The Hidden Cost of Perfectionism in Medicine | Ep10

Michael Hersh, MD

[00:00:00] What if the career and life you've been chasing, the one that's supposed to feel perfect was never real in the first place? In this episode, Dr. Amna Shabbir and I talk about the trap of perfectionism in medicine and how stepping out of it can actually bring more fulfillment and balance. 

Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Better Physician Life. I'm so glad you're here with us today, and I'm so excited for today's guest who I've known for a long time, and I'm really excited to have her on the show. She is someone who has dedicated her career to helping high-achieving physicians redefine success and actually build lives they enjoy living.

Dr. Amna Shabbir is a dual board-certified physician in geriatrics and internal medicine. A master certified life coach and a passionate advocate for physician mental health. She's also the founder of the Early Career Physicians Institute and Amna Shabbir Wellness [00:01:00] Coaching. She hosts the Success Reimagined podcast and maybe her most important role.

A proud mom of two young girls. I am thrilled to have her here today to talk about perfectionism, well-being, and what it really means to thrive in medicine. Dr. Shabbir, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I am great and absolutely thrilled to be here, Dr. Hersh. Thank you for that lovely introduction. You have really dedicated the most recent part of your career to perfectionism and how it impacts physicians.

Talk to me a little bit about where your interest in that topic came from. I'd love to hear. It was one of those moments where you're able to look back and reflect very deeply in life. And I could see that the common thread that tied together so much accomplishment and anguish was perfectionism.

And so that's where it all started. Yeah. And I think that is such a common thread [00:02:00] for physicians. I think medical education and training selects for that tendency toward perfectionism. Can you tell us a little bit about what that journey has been like for you personally? That was the destiny. And when we talk about perfectionism, we have to look at not just the word, but also the context. Now I'm a South Asian woman. I'm born in a dual physician household.

There is pressure to be perfect on so many levels, on all the identities that I hold. So very early on, I feel subconsciously that was right there in front of me and my most like earliest memories. I can picture myself like, this is how you talk, this is how you look, this is how you're poised. Now a lot of those things like the etiquette that my parents taught me and all of those things, they're not necessarily all bad, but it was this element of there, there's a real recognition for [00:03:00] having a performance-based identity when the performative element, whether it is how you perform at school, academia, whether how you perform in the house, all of that matters, right?

If you are this. Good girl who looks always put together, who is always very altruistic and kind, but also competent. Like all of those ways we learn. So I think all of that started to build slowly this facade that became so permanent. I was so good at that. And to the point where anytime my body went through like physical distress also I would.

Learn to hide, learn to make everything look perfect. I think that when I was in my teenage years, I at that time also had an autoimmune condition come up, which I believe was because of perfectionism. I know that we can't put causality directly. We are all physicians here. I understand that part, but there was this real stress to perform to the point of perfection, and so that happened. [00:04:00] Fast forward. I enter medical school. We all know what getting into medical school is like. I got into a very competitive medical school. And so even that process, the whole process of getting to that point, it was so hard. It was brutal. Okay, fine. We get in medicine now we have to survive medicine.

And you're absolutely right. The culture of medicine fosters a very different way of perfectionism. While there is so much perfectionism that happens in medicine, what are the types of people that are getting into medicine in the first place? People like us. And so we're primed, like this is a prime situation for disasters to happen.

And then we enter medicine and then we learned how to disconnect, right? I was already so disconnected, like this is how I'm supposed to look, but this is how I feel. How I feel is not relevant, but how I look and how I perform and how I show up matters. You're a professional. This is how you show up.

Okay? So this disconnect between mind, body, performance, reality, purpose, goals all starts to happen. [00:05:00]  It just deepens and deepens. Fast forward residency happens. I start working as an early career physician. In this whole process further health challenges, I become a mom. I become a mom again.

