Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians What got our attention
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds October 3rd, 2020 - Can nice women get ahead at work?
Saturday Morning Rounds September 26th, 2020 - What is stoicism, and how can it make you a better negotiator?
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians What got our attention
If we had to write a short list of the schools of thought that most strongly influence
our curriculum
- especially the lifestyle design and negotiations portions - stoicism would be way up there.
And we're not alone. High-performers the world round -
from Roman emperors to world-champion athletes, from T-Pain to Anna Kendrick
- have looked to stoicism for practical wisdom on how to live and do well.
Which brings us to this week's article. Whether you're deeply familiar with the tradition or just now heard of it for the first time, this short read is a great examination of some of the most important traits that the stoics taught and embodied.
Many people, when they hear "stoicism," think "denial of emotion." And while the stoics were certainly world-class emotional regulators, there's so much more to the philosophy than that. In our "tip of the week," we will break down the 9 traits from the article and show how you can apply each one to negotiations and the business of medicine in general.
Who we're following Stoicism is full of proverbs and aphorisms, which means that one of the best ways to learn about it is actually to do so slowly and intentionally, treating its concepts as opportunities for daily practice rather than a tome of knowledge to absorb as quickly as you can. The Daily Stoic (@dailystoic) is a great Twitter account to follow if you're interested in doing so. They post (you guessed it!) daily pull quotes from the annals of stoic wisdom - perfectly digestible little tidbits to contemplate and to put into action throughout your day. BBMD tip of the week As promised, here we'll break down the 9 traits from the article and draw some specific connections to your world and concepts that we've highlighted before. The article is definitely worth reading on its own to get some more context, but here are the traits that the author believes were widely shared among stoic leaders and philosophers:
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds September 19th, 2020 - How to become an "Antifragile" negotiator
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds August 29, 2020 - In defense of the psychologically rich life, and how to use negative emotions in a negotiation
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds August 22, 2020 - What drywall can teach us about negotiations
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds August 15, 2020 - Why emotional intelligence is important, and how to develop more of it
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds August 8, 2020 - The most important variable in a negotiation
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds August 1, 2020 - President Obama's eulogoy for Rep. John Lewis, and what it can teach you about influencing others
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians What got our attention President Obama's eulogy for Rep. John Lewis The speech is ~40min, but well worth the listen regardless of which side of the aisle you inhabit. Plus, President Obama is just about the only speaker that you can listen to at 1.5x without missing anything. More on that, and a few other things you can glean from this speech to make yourself more effective at influencing others, in our "tip of the week" below. Who we're following They say it takes a village to raise a child They also say that writing is an act of creation, a "labor of love" So if what "they say" is true, does that make President Obama's former speechwriter, Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) an OB/midwife/doula? We're not sure, but we do know that his Twitter feed delivers (see what we did there??) a consistently interesting and thoughtful perspective. BBMD tip of the week There's a lot that can be learned from President Obama's speech, but we're going to highlight 3 skills today that he modeled especially well. Gravity We made a joke about how you can listen to Obama at 1.5x and still absorb everything, and we're not the only ones - SNL, every comedy news show, and every White House Correspondent's Dinner act during his administration made a lot of much better jokes about his speaking cadence over the years. It's unique and sometimes funny, yes, but it also works. And it's something we practice A LOT with out clients. See, it's often the case that when we slow down our speech or let a silence hang for a beat, we feel awkward. We worry we might seem like we don't know what we're talking about. We worry like might seem weak or unsure of ourselves. Most of us are incredibly uncomfortable with silence - especially silence while discussing an already-uncomfortable topic - which happens often during business conversations. So we talk fast, we use vocalized pauses ("um, like, ya know"), and we hamstring ourselves by undercutting the strength of whatever we said before the silence with a bunch of qualifiers to make others feel more comfortable. Not any more. We offer a reframe - silence is not a sign that you're weak or don't know what to say, it's a sign that you're thoughtful and worth listening to. It's a sign that your word means something, that you're a serious person, and that you respect your counterpart's time and attention, and expect the same in return. Once you can think of a silence like that, you can use those pauses to command a conversation the way a conductor commands an orchestra. You can hang in the balance and take a moment to be intentional with what you want to say next. And you can be pleasantly surprised by what your counterpart will concede just in order to break the silence that's made them uncomfortable, but that you can sit with. As always, practice makes perfect. Write out a script for some kind of business conversation - any kind will do, but the more uncomfortable or potentially confrontational the better - and then practice it in a mirror. Time your first attempt as you would usually speak it, then try as hard as you can on your second go-round to take at least 150-200% that amount of time to say the same words. You'll blow yourself away with how much more expressive you can be and how much more worthy of being taken seriously you'll sound. Be Other-Centered We talk about this concept a lot, and for good reason. It's no secret that President Obama is a Democrat, and the Democratic party is well-known to be more secular and specifically to advocate more strongly for the separation of church and state than Republicans. This is an important core value in the Democratic party. However, here are a few pull quotes from Obama's speech:
Obama probably wouldn't have said those things if he was giving a speech in most other contexts - he almost certainly would have actively avoided them if he was speaking in front of, say, the ACLU. But during this speech, he was in a church. So, he made an active attempt to be other-centered. Obama read the room and spoke to his audience. And so should you. To provide a more applicable example, we just had a call yesterday with a client who's been passed up for consideration to become a partner in her private orthopedic practice after two years of employment with them. Their bullshit excuse is that COVID has made money tight - really, they probably just wanna profit off her efforts for another year. So, how can you speak to your audience and be other-centered in such a situation? Well, Orthopedics is a male-dominated field well-known for being the "jocks of medicine," so we asked if that was true of her counterparts and she said yes. This lead to us building a strategy together that hinged on an analogy - we named it the "put me in coach" approach. We'll spare you the details of the analogy other than to say that the idea is for her to frame this to them as the feeling of being passed up for varsity your junior year but not knowing why. Such an analogy works because it:
Never pass up an opportunity to maximize connection with your audience. Reject Zero-Sum Frames One of our favorite quotes from the speech was:
So many conversations hit a stalemate because someone frames things as zero-sum, as win-lose. That's an "either-or" construction, and it's almost always a logical fallacy and a trap (often an unintentional one - just a reflection of that person's fear/scarcity/deficit mindset). This often takes the form of "squabbling" over how big of a "slice of the pie" each party gets. Instead, we always always always want to focus on growing the whole pie for everyone. That's a "both-and" mindset - it's also the reality of any productive business relationship, a great way to get on the same side of the table/on the same team as your counterpart, and the best quickest most effective shortcut to maximizing your outcome in a negotiation.
