As a physician, you have the ability to do what you want and design your physician life around your vision and values. However, sometimes you can feel stuck, lost, and burned out in your practice or business, and advocating for your wellness is your first step toward a more fulfilling experience.
Designing your physician’s life can look like many things. It doesn’t have to look like what everybody else is doing. You have so many different options, and incorporating your unique personality and gifting in your practice and creating alternatives will help you practice for joy and not for need. Understand what moves you and what you want to be around you to start building the career and the life you want. This will help you advocate for your wellness better.
Join the conversation with Dr. Myrdalis Diaz-Ramirez as we discuss how you can design your physician life around your values and vision for your career.
During this episode, you will learn about;
[00:00] Introduction to the show
[01:53] A bit about our guest today, Dr. Myrdalis Diaz-Ramirez
[02:45] Dr. Diaz-Ramirez’s background and her journey in medicine
[04:29] How Dr. Diaz-Ramirez brought her unique personality and gifts to patients’ care
[07:01] Defining your physician life and advocating for your patients
[10:06] Partnership with the community and how Dr. Diaz-Ramirez makes it work
[14:52] Creating options and alternatives for yourself as a physician
[18:21] The importance of team and community in entrepreneurship
[23:18] How Dr. Diaz-Ramirez is helping physicians through mastermind
[25:39] Mental health and how to support yourself and your patients
[29:14] What a mastermind is and Dr. Diaz-Ramirez’s mastermind groups
[32:2s] About Dr. Diaz-Ramirez’s words of the year, Together
[33:30] Dr. Diaz-Ramirez’s message to physicians in training or getting started
[34:55] How to connect or work with Dr. Diaz-Ramirez
[35:29] Ending the show and call to action
Notable Quotes
- In the same way, you feel trapped in a job; your employee can feel trapped too.
- You have the ability to do what you want and design your physician life; it will help your wellness.
- Entrepreneurship can look like many things; you don’t have to build a big business.
- As physicians, we have to have other alternatives that can create passive income to help you practice for joy and not for need.
- Understanding what moves you and who you want to be around is important in your vision.
- We become who we surround ourselves with; choose what you want to guide your life, and take it from there.
- You can have a mastermind of anything that you want.
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Dr. Ryan Stegink
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Dr. Myrdalis Diaz-Ramirez
Website and Mastermind registration: https://maxallure.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/myrdalisdiaz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drmyrdalis/
Podcast: https://maxallure.buzzsprout.com/
Above are the episode show notes and below is the transcript via www.temi.com. Some episode transcripts have been edited more than others, but they are up in the meantime to help those who would rather read and for searchability on the web. Extensive editing has not been prioritized as I seek to both produce regular content and maintain my own wellness. See the website disclaimer if you have questions, since this is all for your education and entertainment only. Enjoy!
Transcript
Dr. Ryan Stegink (00:01):
Does charting in medicine seem overwhelming the queue of messages, labs, patient calls that never seems to get smaller. The pile of preauthorizations awaiting your input, the tens or hundreds of charts that you still have to finish and sign it’s exhausting, right? And still all you want is to be able to go home with your work done, to be able to spend time with family, hang out with friends, practice, self care. I want to invite you to join me for a six week long coaching program, charting mastery, where you will get equipped with the skills and approach that you need to get home sooner and leave that work at work, to check out more info and to join the wait list, head over to charting mastery Dott net. You will be among the first to hear when the door is open so that you can join me on this journey.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (01:12):
There will be opportunities to reflect and earn CME after the different sessions as well. And now onto today’s show. Welcome to the MedEd well podcast, empowering positions to get work done at work, and then be able to reflect and choose what is important for both their life and medical practice. I’m your host, Dr. Ryan Stegen general pediatrician and life coach for physicians. Welcome to another episode of the MedEd well podcast, where physicians come to learn about how to take the next step in their wellness, in a variety of areas. I’m so excited to have as a guest today, Dr. Diaz, Ramirez DRS Diaz, Ramirez is a dual board certified anesthesiologist and interventional pain management physician medical expert, professor author, speaker, podcaster, entrepreneur, and mastermind facilitator. Her passion is to help other physicians who as she experienced in the past might feel lost in medicine and burnout most recently. And thanks to over 20 years of experience as an interventional pain physician with a holistic approach, Dr. Diaz Ramirez has identified a need to provide better healthcare combining preventive and conventional therapies in her new wellness center. Dr. Diaz, Ramirez, welcome to the show.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (02:46):
Thank you. Thanks a lot for having us here.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (02:49):