Both of the times I had really bad postpartum depression. Both of the times I didn't want to ask for help because not only was there this real stigma like you can't ask for help 'cause you're a physician and then everything is gonna be on the record. You can't take a single SSRI tablet because the world will come crashing down.

And it got really dark because I wanted to look perfect. And then again, those layers of my identity my cultural identity, they were all there being a woman was there. And so when I look back, everything was tied together with perfectionism. And the way I look at perfectionism is that we're passing it on to each other and there's studies and data behind that.

So as I then went forward with my journey of finding answers, [00:06:00] interviewing high achievers, interviewing researchers, and creating all this and we'll talk about this more as we get further, I realized how little we know about perfectionism, how much we glorify it in medicine, how much we hold onto it.

Dr. Curran calls it our favorite flaw. He's one of the most amazing researchers. On perfectionism, and this is true. And in medicine this is so true. And so yeah. What a great topic to talk about, learn more about and bring to everyone's conscious mind from our learners to our educators. Everyone in medicine needs to fully understand the depth and breadth of the agony perfectionism is causing.

For clinicians, all healthcare workers, as well as how our patients are suffering because of this. I love the way that you put that. It's our favorite flaw. And I wore my perfectionism like a badge of honor for pretty much my [00:07:00] entire life, I remember in middle school. Now, please keep in mind I grew up on Long Island and so maybe the styles were a little bit different in the eighties, but chains were very common for boys to wear, and I had.

A little charm on a chain that said perfect with the T kind of falling off of it, like to imply perfect, but not really, but literally wore it as a badge of honor about how I saw perfectionism as this thing that was propelling me forward. And so a hundred percent, absolutely it's this thing that I feel like I needed to have it because it was the key to my success.

And there is some truth to that, right? But there is a difference between striving. And I think we conflate the two things. We think that the secret of our success is the perfectionism, but it's really the striving. And I know that there is some terminology around perfectionism.

There's adaptive and maladaptive. And then I just brought up [00:08:00] striving. Can you share with us your thoughts about the different levels and layers of perfectionism? Great points and even in professions that are high stress. Imagine a surgeon was doing a procedure and you want them to be less than perfect.

I think we're confused with terminology. We are confusing excellencism, which is not a proper word, but I like to use it for perfectionism. In medicine and largely the humans that fall in the spectrum of adaptive perfectionism where they're able to, handle pressure things well our landing is excellence. So when we look at adaptive versus maladaptive perfectionism, personally, I really am not such a fan of this terminology, but this is the one that is more widely understood and we learned that. So maladaptive is when okay. Stepping back, the easiest way to understand it is the discrepancy.

So when we look at the scoring system, which is called the almost perfect score, when you look at it and you [00:09:00] break it down, we have maladaptive and adaptive. And so what is the difference how you handle failure. So, for example, I always aim for the best, or I always aim for this.

There's nothing wrong with that. You picking a yes on that kind of question? Yes. If you always aim for the best, that's okay. Nothing wrong. I am not. Yelling in a microphone for everyone to lower their standards. I'm not saying that I'm not taking away excellence. Please go be the best person and version of you.

I'm not telling you to become a recovering perfectionist. I'm not a recovering perfectionist, The problem is, okay, the next question can be, when I fail, I'm extremely hard on myself. Even when I do my best, it never seems enough. That is the problem.

It's the discrepancy when you look between adaptive and maladaptive. And so where are you on that? Another way to look at perfectionism and the types of perfectionism that are out there is [00:10:00] this way to categorize it by how we're affected from a larger lens. So there are three types of perfectionism.

Number one, self-oriented. I must be perfect. I have to be perfect. It is more internally driven. Number two is other-oriented. I expect everyone around me to be perfect and flawless. And so when we look in medicine, everyone who is coming through the doors is very high already on self-oriented. Of course, there's a level of precision and perfection that has brought you in, and then you are surrounded by these amazing attendings that are trying to teach you, and they also want you to be perfect and your parents.

