Dare to Dream Physician Travel Podcast

Ep 13: Stepping Off the Treadmill of Achievement with Dr. Dawn Baker

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In this episode you will meet Dawn Baker, MD who is a wife, mother, board-certified anesthesiologist, former engineer, life design coach (Practice Balance), avid world traveler and rock climber, who early on in her adult life knew her passions and goals. She shares her story, which many high achievers may relate to, of how she got caught up in what she calls the “treadmill of achievement” and ended up “losing my way in [from] the idea that I wanted to marry science and service.”

Whether you know yourself and what is most important to you,  or whether you have never done this deep self-searching, it is easy to get caught up in this treadmill of “trying to do everything and be everything to everyone,” and straying from the path of what means the most to you. 

For Dawn, it was the moment of discovering her own unexpected diagnosis while sitting in a dark room with her doctor, and lying in an ICU bed post surgery in the role of a patient, and not a physician, with a coma patient lying next to her, to start what she describes as, “my journey back to the values that I knew, and the reasons that I had gone into medicine, to really being intentional and just basically going back to my roots.”

Part of what Dawn did was to practice “not caring what others thought” of what she was doing and why. Dawn wants others to know that they don’t need a “cancer scare” before living an intentional life based on their unique core values.  She also shares her infertility journey, which started in residency, was put on hold due to her health condition, then spanned 3 years early in her attending career. 

Listen to Dr. Dawn Baker’s story and be inspired in knowing you too can live mindfully and intentionally with balance and meaning according to your personal values.

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Weili Gray

Welcome back everybody to another, their episode of the dare to dream physician, as our listeners know, our podcast is all about helping physicians find their own fulfilling life. For so many of us, we're conditioned to pay attention to other people's expectations, societal and professional expectations. In this podcast, I want to create space for our listeners to really think about, well, what is it that they want and what is the kind of life that brings fulfillment to them? And I have no agenda in this because I want every physician to imagine a life and then create a life that brings them fulfillment. At the end of their life, that they can look back on and feel satisfied with as opposed to have regrets. Our guests today is going to share so many pearls with us. Her name is Dr. Don baker and as I've gotten to know her it just really impressed upon me how she has really been bold in taking her own path and living off the beaten path. She is an anesthesiologist and also the founder and owner of practice balance. Welcome to our podcast, Dr. Don baker. I'm so excited. You're here. Thank you so much for agreeing to come on.

Dawn Baker

I'm so happy to be here. I really have so much enjoyed listening to your episodes so far. I love podcasts and particularly yours.

Weili Gray

I'm just so excited That you reached out and shared your story with me. I think you're going to really inspire our listeners. And they don't necessarily even need to be off the beaten path, but just to give them permission to imagine, you know, what's what sort of life is it that they really want to lead,

Dawn Baker

well, I did things a little bit differently than your average physician, for sure. I am 47 years old and I have been in the practice of anesthesiology for roughly 10 to 11 years now. So I was a non-traditional medical school applicant, where I had a career before medicine. I was an chemical engineer for a little while I practiced in a industry and then I actually went and pursued a master's degree as well. And I knew early on in my engineering adventures that it wasn't quite for me. I did not know exactly what was missing, but I sought the advice of lots of different friends that I had known through my major. At vocation at the time, which was rock climbing and trying to decide where I wanted to be as far as career goes. I actually thought about being a math teacher for a little while and part of what was informing my decisions and career direction were the, the love of rock climbing and traveling and realizing that I could not do that so easily through engineering. At the same time, I really liked to learning. I really liked doing things at a high level in my job. And knowing that I loved science, I still wanted to find something that involved, that kind of part of my brain. And I ended up meeting someone early on in this. Search that had been an engineer and had gone into anesthesiology. So that was one of my early mentors in the field. And at the same time, I had been traveling the world and realized that I just wanted to do something that I could do anywhere even in other countries, but not be married to a certain location based on industry. And that's a lot how chemical engineering is. You need to go live in the Southeast, if you want to do petroleum, or if you want to do biotech, you really need to live in California or back east. And the medicine was never on my radar at all. I knew no one, I had one roommate in college that had gone pre-med, but that was it. In retrospect, I definitely have some clues that I was interested as a child, but I didn't even think of it at the time. And my parents did not know any doctors. So I started getting interested. I went and volunteered in an ER and things like that. And from there, I ended up finally getting into medical school, took a little bit of time. I didn't try multiple tries, but I just was waiting for my husband, husband to finish his professional training and those kinds of things in settling in a location before I applied to medical school. So by the time I went, I was about I think 28, 29 years old. I'm from there, I still stuck with anesthesiology. Looked into all the different fields and decided that this was still the field that I really liked. It had a lot of parallels with engineering and the kind of high level fluid flow and thermodynamics and things that I had learned in graduate school. And then I decided to apply to that residency.

