💻 Career Compass #12
Diving into the paths of other modern millennial women.
Happy 2025! Wild that we are already here, but wishing the next 12 months to be filled with much happiness for you. ✨
After a seasonal break for
, welcome back to another issue of Career Compass - and, for now at least, the final issue. This monthly column exploring other women’s musings, meanderings and methods for navigating life, with a focus on their career paths, started in February last year as a way for me to try a new approach to writing here, and to learn from some wonderful women. I had planned to run it for a year, hoping I’d manage to find enough fellow millennials interested in sharing their stories.The idea was gladly well received, and over the past 12 months we’ve explored linear and non-linear career paths, how these women approach work to make it work for them, and the blurred lines between hobbies and hustles. Spanning all manner of themes from climate to crafting, pensions to pastries, plus motherhood and mental health. It’s been a real joy to learn more about these experiences, and hopefully has provided some inspiration for you, dear reader.
While I’ll be drawing the column to a close to allow more space for other things this year (stay tuned) we still have one more incredible guest - this week coming to us all the way from across the pond!
Hailing from Michigan, USA, Dr
is perhaps as multi-hyphenate as they come, being a pediatric critical care medicine physician, leader, wellness director, educator, and coach… as well as a wife, mother, amateur chef, and book lover! Through she is also a writer and podcast host, sharing all manner of wise words, often learnt the hard way through experiences of burnout.Jillian tackles notions of success, both small and on a larger scale, and her newsletter is as practical as it is digestible. She knows what it is to be short on time, but still want to take care of ourselves, no doubt influenced by her medical career. As I often feel myself to be in this time-poor camp (despite not juggling nearly half as much as Jillian does!) since discovering her work I’ve really enjoyed being soothed and informed by her words, frequently saving posts to return to at another time.
So I am very pleased to share more of Jillian’s words with you here today, and hope that her reflective take on these questions might helpfully feed into your own new year reflections.
Once again, a shout out to
whose Substack space-holding led to my connecting with Jillian - and kudos to for cleverly deeming Claire the new Cilla Black (for anyone unfamiliar with 80s and 90s UK TV, have a quick Google of Blind Date).And so, on with the show!
Thank you Jillian for being a guest on The Navigation!
covers many topics close to my own heart, and that I explore on , particularly how we find a saner way to "live and work".
Could you share some musings on what that means to you right now? In this moment, what does it mean to you to be living a successful and fulfilled life, and why?
Like so many people, when I was younger, I accepted the Western cultural messaging about success. To me, success was becoming a physician, buying a house, making money, and having a partner and family. But, as I’ve gotten older and achieved these things, I’ve realised that, in isolation, these things are not the things that lead to a sense of fulfillment in my life.
Don’t get me wrong, though. As someone who had a mountain of medical school debt to pay off and got paid very little money to work a lot of hours during medical training, I understand how not having to worry about having enough money to live on can make a difference in your life. Being free from my medical school loans has been life-changing for me. But we know from research that, beyond a certain point, money doesn't equal happiness.
For me now, success looks like having life satisfaction, which looks like being connected to others, having a sense of purpose and meaning in the work that I do, and living in a way that is aligned with my values.
It can take a long time to come through that journey of realisation, but I think increasingly people are wanting to tap into their values and live in a way that adheres to them. And yet, the whole ‘white picket fence’ ideal is still alive and well, so I appreciate the ways you sort of tackle these notions.
The themes of your Substack touch on many elements of your life's journey, both personally and professionally, including as a physician and coach, mother and book lover.
Could you share more about the meanderings that led you into medicine, and now to writing too?
I’m one of those people who has known what they wanted to do since they were young. When I was 5, I told my parents that I wanted to be my pediatrician because he helped people feel better, and I wanted to do that too. They explained that, while I couldn’t be him, I could become a pediatrician like him. And I’ve mostly never looked back. Ironically, we even went to the same medical school.
As I now write and podcast about, being a physician is both incredibly rewarding and incredibly difficult, especially being one who cares for critically ill children in the pediatric intensive care unit. For a variety of reasons, I experienced an episode of clinical depression when I was in training and have experienced burnout twice as a result of the work that I do. While my last episode of burnout was several years ago now, I still experience work-related stress on a regular basis because of the environment in which I work. Many physicians and other healthcare workers experience burnout, and they are leaving the workforce in huge numbers because they can’t do it anymore. A lot of the work I do now is aimed at making things better for everyone who works in healthcare.
