I have just launched an on-line learning system BloggingTimeSavers with my partner Katie.

So if you want keep up with my movements check out www.bloggingtimesavers.com.

Although I’m upset that I don’t have time at the moment to keep this blog going, I’m very excited about the direction in which this new project is taking me.

If you remember, Michael had the year off work whilst we were in America and so it was a big adjustment for him to go back to paid work. At least he was still his own boss and it didn’t matter if he got to work 5 or 10 mins late. His challenge was to get his business back on its feet. The staff he left running his business while we were away didn’t do a very good job and so there was lots of rebuilding to be done.

Rebecca started kindergarten a couple of weeks after we came back and settled in really easily as she always does. Her American accent was a big hit with the other kids but it faded fast.

Tali was the one who had a big adjustment to make. Firstly she went from living in a 2 bedroom apartment with essentially only 3 rooms to living in a 4 bedroom house. She no longer had to share a bedroom with her sister and she spent the first few days getting lost in our house. I’ll never forget her little voice calling “Mummy” when she lost me and couldn’t find her way around. She was about 16months old by this time. The other thing that we had to do was get Tali settled at crèche before I started back at work. She wasn’t too pleased the first time we left her especially since for her first year of life she was looked after by her Dad and the only time she got left with anyone else was when Michael did a workout.

I’ll never forget the look she gave me when I came to pick her up from her first trial at crèche. She was 16 months old and spoke a little, just one or 2 words phrases really. When I picked her up after leaving her for maybe 2 hours she clung to me. There were no tears but she wouldn’t speak to me either. She just kept looking at me with extremely sad eyes and she seemed to be saying, “How could you do that to me? I trusted you!”

My next job was to get me back to work in Australia. I completed my anaesthesia training whilst I was overseas so I was now a fully fledged paediatric anaesthetist. I got a full time staff position at one of the big teaching hospitals in Melbourne, not too far from home.

I had to adjust to being the person completely responsible for every anaesthetic I gave. There was no longer anyone else looking over my shoulder. The buck stopped with me. It was a bigger jump than I had initially expected and I was glad to be in the nurturing environment of a big teaching hospital. We never know everything and it was good to have more experienced anaesthetists around that I could discuss the more difficult and complex patients with.

I guess returning home was a huge adjustment for all of us in different ways. It’s interesting to think about how different people cope with change in their lives.

I wonder if you cope better with change if you are more used to it or does your underlying personality predict your reaction to a change of circumstance in your life.

Perhaps it’s all about your attitude and the way you approach things.

Maybe once again it’s all about your perception whether you embrace change with ferocious curiosity or whether you approach it with fear and foreboding.

Tell me what you think

The rostering system for on call shifts in the USA was very different to that in Australia. I was used to being assigned on call shifts and working my life around when I had to work. This was the way things were done down-under. Sure we had plenty of advance notice, usually more than 3 months. But if a weekend shift clashed with a social event that I wanted to attend it was up to me to swop my shift with one of my colleagues.

In Boston and I’m told in all of America the senior resident did the on call roster for the rest of the residents and it was only worked out one month in advance. If we worked a 24hr shift then we were entitled to the next day off. Needless to say if you requested a Thursday night on call and had the following weekend free you could get 3 days off in a row. Also, we were entitled to 4 weeks of annual leave during our fellowship year and it could be taken as single days or as a week or any combination in between. I tried to make sure that I did a Thursday call every month to 6 weeks with the following weekend free. Sometimes I added a day of annual leave so that we could have a 4 day weekend.

We took advantage of every long weekend to take a road trip or visit some relatives. We covered a few kilometres in our second-hand (it could have been 10^th hand for all we knew) 1980’s model Oldsmobile station wagon. It had the wood panelling on the side just like the one Chevy Chase drove in the movie National Lampoon’s vacation. Granny never travelled on the roof.

We covered a lot of New England. During the summer we went to Rhode Island on a time-share jaunt. That is, for the sacrifice of listening to a 90min sales pitch you get free accommodation for the weekend. We drove right to the tip of Massachusetts, Provincetown. Tanglewood, was a gorgeous little town were the Boston Symphony Orchestra performs in the summer. As it got colder we visited my cousin who was at the University of Vermont. My other cousin started at Cornell University whilst we were there so of course we visited her as well. There was the weekend spent in the Adirondaks. There was the road trip to my aunt’s place in Buffalo NY (where I ended up loosing my gall bladder after some exceptional cooking and eating).

We went over the border to Canada several times as well. We even got a couple of days off from the girls for good behaviour (my aunt and uncle looked after them) Montreal was beautiful, but the highlight was Quebec and a ride around the old part of the city in a horse-drawn carriage.

Not only did we drive but we flew down to Florida to visit more relatives and New Orleans for the annual meeting of Anaesthesiologists.