Weili Gray

Wow. So by the time you were applying for medical school, you had already done chemical engineering and you had gotten a master's degree in this field and yet you made the pivot to go into a completely different profession.

Dawn Baker

I did. And I think it took traveling to Thailand and Nepal, which I was on a climbing on a trekking trip and realizing that when I saw other people in the way that they lived their life in different countries, which was completely different than what we were used to in the us. And also just the wide range of socioeconomic situations that I encountered. I realized that I wanted to take that science that I loved, but then marry it with something that was more service oriented. And that was how I came upon medicine. I also knew that medicine was needed everywhere. As I was saying, I wanted to be able to have freedom. That was something that was just always a very important value to me. So freedom to move around and to be able to do the kind of job I wanted to do anywhere. And so that was what made me interested in going into medicine.

Weili Gray

I resonate with so many parts of your story. I also was not pre-med. I was an astrophysics major. had no interest in going to medicine at the time when I was in college. And I had traveled some during college and met a lot of different people, a lot of different cultures. And actually that was what made me want to go into medicine, the joy of connecting with people of just different walks of life. And the thought that everybody needs a doctor. That really was what made me go back to do a post-bac and end up doing medicine. And I was an anesthesiology G resident as well. Did it make you nervous when you were applying for medical school and you knew that you're going to enter when you're a 28 years old of all the training and all the schooling that was ahead.

Dawn Baker

I didn't really think about it too much. I have always loved learning and I know that that's another deeply held value for me. I knew that early on, and it wasn't even an afterthought that I would have to do more school or more training. I always said if I won the lottery, you know, when people ask you, if you win the lottery, what would you do? The answer was never like I would go buy a yacht or have some fancy mansion. It was always, I would travel more and I would do school more and I would just do school classes and any subject that I ever wanted to learn, even something like art history or photography, and I would just keep paying for university. And that was what I would use my, my winnings for. So I didn't really care the fact that I needed to do all that. Of course, when you get into training, the kind of hours and the grueling nature of the training you don't really think about that, right? When you're going into medical school, when you get to residency, you realize kind of that harsh reality, that it's pretty difficult and that you end up kind of aging quite a bit, and having the dance with burnout that most of us have experienced.

Weili Gray

Hm. Yeah. So tell me more about your journey.

