your daily schedule so that you’re satisfying that that need because I’m telling you, you will feel unbalanced and unhappy if you don’t. The final tip is I want you to start imagining your life as a pyramid sitting on a desk and a pyramid has lots of different points. Work out what your points are. So for example, for me it would be growth and contribution that are big points for me, but it also be that I want to have humour in my life and that I love exercise. If you pull too hard on one of your points, you’ve pyramid starts to topple. So if all you do is panic about your finance and worry about your certainty, then suddenly you’re not having variety and you’re not having any fun. So it’s listening to what your needs are and then making sure that your servicing those needs. So I would certainly recommend doing some sort of counselling or coaching just to get the head around that. It’s very practical. Coaching is far more practical than counselling. Counselling is looking back at your past and why you perhaps think the way you do. But coaching is practical tips on what are we going to do? What are the five things we’re going to engage in our diet? What are the five things we’re going to do to get better sleep or whatever it might be? Because you may not have any problems with sleep, but you might have lots of problems with your diet. So how do we get that balance and effect and because it is the start of the new year, is it time to start thinking about you. Today in this podcast, we’re talking mostly about self care for doctors who are retiring and closing their practice, but let’s face it, self care is pertinent to us all at any stage of our lives.

  Thank you so much for your time here today in the Pod MD studio Caroline. It’s been most meaningful and incredibly appropriate to hear you encourage doctors to think about their own welfare for a change. They spend their entire careers putting all their energies into the welfare of someone else, be that their patients, staff, referrers or family, the list goes on. So we really appreciate your insight into this incredibly important topic today.
  

  Caroline: Thanks so much for having me, Portia. I’ve really enjoyed talking about it.