The MuD/PhuD Mind Project: Recent Episodes

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I’m so delighted that my PI from my grad school years, the great Dr. Scott Friedman, agreed to be a guest on my podcast. He exemplifies excellent mentorship and today, in fact, teaches others how it's done. For anyone looking to mentor others in the lab or otherwise, listen up and take notes! Also, please refer to his beautifully written Master’s Perspective written in Hepatology in 2015 (available on website: mudphudmindproject.com).

Some of his lessons:

• Passion and curiosity are key
• Mentorship needs to be an intentional goal
• Being a physician first means he doesn’t need to think very hard on how his research will impact patient care.
• Embrace the bigger picture of where your research fits in.
• Enjoy going into work in the morning and the people you work with, then it isn’t work at all.
• Be resilient in the face of rejection. Having a strong mentor in the face of these rejections is so essential to learning the skill of resilience.
• Great mentors create great mentors
• View trainees as partners
• Learn from trainees on how to be a better mentor
• Joint ownership and partnership will create empowerment in your trainees
• Put your money where your mouth is. Make your mentees a priority.

Intuition can be key to finding someone who is aligned with your values and will be an advocate for you.

We also touched on a personal passion and mission of mine - to address diversity, equity and inclusion within the physician-scientist space. Scott mentioned considering his mentees partners in the pursuit of science and from that belief he took actions that reflected this.

With respect to the racial and social justice movements, he states “The trajectory of awareness and growth and improvement is continuing to move in the right direction.”

He acknowledges that we are all works in progress.

He acknowledges his white privilege and states “I’ve had nothing but privilege and opportunity in my life.” I respect that and acknowledge him for being humble in this goal of being a lifelong learner.

As a final tribute to my time in Scott’s lab, I’ll just read from the plaque that I was given upon my graduation from his lab entitled “Ten Rules for the Clinical Investigator”

• Do be inquisitive.
• Do be ambitious.
• Do not be too ambitious.
• Do measure something.
• Do not jump at the first problem that presents itself.
• If possible, do arrange your data in graphic form.
• Do not be a lone wolf or secretive.
• Do develop a theory.
• Do not be a slave to your theory.
• Do reserve some time each day for unadulterated thinking.

From Fuller Albright

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Hi everyone! Today we are really going to start digging into the actual tools that I use in my own life and with my coaching clients to create more clarity, simplicity and efficiency in their lives. The way we are going to start is by focusing on Time Management, one of my absolute favorite things to coach on because it was a game changer in my own multi-faceted life of being a scientist, physician, mom, wife, daughter to aging parents and the list goes on and on.

You will get all the 12 steps over 12 episodes - this means you will get one step every other week. I know...waiting is tough, so for those of you who need to know everything now, I am giving you free access to the entire guide on my website: https://www.mudphudmindproject.com/

So what this won’t be is simply a to-do list and quick fix. You can get a nice planner anywhere - nothing wrong with that. I love a good planner, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Step 1:

• Get a blank piece of paper and a pen.
• Now that you are sitting in front of that beautiful blank sheet, you are going to fill it up with every single thing that is in your brain in terms of a “To-Do” list.
• Notice what your thoughts are about your completed list.
• Ask yourself how it feels to think those thoughts. (ie. anxiety)
• Now ask yourself what thought can you think to create a more helpful feeling. (ie. calm or focused)

The truth is that our brains are terrible at holding and keeping information organized and remembering detail with precision. Your brain is an amazing processor, but in order for it to run as efficiently as possible, you need to ask it to stay present at any one time. You don’t want it wandering off into the future of needing to pick up the kids or cook dinner. You want it to focus on one thing at a time. The fallacy of “multi-tasking” is that we will only ever be halfway in any one place.

You can think of your brain as a closet and the clothes inside as your thoughts. You have thoughts about your day and some may look like I have “too much stuff to do” or that “I don’t have enough hours in the day”? Once you start by just pulling everything out of your mind and objectively looking at it as you would the protocol of an experiment, you’ll see that we just have things to do - or rather WANT to do, and we all get the same number of hours in the day. Those are just the facts. The rest of it is story and what I do with myself and my clients is to intentionally re-write the story to clean up the old and worn out thoughts that are not serving us.

I want you to look at that list of things for the week and ask yourself the story you have been telling yourself about it. How does that story feel when you say it out loud? What I think the sentence “I don’t have enough hours in the day” and really pay attention to how it feels, I notice a tightening in my chest and perhaps a dull ache in my temples. That feeling in my body is anxiety. It is coming from scarcity. It is coming from a sentence that I repeat in my mind constantly. The good news - we can change our thoughts and thereby change our feelings and experience we have with our To-Do list.

The bottom line is that 80% of time management is mind management. Once you have the basics of organizing your To-Do list on a calendar, the rest of the work is in your thoughts around time and what your brain is constantly offering you about how little you have.

Once you do this practice you will increase your awareness of everything you are choosing to do with your life as well as the thoughts you perhaps have on default about that list of things. From awareness comes power.

Again, you can get the full guide on my website, but I highly encourage you to take this process one step at a time. The process is not meant to add more for you to do, but rather give you some clarity and get you on the path of getting your time back.

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My very first podcast guest is a rockstar physician-scientist and also a dear friend, Dr. Zahra Ghiassi-Nejad. The title of this podcast was inspired by something she said “Wait a minute...no one needs to tell me what to do and I can do it however I want to...or however I want to decide to proceed - use both of the degrees or one of them”

“I get to decide” - those are very powerful words and words matter! Sometimes these words are forgotten along the way of this long training journey.