So tell me a little bit about yourself and your journey to medicine.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (02:52):
Well, you’ve, you’ve said a lot of already it’s a mixture when I was growing up, my parents had different businesses, so I would always like to fix things in their business. They had a children’s boutique. They had, my father was a land surveyor at the beginning. Then after I graduated from medicine, he was a physician after he graduated after I did, but in the interim, they had many different businesses and they would have a property that they rented to many different other companies. And then I was always looking for a way of working there, but I also liked biology. I loved the body. I loved like to heal myself, my dolls and all those things. And eventually chose medicine thinking that I would have, you know, my own office. And that happened, um, later in life. And we had a couple of offices. We grew, we had an interventional pain center.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (03:45):
It was comprehensive pain center in Sarasota, Florida, where I am still am. And we won awards. We eventually successfully sold those clinics and we also created some other clinics for anti-aging. And for a period of time, I didn’t, I worked as an employee to, to have that time. We made the decision to have the time for our children who were entering middle school. And that was a very difficult time. Like we really wanted to be there for them. And now they’re, they have only two more years of high school. So now we’re going back to I’m, I’m truly an entrepreneur at heart. So that’s where our wellness centers, uh, come in. Our wellness center comes into play, and that’s what we’re opening right now, but I’ve always loved, I guess, to take care of people, be, uh, doing surgical procedures and giving time to the patients and time to understand where they’re coming from, what things they have. And I think between that, and then partnering that with my entrepreneurial spirit, as I call it this wellness center will be the best combination for me coming up.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (04:53):
Thanks for sharing about your experience and about how you’ve brought your own unique personality and giftings to really care for your patients.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (05:04):
One of the things that when I was training, uh, to be interventional pain management, our training was really through groups. So we would have a group where we would meet the pain physician, the psychologists, it was a group of psychologists. It was a group of physical therapists and we would all meet and talk about that patient. So that type of group approach is what I really have liked to bring. So we brought something very similar into our clinics and that’s how we grew. We developed programs with the community we had with our, even with our mayor, we would have like celebrate September pain awareness month and then have lectures for the community. So it was always like combining that spirit of bringing more information to people. That’s, you know, I like to share, like to, to give people knowledge and then give them power to be able to change their lives.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (05:55):
So it was always in team approach that you can get the most complete evaluation and planning for that patient and also bringing information to the community and then building relationships with their community so that they can have better care for themselves. And that’s how it it’s been through my training than it was the same way as I had different jobs later, including our company. And it’s the same way that we’re planning to go now at my last job, I didn’t, I wasn’t able to showcase all those abilities and interests of mine. I recognized that. And then I’m transitioning back into that, that type of practice, where I can just put all these things into play for the benefit of our patients.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (06:41):
So you mentioned team and community as really formative things, and it sounds like your training really helps solidify those and the importance of that in the type of practices you were involved in, whether you were employed or in the clinics, you’ve been a part of, or now your wellness center. So tell me a little bit more about how those things really help, not only caring for your patients, but then also your own wellness and living in alignment with your values.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (07:10):
Well, as you say, you know, mentioning values. So the first thing that not only for a business, when you’re talking about a business and you’re doing a business plan that you have your, the principles, the mission, the vision, the values of that company, you should also determine those for yourself. And we’ve done a lot of mindset work, and I determined to have my life be guided by two things that I prefer to be guided for these days before it was certainty. So more the certainty of providing for my family that was like something very big. And, and we all have some of that. It’s not that I don’t want to have some certainty, but I want to be still be guided by love and by contribution. So in contribution, I really feel like I’ve had a lot of training that many people don’t have sometimes some sort of price.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (07:56):