But the absolute highlight was the 5 weeks we spent driving from the East coast to the West Coast before flying back to Australia for my little sister’s wedding. We planned our trip closely and made sure that we didn’t drive more than 200-300 miles in any one day. Prior to leaving Boston we sold the Oldsmobile and we ended up driving across the country in a Mitsubishi Colt. After packing up our apartment and selling off some of our furniture (the rest we left on the sidewalk and watched out the window as people picked up a bookshelf, table light etc) we squeezed ourselves and the 2 little girls into the Colt and left town. We had a roof pack on top of the Colt which was almost as big as the car itself. The girls had toys and various bits of baby paraphernalia crammed around them in the back seat. Luckily, they both, at that time, had short legs.

We called our trip the Griswald’s Journey and from Boston our first stop was New York City where we once more met up with my cousin. Next it was onto Buffalo NY to say good-bye to my aunt and uncle. From there we travelled to Cleveland Ohio and saw a great Rock and Roll Museum. Next stop was the windy city and a great boat tour. We then started heading south St Louis, Missouri was where we saw the arch which was the gateway to the west.

The highlight of Oklahoma City was an all you can eat restaurant. We saw first hand why there is an obesity problem in America. Amarillo Texas followed, we didn’t want to miss Texas. Next was Sante Fe, New Mexico and then it was onto Arizona. We did as much hiking as we could with a 4 year old and one year old and spent some magnificent days at the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and the Zion National parks. Somewhere during that time we also visited the famous Cadillac Ranch.

We were in Las Vegas the night that Mike Tyson infamously bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear. We weren’t actually at the fight but we were staying in a little motel right across the road There were alot of homeboys in town that weekend.

San Diego was the second last stop and we were in Disneyland for the 4^th of July weekend.

Next stop Melbourne Australia.

Australians have a far more laid back approach to life especially compared to those on the East coast. I found this out very quickly when I started work. An early start for me back home was being at work at 7am. A normal working day at Boston Children’s started at 6 or 615. (I’m not a morning person!)

Work was extremely challenging and rewarding and it was great that I had the opportunity to work in the USA. It was, however, much harder to keep my home life and my work life in balance with the early starts and longer hours that were expected of me.

When we arrived one of the first things that we did was the big supermarket shop. We had literally nothing in the house (absolutely nothing!) So all 4 of us trudged down to the super market (well Rebecca and Tali really didn’t have a choice, where we went, they went). Now back home in Australia a trip to the supermarket would take maybe 45 mins including driving there and back. I think we were in there for a couple for hours. We were unfamiliar with all of the brands, and where, back home, we would have a choice of maybe 3 or 4 different brands, in America, there were 10 or 20. We spent a lot of time reading the labels trying to work out which milk to buy, which cereal, which toothpaste etc.

The climate was another thing that was very different. When we arrived in Boston it was summer and Boston is very humid in summer. I put on my full-length coat half-way through September and didn’t take it off again until mid April. I had never even owned a full length coat before in my life. We spent a couple of Sundays driving through New England looking at the changing colours of the autumn leaves. Magnificent! We also got caught driving home from Maine in a massive snowstorm. It snowed over 1m in less than 24 hrs! Michael went to the supermarket to stock up in case we got snowed in and he said it was like being in a war zone. We woke up on April Fools Day to find ourselves in a winter wonderland and it had snowed so much that many of the roads were still closed. People had to first shovel out the snow from their driveways before they could drive to work. I didn’t have any trouble getting to work, I just put on my ski boots and walked as I usually did. Many of the staff and patients didn’t make it into the hospital that day but everyone got a kick out of the fact that the girl from down-under who had hardly even seen snow before managed to get to work on time!

Tali in her snowsuit

Michael and I did a complete role reversal for the year. I was out working and he was taking care of the home front. He was Mr Mom and extremely busy taking care of a baby and a 3 year old. Michael still thinks that our year in Boston was the best year of his life. He got to know our 2 little girls extremely well and got to spend masses of time with them not just “quality time”. Best of all he didn’t have to go to work at all that year (although he did do all of the unpaid work at home)

After our year away from our extended family, we have a much better understanding of what life is like for some migrants who come without mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins etc. Our family became a little unit of 4 and because we had no one else to rely on for babysitting etc we became a very close-knit unit. Michael and I celebrated our 10^th wedding anniversary whilst we were in Boston (actually only a month or 2 after our arrival in Boston) and we went out for dinner to a restaurant with tablecloths and Rebecca (3) and Tali (all of 4 months) joined us. For those of you out there with kids you’ll know that you never take a baby and a three year old out to a restaurant with tablecloths in fact it’s way better if you get take away.

We took advantage of very opportunity we had to travel and see as much of America as we could. Having 2 little people with never stopped us doing anything. Our kids were very adaptable and anytime they were in the car more than about 10mins they drifted off to sleep!

