Choosing the Theme of Your Own Radiology Story

Take an imaginary fast forward trip to your retirement. You are idly thinking back on your radiological career, or someone asks you about it. How are you likely to sum it up?

You might imagine your answer to be more fully formed the closer you are to that point. If you have only got a few years before you put your dictation gear down for the last time, a lot more of your career is on a book’s written pages to borrow a line from Aerosmith. This is not quite the case if you are just starting out.

That doesn’t stop most of us from trying to envision our futures. Forewarned is forearmed and a good idea of what is ahead gives a better chance of shaping it. That is especially the case for most who have had the tools to get into such a demanding field. We’re not likely to suddenly settle down into complacency and let winds of fate blow us where they may.

Accordingly, we keep our eyes and ears open and try to figure out where the things we see and hear will lead, and what we can do about them. We are not going to be right 100 percent of the time, but as long as we average above 50 percent, it should help. Taking good opportunities, avoiding pitfalls, and hedging iffy bets are all in the mix.

Here is another useful mental exercise: Imagine how things are going to turn out for you, or, more powerfully, decide how they will.

If you have heard about affirmations and think this sounds similar, you might be right. It depends on what version of affirmations you have encountered. This isn’t about a pseudo-mystical notion that some sort of magic or divine providence will grant wishes if they’re repeated enough.

Before they were called affirmations, Émile Coué (a pharmacist, psychologist and hypnotist) originally called them “optimistic autosuggestions.” He wrote his first book on the subject, and while he is worth reading about in his own right, I only mention him here to emphasize that these affirmation things are not just New Agey fluff. They have got real scientific underpinnings.

I am also not going to delve into how to use affirmations since there is more than enough material out there devoted to the subject. My interest isn’t even about the pithy little statements that are used as affirmations, like Coué’s best-known example (“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”). I am talking about larger scale concepts, like a global worldview or, the theme of your own story.

It is being written as you live through each day. It can be something that just happens, a series of events that you might choose to assign some overall meaning in hindsight. Alternatively, you might opt for more control as the author of your own autobiography. That won’t let you spell out every little detail, but it can do wonders for the story taking shape in a way that you would prefer.

I have seen this demonstrated most potently, and unfortunately, by rads who use the technique against themselves. They are not intentionally self-destructive. They just fall into bad habits of thinking.

Around my completion of residency/fellowship, the job market was crummy (still a way to go before hitting rock bottom). It wasn’t the best time to be emerging from training and launching a career, especially in the area some of us intended to live. None of us were Pollyannas about the situation but some were definitely more doom and gloom-ish than others.

As years went by and some of us kept in touch, I noticed that the more severe doomers (one, I recall, lamented “so much for a good career” only a couple of years into his) never seemed to get happier. It didn’t matter that we were gaining competence and confidence along with better wages and titles. The doomers always found new things to be glum about.

While I wasn’t Dr. Sunshine about my first couple of jobs going sideways, including a promised partnership that failed to materialize, I did have the core notion that, however it happened, I would find ways to succeed. Obstacles that might have made the doomers say “See? We can’t win” would make me think, “This won’t stop me.” Maybe that was one of my affirmations.

As years passed and the job market recovered, a lot of the doomers stayed put in positions that dissatisfied them. They tried slowly grinding their way up chains of command or otherwise writing their own stories that this was as good as they could expect. I hope that they found some happiness in their slow-but-steady progress.

Meanwhile, the rough sketch of my own story included never staying in an unhappy situation when I could manage something better. If you have read much of my stuff, you know how a few initially promising telerad gigs ran out of gas and when that happened, I switched to others with full tanks. Each transition was a big step up in every way that mattered to me.

That is the real power of affirmations: writing your own story, whatever you want to call it. If you center your worldview on the notion that things will ultimately go where you want them to, it is a lot more likely to happen than if you decide upfront that your tale will be one of frustration and failure.

You will see opportunities and take them rather than failing to detect them at all or finding ways to convince yourself that they are all dead ends. Even if they turn out to be dead ends, your story will at least be a series of valiant attempts that may be satisfying in their own right. Maybe these attempts won’t necessarily prove to be valiant but at least interesting for you to recollect later. They might simply be good tales to tell future generations of rads (or anybody else who is interested).

However, what if you are nearing the end of your career, and now wish you had done things differently? Most of your story is already written as I mentioned earlier. Does any of this help you?

I maintain that it can. Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development have two of eight stages (25 percent) that address personal development in young adulthood and contributions to society in middle adulthood. He didn’t just put them there for funsies. That is fertile ground for coming to grips with what you have done beforehand and adjusting your third act so it is less of a tragedy and more of a triumph.