Dawn Baker

Yeah. So I loved medical school and I really thrived. I thrived in the third and fourth years, especially with the clinical time and then enter new year, came up and it was kind of an extension of that, but with a little more autonomy. So I was really happy. And intern year, I loved it. I worked super hard and it was pretty difficult. But then the anesthesiology years came and I kind of had a slap in the face in the beginning of the first year where all of a sudden things just started getting difficult. The learning seemed so overwhelming. I also started experiencing some kind of strange symptoms. I had trouble sleeping. I had trouble being motivated to get up in the morning and go to do my clinical duties, which of course, you know, we have to get up really early in the morning. At the same time. I was having some hormonal issues and also feeling like I needed to push myself physically and be perfect. So I would be getting up earlier to try to work out. At the same time I had reproductive issues. So all of these things I was ignoring for quite some time, I probably didn't address them for a number of months. I ended up being put on an antidepressant and I had never had any history of depression. It's not even something that runs in my family. And then I got put on a second entity depressant. And you think that maybe I should have realized that something was a little off, but I still didn't. I went ahead and kept going along and trying to do everything and be everything to everyone. And at the same time, I kind of lost my way in the idea that I wanted to marry science with service. And I wanted to have the life of adventure and still be able to travel. And all those things that I went into medicine with, I started getting very focused on a competitive subspecialty fellowship, and it was very interested in a specific area of anesthesia. And I was pushing and I was trying to do research and all of these physiologic things were, you know, the changes that were happening. I was telling you. I was also approaching my mid thirties and I wanted to have a child. I had been married for quite some time at that point. And we really wanted to start a family, at least toward the end of the residency training. So we were looking into that. I started to have a fertility workup. They told me that my hormones were completely off. I took some time off for FMLA in the middle of, of residency because of this wow. Wake up call and I realized something is wrong with me and they could not figure it out for quite some time. And then I went back to training. I was still having trouble with my training. I had trouble doing procedures. And in retrospect when I reveal what happened, you'll really. Why, but I did not know why I was having so much trouble using the ultrasound and doing the procedures that we do with needles, such as putting in a central line or like doing nerve blocks. And so finally, a various Stute reproductive endocrinologist insisted that I get an MRI of my brain and me reluctant, super busy, not able to even carve the time out to go and get an MRI. I finally go to our university MRI on a Sunday and it was Easter Sunday. And I run in there. I'm like, okay, I got, you know, an hour to do this. And I go in and I get on the table and I get my MRI. They call me into the reading room and they say, I need to show you something. And they point to the screen of the computer. And there is this huge pituitary tumor staring me in the face. And it looked like an octopus in the middle of my brain. Just like what? Well, I, what is that? I know I don't have a brain tumor, which is what they were looking for. I knew that that's what they're looking for. And they were like, oh no, you do. It's quite big. And in that moment, things started to make sense. I said, oh, oh, well, that's why all these weird symptoms I've been having, you know, I've been going on. So within a week period of that diagnosis, I was on the table with our head of neurosurgery at residency institution. And I had had visual field testing. So this is where I was talking about struggling with procedures. My visual fields were completely cut. So I had peripheral vision loss that people see with pituitary tumors. It was classic. And once that was fixed, I realized that I was okay with my ultrasound, but it was causing all sorts of problems. Wow. So I went and I had surgery. One of my attending physicians, that was my bosses, did my anesthetic. I was in the neuro ICU. I was next to patients that, you know, were on death store. I was lying in a room next to a patient that was a prisoner who had actually drunk methanol that he had made in his toilet and was in there in a coma. I mean, I was the patient that we were all, you know, taking care of and don't realize that we actually could be ourselves. And that really started my journey back to the values that I knew, the reasons that I had gone into medicine to really being intentional and just basically going back to my roots.

Weili Gray

Mm, well, that is such an amazing story. And I definitely want to explore what you've said, but I want to backtrack a little bit to you mentioned sometime during residency, you sort of had lost track of the, the values that have brought you into medicine, what you had learned from traveling and your joy of meeting different people and instead you got very focused on an academic type of goal. How, how do you think that happens?

Dawn Baker

I think it really easily happens to a lot of people actually, and it doesn't have to take a health scare. Like I had to wake up and. To really examine your values. And so that's what I try to help people with now through my company. But it, yes, it is very easy, easy to just get on that path. I call it the treadmill of achievement because we start doing the gold star seeking early on. Even before we go to medical school. I mean, medical school is very self-selecting for the kind of people that really love achievement already. I mean, I can't lie. I liked getting good grades. I like to doing well. I really care about learning and mastering what I'm learning, but it ends up not being enough for that particular part. Morphs into this other thing where. Doing things for people because they tell you how great you are and then they give you more things to do. And then you see in when you're in residency, I think a lot of times too, we're mostly at academic centers. And so your role models that you see doing work are the people that are still on that treadmill and no shame in that, if that is really what you care about in the end, but it's good to step back and realize if that is the path that you want to go, because it isn't necessarily the most balanced path for everybody. Everyone's idea of balance is different, but I think a lot of people, they just have their head down and they're go, go, go. And they're trying to get through each hoop that is put in front of them and they don't stop and think about why they're doing it.

Weili Gray

Ah, so good. That's so good. I had a similar experience too, during residency where I, I loved pediatric anesthesia. I love taking care of the little kiddos. And people around me would say, oh yeah, you're sort of a natural at taking care of the kids. And so that made me think, oh, I want to become a pediatric anesthesiologist. I'm going to apply for a fellowship. And I did, I interviewed for fellowships, I flew to different places and interviewed. But throughout that process I didn't end up ranking programs because I thought, well, wait a minute, let me backtrack a little bit. My husband and I was married We'd had one child, we are passionate about living in beautiful rural places and that really doesn't match with the type of job that's available for a pediatric anesthesiologist, which is usually at a children's hospital at a tertiary care center, usually in an urban area. And my husband was very clear that he really had no interest in living in an urban area. And if I was honest with myself, really, I wasn't either, and so I, didn't end up going through, but that was exactly what you described really resonated with my experience. Yeah. And what you just said a minute ago, too, at the start of that really resonates with me as well, because that was the experience I had, where the particular area I was interested in was the transit Safa, GL echocardiography. And I took an early elective and I was told, oh my gosh, you are a natural. You really understand this. And part of it was because of my engineering background. I just really, it clicked with me very quickly because of all the physics involved, I just understood it. I knew the equations, I had already seen them. And so it was like, oh my gosh, she's a superstar in this area. And so I was pushed and I was told that I was good at it. And so then you go that way and it was so great that you, along with your husband actually realized that this was not your dream and that you needed to go away from what people were telling you to do in order to keep on with your particular values and your dream of what you saw yourself doing. Yeah. And I would say it wasn't like, people kept saying every day you had to do this, but you just hear a few comments and then I started internalizing, oh, I have to do this. And it was normal in an academic setting for people to do fellowships. So I thought, oh, well, first I must do a fellowship. And second, this is my niche, I guess just because of some positive experiences I've had with it. What I learned throughout the process is, I can enjoy hanging out with children. Fast forward 10 years, now I'm a sleep specialist, which is a very unconventional fellowship to do after anesthesia. And I see pediatric patients as well as adult patients. So I am still taking care of pediatric patients now. When you realize something that brings you joy, something that you're good at or passionate about, there's more than one way to pursue that.

