Awakened Anesthetist

2025 Life Update: Embracing Intentional Breaks for Fulfillment

• Mary Jeanne, Certified Anesthesiologist Assistant • Season 4 • Episode 68

Share episode

Reflecting on recent experiences, I share how taking an intentional break has rejuvenated my commitment to living life by my design. From unexpected snow days to exciting new projects like CAA Matters, this episode emphasizes the importance of balance and self-care in both personal and professional realms.  

In this episode I talk about:
• Personal update on podcast winter break and family time 
• The impact of taking intentional time off 
• Navigating disruptions and embracing flexibility 
• Introduction of the CAA Matters wellness curriculum 
• Exploring my transition from podcasting to teaching 
• Anticipation for my upcoming AAAA 2025 conference presentation

You can now text me! Questions/Suggestions

I want to learn more about CAA Matters.
CAA Matters is the 1st comprehensive wellness curriculum for 1st year AA students. I designed CAA Matters to be flexible, relevant, and seamlessly integrated into an already packed first year schedule so you don't have to compromise.

CAA Matters is now enrolling for the '25/'26 Academic year.


Want more?

Stay in the know by subscribing to the Awakened Anesthetist Newsletter-
more resources, exclusive content and ways to connect.


Interested in practicing mindfulness with this CAA community?


Let's Chat! Contact me:
awakenedanesthetist@gmail.com
IG @awakenedanesthetist

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Awakened Anesthetist podcast, the first podcast to highlight the CAA experience.

Speaker 1:

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. I'm back. Hello everyone. Welcome back to Awakened Anesthetist Podcast. Welcome back to this first and only certified anesthesiologist assistant podcast and the community that we've formed.

Speaker 1:

I am back from a long, wonderful winter break and I thought this would be a really good time to fill you in on some life updates, kind of where I've been, what I've been doing. And I thought this would be a really good time to fill you in on some life updates, kind of where I've been, what I've been doing and some decisions I've made about 2025 and onward. So if that sounds interesting, then I hope you stick around and hear about all that's been happening. Okay, the first thing that you should know is that season four of Awaken Anestis podcast runs through March of 2025, and that is not changing. You may have noticed that I haven't posted any new episodes in over a month or about a month, and that's for several reasons, and also that's changing today and there'll be several more new episodes through the end of season four, march 2025.

Speaker 1:

But there's been several reasons and I wanted to just fill you in on why I've taken such a long break. The first one is that I had planned to take a winter break. I had been planning since basically the start of season four that I would take a long holiday break. I have three small kids all in elementary school and they have, you know, sort of the normal two weeks off between Christmas and New Year's and I wanted to be home so that we could, of course, have that family time together and I could also take some of the load off of my husband, because having three kids at home all day is a lot and I don't want that for myself to have to do that alone, and I don't want that for him to have to do it alone. So I just knew it would be better and the life that I want to lead is one where I get to really choose when I work. And since becoming a PRN clinical CAA, I have that luxury. And since becoming a PRN clinical CAA, I have that luxury. And so I just knew I wanted to take that two-week period the winter break, the school break off of podcasting and off of working in the operating room. And then, when I sat down to really narrow out which days you know on the front end or the back end, I I also needed I admitted to myself, I guess, that this podcast, which is a true labor of love for me and I've had no formal training in any of this, I've just really taught myself bit by bit.

Speaker 1:

The podcast is a lot of work and I think I didn't really realize how long each episode takes me, you know, from, like, the initial idea to the outline, to lining up the guests or like, if it's just with me, creating the talking points and the flow and the storyboard, the recording, the editing, the post-production, like it's all things, the post-production, like it's all things, and really each episode takes about three weeks, maybe a month, from start to finish, and I love that pace. I probably could do it faster. I'm sure there's streamlined methods that I could use. I'm sure I'm not editing in the fastest way, but I like the way I do it and I put a whole bunch of energy up front. Like there was this huge learning curve on how to do this and I put so much work in up front that I just kind of don't want to change anything and have to relearn any of my systems, and so I just do it the way I do it and it takes a long time.