When I talk to the patients, when they come to the clinic about the things that they don’t know that are normal process, just because we’ve had all this training and then having all that put together with a team that can see the blind spots that you might have, because we have to recognize that we not know everything and treating patients in, you can call it a holistic approach, full body. We usually call what’s called the biopsychosocial model of, of pain management. Where is where I was that gives the patients research as shown that gives the patients the longer lasting benefits. So putting all those things together allows me to contribute the best in the best way that I know to contribute to my patients and being in charge of that, giving me the freedom to be in charge, being in control of what I have in terms of my career, being able to, what do, what we call design your physician life gives me peace of mind having gone through burnout in the past, which I’ve been through burnout.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (08:58):
Like many of us have finding that really not having that control, that, that lack of planning when everything is on somebody else’s hands. When I cannot provide the service of medicine, the way that I know I can provide, then that has made me ill. And I have allowed that to happen. I have to recognize that I have options and the options for me in my case is to how can I be, well, how can I get out of this burnout process is really going back to that entrepreneurship, being in charge, being able to design and being able to provide that type of care, comprehensive care to my patients in this new venture that we have.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (09:37):
It’s really inspiring to hear how you took your experience with burnout and that lack of control. And just saying that you have options. So for other physicians listening that may mean becoming an entrepreneur that may mean finding an employed position that more fits with your values or some of those mindset things to say, all right, what things can I control? And I really liked your emphasis on partnership with the community. How has that been a part of your vision for entrepreneurship and really affecting some of those social drivers of health?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (10:13):
Well, you know, I love to have things that I can share. Obviously, at the end of the day, we have like to sustain our families for example, and I don’t necessarily like, like to sell stuff, but I think that if I tell people about these exciting things that I have, I can convince them to come with me and then, uh, share these opportunities with me that I know will benefit them. So the way that we’ve decided to do that in the past and we’re planning for the future to is that for example, with our community, we have yearly conferences and even have seen all, just do a week for our community here, where they can come for free. We, we get to sponsor lunches and, and they can comfort all these information. And even though I might be the one talking, eh, might be able to talk about headaches, my arthritis, whatever things, but what I is other other for, from the community, right?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (11:13):
So say, Hey, Dr. So, and so you’re a neurologist, you’re, you’re an orthopedic surgeon, your rheumatologist, your a PLA helps patients who have large breasts who have shoulder and neck pain from those breasts together gives us a longer results, gives us better chance of communicating, of, of, of making really good connections within our community, for us as a clinic and for our patients. And that’s how we build the community. And I think that if you contribute and you make things where your employees are also happy, you make them part of that, that you treat your employees in the right way, they will be happier with you. So that’s also contributing to your community contributing to not only for your patients, but also start with your employees, making sure that they’re healthy, that they’re, they’re growing at the same time that they have things because the same way that you feel trapped in a job, maybe, you know, they can feel trapped too.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (12:13):
Right? And then you have invested a lot of time, money, sweat, and tears, teaching them something for them to leave. So yes, you should teach them as they, yes, they’re leaving tomorrow, but hopefully like they will stay with you forever. So you have to take care of your patients. You have to take care of your referring physician. Your employee in an orchestrated way will help you be healthier too, because what you’ve created is created community around you. And that’s the thing. Like you have the option of doing these things. You have the ability to choose what you want to do as a physician, design your physician life. If you design things this way, it will help your wellness. You will be able to be happy with the things that you’ve created, because you’ve had the control to do those. And you don’t have to wait.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (13:05):
What I say is like, I would not. Okay. So imagine that you give as a pediatrician, you’re a pediatrician and you have these orders for a patient, right? And you tell the mom or the dad go and do these things for your child. Get these labs done, right. And the next month comes by and they come back to your clinic and they say, oh, I don’t have the labs. Nobody called me. What are you gonna tell them? Are you gonna wait for somebody to call you your body? Right? Maybe there’s that order or something on that somebody’s desk. It went on the floor on their desk. You don’t know what happened. So don’t wait for somebody to call you as the patient. That’s what you tell them. So why would you wait for somebody to take care of your life? So you can blame your employer.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (13:52):
