How NOT to be a PA Sellout: The Physician Assistant Vocation

So many PAs I meet are unsatisfied with their careers.

I have met many a mid-level practitioner who has become entangled in a web of profit driven, incentivized by the numbers healthcare.  They have forgotten why they became a PA, to begin with.

We all become PAs with a great desire to help people, but it often doesn't end that way.

PA Jekyll and Mr. Hide

The transformation happens sometime around graduation... Once the salary figures start being tossed around.

People change in ways I cannot even describe. It's all about competition, numbers, salaries and benefits. It is all about me and less about what all your wonderful skills can do to help your patients.

This is why you went into medicine. I challenge you never to forget this.

We can all succumb to social pressures, and after a while when money and profit run dry we are left unsatisfied.

This level of dissatisfaction is measured by the degree to which you have succumbed to another pressure in life:

Social Pressures to Conform

This counterforce can be very powerful, you want to fit into a group. Unconsciously you feel that what makes you different is embarrassing or painful. Your parents often act as a counterforce as well.  They may seek to direct you to a career path that is lucrative and comfortable.

If these counterforces become strong enough you can lose complete contact with your uniqueness, the reason you went into medicine, who you really are.

Your inclinations and desires become modeled on those of others.  This can set you off on a very dangerous path, you end up choosing a career path that does not really suit you, your desire and interest slowly wane and your work suffers for it.

You come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes from outside of work.

Because you are increasingly less engaged in your career you fail to pay attention to changes going on in the field, you fall behind the times and pay a price for this.

At moments when you must make important decisions you flounder or follow what others are doing because you have no sense of your inner radar or direction to guide you. You have broken contact with your destiny, the one you aspired to when you started PA school.

At all cost, you must avoid such a fate!  The process of following your life task all the way to mastery can begin at any point in life.

The hidden force that drove you into a career in medicine, into this career as a physician assistant is always in you and ready to be engaged.

Three Steps to Realign With Your Goals as a Physician Assistant

First: Connect or reconnect with your inclinations.

The first step is inward, search the past for your inner voice, clear away the voices that confuse you such as parents or peers, look for an underlying pattern, a chord to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.

Second: With this connection established you must look at the career path you are already on or about to begin.

The choice of this path or redirection of it is critical.  To help in this stage you will need to enlarge your concept of work itself.

Too often we make a separation of this in our lives. There is work and then there is life outside of work where we find real pleasure and fulfillment. Work is often seen as a means for making money so that we can enjoy that second life that we lead.  Even if we derive some satisfaction from our careers we still tend to compartmentalize our lives in this way.  This is a depressing attitude because in the end, we spend a substantial part of our waking life at work.