Speaker 1:

So if I'm going to take a true break and not have that awful feeling where you're on your vacation but you're really just worrying about going back to work and having to squeeze you know this is sort of non-clinical but like squeeze your life that you missed into the week when you return and all have to do it all at once, like I did not want that mental load and so it became kind of clear that I was going to have to take, you know, three weeks off to really be mentally free from any of the planning process, or doing process, of creating this podcast for everyone, and so I was kind of like all right, well, just see how I feel and sort of take it day by day. I constantly had to tell myself it's okay to take time off, it's okay to rest, it's okay to not have every moment be super productive. My life has slowed down dramatically and I still have to remind myself that this is okay, that this is in fact what I want. Sometimes I can feel uncomfortable in stillness and it's just a daily reminder to say this is the life I've worked so hard for being able to control my clinical schedule, being able to say yes when I want to say yes or no when I want to say. This is the life I've worked so hard for being able to control my clinical schedule, being able to say yes when I want to say yes or no when I want to say no in terms of all my other obligations. But it's not easy and I just wanted to share that here in case you're trying to make some life changes and thinking that, oh, when I do this or do that, everything's going to be perfect and easy. It's like no, everything, you know, your conditioning kind of creeps up to haunt you, your perfectionism, all the things that you have. Now they'll get quieter, but I still have to remind myself that I'm the master of my life and that I get to make decisions and I don't have to do things just because I'm expected. You know other people expecting to do it. Or, even worse, is I expect myself to do it or I'm thinking other people expect me to do it and they really don't care, like you maybe have not even noticed that I've not uploaded new episodes and I'm over here stewing about it. But yeah, it's been a practice, and so I took three plus weeks off. I really enjoyed my time off.

Speaker 1:

The week before Christmas I was able to not be stressed and we hosted Christmas. We celebrate in all the normal ways, so like wrapping all the presents, everything like that. All that little stuff was fun, as opposed to doing it at midnight because it was the only time I had available. It was just a really nice experience. My kids had both parents home. My husband works from home. He works part-time from home as well as I work part-time but we were both home and just got to be actively engaged at doing things with them. We had friends over.

Speaker 1:

We, after Christmas drove from where we live near Kansas City to Cincinnati, ohio, like a road trip and visited my sister and her family and had a whole bunch of cousin time and celebrated New Year's. And then the plan was to drive back and a couple of days later our kids' school would start back up and we were like, ok, this is like a perfect little break. And then I thought, ok, the week my kids go back to school, I'll still be on my winter break and I'll kind of get back into it. Well, we weren't prepared for the fact that a winter storm moved through our area and several other areas, but in Kansas City, I think it was. What did they call it? They called it a. Okay, I just had to Google it. She was called Winter Storm Blair. She basically dropped 12 inches of snow in 24, 36 hours, and so my kid's school that was supposed to start on this Monday after the holiday break canceled for the entire next week. And of course they don't tell you there's a snow day until the day before, and so every day we're like, okay, maybe they'll go back to school and maybe things will get back to our normal programming. And then there was another snow day. So, basically, everything went out the window. It was all hands on deck.

Speaker 1:

If you have kids and you are, you know, having to deal with winter weather, snow days or hurricane days or you know any sort of unexpected school days off, you know that it is very disruptive and you try to make the best of it. And I was like okay, I have this time off. This is what my life is about is having the flexibility to stay home if I need to, and I really wanted to not look at it as a negative like, oh my gosh, I gotta get my kids to play so that I can then do this podcast or type up this outline or whatever. I was like no, this is what you want. Just relax into it and try to make the best of it and not worry about meeting these expectations of like, okay, the next podcast episode has to come out on such and such date, because, again, I make all these decisions, there's no one telling me that I have to do this, so I don't need to put a whole bunch of pressure on myself. But it's just funny how, you know, as a high functioning perfectionist type A, like, we just do that to ourselves. So this was all a very good learning experience, and we are now at the second week of January. My kids, you know, there's a couple random like Martin Luther King Day they had off, they had a day off the week before, and so basically we've had stretches of them being at school and then stretches of them being home. But just now I'm starting to feel like I'm back in my normal swing of having those precious hours alone with my creativity, with the quiet, to be able to get some of this podcasting, work or fun done, and so that's why I've been gone for so long and that's why it's well, I guess it's not the second week. It's currently January 22nd right now as I'm recording this, and this is planned to come out in three days, on Friday. So this is what I've got my act together, and it was great. It was a wonderful learning lesson. I'm so grateful to have the flexibility.

Speaker 1:

I did go back to my PRN position. I've worked. Have I only worked once? Oh, I've worked once and they called me off once. When you're PRN, the hospital or the anesthesia group can say hey, we know that you're meant to work today, but we don't need you, and that happened once. So I've worked one time since December, which has also been lovely, and, yeah, I'm back recording doing this life update and then next Friday there will be a true it's actually one of the your Complete Guide to Understanding the Certified Anesthesiologist Assistant Profession.