Such as my, they wanted me to be perfect. They still do. So that is your self-oriented and other-oriented. And number three is socially prescribed perfectionism. That is that not only do I want to be perfect, not only do other people around me want me to be perfect the whole world wants me to be perfect.

Strangers online want me to be perfect. Everybody wants me [00:11:00] to be perfect. We are all perfect. That's what's being perpetuated. Largely no surprised there by social media, but this element of socially prescribed perfectionism has been growing and you look back in data even before social media was big because marketing and all these industries have done such a great job.

So every one of us ultimately feels deficient. You can do whatever you want, you'll still never feel enough. And that in a nutshell is perfectionism . Now stepping away. When we look at data over the years, studies that have shown such as studies by Dr. Thomas Curran, it shows that all three types are rising, especially in young adults.

But the type that is rising the fastest and the type that is the most dangerous is socially prescribed perfectionism. That's the type that is the most strongly linked with mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

So that's the type that is the most strongly linked with mental health issues. And then when we look back [00:12:00] and we're glorifying perfection, right? And we're talking about perfectionism in the context of medicine, one of the worst things that we think and we glorify is that. All physicians need to be perfect.

We think that at large, physicians think that in their mind, and that when you look at it through the lens of socially prescribed perfectionism, the whole community looks at us like that. Our patients look at us like that, and we have furthered those narratives where we all think we're walking around with halos on our head, and we're trying to take responsibility for things that lay outside of our control.

All of these elements really impact physicians in medicine as well. And I think to your point with the kind of socially prescribed perfectionism, it's always existed, right? Magazines have always portrayed what you know, people should look like or ideals and. That Instagram veneer, I'll just name it, of what a perfect existence should look like and what our lives should look [00:13:00] like and how our kids should behave and all of the shoulds that pile on top of each other.

That's how we occupy our downtime. We're scrolling in these spaces or just watching other people and wondering is this what my life is supposed to look like? Why doesn't it look this way? And so it's easy for that to magnify and along with it the anxiety, the comparison, the despair that things aren't the way that they're supposed to be.

I know you've had a lot of conversations with physicians and professionals in general about these different types of perfectionism? Have there been any specific takeaways or lessons that, that were particularly enlightening or new or different? One of the ways I start these conversations, which you can hear in my podcast is what does perfectionism mean to you?

And it's always so interesting what everyone shares and what really stood out to me. [00:14:00] Between clinicians was that I gotta have it. And then what really stood out between what research and actual data tells us is that, no, you don't have to have it. It is harming you. And so this absolute necessary need, and now there's another way I look at things is everybody wants to feel like they're broken or they think they're broken.

You don't have to start a conversation from that lens. So when we talk about perfectionism and we talk about perfectionism in medicine, everybody, walks in with, and this needs to be fixed, but I also really need it. It's like the space of agony almost. And so that has been interesting to witness.

When I say that you don't need it and how it's harming you, I really want to draw on the second insight, which is tied to the first one, is this high level of self-criticism and low level of self-compassion that's really prevalent among most high achievers, including physicians, including myself, and how that's not [00:15:00] a good idea.

Imagine you're operating on someone where you're doing a procedure or you're in the exam room. It's a high-stress situation. Something goes wrong. As a perfectionist, most likely. What research tells us is that you're going to be low on self-compassion and you're going to be high on self-criticism.

In that point, you'll feel like self-criticism is necessary. Yeah, I did a bad job. Like something, something wrong just happened. You're gonna be having this internal conversation in your own head. Do you want your surgeon to be talking in their own head with themselves or actually looking at what's happening?

Do you want them to be mindful and to be aware? How dangerous is that? So we think, oh, self-compassion, Amna wants me to give myself a hug and everything will be okay. Yes, I want you to give yourself a hug in that mental moment and say, okay one of the components of self-compassion as Dr.