You should not blame anybody else. You should just say, you know what? If these are not the right circumstances, the set of circumstances that are gonna make me happy for the things, for my values, for my principles, then you have choices you can move on. And then you’re gonna talk about, I don’t know, the golden handcuffs and, and all these things, you know, I want to stay here, just invested in this house, or my kids are here and all these things. So you have to learn to make the choices around. What’s gonna make you not be ill. So in my case, I was becoming ill because of the choices I had made. I made the choice to be more with my family. But then the company I chose was not gonna be conducive for me to be able to do all these things that I’m telling you that, that I like to do.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (14:38):
Right. And that go with my principles of the way that I want to treat patients. So that was a choice I made. And yes, we talk about the golden handcuffs. It’s so easy to get that paycheck and then getting those vacations and you don’t have to be getting a scribe and you don’t have to worry about these other things, but then it led me to burnout. So how did I get out of there through entrepreneurship in my case. And I think that that’s entrepreneurship can look like many things. You don’t have to just say that you’re gonna be building a huge business as entrepreneur like we have in our mastermind, we have many people who are, they have many different interests and they don’t have, they can do passive investments in real estate, for example. But I think we have as physicians to have other alternatives.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (15:26):
If we decide, if we’re making the conscious decision of having this particular job and staying there, it becomes mono. You know, it is monotonous. Like it’s the same thing. We are really hyper. We want to learn. We want to study. We want to do these other things. So if you don’t have an instrument to play or something to paint or, or traveling that you’re doing, you have to really get your energy some other way. And it’s through so many physicians I’ve seen in the most cases, what brings them the most happiness that, you know, you can see that, that physician coming and they’re happy coming to work to the, to see their patients. Most of the time is really because they have some other way of having some income that they don’t really feel the need. You know, like I could come here and I could quit any time, but I like to see patients. And most of us really want to see our patients. But if you have something that gives you passive income, something that you can control that goes in alignment with your values, and you have that alternative there, that entrepreneurship can give you, you should be able to practice for joy and not for need
Dr. Ryan Stegink (16:35):
Mm-hmm . Well, and what I really heard throughout that was just the importance of intentionality of you choosing, Hey, what’s important to me, is it being home with my family? Is it starting a business? Is it being able to have the time freedom? If you have a hobby that requires you to do some traveling, whether it’s something outdoors or you’re involved in triathlons, but I think that intentionality of you choosing, and I think because so much of training is about do this, do this and do the next thing. We forget that. Okay. When we went through this, we had to create a differential diagnosis of things that we thought could be consistent with how this patient is presenting before us. And so it required some different thinking skills thinking outside the box. Well, could it be this well, could it be that it’s considering what are the options of what could be going on and saying, okay, what could I do with the rest of my career?
Dr. Ryan Stegink (17:40):
What could I do in this next season? Could I change my hours and really advocate for that and describe how this is best consistent with what the company’s goals are, or does it mean that I take a break and do some locums and do some traveling or that I start my own business or whatever you come up with. And so I think taking that time to really say, what do I value in this season? And what does do I, or my family need, I think is really helpful when looking at the importance of entrepreneurship, how do you see team and community as important for developing one’s vision for that?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (18:28):
Well, I think that the first thing that you have to do is understand what you want, what moves you, right? And then from there you make your other decisions. And the first decision that should you should make after that, in my mind is to understand who you want to be around with. Right? So if, as a physician, you work at a hospital and you’re lucky, like we’re still fortunate around here that our hospital has a lounge and you decide to be on that table where everybody is complaining, you’re gonna still end up complaining like they are right. But yet, if you move to the other table where you see these physicians who are happier, then you’re gonna go and be happier with them and learn what makes them happy. So first you have to choose your company because we become what we are. And that’s when we’re talking about teams and we’re gonna talk about community, then that’s the first thing that you should really have to surround yourself with people who you would like to be like, right?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (19:32):