Speaker 1:

Your Complete Guide to Understanding the Certified Anesthesiologist Assistant Profession another episode in that series about how much money we make, which is going to be a really valuable episode. I think it's a different take on it than maybe you've heard before. Maybe more in-depth is probably what I'd say a little bit more realistic, not so showy, I suppose, about some of the high numbers, which are true in there and the salary is great, but some of the reality behind all that. So you have that to look forward to. And then the other exciting thing, the other reason why, and what's been going on through all of what I just described is the second reason why it's taken me a minute, a beat, to come back to podcasting, and that's because you may know, if you've been listening to this podcast, you've heard a little mid-roll ad for CAA Matters, which is a standalone wellness professionalism curriculum for first-year AA students that I've developed and created and decided last year that in 2025, I wanted to start teaching. And so, because the launch of this curriculum is really set for the 2025-2026 AA school academic calendar.

Speaker 1:

I knew that I was going to have to be hitting sort of the marketing and, you know, speaking to people and networking that all really started pretty heavy end of fall 2024 and then December of 2024. So just last month, but basically leading up to December, and then in December I had a whole bunch of discovery calls booked for program directors who are interested in CAA matters. Of course I, you know, was doing all this marketing which, again, every time I do something, I have to teach myself first how to do it, how to create a pitch, how to simply say what your now I can't even simply say it but like what your vision is, your mission, your impact, the value proposition, like all of that stuff takes effort for me. I just can't come up with that stuff. It's just not the way my brain works, like I can eventually get there, but it takes a lot to get the words on paper and to, you know, get, find the right words, I guess. And so I was deep, deep, deep doing all of that, which was great and exciting and another huge growth moment for me.

Speaker 1:

The CAA Matters curriculum has really been a culmination of things I've worked on for the past five or six years personally and professionally. So when I was teaching at UMKC MSA program, I was there for 13 years and the last three-ish years years I really transitioned into teaching more wellness courses. I overhauled their substance use disorder curriculum, like substance use disorder in the CAA profession curriculum and or the anesthesia profession at large, and that sparked a whole new bucket of interest for me, a whole new area that I felt really called to dive into for me personally, because I'm a CAA and I need this wellness information as well as feeling really called to bring this to our profession in a bigger way. And so, little by little, kind of decision by decision, what ended up coming from all of that and from the many things that I could have done with that passion, which was part of the hard part, is like OK, I have this passion for wellness for the CA profession, for creating connection, for disseminating information for, you know, building groups and allowing people space to think deeply and listen deeply. Where do I go with that? And I had a lot of great ideas and a lot of people saying, oh, we could do this, or maybe we start a quad, a wellness group or maybe a subcommittee, or I mean, I could go on and on.

Speaker 1:

There's like a thousand things in the past six years that I thought I was going to do and just slowly, this CAA Matters curriculum just presented itself to me like my life experience began to create this curriculum and it just became clearer and clearer and clearer that this is what I'm called to do. This is what's just dying to come out of me. I really enjoy teaching. I really enjoy that first year. I was a first-year clinical instructor for many, many years and I just want this information to get to our community as early as possible. I guess if I knew who was going to become a CAA, I'd go find them in undergrad and give them this information, because it would be. You know, the earlier you get it, the more helpful it is. But first year students are where I really started to target, like what group I wanted to focus my energy towards, and so there's more to say on that.

Speaker 1:

But basically, caa Matters began to slowly take over more and more of my time and energy, and I felt my take over more and more of my time and energy, and I felt my internal drive, my passion, shifting from the podcast and wanting to do that in all of my free time to the CAA Matters curriculum, half because I needed to to figure out how to market this and how to sell it and what to do with it and putting it together. Of course, creating the curriculum, all of that just took a lot of time and energy, but I found myself wanting to do that more than I wanted to, you know, make an outline for the podcast. So I just followed that instinct as well and in let's see in 2024, at some point I was setting my goals for CAA Matters and I had said I wanted to find six AA school partners and at the time of this recording, it looks like that's going to happen and that I will begin teaching the CAA Matters wellness curriculum to six schools starting this spring of 2025. It's a 12-month curriculum, so it follows the first-year students throughout their entire first year. No-transcript and like oh, I'm not the only one who's going through this. It's just such a powerful experience of shared humanity and shared experience that I knew I wanted to incorporate that, that I knew I wanted to incorporate that, and so that's an exciting thing, yeah, and I am just kind of slowly coming off of that really heavy growth period this December and January, and what naturally happens, and what's supposed to happen, is that when you go through a period of push and growth, you need to follow it up with a rest period.