She came to the US from Iran on an F1 visa to attend NYU for undergrad. Despite what others said about her visa status, she was determined to pursue a combined MD/PhD degree. She said it best: “You can’t get there if you don’t try.”

Zahra was there by my side in the lab during our graduate school years and we share many special memories. She is now an attending physician in radiation-oncology at Mt Sinai Hospital in NYC and enjoys helping her patients get the life-saving treatment they need to combat cancer. She has two beautiful children, a loving husband and is also on a personal growth journey.

Some of the reflections we went through about our joint experience in the grad school years, dated more than a decade back. We spoke about our wiser selves and how we have a perspective now that we couldn’t see back then. We both share that with you here.

Dr. Zahra Ghiassi-Nejad’s advice to MD/PhD trainees:

• Never lose sight of the “why” you are putting yourself through an 8-9 year program when you are in the lab years pipetting and repeating experiments.
• The lessons you learn in the lab are more valuable than the specific project you work on.
• It is always okay in the end and if it isn’t okay, then it isn’t the end. (John Lennon made popular, but likely an old Indian proverb)

I hope you walk away knowing that no matter how you do the path, it is the right way. The right way is the way you decide for yourself.

The opinions provided on this podcast represent those of myself and of my invited guests. They do not represent the opinions of any particular institution. This is not professional advice and for your entertainment only.

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The beautiful thing about the journey we will take into looking at our mind with curiosity is that it mirrors what we already do in research.

We start with the scientific question.

• Why do we want to answer that question?
• Why is it important to us?

It may help someone

I’m curious (just because I want to)

It sounds interesting or exciting to know the answer

It sounds like fun

• I want you to ask yourself why you are doing the research you are doing.

Then ask yourself why you keep doing it.

Is your ‘big why’ compelling enough to get you through the obstacles that are in the way?

If your reasons for doing it are convincing enough to you, that is what is going to get you through.

It is why we do the work.

Now, think of a time in your life that you started something and you stopped before completing the goal.

I’m not saying that changing our minds about our path or decisions is a bad thing (more about that later), but let’s be curious for a moment and think of that time.

• For me it was most recently bench research.
• When COVID led to the shut down of my postdoctoral lab, I went through some soul searching and put my BIG WHY with respect to the bench research to the test. I asked myself “WHY” as many times as I needed until I got to the root and most fundamental reason.
• Why do I want to continue doing bench research?

Because I want to know the underlying mechanism to explain my clinical observation.

• Why do you want to know?

Because I believe it could help people and I’m positioned to answer these questions.

• Why do you want to help people through research?

Because I enjoy the creative process and helping people fulfills my purpose.

Once I established that the reason I wanted to continue bench science was to help people through a creative process, I asked myself how I could still fulfill that purpose in a different way.

• I decided that I can still contribute to science through supporting physician-scientists. I wanted to inspire and continue to be present in this amazing world in my own unique way.
• I started to get curious and ask myself if there is another way I can stay aligned with my BIG WHY.
• Is there another way I could still be curious and also help basic science move forward.
• If you are listening to this podcast and have put one and two together, you may recognize that I decided I could still uphold my values of making a difference in science by helping other physician scientists and researchers with their mental resilience. If I could help you all listening, then I could still be making an impact in science.
• If your WHY is compelling enough, you can and will find a way to uphold it. It may just not look the way you anticipated it would.
• I may have convinced myself at some point that doing bench science was the way I would make that impact, but learning the tools of mind management allowed for me to get very curious about my assumptions.
• Other reasons you may be doing things include: prestige, recognition, what i’ve seen my family do and I don’t know any differently,
• Ask yourself this “why” question 5 times.
• Each time you answer the WHY, ask yourself again until you get to the root of your motivation. That is the one you will want to defend and fight for.

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Mission:

• To serve as a platform for sharing stories and insight from other physician-scientists and pay it forward.
• This knowledge has been hard earned and I can’t think of a better way to give back than to share it with all the budding physicians scientists out in the world who are filled with big dreams and high hopes!
• This podcast is also for you seasoned physician-scientists especially if you have developed a hard edge over the years and perhaps some bitterness at the NIH pay line. Join us here to regain some inspiration and learn some tools to get you back to your inner pre-med dreams.
• Amplify the voices of those who are underrepresented in the physician-scientist space.
• Explore our thoughts about the MuD/PhuD path and pipeline.
• Investigate our mind with curiosity and compassion.
• Experiment with our mindset in order to get back balance, creativity and a passion to pursue our life’s purpose.

How we will do this:

• Every week a new podcast will be published.
• I will alternate between a guest physician-scientist and my own insights into cultivating a growth mindset.
• We will have fun doing this with creativity and inspiration from those around us.

If you want to take things deeper:

• My plan is to teach everything in this podcast.
• You will get the inspiration and the tools
• However, human brains do not learn by just listening!
• The information is fun and makes you feel good.
• BUT, ask yourself what changes you have actually made by just reading a book.
• In medical and graduate school, I needed to learn by doing.
• You can do all the things on your own, but if you want to accelerate your progress, reach out to me.

You are also welcome to join my various online communities! Some of you might want 1:1 coaching and some of you will want the group experience too. I’ve created those opportunities for you with two of my amazingly talented and beautiful physician coach partners.

For 1:1 coaching, email me: drurslang@gmail.com

Follow me on Instagram: @drurslang

Website to book discovery call: mudphudmindproject.com

If you are a Latina Physician, join us in our LATINA DOCS Facebook community. Latinadocs.com

If you enjoyed this episode and also believe in my mission, please subscribe, rate and review - it makes it easier for other physician-scientists to find me. Until next time!