So you don’t want to surround your, and you can love them. Not telling you not to love them. Like, you can love them. You can love your friends. You can love your family, but you really have to start choosing that intentionally. And that’s something that we’ve done when we’re creating the teams. Whenever you’re interviewing somebody, whenever you’re training somebody, you really should look for culture in that team. That’s a very important thing. So in our office, for example, one tool that we’ve found that we’re very fortunate that we’re gonna be implemented in this new clinic is that we found a company that will teach our employees mindset. So we, we have intentionally made the decision that our employees need to learn about mindset, why? And I call it like the, the monsters Inc effect. And you’ll listen to me talk about the monsters Inc pet and that movie.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (20:24):
You have children, you have a two year old and, a 4 month old, so beautiful babies. And at some point, hopefully you’ll show them monsters, inc when they’re ready. And in that movie, they gather energy from kids who are crying right first with the monsters. They come to scare them. And then after that, they find out a better way of getting energy. So I think that’s that we have to use that in our teams, when we’re creating our teams, we make them happy. We make them part, we make them grow. And if they grow and they feel that’s happiness, right? Like you have the control and you have the, the, the ability of working for something that’s really meaningful. And that’s what we do with our teams in the clinic. And that’s what we’re also trying to do with our mastermind. So in our mastermind, and it develops helps with the communities talking about the things that I’m passionate about.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (21:17):
I’m really passionate about helping physicians, finding these, these alternatives because we can get stuck. And we don’t know, and we can be feeling like lost, overwhelmed, or burnout. And we have in our, in our mastermind, we have physicians who know what they want. They have a business, but they’re kind of stuck in it. Or they have an idea for a business and they don’t know how to start it, or they have no idea what they want. So we help them find those things. But by helping them, we believe that we are eventually helping our communities, because then we know that once those physicians have had their blueprint, they know exactly what they’re gonna do. Next. They have changed their mindset and everything they’re gonna present in a better way to their families, to their employees, to their patients, to whatever it is. So that’s, that’s why we’re, we’re building this type of efforts to help how to help our teams. That’s what we’re implementing in our, in our own companies. And then also doing that for physicians around us, because we know that’s gonna have a better major impact, longer lasting impact and, and an impact of greater, greater capacity.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (22:25):
Yeah, well, and that was the same word that I was thinking of while you were speaking was, was that impact. And so that love and contribution and caring for those around you, not only your family, but then the team that you’re building, the it’s like team of other, like physicians in, or others in a mastermind or other professional community, but then ultimately, so that you can impact your patients and your community. And you can’t do that if you don’t have that business and that team being able to, to move things forward. And regardless of whether you’re employed or you’re an entrepreneur, it like, they’re all organizations, you do this together. And so whether someone else is doing the marketing and the patient experience and some of those other things, or whether you’re doing it all yourself, it all goes together. And it’s about having that impact.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (23:24):
Yes. Yes. And there comes a time in your life where you’re gonna think more about your legacy. You know, you, you, do you think about this in different ways. First, what I want to do for myself, what I want to achieve. And then later, if you decide to have children, then you do that for your children and then for yourself and, and what type of legacy you want to live for for this world. And in my case, I really want to help physicians because they take care of us, right? If we don’t take care of each other, who’s gonna take care of us. We don’t have good physicians available. So that’s, that’s been my effort, the efforts that we’re we’re doing right now, because of that concern. And I don’t know if you’ve mentioned this before, but 300 to 400 physicians commit suicide every year.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (24:12):
That’s three to four medical classes that do this yearly. So think about how many medical classes we have and then how many are committing just suicide. Like, we really have to take care of each other. As our suicide rate were twice out of the general population, worsened by COVID worsening women. So I really want to, to try to, to help us as a profession to survive, because I feel that, you know, like sisterhood, brotherhood, whatever you want to call it. And, and I think we there’s, hasn’t been a better moment to take care of each other. Like this moment through social media, we’ve met so many people, physicians are ready to help each other to tell you how to get things done. And, uh, we’ve, we’ve done this, like in our mastermind, the members come and, uh, they tell me, you know what I like, how so?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (25:03):