Speaker 1:

And so last week my energy was so low, I was napping for hours a day and, you know, getting nine hours of sleep at night, and I was like am I getting sick? What is going on? I was just like I think this is because just mentally, physically, emotionally, I have been so high that I had to come down and I, for the first time in my life, was like I think that's what's happening and I just need to honor this as opposed to beating myself up about you know, I'm being lazy or something, and that, too, was a huge growth moment and just an experience of choosing myself in a way that I've said oh, of course I want to be able to take a nap during the day, like that's my dream life. But then when you're faced with a day where you have an available slot to take a nap, you're like beating yourself up, like I'm lazy, I should be doing something. I'm like wait, this is what I said I wanted. So it was just a lot of confronting that sort of push-pull experience and basically all of that happened and kind of dropped me off into a slightly clearer moment.

Speaker 1:

Right now, caa Matters is still on in the background. I have started interviewing and setting some outlines and recording schedules up for process episodes to come, and I have also contacted our current Quad A president, nicole, who I will be interviewing live at the Quad A again, which means that for the past three years I've been able to interview our current Quad A president, like the Quad A president of that year, and just like as a growth, like as an example of what this podcast has been able to bring into my life and to reveal to me about myself and about what's important to me. I will also be speaking at the Quad A for the third straight year about a topic that's really important to me and it's basically again feels like a culmination of everything I've been doing, especially with this podcast and my idea that the CA profession is uniquely able to allow us to live a life by design. And how do we harness that? What about the profession? Do we take and harness and leverage, use as a tool to live our life by design? And so I am presenting on exactly that at the Quad A on Thursday. So the first day of the Quad A at 9 am. Usually the audience on that day and time is mostly students, which I'm really excited about because, again, it's kind of like the earlier you have this information, the better off you are, and it's just. I think it's going to be a really great discussion. It's going to be a little bit of that workshoppy type of thing that I like doing, where you get to talk to each other and this huge mess of people, and it's just kind of a cool experience. So I'm excited for that and, of course, I'm also preparing for that right now.

Speaker 1:

And, yeah, I'm just excited to keep podcasting through March. What I can tell you is that I will not be putting out four episodes a month. Obviously, I did not do that in January. That won't happen in February and March. You can look forward to two episodes in January, so today, and then next week. Two episodes in January, so today and then next week, two episodes in February and two episodes in March, with the finale of season four being that live episode at the Quad A with our current Quad A president, nicole, and After that I'm not exactly sure I cannot guarantee what else will happen after that.

Speaker 1:

I can't imagine not podcasting. This has been such a touchstone into something so deeply cherished like storytelling, making connections, and just the place that this podcast has taken my life is just astounding like from where I started to where I am now and how many of my own personal dreams have come true because of this podcast in lots and lots of ways. You know, both personally and professionally. I just can't imagine not doing it. I love it too much.

Speaker 1:

But I am very, very realistic about energy maintenance and management now and I know how I want to feel when I wake up in the morning. I know how I want my days to feel. I know how, you know, I want the luxury of time in my day. I don't want to be pressed for time. I also know that a lot of projects take my creativity and I am not creative when I am stressed and rushing, like I need to be quiet and alone and have time to meditate and sort of be with myself before my creativity really kicks in. And I'm not sure how that's all going to fall out when I start teaching CAA Matters. I will be actively teaching that starting in May and, you know, through the next 12 months and hopefully for the next year and several years to follow, as long as the curriculum stands and grows and changes and morphs to whatever comes next, I'm sure. But I just don't want to make any guarantees, but I want to really enjoy the time we have together through the end of season four. So I just want to say thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 1:

Truly, podcasting has changed my life. It started with a podcast with my husband and I, called Growth-Minded Marriage, and I've just learned so much about myself, who I am, what I want in this world and how that all overlaps with being a CAA. It's been such a truly transformational experience. I just this period of my life is just so meaningful. I can already tell that I'm going to look back and be like oh, those were the good old days when I started podcasting. So I'm just really excited to continue this season four journey with all of you who are listening fellow CAAs, aa students, prospective AA students, aa students, prospective AA students so important for us to hear our names spoke and hear things produced by us and for us, and I'm just really happy to get to do that for our community and for our profession and for you personally and for me personally as a CAA, truly a dream come true, and I guess we'll talk soon, y'all, and I'll see you next week. So thanks for being here.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Mary Jeanne Roberts, CAA

Host