Neff says is mindfulness. Be mindfully aware of what's happening. And so we think it is necessary. It is actually very dangerous, and that's the second [00:16:00] part of it. This insight about how most of us are so low in self-compassion, we think it is necessary to be self-critical and how it is a terrible idea in high-stakes environments, like being a physician, being a pilot.

Imagine something going wrong, and now you're having this conversation in your own head. No, I would want the pilot to be more mindfully aware and be able to take decisions or act quickly in that time. Number three is this recognition on how much it plays into burnout. And I'm not going to say moral injury because that is way outside of our control, but it does dull our perception of what is burnout and what is moral injury.

And what do I mean by that, Michael? It's when you and I are sitting and we're taking responsibility for why things are not going the way they should go. Our patients deserve the best care possible. We're really upset and we're really sad that things didn't go perfectly and we're beating ourselves up.

That [00:17:00] moment of lack of clarity between what is a system issue that is outside of your control can happen. When you're so steeped into perfectionism you are going to internalize everything as it's a me problem. I didn't do this right. And Dr. Steph Simmons said she's the Chief Medical Officer for Dr.

Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation. And in our conversation, she said, we get into all kinds of trouble when we start taking responsibility for things that are outside of our control. And that is what I see a lot of physicians doing as well. So try to create creating awareness surrounding what is moral injury, what's a system issue?

Where is burnout coming in? What is outside of my control tends to happen. And then of course we know that there's data that shows perfectionism will lead to burnout. Now, there is another interesting thing that came up, and this is not specifically tied to medicine, but we think that perfectionist, if you hire someone who's a perfectionist, they're going to be an excellent employee, right and wrong.

And what a controversial [00:18:00] statement to make that actually all things considered, when you look at burnout, when you look at performance, when you look at the wonderful word that we all love productivity, they're not more productive. They're not going to have some sort of edge over someone who's not a perfectionist.

So many levels, this is a terrible idea and we're not serious about it. And so another I know I'm going on here. One last thing I'll add and I'll give you a moment to pause. So that doesn't turn into a monologue is being a woman in medicine or being a parent in medicine, both of those roles and then adding perfectionism in there, there's a whole different conversation that can follow.

So for my interviewees who were women in medicine who are women physician or who are parents, and they're feeling that stress of being the perfect doctor, the perfect, perfect mom, perfect dad. And they're all high achievers, right? So, as a high achiever, you want your child to be that high achiever.

How do you stop that toxic achievement [00:19:00] that was ingrained in your mind from transferring into your children? I felt like I really messed up as a mom by putting them in not the best of the best high school, middle school, or whatever. How does that tie into the mental health and environment that we're in our own houses?

So a lot there. Yes. So much. Just to distill out a couple of the points that you were making. Number one, the issue with a perfectionist at work is that. The reason why it can impact productivity is, I don't wanna finish my chart until it's perfect, or I'm not ready to make these decisions until I've explored all of the different avenues.

and I think from a productivity standpoint, there is some benefit to the decisiveness and to allowing us to figure things out as it unfolds. And that's part of the reason why I think perfectionism can impact us at work. And again, it's not that we are not striving for [00:20:00] excellence and striving to be excellent clinicians and to uncover all of the, potentially all of the potential things that could be going on for our patients.

And in order to continue to do that, we do have to close our charts and we do have to make clinical decisions and perfectionism can interfere with that. I think another kind of just point that I wanted to make is, as you were talking about, what does self-compassion look like? I think, physicians are trained to be very decisional in the moment.

So we are, in the clinic, in the hospital, in the emergency room, in a procedure room, in the OR if something is going wrong, we are showing up, we are doing the things, and we are making sure that we are taking the. Best care of our patients in that moment. That is not where the self-compassion comes into play.

It comes in an hour later, a day later, a week later, when we are still perseverating and thinking about the thing that didn't go the way that we wanted to, and showing [00:21:00] selves no compassion. For the things that didn't go the way that we wanted to. Now we know that the work that we are doing is hard, and it involves real people and patients and their disease processes don't read textbooks and not everything goes according to plan and it's not supposed to.

