Dare to Dream Physician Travel Podcast

Ep 14: Seeking Self-Knowledge Through Slow Travel with Dr. Dawn Baker

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In this episode you will hear the second half of my conversation with Dawn Baker, MD, an anesthesiologist, lifestyle design coach, wife, and mother, who has made her medical career fit her personal core values, and not just succumb to the expected traditional path that many physicians find themselves on. 


In this episode Dr. Baker shares:

  • One way “to embark on a self-knowledge journey, and how to really be in tune with your values…”

  • Her own experiences with her different slow travels, and how they have always given her epiphanies and learning experiences.

  • Her first locum tenens assignment which was intentionally chosen to be in an exotic location, blending her and her husband’s love of travel and learning of new cultures, while raising their 3 year old daughter.  

  • How she eventually decided to leave her 10-year “dream job” faculty position, and now practices solely as a traveling locum tenens physician.

  • How she incorporated the life dreams of her husband, his career, the needs of their growing daughter, and her own life desires to create a life of balance and fulfillment for the entire family.

… and other learning experiences!


Dr. Baker's message to all physicians: “in order to dream, the first thing you need to do is know yourself”.

Guest Resources:


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Weili Gray

Welcome back to another episode of the dare to dream physician podcast. Before we dive into this week's episode, which is the second half of a profound conversation I had with Dr. Don baker, she's an anesthesiologist blogger speaker, lifestyle design, coach, wife, and mother. I went to first give a shout out to our listeners. Yes. I want to thank each of you for giving your precious time each week to listen in to the podcast. When you tune into an episode of the dare to dream physician podcast, you step into a space where you can have their freedom and courage to explore who you are and who you want to be and how you want to live. When you listen to an episode, you create the time to imagine the possibilities and dream a beautiful life with the knowledge that we each have limited time on this earth. And when you listen in, you tap into resources, you gain the knowledge and skills that allow each. To make that dream life come true, not in 10 or 20 years, but sooner than we ever imagined. When I started this podcast two and a half months ago, I would not have dreamed of where we are today. I would have been happy if I had gotten a hundred downloads and a few of my friends listening in, I couldn't be more thrilled that the podcast has already reached more than a thousand downloads and have listeners from literally all over the. We have listeners in five of the six continents, north America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia, south America. I'm waiting on you. I'm also going to start shouting out places where you are listening in from. So those of you in the great state of Alaska, you know who you are. I'm ecstatic. You are listening to this podcast. Come follow me on social media. Drop me a note about what you love about the podcast, what you want to hear in the future. And of course, any feedback, anything that can help me better serve you in order to dare to dream and live your most fulfilled life. So I can be found on social media dare to dream physician on Facebook or Instagram. And please, please share this podcast with another friend in your beautiful state of Alaska. And as always, you all can contact me through my website, dare to dream physician.com. There's a section where you can write me a message and you can also find out more about one-on-one life planning with me, or you will have even more space and even more energy to explore envision and create the dream life that you so deserve. And so thank you. Thank you to all of you listeners. The entire tribe of dare to dream physicians from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for listening to this podcast, and please continue to support and help make this space a better place for all of us. Okay. Back to this week's amazing episode, Dr. Don baker is going to be sharing with you all her experiences with life as a series of sabbaticals and how all of us can benefit from my reset trip, pursuing slow travel as a way of gaining self knowledge. We're picking up from the end of the last episode, by the way, if you haven't listened to episode 13, stepping off the treadmill of self achievement, which is the first half of my conversation with Dr. Don baker, you must add that to your playlist after you're done listening to this episode. It's so good. And I wouldn't be surprised if either the last episode or this episode may change your life. You just never know. 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, 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.

Weili Gray

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that because I was so excited to hear that you took a nine month sabbatical and we had a chat before interview, and then you actually told me that's not the only sabbatical that you took. So tell me more about all of it, your history was sabbatical.