For me, the stress doesn’t knock me down the way that it did before because I’ve learned and implemented the strategies that I need in order to maintain my own wellbeing. I now teach a lot of other people how to do this in their own lives through workshops, coaching, conference presentations, and, for the past few years, writing and podcasting.
Writing
started as a way for me to understand my own experience, but it has turned into a way for me to help people (including those outside of healthcare) in a different way. I continue to be humbled by the way people respond to what I write, and it is so satisfying to be able to connect with people and help them live better lives via my writing.
I think you strike the balance really well because as a reader I never feel your words exclude me, even though I don’t work in the medical field. And yet having a healthcare focus I think is of interest to a lot of us who, perhaps in recent years more than ever, have taken a step towards better understanding the various challenges faced by medical professionals.
Based on your experiences, what methods do you recommend for others to avoid, or address, burnout? And relatedly, decouple from perhaps traditional notions of success - which I think is something millennials in particular find challenging?
The world is such a hard place to live right now, no matter who you are. There are so many sources of stress and things to despair about. And, understandably, this keeps many of us stuck inside of a stress loop where we feel unable to take a break to recover. Ironically, we often find ourselves trying even harder as if this will help us recover. Over time, this can lead to chronic stress, burnout, and even mental illness if left unaddressed.
One of the ways that we can try to prevent this is to intentionally set aside time to de-stress, a practice I’ve dubbed Active Stress Management. This means taking time every day to get some stress relief, even if you haven’t finished your to-do list. It’s especially important to do this when your life feels busy or overwhelming, because the persistent stress that you feel is your body’s way of telling you that you need a break. And, as I heard someone say once, “First, burnout whispers. If you don’t listen, it runs you over like a bus.” This was certainly true for me.
All of this being said, we can still experience chronic stress, burnout, or mental illness even when we are regularly taking breaks. In this case, seeking professional help from a licensed mental health professional or physician is extremely important. Recovery from depression would not have been possible for me without a therapist and medication. And, while not everyone needs these things, there is no shame in getting the help that you need, regardless of what some people may say.
In full transparency, I personally don’t think I would’ve been able to decouple from traditional notions of success without my experience with burnout and depression. Through my recovery from these conditions, I was able to see all of the ways that perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and people-pleasing were driving my burnout and making me unsatisfied with my life. Having a certified coach and a therapist to help with this were key for me in order to sort out where these beliefs came from and design a life that worked better for me.
While having your own burnout experience or mental illness is not a prerequisite for doing this for yourself, I do think it’s helpful to have someone to partner with. For me, that someone has most consistently been a coach. And, coaching has been so beneficial for me that I decided to become a certified coach myself in order to help other people find their way to the life they truly want to be living. I’m always happy to talk to people looking to make a change in their own life and do take individual clients. Anyone interested in working with me could fill out the form here to get in touch.
Thank you for sharing so honestly, Jillian. I’m very on board with your concept of Active Stress Management. Towards the end of last year in particular I found myself very rarely switching off from a never-ending to do list, and struggling to ‘rest’ even when I’d allotted time to it. So something for me to practice more this year!
Finally, do you have any Cultural Compass style recommendations to share with readers?
I love to create recommendation lists on my own publication as well! One of my recent ones focused on winter wellbeing practices and included a list of articles that I would recommend for people trying to stay well this time of year. Here is a sample of those recommendations:
📗 Slow Seasons by Rosie Steer of - just started this one and am planning to read it with the changing seasons this year
📘 Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman - this was a highlight from my 2024 reading!
📙 Wintering by
📔 Inner Workout by
📑 A Simple Winter Survival Guide by
📑 When Your To-Do List Does More Harm Than Good by
🎧 How to Find Calm Through Walking by Greater Good Science Center
The whole list of practices and resources can be found here.
Thanks for having me!
What a great selection Jillian! I read Wintering for the first time at the end of last year and will definitely be returning to it again. Meditations for Mortals is on my list for 2025, and I’m also a fan of ’s work. 📚
Thanks for sharing your wise words here today, and wishing you all the best for 2025.
If you’d like to get in touch with Jillian, you can find her in the following places in addition to Substack:
Instagram: Jillian Bybee, MD (@lifeandpicu)
LinkedIn: Jillian Bybee, MD | LinkedIn
Website: Jillian Bybee, MD- Physician Leader, Coach, Speaker
Podcast: Humans Leading
If you liked this piece and would like to show some support without a paid subscription, a new year Ko-fi coffee is always a welcome gift.☕
It's great to see you both collaborating; no wonder it turned into a great interview piece 👏
Thanks for having me, Lauren! It was lovely to collaborate with you.