So the self-compassion comes in later. When we give ourselves an opportunity, and again, we have to give ourselves that opportunity. It doesn't just happen on its own to process the thing that happened and to allow us to have some self-compassion for me, any other gastroenterologist in this same position would've felt the same way, and there was nothing we could have done to change things or do things differently.

And I took the very best care of the patient. That is all I can really expect of myself. And so these are the opportunities that we have for self-compassion. And so just know like [00:22:00] this isn't a flaw that things didn't go perfectly in the procedure room. And we still get to show up for ourselves and have our own backs when we need it.

And then the last thing, so that this doesn't turn into a monologue, as you were saying, is. That self-critical voice that you were talking about, which shows up all the time for us. I always like to remind people that, we as parents would never, if our children were struggling, if our children or having an issue would never talk to ourselves.

Talk to them the way that we speak to ourselves in that moment, right? We do have compassion for our children when they're struggling, when they are failing, and we want them to understand that a failure doesn't define them. It is an event, not an identity. And so how can we do that for ourselves? And I'm wondering if you have learned any tips or tricks or [00:23:00] what do you do in your own life to conjure up some self-compassion in those moments?

Excellent reflections. I wanted to say just one thought that came to my mind is as you talk about, How all of this over the course of our career has this impact.

We all remember those patients. We remember the first patient, that patient, every patient that was an event that really took a piece of us from like the emotional exhaustion and some of those thoughts, and we have to do like this cleanup.

It's almost like this cleanup, this tuneup that is necessary that needs to happen. And so I invite everyone to think about self-compassion as a necessary tool. It is a necessary tool for your success and longevity in medicine, as well as how you model it to your children. You said that we will want them to learn from the event and not internalize that event, but if you don't show this to them, how are they going to learn? So [00:24:00] I remember I, from forgetting the exact statement that I made, but my daughter said, mommy, you would never let me say that to myself. Why are you saying that to yourself?

I think it was a comment about how I was looking or something like that. She said, you said we never say that. And so she had overheard me say something in the mirror. And so how are you modeling that and how our attendings and medical educators? Modeling that for each other is really critical.

Now, coming to how I have tried to do it. Dr. Hersh, self-compassion has been the most difficult thing for me. To immerse myself into, even to this point, it's hard. And the reason I say this is because it's not after listening to one podcast episode or reading a book, things will suddenly shift. So then don't beat yourself up for not being self-compassionate and turn this into some other spiral.

And the reason I also say this is because we think that change is that easy. Because our dopamine driven [00:25:00] current life where everything is just a click away, has made us believe that even healing looks like that. And healing takes time, and it's messy and it's personalized. So what I would want the listeners to take away from this is hold space for yourself.

Things take time. The first thing that I did was to start generating awareness. Have some level of metacognition. Just watch yourself think. And that's all I did. I just allowed myself to view how I treated my own self, and that's all I said. I said, I'm just going to sit and watch what I say to myself, and sometimes I'll have my clients do this as well.

I open my notes tab on the phone and every time I said something derogatory to myself or berated myself. I put a red X in there. The amount of red Xs I had at the end of the day was ridiculous. So just awareness is step [00:26:00] one because if you don't have awareness, you don't have anything.

What are you going to fix? You probably don't even think that this is a problem if you're not even aware of it. So that was step one. and step two is exactly like you said. Would I talk to a loved one the way I just talked to myself? 

Would I talk to any random stranger walking down the street the way I just talked to myself? Would I talk to anyone, any other human the way I just talked to myself? If you cannot even talk to yourself in a decent manner, which I wasn't, that was step two.

So how can you make something that seems so abstract closer. Just like that awareness and how would you talk to any stranger? Was the second step. And then the third step was slowing down and it is so hard to slow down and slowing down was really closely tied to self-compassion.