Dawn Baker

Yeah. I actually have a long history with sabbaticals. If you want to define them that way, I would define a sabbatical as even you can call it a mini sabbatical, but any period of time that you're taking off and doing something different, that's longer than maybe a month longer than a traditional vacation could really be a sabbatical in my book. And when I was graduating from let's see, I think it was undergrad in the nineties, my husband and I both had this idea that before our jobs and him going to law school, that we were going to take three months and travel go. With our trailer, we had a travel trailer and a truck and, and drive around the Western United States and go rock climbing. And I remember my dad who was a executive in a utility company. And so, you know, big into business saying to me, well, then there's going to be a gap on your resume. I don't know that you should do that. That seems like a really bad idea. And so I was worried, but my husband's said, just go with it. Let's just do it. So we did it. And of course I still got a job and yeah, I had to make a one sentence statement about what I did to them and just make it sound good. And they were like, okay, they didn't even blink, the people that were interviewing me for jobs. So I still got a job in engineering even after doing that three month sabbatical. So I also went on a trip that was a year long trip in between. Have my master's degree in chemical engineering and then moving to the state where I applied to medical school. So it wasn't right in between medical school, because I had a period where I have to apply the application process is pretty long, but it was something that my husband had to negotiate because it was right after his law school. And then him getting his big first firm job. And he luckily was in a field that did have a high need at the time. And so he did have a lot of job offers, but he chose the one where they were willing to let him take this period of time off and defer his start of work by one year. And they said, as long as you pass it, You can do this. Okay. And so that was how we ended up living in the place we lived, which was salt lake city for a number of years, because he had this job where the people had said that it was okay for him to take this sabbatical. So we went for six months on another road trip around the entire country, rock climbed all over, especially in the east, because we had never gone to the east. In fact, we went to states that I had never traveled to in my life. And then we also took. I overseas trip during that year and we went to Thailand, lived there and rock climbed there for a month or two. And then we did the same thing in Nepal and not rock climbing, but tracking at high altitudes, just doing the tricks. And so that was obviously a real. Life shaping experience.

Weili Gray

Wow. I, as you talk about these experiences, at the time you're an engineer and then a physician and your husband is an attorney. The professions that you're both in aren't necessarily the professions that are open to traveling and seeing the world and seeking new experiences. And yet you're in this other community of rock climbers that are seeking these new experiences where I'm assuming it's normal, right? You're meeting this community of people where Hey, it's normal to take this time off. Or maybe they aren't taking time off. Maybe they're just, designing their life where they can work enough to get money. And then, do this main thing, which is travel around the world and go abroad climbing. I'm curious, what have you learned from this rock climbing community?

Dawn Baker

Yeah, what you just said is exactly right. There were all of those types of people. There were people that were professionals. We met people that were doctors and lawyers and they were making it work. So we saw people that were designing their life around rock climbing, but still having these jobs. And yes, they had certain specialties or they had certain types of jobs within their professions, but we knew that it could be done. And then at the same time, we also had friends where they. Worked deliberately in jobs that were quite I, I don't want to say beneath them, but like jobs that were sub professional and were very simple because they really value just being able to go out and do these long rock climbing trips and people who are really serious into rock climbing or surfing or any lifestyle sport know that it does take some time. And that travel is a big part of the experience. You're not going to get to a high level in one of those particular sports if you're just going out one day a weekend, every once in a while. Like skiing, if you go skiing and a lot of people can resonate with this analogy. You go skiing like once a year at Christmas break you're skiing isn't necessarily very good. But if you ski. Every day, if you're the ski bum lift operator, then your skiing is going to be really good. And so, you get to a certain point in climbing and some of these other sports, like I said, where it's just very exhilarating to be able to do it at a higher level and advancement and see those, those progressions. So early on, we had a lot of different role models, even role models that had jobs like school photographer, like lab rat, where they were able to take these long periods of time off, or even just schoolteacher. I mentioned in the beginning when we were talking that I was interested in school teaching because people that were school teachers had the whole summer. Yeah. And that seemed really great to me.

Weili Gray

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds really good to me to. Eight weeks or more off. That's amazing. And I'm just thinking, for our listeners also, it doesn't have to be rock climbing or some crazy sport. But it could just be whatever priority that you have in your life. It could be traveling, it could be really anything even just something mundane. But to really, to prioritize that and say, actually, this is the center of my life is very counter-cultural.

