SERIES: Part 2. A Road Map to Self-Discovery- Gratitude

My road to self-discovery was laid over many years, and spoiler alert* the work is on going. But I can identify 3 pivotal moments in my journey that created a profound shift towards a deep sense of knowing who I am  and what I am meant to be in this world. In this 3 part series I recount how a shift in my mindset gave me the permission to appreciate the privileges in my life while also wanting more; how the birth of my gratitude practice reoriented my brain towards the present moment and how a brave step into therapy challenged and healed my limiting beliefs.

As a CAA, I know how important it is to share the messy middle- the why and the how- as well as the end result. That is how we learn in the OR and in life. After listening I hope you feel a sense of empowerment that you too can discover the life uniquely meant for you, whatever that may be.

Resources Mentioned:

• Growth Minded Marriage Podcast Gratitude: His and Hers
• Awakened Anesthetist Podcast ep. 14 Gratitude for the Busy CAA

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the Awakened Anesthetist Podcast, the first podcast to highlight the CAA experience. I'm your host, mary Jean, and I've been a certified anesthesiologist assistant for close to two decades. Throughout my journey and struggles, I've searched for guidance that includes my unique perspective as a CAA. At one of my lowest points, I decided to turn my passion for storytelling and my belief that the CAA profession is uniquely able to create a life by design into a podcast. If you are a practicing CAA, current AA student or someone who hopes to be one, I encourage you to stick around and experience the power of being in a community filled with voices who sound like yours, sharing experiences you never believed possible. I know you will find yourself here at the Awakened Anesthetist Podcast. Welcome in. Hello all my fellow CAAs, aa students and those looking to become one. I am your host, mary Jean, and this is part two of my roadmap to self-discovery. This little series kind of came to me as something that I wanted to share. It was something that I had been looking for six years ago me when I was embarking on this journey of wanting to do more in my life, wanting to do more aligned things in my life All of these words and thoughts I really couldn't even say. I just felt unsettled, and so I was just stepping in the direction of something new, of trying to figure myself out and what it meant that the life that I was leading didn't quite fit anymore, and how to move forward with that. It was a period of time where I felt really lost. There were really high moments, there were really low moments, and through it all I can now recognize that I needed mentors that understood my position as a CAA. I needed other voices who I didn't have to explain the fact that the CAA profession is amazing and wonderful and creates such value and I love doing it but it maybe doesn't hit all aspects of who I am and how to make peace with that and how to move forward. So I want to be that voice for you If you feel like you're in a similar situation, or maybe in your future you want to embark on some new endeavors or do something adjacent to your CAA career, or you really just want to hone in on how you feel so fulfilled as a CAA. I think this roadmap to self-discovery is applicable to all situations, because it really just again is a roadmap to knowing yourself more deeply, and I have the experience now of being on the other side of a six-year journey and, of course, self-discovery and personal growth continues year after year. But so much change has happened in the last six years that I did some self-reflection and could look and see that these three benchmarks of the mindset shift I talked about in part one this episode is going to be about a gratitude practice and how that transformed my life. And then the next episode, part three, that will come out in like a month, is about going to therapy for the first time and really coming up against all of those limiting beliefs and subconscious thoughts that I had carried with me since childhood and how releasing those really empowered me and made me so much lighter and able to proceed so much easier. But this episode today part two is about gratitude, and gratitude has been really important to me. It's been an important benchmark, of course, on my journey, and I was thinking exactly about what I wanted to say, the perspective I wanted to share in this particular episode, because I think there's a lot of voices out there you may have experienced some that are toting the importance of starting a gratitude practice, and then there's some voices out there that are talking about the science, like the neuroplasticity that's possible with a gratitude practice, to change your negativity bias and to really help you have neurological changes that will then manifest in being maybe more satisfied or happier, like that feeling of happiness every day, and those are all well and good, and I also want to say that I didn't know any of that when I first started, and I think that's what this episode is going to be about. In fact, I know that's what this episode is going to be about. So let's dive into the very, very beginning of my journey, this self-discovery journey. It was 2017. I had just found out that I was pregnant with my third child. I was not planning to get pregnant with a third. My husband and I, probably six months before this, had decided that we were happy with two. We felt like two kids was really sustainable and the life that we were leading sort of made space for two kids, and so I decided to get an IUD, like the contraceptive device. I went into the OBGYN to have it placed and they make you take a pregnancy test right before the IUD is placed, and I was pregnant. So not only was that a huge shock to the system, but it really had me recalibrate and reassess the life that I was leading and how that would look if I brought a third child into it. And this news really just amplified feelings that I was already feeling. I felt like I was happy and that I was grateful, as I had said previously, with the career as a CAA and my professional goals had kind of been achieved and I just felt really satisfied with that aspect of giving anesthesia. But I wasn't completely satisfied as a human being. There were