Creating these moments where I would just. This is not me practicing meditation or mindfulness, which I eventually started doing, using gently guided meditation [00:27:00] or guided mindfulness. Dr. Kristen Neff's website has a lot of free resources for our listeners if they want to access, and if you haven't read her book, Self-Compassion is right Behind me as well.

A wonderful book to read that really helped me was just slowing down and I just sat with my thoughts and I watched myself. Berate myself over and over again. And then I slowly started shifting that, switching that out with just neutral, decent conversations with myself, for example if there was something that happened.

And for me, the first and the worst was how I would internalize anything that had anything to do with mom guilt. And so I would be so hard it was, I can't forgive myself. I'm a mother. Like how did I. How did I forget that? My then 3-year-old spirit week at preschool, it was crazy sock day.

And for the older one it was crazy hat day and I mixed it up and I sent them, I'm like, they're gonna think like this is it. We [00:28:00] we don't matter to our mother. Clearly she mixed this up. I was like, this is the level of perfectionism and then the level of lack of self-compassion that was there. So I just, I said, okay, if this was any random mom in the carpool lane, what would I say to her?

And slowly it started becoming more accessible. But awareness was the first step in sitting with it. A tool that is available to us and we don't even realize it. We, as high-level thinking human beings, can be the watcher, right? Like we can take a step back and watch our own thoughts and, if you never think about it as a growth edge or an opportunity, then it just never happens. But I think it's so important to remember. You know how I describe this Is your refrigerator, does it make a sound? Do you ever notice it? Of course your refrigerator is on and you never notice it. You just get used to it.

And the same is true for the thoughts, the things that we're [00:29:00] thinking, that background noise that we've just learned to get used to. And for the most part, ignore. And it has an impact, right? If your refrigerator stops working, you're going to notice pretty quickly, right? And the same is true if you don't pay attention to the thoughts that are constantly running in the background.

It's going to take a toll. And I think that is one of the things that we see as physicians are so hard on ourselves and struggle with self-compassion. It is one of the things that comes up. It is that underlying theme over and over again. And as you were detailing at the beginning of this episode, perfectionism is a common thread that runs amongst all of us.

So is a lack of self-compassion. And I think that this is for sure part of the human element, but I think physicians are trained to believe not only that perfectionism and striving is what got us to where we are, but that we also got there by beating ourselves up into [00:30:00] the striving and the perfectionism all along.

And we also know that when we are berating people. They can't function at their best. So it is this thought distortion that we have, that if I beat myself up enough I will strive. I will do better. And we all know that people actually do better when they're in a supportive, loving environment.

And as you were pointing out, we have to do that for ourselves in our own minds and give ourselves the opportunity to figure that out. And for me, that was really only became possible with coaching, right? I never was able to do this for myself on my own. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

I was exactly like we were thinking on the same lines, because this was pointed out to me by my coach who held up a mirror and showed me all my blind spots and my other coaches as I've as Michael, we're recording this right after I've given a TED talk on perfectionism and.

Even my TEDx coach was pointing this out to me and I really needed to take my own medicine. It was amazing that even with [00:31:00] all this work, how sneaky this can be, how hard I was on myself, how if I would miss a single like word. So when things are so inaccessible, there's, that's another problem with us in medicine specifically, we had to bootstrap our way through everything.

No, we don't. if you need help, please ask for help. Whether that is your primary care physician, which in my case was the first person who prescribed the Lexapro that I needed when I was in the pit of postpartum depression, and then if you need a counselor, you need a therapist, you need a coach.

Having physician coaches has been transformational. My physician coaches have been able to understand the pain that I carry on such a deeper level and hold up that mirror and validate. Because a lot of the suffering that we have in medicine is not witnessed. It's horrible because we have normalized it.