Dawn Baker

It is, but it is also extremely rewarding. And I say to everyone, when I'm talking about. How to embark on a self knowledge journey and how to really be in tune with your values, how to get to the point where you can achieve your best work life balance for you is to do some sort of reset trip, some sort of slow travel, some trip that's longer than a typical vacation you would take. So many people in this country never go on a vacation that's longer than one to two weeks, and they never go on a trip that is not just all prescribed for them, like going to a all-inclusive resort where all of the activities are all planned out. A lot of people don't know how to actually just travel and go to another place and just live, just rent an Airbnb and be there. And it's such a rewarding thing to do with family too. And I will say, I'm talking all about rock climbing. I don't rock climb a ton anymore because once I had my daughter it just didn't seem exactly as rewarding as being with her and hanging out with her. And we sometimes go climbing with her now and we've exposed her to it. And we've gone on some trips like that, but we're not climbing at the same high level that we were because it doesn't mesh with taking care of her. And so for us, at least, and so now we're doing more trips where the point is to expose her to sleep to a new culture or to a new location and just doing everyday things and learning, just learning again for her and for us. In a different location. So that's the kind of trips that go on now. And, and back at you talking about this nine month sabbatical in 2019, it was half in COVID time and half, not so half of it was spent in quarantine, unfortunately, but the other half in the beginning, it was all about trying out traveling anesthesiology. So I did some locums assignments. I even did an overseas locums assignment and then just trying out some different ways of life with our daughter. And we really focused on water places. And we went to Panama the Virgin islands and in Panama we spent over a month in Panama. We did a sailing charter where we lived on a boat with a family. And they have a child. The child is older than our child, but the, the idea that they live on a sailboat all the time, kind of like people live in RVs, but they're on a boat. If you can imagine it's even more moving parts and craziness than being in an RV. It was so fun. We loved it so much. We actually, and of our minds now to maybe live on a sailboat someday and we were actually going to pursue it before COVID occurred. But now it's really hard to get around and navigate in the Caribbean where there are all sorts of different countries because of COVID. So we've shelved that and that's okay. But that was one of the things that we did was just try out a new lifestyle. And during the sabbatical. It was wonderful.

Weili Gray

I think to our listeners, especially ones with kids, they're thinking, well, how do I put this together with raising a child?

Dawn Baker

So that particular trip that I was just referring to with the sailing and Panama and the Virgin islands, she was three. So she could swim a little bit, but needed some assistance. We couldn't do a lot of crazy kind of snorkeling or scuba or anything like that, but she had enough skills that she could be in the water safely with us around her. And so not school age as far as traditional school goes. But we have always been of the mindset that we were going to homeschoolers. So we were familiar with the idea that traveling would just integrate into our lives and schooling would be part of the traveling and it can be done. I, as people have seen with COVID, the kids can learn even on the internet, over zoom. We have to have an internet connection when we travel, especially for my husband to continue to do his lab work. I can take a break from clinical work, seeing patients face-to-face while we travel, but he still continues to work. And so that's one of the requirements we have when we travel and that's okay. But if you have that. You can have your kid have opportunities to learn and school. With the age of the internet, there are so many options for things for your children to learn from it. Doesn't have to be traditional and sitting at a desk at school. Yeah.

Weili Gray

Mm mm. And I want to also go back to when you introduce the concept of slow travel. You did a really nice job explaining what that is, because I think for a lot of listeners the vacation is and taking a trip is, going somewhere maybe like on a tour or, a fairly planned out schedule for a shorter period of time. While that has its own value That is very fundamentally different from the slow travel that you're talking about. And I've done both in my life. In slow travel sometimes it can be kind of unsettling because usually when you go to a new place on a trip, you're going there to escape. You no longer have to work. You've got these experiences planned and everything is novel. You may be dining at restaurants or staying at the resort. Not necessarily connected to the experience of that location. Right? Because if you did slow travel and you're not living in a resort and you're maybe interacting more with the locals, you realize that, well, this is just real life for them. It's maybe a little different kind of life. They have a different landscape, different foods, different culture, but it does have that feeling of, well, this is the new mundane. And I would say, I personally felt a little unsettled cause I thought I was going to travel to feel exhilarated. Plus if I stay at an Airbnb, all of a sudden the house is starting to be messy. When I first get there, the house is not messy, but now my kids are playing all around the house and I'm like, oh, this is kind of back to what it was like living at home, except when I'm in a different location. tell me more about how to cultivate an experience from this slow travel, cause I think I personally am guilty of getting hung up on the little details of life where I'm may not be getting as much out of it as I could.