And so does it, and can you get them to coach me? And then I call so and so, and most of the time I had, yes, yes, yes, yes. So they want to come to our mastermind. They teach, they coach our members in front of, of our, of our group. And it’s been amazing. We’re all learning together. We’re forming plans together. We’re growing mindset nurturing together. And there’s there. Hasn’t been a better moment. So physicians need to understand, we have choices, we have choices. You don’t have to be feeling like this because the situation, whatever it is, you have to understand. You made that choice. You have to own it. And that’s the first thing you like when you have a patient who has, and let’s talk about mental health, right? When you have a patient who has depression anxiety, the first thing that they have to do is really, as, as a team, you and your physician as a patient, right?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (25:58):
You have to recognize that there’s a problem. The patient recognizes and looks for help. If that comes from the patient, recognizing that they need help, that will give longer lasting results when they seek therapy. So as a physician, if you are tired and there’s different things, it’s not only burnout like at the, you know, we study until we’re 30, 30, 1, 32. Most of us, if we just went straight through it, we had some other non, you know, less, less conventional trajectories. You’ll be a little bit later. But then that matches with coming into like midlife crisis or mid-career crisis, which we could also have besides burnout. But the problem is that the things that you should recognize, there’s a problem and then seek help and understand that you have choices. And that you’ve made decisions that have put you there. It’s not nobody put you there.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (26:50):
Nobody told you, you know, like you could say no to study medicine. And, and I know if people are telling me about their parents and all this stuff, but, but still you’re an adult, right? So we can make choices of studying or not medicine. And then which jobs we have, which situations, which houses we decide to buy, which cars we decide to, which expenses are not, we decide to, to take. And those are all choices that we’ve made with somebody else or without somebody else, but we’ve made them. But regardless of that, of that situation, and I’ve seen them all in our mastermind, there’s always a way out. There is no need for physicians to be committing suicide. We have to understand that. And, and we do have, it’s a problem, right? Because we haven’t talked about mixing burnout in somebody who has break existing depression or anxiety. That’s a different topic. But if you don’t have these preexisting conditions from before, for example, then you can make these choices in this way. That I’m, that I’m telling you. If you obviously have depression and anxiety in some other ways, deeper things, then you have, like, we tell our patients recognize that there’s a problem and seek help.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (28:02):
Mm-hmm . And I think that’s super helpful because it is an epidemic of just saying, we need to come alongside one another because there’s, it’s just so hard to think about, but we can, can make those connections with someone across the country or around the world to support one another. And it’s, this is a unique time in, in history where it’s like, we can, we can talk, we can record podcasts. We can be entrepreneurs in a digital space or get the word out there to say, how can we help each other and to bring awareness of this. And so I think what you’re doing to just encourage and catalyze this change, and really it’s it’s culture change that as we talk about our own struggles or say, yeah, there is a way to just have agency of saying, there are other choices out there. And sometimes it’s just that you didn’t know that they existed. And so being a part of something like a mastermind or coaching or something else to say, okay, what else is possible? And then ultimately you can choose what you wanna move forward with.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (29:21):
And we’re very fortunate. We have chosen our master. Let me tell you what a mastermind is for those who do don’t know there, you can, you can have a mastermind for every, for anything you want, right? Like if you want to create something specific, even I say like a cake, you can have a mastermind for a cake. In our cases, a physician entrepreneur mastermind, where we meet specifically to help physicians gain access to knowledge that will, as I said, either create momentum for their business, or bring a business from an idea to the reality or giving you ideas of what to do. Just, just trying to give you control direction again in your life. And we do that through a six month commitment. We meet once a week for one hour, and then we have, we have learned that there are different topics that people really are asking all the time that they want to know more about.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (30:14):
So we have created a curriculum for our, our members of the mastermind. And we are very fortunate that we are doing small groups. We want to do small groups because we want everybody to grow. And we don’t. We are, there are different efforts out there. There’s some that are big groups and they give you the challenges as a group. And they give you the workshops as the larger groups, we want to do more one-on-one coaching at this rate. So we’re able to get one on one coaching from me. We have a project management that helps ’em with their blueprint of their plan. We have one-on-one coaching from somebody that you might want. And when we have, we pair you with somebody else, and then the two of you get, you know, two to one coaching from another successful entrepreneur. So in getting these small groups, we are able to get to know our members and really help them and see those transformations.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (31:02):