Quote we're contemplating
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds July 25, 2020 - How medicine became the stealth family-friendly profession, and how to make it moreso by negotiating better parental leave; also, #MedBikini
Saturday Morning RoundsA weekly round-up of career & negotiation content for women physicians What got our attention How Medicine Became the Stealth Family-Friendly Profession by Claire Cain Miller in the NYT Upshot. This article captures the current-state of work-life integration for women physicians better than any other we've read - and we've read a lot. The title, we'll admit, is deceptively cheery when compared with the reality that many women physicians face today. However, the author does a good job of balancing her celebration of the wins that have been tallied to-date with her coverage of the structural imbalances that still need to be addressed. Overall, it's a pretty short read that's densely packed with good information - we highly recommend you scan it fully for yourself. Some of the main themes touched upon are:
|
Who we're following Less of a who, and more of a what, this week - and that what is the trending #MedBikini controversy Long story short, the Journal of Vascular Surgery published a "study" in which 3 male researchers created fake social media accounts, searched the Vascular Society's database to find member physicians on social media, and then shamed physicians they deemed to be "unprofessional" for wearing a bikini or holding a beer in their personal social media profiles. Same bullshit, different day. Med Twitter recently discovered the article, and the outpouring of rage + swimwear photos that has become #MedBikini has successfully gotten the journal to retract the article and publish a formal apology. Good on y'all for showing that being a doctor and being a human aren't mutually exclusive. That being said, we have a responsibility as your de facto career consultants to point out that a lot of organizations do informal social media reviews like this without publishing them, and while we look forward to the day when such social media posts don't disproportionately punish women, that day has not yet come. We're not gonna preach to you about what's professional or unprofessional or make any specific recommendations, but we will encourage you to (a) intentionally draw that line for yourself and (b) generally err on the side of caution. BBMD tip of the week Parental leave, the gender gap, race and intersectionality, politics - all of these topics share a common theme: they're very charged. What do we mean when we say a topic is charged?
But more importantly, what do we DO when a topic is charged? The first question we should ask ourselves is whether it's worth the fight in the first place. If you (a) can't change the outcome and (b) aren't likely to change an opinion, yelling into an echo chamber or at an unreceptive counterpart is only likely to make things worse. However, there are many topics - parental leave being one of the most important among them - that we can't afford to ignore. So how do we wade into this dangerous territory in a way that's productive? The key is to:
Defensiveness is the single most counterproductive emotion in any exchange, and becoming sensitive to it in both yourself and others is a communication superpower. Humanizing your counterpart and yourself is like putting guardrails on the conversation that keep it on the road and headed in a productive direction. It increases empathy and puts everyone's focus on solving the problem at hand rather than "winning" a fight against an opponent. What can you tactically do to avoid defensiveness and increase humanization (I think we made that word up)? Ask yourself a simple question:
We talk a lot in our curriculum about how important it is to assume best intent - it provides the clearest path forward and maximizes the emotional resonance of your interactions. In this case we also add the assumption of intelligence because it helps us to more effectively see things from our counterpart's perspective and to understand their priorities. Doing so greatly increases our chances of actually changing their position. In the specific area of parental leave and career perceptions, one great way to do this would be to actually have an open conversation with the decision-maker(s) at your institution about the topic. Transparent conversations about charged topics can be incredibly effective if you follow this outline:
The above method might not solve the gender gap overnight, but we've seen it change entire institutions' policies more quickly than any legislative action ever dreamed. As an example, one of our clients works for a very large, well-known academic institution on the east coast. With our help, she negotiated an increase from 6wks of unpaid to 12wks of paid maternity leave. A year later she called to let us know that the mere existence of her contract had catalyzed an institution-wide policy change to match everyone's parental leave offer to hers - not just on the medical side of things but throughout the whole university! Change comes most often from inside an organization itself, and you can be the most powerful force to make it happen for both yourself and others.
Quote we're contemplating
---
PS - If you were forwarded this email and enjoyed it,
subscribe here to make sure you don't miss out on future ones!
PPS - As always, please let us know your requests and suggestions by replying to this email (we read 'em all) or getting at us via Twitter. Which section above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Just send a tweet to
@BossB_MD and put #SaturdayMorningRounds in there so we can find it.
Have a wonderful weekend, y'all! |
Saturday Morning Rounds July 18, 2020 - How to help MS4s during COVID & talking about money during your interview
|