Dawn Baker

Well, those are all really good points. And I think there is a time and a place for both a vacation and a slow travel type of trip at the same time. It's in your mindset. What is mundane? What is boring? What is not boring? What is fun? I happen to actually like that mundane stuff. And it took a mindset shift after I had my daughter to realize that those things were the things that I was here to do. I am here to prepare her food at night when some days we're just talking about at home, but I'd be making her lunch for a Workday where she was going to go and have childcare while I was going to be at work. And you know, it's a nine at night and I'm like, man, I gotta make these little, I got to cut these little bits. Cause she's too, you're like cutting these little food bits and you're like, oh, I just want to go to bed. And then I realized I just, I had an epiphany that I don't have to do this. I get to do this. I want to do this. This is important to me that I am feeding my daughter healthy food. Is not just something that I picked up at the local store and just slapped into her food container. I'm preparing homemade food for her, something like that. So it's like, what do you care about, what are your values? What do you really want your children to learn? What kind of things do you want them to, to experience when you're on the travels? And that may be that you want them to have the adrenaline rush all the time, but it may be, they just want them to see a different culture and seeing a different culture. It is kind of boring in a way, if you want to call it boring, but I really like it. I really like going places as an example. Okay. Here's an example of a trip that we took. This is not during the sabbatical, but we went on a trip to Alaska and half of the trip was us hanging out in an Airbnb in Anchorage. Before we went on a cruise and the cruise was the inland passage. So that was with some family members. We were all meeting, but first we went to Anchorage I actually had more fun on that part than I had on the cruise, which is the quote adventure filled part. Yeah. Because I really liked immersing. Yeah. Myself in the culture of anchored. We met all sorts of families. Every time we went to a park, we met a different family that was so nice and friendly. And my daughter played with these different children. I really loved going to the store and I really loved going into the park and picking the berries that were local in the area. I enjoyed walking around the neighborhood where we were staying. I liked that part of the trip, much more than getting on the cruise ship and then having them tell us when we had to eat, having them, give us the food that we had to eat and telling us what we needed to do. And, oh, we're stopping here today and this is where you have to go, and this is what you have to do. And by the way, it costs a ton of money and you got to wait in a bunch of lines and you've got to wait to get into the van and go on the excursion and all that stuff. I just didn't really enjoy that as much. It's not that it was bad. It was great. It's just that when I look back, I liked the other kind of travel and I'm not saying that you have to be like me and you have to like this slow travel. But what I do think is that everyone should experience at once and see what they think. And yeah, it does take a little bit of a mindset shift to think really about is this really boring? Or am I just saying that it's foreign because it's similar to something I would do at home, like cutting up vegetables or sweeping the floor in the Airbnb.

Weili Gray

That's so good. Yeah, it reminds me the time when I went on my sabbatical, which was between my fellowship and my first attending job, I took nine months off. And part of that was just visiting with family because I didn't really get to see them much during residency. That was very mundane and very nice. you're right. It is a mindset thing because at times I would get frustrated cause it'd be like I don't really feel like

um,

Weili Gray

on on anything special. It's like almost like I was in high school and back home visiting my parents, except now I am married with kids. But then I look back and I've never spent so much time with them. I haven't been able to, since I was in high school. And it was very special, I think, you know, for my kids what had two at the time one was a baby, so he won't remember anything, but my five-year-old and he remembers that time, very well spending that, day in and day out time with his grandparents. And then we went on a truck camper trip out west. And I have to say I was guilty of being annoyed with the crying cause my kids would cry. They didn't like sitting in the car seat. So, you know, there are many times when, during our long drives the crying and if the weather was not good outside being stuck in the truck camper. But it was amazing, amazing to be able to see all these national parks we visited. Even though I was stressed at times with the daily grind of making food for the kids and doing those sorts of details, but it was very relaxing. The night sky was amazing. You're out in nature a lot of the times, and it was so relaxing. And I think back to it, I told my husband at the end of that trip, I said, I'm not going to do this again, especially not with the kids being this young, but now it's been a while and I'm thinking I would love to do that again. You're right. I didn't appreciate it at the time because I was so focused on the things that annoyed me, but but it is very rewarding.

