What do you believe?
Why do you believe that?
One of my favorite definitions of beliefs is just a thought that you have thought so many times you think it is true.
Many beliefs we have serve us.
We believed we could become doctors.
We believed we could help people.
Some of our beliefs are really holding us back, and we call those limiting beliefs. We can address those specifically in a later blog. For now, we are just trying to raise your awareness that much of what you believe to be true, is just the way that you see or interpret things.
It’s so funny that once you learn to start separating the subjective experience of the world from the objective facts, you may begin to really see that much of how you see the world is “just a thought” or that your thought is a “belief” about the world.
What is interesting is that we have the power to see these thoughts as beliefs, not necessarily the only way to see the world. There may be other people who see this same thing differently. You may even see this same thing differently on one day versus another depending on your mood, if you are tired, overwhelmed, behind, versus if you just had a great day.
That’s so much of what we do in coaching is I ask you what is going on in your life. You tell me all about it. I listen. Then we take a step back together and separate out the facts versus the thoughts. We look at what you think and what you believe. We ask if those thoughts are serving you. If so, you keep them. If not, we help you look at another way to see it, a way that might be less painful or even more helpful.
Even just distancing yourself from the thought and see the thought as separate from you and that one day it might be optional, or you could replace that thought with some other way of looking at the world can be freeing.
Remember that your thoughts are a reflection of biology, they come from your brain. Your brain is designed to be incredibly efficient. Therefore, once you think a thought enough times, it becomes a default pathway, like a superhighway in your brain. You don’t have to concentrate to think it. The new beliefs, those they are more like bumpy dirt roads. It’s not fast or easy or quick to get down the new road or to repeatedly connect new neural pathways. But it’s so worth it.
Beliefs are some of my favorite things. They give me hope. I believe that medicine doesn’t have to be the way it is now. I believe that doctors are people too and deserve to be treated with compassion.
I believe we are not cogs in a wheel or revenue generating machines. I believe we are healers. I believe healing is about connection. I believe the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.
I believe we were not trained to save lives so that we could spend most of our time staring at computer screens typing in clinic, in hospitals, and at home on nights and weekends.
I believe somethings got to give. I believe change is a foot.
I believe we are uniquely positioned to demand change and create change. I believe now is the time. I believe I am part of the solution, that all of us are part of the solution.
I believe we will leave medicine better than we found it. I believe this is all just a phase.
Just as people wore neon in the 1980s and hair bands were all the rage in the 1990s, this is just a phase that one day people will say, remember back in 2010 to 2020 when doctors sat and faced computer screens all day every day and got terribly burned out until things finally had to change?
I think nearly everyone agrees. All the major medical associations and all the lead medical journals are paying increasing attention to physician distress in the current health care system. I don’t know what the answer will be, I don’t think anyone does.
It doesn’t matter exactly how it will happen, because we have to be committed to the result no matter what.
Everything is just an experiment to find out the best way to make it happen.
I believe this with all my heart. I believe. What do you believe?