You don't have to feel called to medicine to be a good doctor

Is medicine a calling or just a job? Christie Mulholland thinks that question is the wrong one, and answering it keeps physicians stuck in burnout. Christie, a palliative care physician and certified physician development coach, returns to the show to introduce a four-quadrant matrix that maps how called you feel to medicine against how satisfied you actually are practicing it. This episode is based on her article "Moving beyond the false binary of medicine as a calling," published on KevinMD. She walks through each quadrant (the calling, the craft, the wound, and the wall) and the specific coaching question that unlocks a next step for physicians living in each one. Christie also talks about how profit-driven systems benefit when "calling" stays the only acceptable answer, why work-life balance keeps getting squeezed out of clinical careers, and when a career pause becomes the move that smaller adjustments cannot replace. Listen for the question that names where you actually are.

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