Dawn Baker

Yes. And I can't say that I've gone back to echocardiography at all. And that's okay. I'm all right with it. I realized that at heart, what I really wanted to do was be a generalist and it goes back to my roots of why I went into medicine and why I even chose anesthesiology, which as we discussed earlier, just like you traveling, I saw different walks of life. And I realized that I really just wanted to be around a variety of different types of people, diverse ages, diverse disease states and types of people that I served and that I took care of.

Weili Gray

Yeah. And I also wanted to tease out this other part you were saying, which is, you're this rockstar med student intern, and all of a sudden things started becoming harder. You mentioned it what's wrong with me, you know, common things are common. Maybe take maybe it's depression, I need to take antidepressants. And things still didn't get better. Did you also feel that other people started looking at you differently?

Dawn Baker

I did have a little bit of judgment during the period of time that I was sick from attending physicians, unfortunately, and I had some good mentors that continued to support me no matter what. And the people that really mattered in my residency program, my program director and my department head, may he rest in peace were very, very supportive of me. And those were the people that really mattered and I owe them and an indebted to them forever. But a couple of the nay-saying attendings gave me some bad reviews and my faculty mentor had them stricken from my record cause they were completely biased saying that I should not have taken time off and that I wasn't dedicated to the field. Not knowing that really, that I was really sick. And at that time, no one really even knew that I truly had an organic process going on. It was more like she's ill and we don't really know why and that kind of thing. But again, the people that really mattered very supportive.

Weili Gray

Right. Yeah. I'm just trying to imagine back to that time, because you have these high expectations for yourself that was difficult to meet and you didn't know what the reason was. And then also having to deal with that, an external reactions, you had your internal reaction to what's going on with me, but then having to deal with external reactions to that in a high stakes type of environment.

Dawn Baker

Yeah, for sure. But you know, the funny thing is you get diagnosed with something like a cancer and just your perspective and the things that you care about completely change because all of a sudden, it's not about what other people think of you. It's not about what you're interested in or how well you're doing or any of that. It's well, am I going to live through this? And you know, I was really. Grateful when I got a diagnosis, actually, because all of the things that I was experiencing were these weird non-specific things, including infertility and things that people can't always tie a diagnosis to. And then I had this tumor that was fixable and resectable and benign. And all of a sudden, you're just immensely grateful that you don't have the diagnosis of a GBM or even not quite as bad as that, but something that required a bunch of chemo. And those things did happen. I saw other residents and other faculty members and things when I was training, go through way more serious things than I went through. And so you just feel grateful to, to have. A way to fix your problems and to move on and just that wake up call to go back and say, okay, why am I here? What am I doing? Where do I want to go? What's my future direction.

Weili Gray

Wow. I think that's so powerful. And I agree with your previous comment that people don't have to have a cancer scare or a health scare or a near death experience to have an awakening. I think we can borrow other people's experiences just by listening in to your story and your awakening. I think that may be all that someone needs to have an awakening themselves. One of the reasons why I pursued being a life planner in the process of life planning, there's some of these questions that we ask clients one of the questions is, you go to the doctor and you find out that, you have five to 10 years to live. And in this meantime your health will be good until the moment you die, what's your life be like? How do you want to design your life when you have that knowledge? And that is a reflective exercise that all of us can do. We don't need to have a health scare, but that being said, I've always been so inspired just to hear other people's stories when they have lived through something when they have lived through a near death experience because it really does on such a personal and powerful level, give them that experience of. This is, this is I only have this one life, there's not a second chance that I get and, does it really matter the way of other people's expectations and the expectations of this system that we may be living in at the time, you know, to those things really matter. Are they going to be there when I'm at the end of my life? They're probably not going to be there. It's going to be us, ourselves and our loved ones. But not the not these systems and institutions that we're part of. So I just love that you share this story with us, and I am so excited to hear about this awakening. Tell us more.

