Unemployed! (cont.)
a Networking
Again, the matter of location rears its
head—do you want to move or stay? Sometimes, that’s
almost a foregone conclusion. For instance, if your layoff
involved several physicians, the chances of remaining in town
are lower, Cejka professionals say. They once dealt with a
dozen doctors on the street in the same city at the same time,
and couldn’t help any of them when they refused to move.
Physicians in these shoes need to rethink career options
altogether.
Scherger, on the other
hand, used his unemployment status to jump at the chance to
leave Florida for a locale more suited to his tastes. He and
his wife eventually settled in Southern California when he
accepted a job as a clinical professor of family medicine at
the University of California-San Diego.
It’s a mistake
if your CV continues to list your status as employed from X to
present, says Cejka’s Smallwood. You need to update the
paperwork to reflect your status, or the inevitable background
search will rat you out and send up red flags. Once face to
face, stick with an accurate but concise
story—“This is my situation, this is what occurred,
and I can provide references to verify this”—and
have your attitude firmly under control.
“When
we’re asking questions, we want to hear positives versus
blame or excuses,” Smallwood says. “Frame it as
‘It was the right setting for me,
however...’”
Emotional upheaval
Unemployment’s true danger lies with
a physician’s emotional response. As Scherger admits,
“It’s devastating. It’s a shock to be in a
job you’re excited about and suddenly your professional
rug has been swept right from under you.”
Pfifferling has a
fancy psychological term for it: enantiadromia, or the
ego’s association with the job as who you are. “So
doctors perceive unemployment as a disappointment at the least
and a failure most commonly. And they’re most poorly
prepared emotionally for dealing with failure” compared
with other occupations, he says.
Casey describes her
ordeal as a grieving, where she cried with every patient she
told the news. LoPresti says he was initially angry but a few
days later found he was happy to be rid of a bad situation.
“Then there was fear, as in ‘What am I going to
do?’ Even when I decided to go into private
practice—gulp! Now it was my money on the line,” he
says.
The entire gamut is
normal in the first blush, counselors say. Pfifferling is in
favor of career coaching to ensure you don’t slide from
normal to emotionally scarred. Unfortunately, too many
physicians either veer off into hypercritically flogging
themselves or they cast blame. The first group wears the loss
as if it were stigma branded across their foreheads. These
doctors run themselves into the ground to please their next
employer and “fix” the past. Blame casters refuse
to take any responsibility: Someone was threatened by me.
Someone lied on my review. I’m Irish and they wanted
Indian physicians.
Pfifferling admonishes
both types not to give away their power in these ways. Scherger
seconds that sentiment. “A lot of doctors live a charmed
life—we have a high income after training and things are
comfortable for us. So that sudden, unexpected job loss is a
very sobering thing. It humbles you, it makes you more
realistic.
“But you
can’t let it disrupt your personality or leave you
cynical. You just have to be a trooper, regroup, pick yourself
up and carry on,” Scherger says.
Beware, too, the job
search scars. How you react to many of the contract
negotiations can earn you labels like “outlier,”
“impaired,” or “disruptive.” In an
industry where lawsuits of any kind strike fear in
practitioners’ hearts, few people want to deal with a
troublemaker or litigious person. Pfifferling often finds
himself as a third-party mediator in resolution disputes
precisely to keep physicians from winding up in the legal
halls.
Surprisingly, he has
an ally in Abruzzo. This attorney, too, tells his clients who
feel they have a grievance that it’s usually best to go
quietly into the night. “You have to worry about your
future and your reputation,” he stresses. “My
advice is to focus on getting established somewhere, and then
if you want to pursue a lawsuit, explore it.” Most
contractual issues may be challenged anywhere between three and
five years out.
“The last thing
you want is to be perceived as a bad apple, a whistleblower, or
a loudmouth. Any practice would have second thoughts about
hiring you, so the high road is always best,” Abruzzo
says.
That doesn’t
mean shun legal professionals altogether. Scherger, for
instance, hired an attorney to negotiate a five-month severance
package. Just draw the line between the boardroom and the
courtroom.
And count on the
unemployment event to shore up your skill as a doctor.
Casey believes her practice’s “failure”
transformed her into a stronger advocate for patients. She
currently works for the University of Kentucky at a family
medicine clinic in Hazard, overseeing the rural family medicine
residency program there. LoPresti discovered that his instincts
for how to practice medicine did make economic sense.
“You don’t have
to believe that everything happens for some divine
reason,” Scherger says, “but that doesn’t
mean you can’t take this crisis and turn it into an
opportunity. It’s up to you to figure out how to make the
most of it.” g
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