The one thing I never worried about as a practicing physician, and I worried about a lot of things, was security.

I was attracted to medicine for its goal of helping people, for the scientific exploration and foundation. But I also appreciated the sense of security. Doctors would always have jobs.

But now many physicians’ jobs have been threatened. At least in the short run.

Doctors have been trying to figure out how to keep their practices open with elective surgeries and even routine health visits disrupted by the pandemic. Employed physicians, who don’t have to worry about keeping the lights on, have also been feeling insecure as their salaries and/or reimbursement have been cut by lack of direct patient care. 

I never imagined these sorts of problems. Sure, there was a sense of insecurity about being “productive enough” or keeping up with peers, or keeping up with the changes in medical knowledge, but the global cuts in salaries were never something I ever considered. The difficulty surgeons have been experiencing to find new positions is also not something I’ve seen before. 

Part of what this time has been showing us is that the assurances of tomorrow, that we know what tomorrow would look like, have been an illusion all along.

There have never been guarantees and the unexpected and frequently unwanted could approach us and capsize our lives at any time. This insecurity has always been there, but we haven’t been forced to see it. Now we are. It is everywhere and we have no way of knowing how long it will last. That is part of the insecurity. 

But those assurances are not here and we know not where they can be found as our old world continues to slip away into the uncertainty of coronavirus.

Amidst all this change has been my own career change. I left medicine and re-trained as a professional coach. In my old career, there was always a clear next step. It was prescribed. Both the method of getting there and what to do after that was completed. But in the new career, nothing was prescribed, not even the training really. What to do and how to do it was totally up to me. 

I spent a while standing in the liminal space filled with uncertainty and waiting for inspiration. All the while knowing from the experience of others and my own intuition that the path would not be clear until I started down it, maybe even not until I’d gone down it quite a while. It was a completely new skill set, walking into the wide-open uncertainty of possibility. 

Coaching helped me move across the threshold, into new action, a new way of doing life. Coaching can help you too, if you feel stuck, if you feel alone, if the uncertainty and indecision have been weighing you down and preventing you from progressing down your new path.  Or even helping you recognize that a new path is now necessary.

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