Dawn Baker

Well, After I got the diagnosis and had had a rough period of time for recovery. I mean, I had my surgery, I was in the ICU for a little while, but things were pretty stable. I actually had a readmission for a very, very low sodium. So they were really worried about that. It took some time to kind of get stabilized. I went back and finished my training and I was a little bit. In finishing. But at that point, like I said, I was just very grateful and happy to be functional, to be alive, to be able to finish my training because during the time when I didn't know exactly what was wrong with me, and I thought it was all burnout and just depression and hormonal issues, I would wake up everyday and say, I want to quit this. I want to stop. And I was about halfway through residency and my husband would say, oh, you're so close. Just stick it out a little bit longer. And so at that point I was really happy maybe that I was able to just finish the residency. It didn't matter what I was going to do after that. I just wanted to get that accomplishment and have the freedom that I could then go and carve my own path and find a good job situation for me. And so I looked for a generalist jobs and I ended up finding a job that was all clinical. I decided I wanted to go back to basics and I wanted to have simple simplified roles. And so no big academic position, no fellowship nothing that involved a bunch of administrative tasks or anything of that nature. And I found a purely clinical job and it actually was in the same place where I was training. And they welcomed me with open arms. And I practiced there for quite a number of years until just recently when I have gone out on my own and started doing just locums anesthesiology. And at the same time I started my blog. That was the start of practice balance was like you were saying, wanting to help with people to realize that they don't need to go as far down the rabbit hole, as I did in order to wake up and realize that they need to pay attention to their work-life balance and really pay attention to themselves. And so I started writing, which I've always loved writing for years and years. I wrote essays. I never wanted to be an English major or anything, but also just technical writing. I wrote an entire hundred to 200 page master's thesis, and I really enjoyed doing that, which sounds strange, but I did. And so I went to writing and I started this blog. I started out writing informational pieces about burnout and work-life balance geared toward early career physicians and residents and other professionals, even people straight out of law school because my husband went to law school. And so they have some parallels that we have in our training and difficulties with work-life balance. And so I started there and it morphed into over the years, me doing speaking engagements, I'm speaking at conferences. And then I, I have just added to the company doing life coaching. And that has been going on for about a year. So I have a small practice of one-on-one life coaching and really individualized for people who want to get a better grip on their work-life balance and really have a good vision of the lifestyle that they want to be a leader.

Weili Gray

Mm. Hmm. So you got a diagnosis and got better and finished residency. And you found a job that aligned with the life that you want it to lead. Tell me about the other aspects of life, because you had this awakening and now I want to go back to what really I value the most. I want to better understand what that looks like.

Dawn Baker

Yeah. Well, another part of that was getting the job, getting through the board certification and those kinds of things. And then we, as a family, my husband and I turned to focus on building our family, which was always not always, actually, we didn't know that we always wanted to have kids, but we have a very close relationship. We knew that at that time it was right that we wanted to expand our family. But because we had initially started looking into this before I had my pituitary tumor diagnosis, once I had the diagnosis and I had a pituitary tumor removal, my hormones were very messed up. And so I need to basically replace all of my pituitary hormones. And that means not being able to articulate and get pregnant in, you know, the traditional way. So I sought the help of reproductive endocrinologists again, and I, it was a long process, but I ended up going through about three years of infertility treatments and I finally had a child and she is just the vision of our lives. We love being here. We didn't even know that we were going to love it this much. And so it has really fit with my vision of the life I wanted to lead as well. I didn't know that I was going to love being a mother as much as I do. I was always thinking, well, it's okay if I don't, if it doesn't happen, it's going to be all right. And I did also just for self preservation need to say that to myself, because as you're going through in fertility, it's really difficult to have expectations. That's a really good way to cause yourself a lot of depression and anxiety as anyone who's gone through. It knows.

Weili Gray

Hmm. Yeah. What was that like for any three years? Sounds like a really long time.

