70: So I Built the Hallway - People Worth Listening To

Let's talk about medical conferences.

Specifically, I wanna talk about the part of every medical conference nobody puts in the brochure.

You flew somewhere.

You've got the badge and the tote bag.

You've sat through a full day of sessions, and the sessions were good.

You took notes.

You learned things.

And then on the way out, you end up in the hallway with three other clinicians waiting for the same bad coffee, and somebody says something like, "Yeah, I left that kind of practice two years ago." Another says, "I almost did, and here's why I stayed." And the third tells the group, "I cut to four days and took the pay hit, and I'd never go back." And twenty minutes later, you felt something the whole day of sessions didn't quite reach, not because those three people were smarter than any of the speakers, but because there were three of them, and they didn't agree, and you got to stand in the middle of the conversation and pick up the parts that were important to you and your specific situation.

That conference hallway is what I wanna talk about today because I built one on purpose, and I'm going to tell you about it.

But let me back up.

This didn't come out of nowhere.

It came from the last few conversations we've had on this show.

We've talked about conversations, the conversations you miss out on, the conversations you need to make time for, and how the lack of those conversations can lead to feelings of isolation even when you're surrounded by a team in a clinic.

I argued that the casualty of an overbooked life isn't only your sleep, it's those exact conversations.

And I made the case that the loneliness that creeps into a clinical career is a structural hazard of the work.

Then last time, we turned the lens inward to connection as a skill and how to combat loneliness, working on the communication skills you've lost along the way, the skills that fill up your well, not just the ones you give to others.

So those episodes were really me building towards something.

If you've been nodding along, the fair question to throw back at me is, "Okay, fine.

How? Where does a working clinician actually go to do any of this?" It's a great question, and for a while, I've been doing it on my own here in this podcast.

But that conference hallway with its different voices is important.

So I went and built the hallway without the conference badges and swag bags.