parts of me that were unsettled, that didn't feel quite right and I had absolutely no idea how to fix that feeling. I just knew I had the feeling and that the feeling was growing. And then when I got the news that I was pregnant with my third, I just had a realization that the life I had previously lived working full time as a CAA, working nights and holidays and weekends, long shifts and just the unpredictability that oftentimes goes into a full time CAA schedule it just was no longer sustainable for our family, for what my family and for what I wanted for my life. And those pieces all kind of came together in 2017 and led me on this seeking journey. I guess is a probably good word for it. I was just going out into the world trying to find voices that I could resonate with, voices that understood my perspective, voices that had clues on how to move forward, what to do, how to figure out the next step, and one of those voices that I stumbled into and I'm actually a little bit I don't know, maybe a shame to say, but this is the truth One of the voices was Rachel Hollis, which you may know of her. She wrote a really impactful book in 2018, for lots of good reasons and lots of bad reasons. It was called Girl Wash your Face. This book came out. It was a self-help book about like kind of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and anything you want is possible if you work hard enough. And her critics really found her fairly tone deaf and even racist, and, you know, a lot of privilege was in her voice that she didn't recognize. And Rachel Hollis has kind of fallen from grace, which is why I am a little bit ashamed that she impacted me so much in this 2017-2018 era, but that's the truth of it. So if I'm going to tell my story, I have to start there. She wasn't the only voice, but in that time, I was in and around this self-help world of monetizing your passions, figuring out what brings you joy and then creating a business out of that so you can like blow up the life you're already living and move on to this new life. And that message certainly served a purpose in my life. I found myself, shortly after 2018, realizing that Rachel Hollis and the voices that were in that community no longer spoke to me. They felt like they were kind of pandering to me and also capitalizing off of me, and they weren't CIA voices. They weren't voices that understood I love my profession. My profession is allowing me to do all these other things, and so I kind of fell away from that. But in this timeframe, there were several voices in Rachel Hollis' community that was saying that one of the important things you could do is start a morning routine and you can journal during that morning routine. And then that conversation led into a gratitude practice and you know it's probably one of those things where you've heard the same message over and over again and that at some point in your life it's just the right time for you to hear that message and it hits you in the right way and you're like, okay, I'm going to take an action step now, I'm not just going to think about this, and so that for me was 2017, I started rearranging my mornings to be able to have some time before I went to work. I was still working full time. Usually I had to be at the hospital like 6.45am, you know. I usually would get up then, probably about an hour before, so that I would have time to move my body a little bit. I was working out at home at this time doing like beach body exercises in my basement, and I had little kids, so I would like had a lot of morning jobs for the little kids, so I would get up and do all of that, and then I also would carve out time to have coffee and sit on my couch and do some of these morning routine and rituals that this self help community was suggesting, like having some moments of silence, journaling and writing down things you're grateful for. So I wouldn't say that anything major happened right away. I will say that pretty quickly. I recognized that it felt good to find the little things in my days that brought me joy. It felt good to kind of stew on them and think about it and like be curious about what made me feel good, and what did that feel like in my body, and so the gratitude practice initially allowed me to do that. But what became really meaningful was when I realized that I resonated more with taking gratitude off the page and bringing it into my spoken life. So I had a group of CA colleagues in an anesthesia community in my area my Kansas City Missouri area that meant a lot to me and that I was pretty close with, and so I was having a lot of unsettled feelings and, you know, I just didn't feel that good at work anymore, and so I was like okay, I want to use work as a testing ground to see if I use gratitude, if I speak gratitude at work, does it change me, does it make me feel differently? And lo and behold, that really clicked for me. It became very natural for me to recognize that I wasn't feeling great, and so during the work day I would find someone to like say something nice to or share gratitude about them, with them, and in an instant my day could change. And I just then held on to that good feeling. I was like, wow, I can't believe how different I feel from just speaking this gratitude and I would do it again, and I would do it again and I would do it again. And then, lo and behold, I started catching myself bringing that attitude back home. My kids were little at this time and little kids like to observe lots of things, and so there were ample opportunities for my kids and I to point out beautiful things around us or to notice little, secret, hidden things that we'd see. As we, you know, drove past the forest, we'd see a deer and we'd be like, oh wow, I can't believe it's so awesome to see that deer. Or we'd see the stars at night or the moon. And we just made a purposeful effort. I made a purposeful effort to engage my kids in noticing these really small joys is what they felt like. And this snowballed in my life, and I would say this all happened for probably about a year and a half so from like 2017 to almost 2019, before I realized that what I had done was. I created a very inspired gratitude practice. That meant a lot to me and most surprising is it gave me again another insight into what made me happy, what brought me joy, what made me tick, what did I look forward to when I was getting