WWAJD?
The update: I’m feeling less burned out. I haven’t had a real break yet, but I’m on ethics consults and, so far, the pager’s been kind. Practicing my minimum baseline has helped, and unexpectedly, practicing my minimum baseline has led to my respecting boundaries that make it easier to keep plugging along.
The surprise: I’ve been feeling some pulls towards practicing aspirational behavior. I woke up the other day wanting to take a walk. Like, legitimately wanting to. I was so surprised, I tried to talk myself out of it. “You’ve been so tired,” I thought to myself. “Just rest, build your energy back up.” But then, somewhere else in my brain, I found the thought, “What would Aspirational Jessie do?”
I think we’re long from the days of omnipresent WWJD, but other “WW__D” have remained in my lexicon. “WWHVD?” prompts me to think of what our pediatric neurosurgery nurse practitioner would do, because I never want to disappoint her. “WWTSD?” Well, she allegedly just got married, so I hope she’s honeymooning somewhere fabulous where paparazzi will never, ever find her. WWAJD isn’t part of my typical vernacular, though. Sure, I have goals and plans to achieve them, nicely delineated (Full Focus planner, thank you). Admittedly, progress towards those goals seems to move in fits and starts. I get time out of the unit and make progress, and then things sit, generally untouched, when I’m back in the throes of patient care.
But we know, at least intuitively, that things aren’t all-or-nothing and the way to make progress on big ideas is to just keep moving, no matter how small the moves are. Interestingly, small moves forward are also what make us generally happier at work overall. In 2011, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer described The Progress Principle, the study of 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees across seven organizations, and found that when people consistently take steps forward (even small steps) on meaningful projects, they are more creative, productive, and engaged. They determined that achieving consistent, small wins was the biggest indicator of a rich inner work life, and that inner work life enabled people to be more productive, more engaged, and more creative. (If you watch that Ted Talk, you'll be shocked that it was recorded over ten years ago because there are so many parallels between then and now.)
Since work can take so much from our non-work lives, I’m going to take this opportunity to add an occupational concept to my non-physician life. Will taking a ten-minute walk build my aerobic capacity? No. But Aspirational Jessie does it anyway, because I do want to be a person who enjoys walking just for the sake of it. Aspirational Jessie also sends “thinking of you” texts to people she, well, thinks of randomly. Aspirational Jessie takes an extra second to put on jeans to run errands instead of keeping her home, cozy, mismatched, athleisure on to do so. For some reason, “aspirational” feels better to me than “perfect.” “Perfect” is constant and unyielding, with one little slip-up, and I’m back to square one. And if I looked, I’d probably find some perfectionistic tendencies that contributed to my recent burnout. “Aspirational,” on the other hand, is gently fleeting, in a way that’s not unpleasant. “Aspirational” comes and goes. When there’s room for it, it finds me. And when there’s not, it doesn’t. The other thing WWAJD does is give me something to run towards (the best version of me at that moment) instead of something to run from (feeling awful and being burned out). The end result is the same: I emerge from burnout. But the energy I burn to get there is cleaner, more sustainable. It feels a lot better to run towards something you want than running away from something you don’t.
So what does Aspirational You look like? What do they do, what do they forgo? What do they spend extra time doing just because it puts a little spring in their step? And most importantly, when thoughts of Aspirational You find you, do you listen?