So you're being hard on yourself. Too bad. So is everyone else. You're sleep deprived, so what everyone else's as [00:32:00] well. Your hospital system's horrible. Great. So has every other hospital system you gotta deal with. Insurance. It is nonstop. So you have to step away and coaching is so powerful for it.

And you talked a great metaphor about the refrigerator. I also want to add over there the mind-body disconnect that I alluded to earlier as I was talking about my own journey. That then further is this again, how we dissociate, how we compartmentalize, how we don't realize the way we're talking to ourself, but we are the experts in empathy.

We are not allowed to show ourselves compassion. We're not allowed to feel emotion. So you literally are having this very big mind-body disconnect that's happening that further creates this almost this barrier that you can't access your own thoughts. And so for me, having my own physician coach help me with that was so powerful.

It does not have to be that way. To this the funniest and most simplest example I can say is that show me a physician. In training or otherwise at the [00:33:00] job who had to go to the bathroom and actually went to the bathroom on time when they had to go. You forget like all of us need retraining.

That's hilarious that you say that. 'cause a hundred percent. I'm like running in between procedures and I'm like, do I have time to go to the bathroom? No, I should probably just I'll do it after the next case. And it is how we ignore our own needs. To rise to the occasion and you still at some point have to take care of yourself.

And I, this has been a phenomenal conversation, I think so important, is there any additional takeaways in terms of what physicians should be thinking about or taking away as we close out the episode? You are a perfectionist. I can already tell you that you are, most, all the time living in this cognitive distortion of all-or-none thinking.

Either I have to be miserable or I have to walk away from medicine, or everything has to be a hundred percent it's not like that. There is an entire spectrum [00:34:00] of options available to you. Joy can be accessible, happiness can be accessible, and perfectionism is painful, 

My request to you would be to get help to unplug, to step away, whether help means adding five minutes of white space into your calendar. Whatever that looks like, rest, step away. Invest in your own healing. It is ridiculous why all physicians are not given by their places of work. Opportunities to work directly one-on-one, either depending on their needs, with a therapist, a counselor, or a coach.

To me, it is wild. We're the people caring for entire communities. There's no one helping us care for our mind. So if you are in a place where you can ask for help, please ask for help. If you want to ask for help individually, ask for help serious humans invest in their wellbeing, and if you do that, you're going to have an excellent life career.

Professional fulfillment. I know. Every one of us [00:35:00] is walking around with so much pain and suffering right now as a physician. You have so much unprocessed emotions and so much strategy that you can learn to level up. It doesn't have to be this way. That's what I would end it with. Yeah. And for the listeners who want to learn more, you have entire podcast that has been dedicated to exploring the topic of perfectionism Success Reimagined.

Tell us more about that and then tell the listeners how they can learn more about you and where they can find you. Thank you for the opportunity. I would invite everyone to just go to my website. It's dramnashabbir.com and you'll be able to access the podcast through there. I hang out a lot on LinkedIn.

Never thought I would say that back in the day, but I do. Or Instagram, so you can find me with my first and last name there. Thank you. This has been so wonderful, and specifically the, in the podcast. I have had wonderful conversations [00:36:00] with clinicians and individuals who have really struggled with this, and as you follow the chronology of the conversations, you'll start noticing the points and the highlights that are, that come up, and you might see yourself in there.

But this has been so great. Thank you, Dr. Of course and I think that there is so much power in our stories, which is why I'm here and I know why you're here. Because when we can hear other people telling their stories, so frequently we hear ourselves in those stories. And for me, that is what really cracked the door open on possibility because I would say before hearing other physicians talk about their experiences.

I didn't really see, it was like you were just saying, I just imagined this is just what it's like, suck it up. And being able to hear other people and hear their stories and see their own personal transformations, it opened up the possibility for me. And so thank you so much for the work that you're doing.

I know it is helping so many people. And thank [00:37:00] you so much to the listeners for being here with us today, and I will see you next time on the next episode of Better Physician Life. Take care.