And they get to know about all these areas that they never knew about because they don’t tell us about entrepreneurship in medical school. So if you want to have a clinic, they don’t tell you the steps that you want, that you need to have, uh, a clinic. They don’t tell you finances, how to take care of that money, because the truth is that regardless of what your salary’s gonna be, usually changes significantly from your residency and fellowship to that job. So they don’t tell us necessarily how to, to spend that, which I tell you, I’m telling you that when I graduated, I spent it all right. I had like, oh, I was so happy. I was so ready for that house and the car and everything. So there has to be a balance to those things. And we can now tell people and creating community, as you say, like we have people from the east coast of the United States, all the way to Hawaii in our, in our mastermind.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (31:49):
And most recently, two big things. One is that we just went to a wedding of one of our members that we only met online. And I always tell my kids don’t trust anybody that you just meet online. But these are our friends now in Chicago, number two, I’m partners in this clinic with somebody who was a member of our mastermind and a coach and another one who was a member of our, of our mastermind. So we’re partners now in business and we have alternatives and we’re growing so much together. And, um, together is a big word together. Like somebody asked me at the beginning of this year, 2022, what was your word of the year? And I said, together, little did I know word that together? Word would take me during this year. So building teams, building communities, doing it alone really is not the way to go.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (32:40):
Sometimes we say, oh, you know what? I’ve done this, I’ve done that. And I deserve so much. You earn, you’re able to gain so much more when you work correctly in a good way that you identify people really like minded people. And, um, you’re in this positive, not everything is, you know, roses. You have your Thorine too, right? Your learnings along the way, but you have to do intentionally, you know how you’re gonna present yourself, how you’re gonna wake up, how you’re gonna make these decisions. And that’s how we’ve been able to work in the mastermind and with the groups and communities that we’ve built and are going more, you know, farther away than just little Sarasota glory that where I am.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (33:21):
So I really like that word together. As we wrap up. When you think about that word together, what advice would you give to a physician still in training or early in their career? How would they look for that together and get started on their career?
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (33:37):
Oh my goodness. You’re so lucky if you’re listening to this, when you’re only in training, like I’m 20 years out of my, my fellowship right. Over 20 years and you’re just starting. So this is like take advantage of it. Just take it all, learn about it. Seek for answers, look for answers. And it’s not that, you know, as physicians, when we come out of training, it’s suspected that we’re gonna at least change jobs twice during our careers. That’s like the minimum, but don’t, don’t settle, but don’t just like give up right? Make, make decisions that are intentional and planned. You can plan for your life. You can design your life and your life should, you should choose what you want your life to be guided by. If it’s by, if it’s certainty or uncertainty, love, contribution, significance, growth, what you want to guide your life and then learn, take it from there. So work on your mindset, make sure that you’re learning not only for you, but with others, and you’ll see how you will grow much more and you will achieve much more than what you could achieve on your own. That’s what I would tell them.
Dr. Ryan Stegink (34:53):
Thank you so much, Dr. Diaz-Ramirez for joining me on the MedEd while podcast today, if someone wants to hear more about you or to work with you and your mastermind, wherever they find you.
Dr. Diaz-Ramirez (35:03):
Well, thank you for that. We do have a podcast it’s called design your physician life, and you can find that in any of the big platforms. And we also have our mastermind is called max mastermind. So our website is max sal.com, M as in Mary, a X, a L L U R E. And actually we have our next session starting at the, at the end of August. So I invite you guys to come. We have webinars so that you can learn more about it. And that’s it. Thank you Ryan, for having me here today. It’s been really true pleasure
Dr. Ryan Stegink (35:36):
For all of you listening. I want you to consider how you can apply what you’ve learned from Dr. Diaz, Ramirez in today’s discussion and how to apply that together in community. And then I want to encourage you to please share this podcast with another physician in your life and subscribe. And if you haven’t done so that you consider leaving a review, you can help change the culture of medicine and promote wellness for your patients, your colleagues, and yourself. Thank you so much for all that you do and have a great day. And now for our important disclaimer, Dr. Ryan Stegen is a practicing general pediatrician, but the MedEd, well podcast does not reflective views, opinions or belief of his employer nor his affiliated university. Additionally, the MedEd well podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be considered advice regarding financial legal student loan, medical, or any other specific topic. In such a case, you should see consultation with certified professional in that particular area. Again, thanks for joining us on the MedEd well podcast and have a great day.