Dawn Baker

Every time I've taken a break period or a sabbatical or a mini sabbatical, I've always had. Epiphany's or learning experiences about myself and about what I want. And so I think it takes a little bit of time before you realize what those are, but just being open when you're on a trip and you're doing the day-to-day and you think, well, I'm just kind of living my day-to-day life. You will realize what you're learning. You'll realize what you're gaining from the trip. Just like you did, how you had this gift, not just to your kids, but to your parents of being with them as I'm sure they're getting older. And you know, th that part was really important. And so you realized it pretty quickly after, and it's worth some of the mundane things. We all have mundane themes. And even in our jobs that we do, and they're just kind of part of life, it doesn't mean that they have to be bad. I think that finding some beauty in the mundane and the everyday is really an important gift.

Weili Gray

I'm now very curious to hear about maybe an example of an epiphany or a realization you had after taking a slow travel trip, either it's through the sabbatical or something else.

Dawn Baker

Well, the most recent trip that we had, where I went away from my job that I had been doing as an attending physician for almost 10 years. I had been at the same institution where I had trained. So I was providing anesthesiology there and had really only practiced there had only had the experience of the type of hospital that was there. The type of patients that were there, the work environment the predictable nature of what my work day was going to be. And my husband for a few years had been thinking that he really wanted to make a change in where we lived. And I liked my job. And also people said to me, it's going back to the people say to you something, like you're good at something people said to me, oh, you have a dream job. I mean, you have a job where you work three days a week and no call and no weekends, and you don't have admin responsibilities, or you don't have call responsibilities. You don't have teaching responsibilities. How can you walk away from that job? And I wasn't necessarily considering walking away, but my husband really was thinking about making this lifestyle change because he is very location independent with his job, again, I am not as location, independent being on faculty somewhere. And so that was part of my wanting to go on this sabbatical was just as a trial. What would it be like if I practice some more. What do, what would it be like if I did a locum in a CCO assignment and we traveled to go do it, what would it be like if I was living in a different place with this child, because I hadn't done anything like that with a child yet, hadn't done in this kind of slow travel with a toddler. And it's challenging for sure. So that was why we initially did that sabbatical. And so what I learned about myself on that trip was that I could practice anesthesiology in a different location and it was going to be okay. I think that sometimes our confidence gets messed with when we get really comfortable in a certain work scenario or life scenario, anything where you don't know how you would, how you would behave. Yeah. If you were in a completely different environment. And so one of the things that I learned was that I was going to be okay and I had the skills that I needed and I had the experience I needed to do anesthesiology anywhere. And now that's what I do now. I do traveling locums only because when we came back, I did work a little bit more at that same place, but I ended up leaving so that I could move around work a little more sporadically travel or, and, or live in two different locations. And originally we were thinking that we were going to try out this waterborne lifestyle of living on a boat. And then now we just shelved that right now.

Weili Gray

Right. Wait, tell us more about this locums assignment you took a risk to do after leaving your comfortable dream job at your institution. Where that was and how was it different practicing anesthesia there versus your previous institution? And also, what was it like having a toddler in a new environment?

Dawn Baker

Well, the first locums assignment that I ever did was actually in the us Virgin islands. And so it is a non traditional locum tenens assignment. I think that if you look at any locum tenens assignment in the states, it wouldn't necessarily be exactly the same. The location for one thing, my family could come with me and still enjoy themselves. We went somewhere that was more of a destination. But the other thing was that the assignment was at a government hospital that has fairly limited resources. So while it's not a medical mission, it wasn't exactly your typical locums assignment either. It was kind of a hybrid, I would say. And so it was similar to working in a VA where the equipment maybe was a little more dated. They didn't always have certain things that you really wish that they would have, but at the same time, they would sometimes see emergency situations that were a little bit more nerve wracking or stressful than what you would want in that, with those kinds of resources. And it was a good challenge. I thought it was a different model too, because it was a mix of nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists. I had to take call and I hadn't taken call in a really long time I had to work post-call I hadn't done that in a really long time either. And so. It was a great experience, but at the same time, there's a lot of similarities. You still take care of patients in the same way. And we still had mostly the same drugs. We still saw similar situations as far as clinical scenarios and what the patients present with. It was mainly people that are local to the island. So I got to see a slightly different culture there. It was great. It was a good growing experience for me and very unusual for locums. I did write about this experience. It's on my website.

