What Do You Want?

When was the last time someone asked you what you actually want?

Not what's best for your patients. Not what your department needs. Not what makes sense given your finances or your current schedule.

What YOU want.

I'm going to guess it's been a while. Maybe since you chose your specialty.  Or actually maybe it was when you were ranking residencies for the match. Maybe before medicine took over so much of your life. 

That's a system that trained us to optimize for the medical system, not for what we really want in this life.

Medicine Trains Us Out of Wanting Things

We spend more than a decade in environments where the answer to “what do you want?” is irrelevant. You want sleep? Doesn't matter. You want a weekend off? Too bad.

Bit by bit, we learn to stop asking for what we want.  Over time, after it’s been so long since someone asked us, it can become hard to even know what we really want.

The Worksheet We Give Every Client on Day One

Inside the Empowering Women Physicians coaching program, during the very first session, we give them a worksheet called “What Do You Want To Create In Your Life?”

Seven questions. Not complicated. Not clinical. Just honest.

What results do you most want in your life? What beliefs have been getting in the way? What would you need to believe to finally get there?

You would not believe how hard it can be for some people to answer. Not because the questions are tricky. But because many of us have genuinely never been asked.

Why Wanting Feels Dangerous

After working with over 1000 women physicians, here's one way I have found people can start this work even when they don’t know what they really want.

We are really good at knowing what we don't want. We don't want to feel this exhausted. We don't want to dread Monday mornings. We don't want to chart on weekends.

We can flip that around into a vision of what we DO want. 

Don’t want to chart on weekends?

Then what you do want is to get all your charts done at work. 

Don’t want to feel exhausted?

Then what you do want is to feel rested.

Don’t want to feel like you are just running around busy all the time with no time for yourself?

Then maybe what you do want is to finally enjoy this life you worked so hard to create.

What Happens When You Actually Answer

The clients who do the deepest work in EWP are almost always the ones who get honest on this question early. Who allow themselves to actually want something.

One client wrote: “I want to craft a life that is based on service to others AND myself.”

Service to others AND myself.

When is the last time you gave yourself permission to be in that sentence? Not instead of your patients, not instead of your family. But alongside them.

What you believe is possible 

It's not just about knowing what you want. It's about what you believe is possible.

The worksheet asks what beliefs have kept you from getting there. And then it asks: are those thoughts actually true?

That gentle, honest “wait, is this really true?” is the beginning of everything.

And then it asks you to complete this sentence:

“Maybe just maybe it might be possible that…”

Not certainty. Not a five-year plan. Just a crack of light. A single maybe.

Because change doesn't require certainty. It just requires the tiniest opening.

The Data

77% of physicians entering EWP meet criteria for burnout. After just eight weeks, that drops to 33%. Professional fulfillment nearly triples. Self-compassion more than triples. Published in peer-reviewed literature, replicated cohort after cohort.

Those outcomes literally start with these exact questions. With someone finally asking you what you want.

Start Here

What do you want?

Not what you should want. 

What do YOU want?  What results do you want to create in your life?

Sit with it. Journal on it. Let it be messy and incomplete. You don't need the answer today. You just need to be willing to ask.

You've spent your whole career asking other people what they need.

This one is for you.

Then you just ask yourself what you can do to take one tiny step in that direction.  The compound effect of small changes over time are immeasurable.  

You’ll start to see progress before you know it.  We see it time after time, cohort after cohort, woman physician after woman physician.

It all starts with asking yourself what you want.  Then taking a step in that direction.

So much love,

Sunny Smith, MD Founder, Empowering Women Physicians