Dawn Baker

Well, it's not that long in the grand scheme of the time that some people go through and fertility treatments, I've heard of even eight to nine years and escalating and their level of, assistance that they're needed. So I feel like in a way that I got lucky in that sense, because it happened for me in three years. So I had my pituitary tumor issue, which another reason I felt like I was lucky in the infertility scheme is that I actually had a diagnosis that might infertility made sense. Whereas some people that suffer from infertility they don't know why they have their infertility. So I had this explainable and fertility compounded by the fact that I was getting older in age. And so the older that we get the less quality our eggs possess. And so it becomes more difficult each go round that you do The period of time that I was in infertility. I had a couple of years after my brain tumor diagnosis and treatment and that sort of thing, where I could kind of come back into my own and feel healthy again. And did some of those climbing travels that I was missing. But then when I went into the infertility sphere, I again, variance some issues with comparison, depression, anxiety, trying to figure out ways that I could employ self care in a healthy way so that I could get through the treatments and also trying to live in the moment constantly, because it's very difficult to plan things in the future. When you don't know it. Any given month you're maybe going to be pregnant. And so even planning the travels that we loved was difficult at the same time, I feel like I should have maybe balanced that a little bit better. I remember specifically not going on a trip to Spain because I didn't feel like that I had the mental bandwidth to do it and I could have gone and enjoyed myself. I was in the midst of fertility treatments, but on a small break from it. So, the other thing about infertility treatments, that's really difficult, probably easier if you're an attending physician than a resident, physician is just the scheduling of it because it is unpredictable. You don't really know how infertility cycles are going to go even from a day to day or a week to week timeframe. And so, depending on what kind of work schedule you have, if you have a clinic schedule. You might be able to make some arrangements. There's a lot of monitoring involved and going to physicians to have your ultrasounds and look at your egg development when you're in a, like an IVF cycle where they're stimulating your eggs, but in the operating room, you couldn't even do that. You know, go do that every morning because you needed to be in the operating room. And everyone who works in the operating room knows that you can't not show up. So, so that was difficult to navigate. But I will say that having a really good sense of myself, having gone through the health scared that I had already gone through and realize that I really didn't have anything to lose. I was very open with people about what was going on with me. And I just didn't care what they thought. I just said, Hey, this is happening. Can you help me out? Can I get coverage for this time? Or I would go to the person that makes the schedule and say, look, I think I'm going to need this particular week off. I'll make it up to you later. And if they thought that of me tough, it was okay with me because I was going to do what I needed to do for me.

Weili Gray

Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good lesson, I think, to learn for physicians because we often just think of, meeting everyone else's demands before we think of any portion of self-care. And usually that means that there is no time or energy left for our own self care.

Dawn Baker

Yes. And then in that same sense each day, you're giving and giving and giving to. People around you patients, but also people at work other healthcare member teams, other leadership groups, and then you go home and you have nothing left for you or for your relationships. And what is the most important thing to you? Is it, your people that you're working with or is it your people at home? That answer is really up to you. I'm not saying that one answer is right, but I know what was important to me.

Weili Gray

And I would also add that I had some of these questions also, and my fear was always that, well, if I paid attention to myself or prioritize my family, that means I'm gonna be a bad doctor. that means I'm going to be a bad colleague. And what I've learned over time is they can exist together. They don't have to be mutually exclusive, but that was a big fear of mine. When I first started asking those questions,

Dawn Baker

Yes, absolutely. And it's the same with when you want to take some time off or you want to do a different schedule? It's really hard to ask those questions and I've even written different articles about on my website, about my experience with asking for things, my experience with asking for time off, we talked a little bit about sabbaticals, my experience with asking for that or having just like a slightly different work schedule than other people.

Okay, listeners, that was part one of a two-part interview with Dr. Don baker. Can I just tell you how much I'm loving this conversation? She has shared so much incredible wisdom on life. And I actually met Dawn through this podcast in episode six dream and growth in skin. I talked about how I had done a nine months sabbatical for medicine and how at the time that I did it. And even at the time of the podcast recording, I had never met a physician that took a sabbatical as long as nine months. And I asked. That if you had done a nine month sabbatical to please reach out to me, cause I love to talk to you. And when I put that message out there, I wasn't sure that it was going to apply to any of our listeners. Indeed Don reached out to me. And shared her story and the rest is in our conversation recorded in this podcast. So in part two of the interview, which is next week's episode, she will be sharing her experiences with slow travel and her recent nine months sabbatical. She also talks about how she designed her life as a series of sabbaticals from work. So please stay tuned. Make sure you hit subscribe because you're not going to want to miss the next week's episode. It's going to be so good.