Weili Gray

Yeah. We'll look then the show notes, for sure. And so was it challenging bringing a toddler to a new environment, a new house.

Dawn Baker

Yeah, it was challenging, but I will say that my husband is very present with my daughter and is used to taking care of my daughter because he does have this variable work schedule and works mainly from home and is able to work on the internet. So he really does step up in certain circumstances. Now that's not to be said that you need to have a husband like that, or a wife like that. You can always try to hire people. There are always resources that you can find. You can talk to the people that you're going to be working with at the hospital and find resources for childcare. That's what I would recommend because they know people. But there are also agencies and things, and it really depends on where you're staying and what kind of place you're going to.

Weili Gray

How did you find this particular job? I was listening to a podcast. I love podcasts. So in addition to yours, I listened to quite a few podcasts and it's an anesthesiology related podcast. And a person that was interviewed he's the head of a specific agency. And they happen to mention this job on the podcast. And so I said, Hey, that sounds really interesting. I got to go do that because it was just off the beaten path and it just sounded like something for me. Wow.

Dawn Baker

That's fantastic. Can learn a lot from podcasts.

Weili Gray

I agree. I have about a 30 minute commute to work and sometimes I wish it's a little bit longer just so I could listen to more podcasts thank you so much, Don, for coming on the podcast, we're actually reaching out to me. Everything that you've talked about is so aligned with what I want listeners to hear and what I want our listeners to do as a result of listening to the podcast. How do our listeners find you?

Dawn Baker

The easiest way to find me is to go to my website, practice balanced.com. And there are lots of articles there that I've written that can inspire you to do something different, to wake up to living intentionally just lots of different subjects. If you're going through an infertility journey, I have an entire. Section where I talked about my infertility on there and you just have to search in fertility and within my website, you can go to the, get in touch menu option, and you can do a couple of different things. You can either email me directly on there. You can subscribe to my newsletter, where I send emails about on average, once a month, I'm not too frequent with my emails and I'm not going to spam you. I don't send a lot of specials or anything like that. My blog, this is like completely commercial free about 99.9%. I sometimes promote my other fellow physicians work and do affiliates for them if they're doing something special, but that's pretty much it. And then I have a coaching business on there. So we're interested in going through a self knowledge journey and you need. You're going through an infertility journey and you need to find ways to take care of yourself and just feel sane on a day-to-day level, if you are thinking about a career direction. And you're just not really sure what to do. If you feel stuck, if you feel overwhelmed with your day to day, you can book a call with me and we'll do kind of a mini coaching session and we'll chat about your biggest pressing problem and decide if we might be a fit to work together for coaching. The other thing is I love Instagram. So that's my most popular or my most frequented social media channel. So I'm practice balance on Instagram. So you can also follow me there. And I love it because I just love taking photography and showing images.

Weili Gray

Wonderful. I will put all of that information in the show notes and I already follow you on Instagram. Do you have any parting words for our listeners, any words for them to help inspire them to dare to dream and live their fulfilled life?

Dawn Baker

I'd say that in order to dream, the first thing you need to do is know yourself. So take some time to get to know yourself as well as you can. And if that means taking a little break from work. If that means journaling, if that means taking some assessments that are online, that I have linked in my blog, that you can find there. If that means just getting the freebie that's on my website, that's like a guided journal entry of questions for introspection. Do that, do something to learn more about yourself. So then you can figure out your direction and how to achieve your dream.

Weili Gray

Yes. I agree. A thousand percent on that. think that it is so important because we spend so much time in education and then in training and through that process, it is so easy to forget who we are and why we're doing all of this.

Dawn Baker

Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to chat with you.

Weili Gray

Likewise, thank you again. couldn't be more thrilled that you reached out.