up in the morning? Like what sequence of events could I purposely put back in my day, because I've noticed that for several days now I've thought, wow, I'm really excited to get up and have that delicious cup of coffee, and so I would make a purposeful gesture to really savor and enjoy and make sure that I had time to have that cup of coffee at home on my couch. You know, looking out the window or whatever sequence of events brought me that good feeling, and similarly to part one, where I felt like I got a glimpse at my true, authentic self, the same thing happened with this gratitude practice and because I was so focused on figuring out what's next for me and how to know if the decision is a right decision or a wrong decision. You know, at this time I was thinking of so many things starting a business, leaving my anesthesia job and how many days did I still want to give me anesthesia? I was thinking about so many big and small things that a career shift or a life shift can bring. Again, I was welcoming a third child into our home that we had previously thought would be simply a family of four, and so it really helped to have this touchstone into my own self and to be able to understand what made me feel good. What brought me feelings of gratitude, how feeling gratitude for someone else and then sharing that with them gave me such a tangible feeling of connection and belonging and that I wanted more and more of that in my life. And not surprisingly, when I look back over the past six years, I can see that what I've done day after day is follow the things that bring me joy, follow really the trail of my gratitude, follow the points of connection and that feeling of belonging that sparked something inside of me in 2017 and 2018 that I kept returning to again and again using this gratitude practice, and, of course, everything has shifted and morphed, but I can find a path that gratitude created from the beginning of this process in 2017 to where I am now in 2023. And so I want to tell you that if you are looking to make a big shift in your life, the first thing I want to say is that it's going to take more time than you think and it's kind of a roller-closer, and that has been what has felt true for me, and now that I have the advantage of looking into perspective like retrospect, I can see that I did move forward. I just move forward gradually and there were ups and downs and you don't oftentimes know that you're on a path moving forward until you're, you know, at the other location and looking back and saying, oh, there have been so many good changes in my life, I've made some good steps in the direction that I want to be living, and I guess those things that I was doing slowly, day after day, were making a difference. And gratitude, for me, is one of those things. And I want to point you to two more reference points. There are two other podcasts that I've recorded. One is called Growth Minded Marriage. It was a marriage podcast with my husband. We started it in 2020. There's about 35 episodes, but I'm going to link the episode that we did on gratitude. I believe we recorded it maybe September of 2020. So it was so interesting for me, in preparation for this episode, to go back and listen to that episode on my first podcast and just here, where we were and where we wanted to go, and then to kind of be further in the future listening to it. It was just a really cool experience again of this feeling that if you keep walking in the direction of doing the next right thing, eventually you're going to be to the place that you want to be, and you might not even realize it until you take a moment and turn back and say like, wow, I've made such progress and I'm really living this life that I had only previously dreamed of. The other episode is actually on this podcast and it was one of the five-ish minutes of mindfulness for the busy CAA episodes that I had created on gratitude, and I talk a little bit more about the science and the neuroplastic changes and a little bit more that I had learned about the science of gratitude after I had started my practice, and I believe that episode came out in September of 2022, so about a year ago. So if you're looking for more of the evidence, the scientific data behind why a gratitude practice can change your brain or can change your perspective or your mindset, I really recommend that episode as well, as there are some tangible how to get started tips in that episode, specifically for CAAs. One of them is how to practice gratitude in the operating room, so I think it's a really tangible place to start. If you're looking for a few more resources or want to hear a few more angles on how I started my own gratitude practice, the takeaway from this podcast I really want to come across is that the effort that you're putting in now towards your dream life or towards a life that feels more satisfied and fulfilled they don't go unnoticed. It will eventually pay off. I think it's really helpful to remember that everything likely is going to take longer than you expect, and that's one of the hardest parts of the journey for me. I am a CAA. I love quick results, and this self-discovery journey is the long game, and so I encourage you to keep going. I hope this episode is helpful on your own journey If not just enlightening and you get to know me a little bit more. I will be back in two weeks with the next process episode, and between now and that next episode releasing, I will have completed my first silent five-day mindfulness retreat. I'm sure at some point I'm going to share my thoughts and feelings and what happened in my experiences, so if you're interested in that, make sure you are subscribed to this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on. Another good place to stay in touch is over on Instagram. It's really the only social media platform that I routinely show up, and so if you want to follow me there at Awake, at Anesthetist, I suggest that. I've been loving connecting with this community. I love that each day there's somebody new to meet, and so I just really encourage you all to share this episode. Share it with another CAA or AA student in your life. Tell them why you think they love this podcast, why it's really meant for them and for our community. I care so much for our CAA community and I know we all deserve to feel good behind the drape. Let's talk soon.