The highlight of the year was our road-trip across the country. We drove from the east coast to the west coast, taking 5 weeks to do so. We saw more of America than most Americans do!

More next time.

powerful, no words needed!

….the next challenge involved relocating to the other side of the world to complete my anaesthesia training. But first a few hurdles had to be jumped over. Firstly I had to get a job overseas so that we could combine travel and work, something that I’d always dreamed of doing and will continue to do in the future.

I decided to try my luck in the USA because I had a few contacts to write to and we have family that live there. Anyway after many letters and faxes I flew over to interview at the Boston Children’s Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I wanted to continue my training in paediatric anaesthesia.

My first choice was to work and live in Boston but as luck would have it CHOP offered me a job first. Unsure what to do I called the Boston Children’s Hospital and fortunately they too offered me a position as a fellow in paediatric anaesthesia. I was due to start 1^st June 1996.

Back home to finish my Australian training, pass a couple more examinations so that I was able to get a medical licence in the state of Massachusetts and have another baby.

My second child was born on the 25^th March 1996 and on the 13^th May 1996 all 4 of us left for the USA. The house in Melbourne got packed up and rented out and after a very long flight we arrived in Boston to our apartment in Longwood Towers. We had arranged furniture rental prior to our arrival so we were able to go straight from the airport to our new home. We had 2 weeks to settle in and buy the basics before work started for me.

Now this might sound like an extremely daunting task, leaving family, friends and an established life to take our chances in an unknown place but the truth is that people do this kind of thing all of the time and many of them in much worse circumstances than us.

We looked at this relocation as a great adventure and a challenge there was no negativity for us whatsoever. Compare this to those people who have no choice but to leave their homes because of wars, persecution or natural disasters.

Remembering this time in my life makes me realise that our attitudes and emotions have a huge impact on our perceptions of the events that occur in our lives.

Are you a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person?

Do you spend your life looking for positives or negatives?

What have you brought into your life?

…interesting questions to ponder!

For fun I ran a Google search on “secrets of success” – results 3,320,000.

I also ran a search on “easy money” – results 36,300,000.

This is mind-blowing, over 36 million internet sites about “easy money”. Well this blog post is not about any get rich quick schemes because they don’t work. There is no such thing as an overnight success. If you look at anyone who is billed as an “overnight success” then look more closely. They have spent years mastering their craft.

Success comes with much hard work, focus, determination and perseverance. The trick is to become successful at something that you are passionate about doing and then it doesn’t seem like work.

I first learnt these lessons back in my anaesthesia days but somehow as the memories of those challenging years faded I forgot those lessons and have just recently re-learned them.

But back to the story of how I learnt those lessons in the first place. During my medical training as you might expect I had to pass plenty of exams. There were written exams with short answer questions and essays. There were multiple choice exams where a combination of the answers was correct, not just one. There were oral examinations where we were asked questions by a panel of examiners usually 2 and there were clinical examinations where we had to talk to and examine a patient and then present our findings to the examiner. All in all by the time I started my specialist anaesthesia training you could say I was a veteran at passing exams and had used many successful strategies to pass. I can’t remember ever failing an exam although some subjects certainly held less allure for me than others.

I never tried the trick on the video below…..

Anyway as you might expect, for specialist medical training the standards are much higher and the depth of knowledge required is far deeper. Anaesthesia training consists of 5 years of on the job training and passing 2 difficult exams, the first in year 1 or 2 of training and the 2^nd in the 4^th year of training. There are also a few other requirements such as a research project to be completed.

Anyway I thought that I had studied hard and applied myself well to my chosen profession. I was certainly enjoying the challenge of the operating room environment and as my level of experience increased I was gradually given more responsibility in patient care. I must stress that during anaesthesia training there is always a fully trained specialist anaesthetist supervising the trainees. However the level of supervision required is reduced as the trainees get more experienced.

I undertook my 1^st part examination during the second half of my first year of training and to my deepest disappointment I only passed one of the 2 subjects and so had to re-sit the exam the following year. It was only after I failed the exam that I had a clear understanding of exactly how much more knowledge I needed to pass the anaesthesia exams as compared to passing the medical school exams.

So I set about learning the core material in greater details and I completed many more trial exams both written and oral. It was my oral examination technique which had let me down in the first place.

This experience taught me many things. I had never failed before in life and I learnt that when you fail and you are determined enough to continue on the same path you just do what you have to do.

There’s no such thing as failure only feedback – the feedback I got was that I needed to know the material in greater depth and I needed better oral examination skills to ensure that I could show the examiners that I knew my stuff.

The other thing that I’d like to point out is that successful people do the things that other people aren’t prepared to do.

When the time came around for me to sit my 2^nd part exam my life circumstances were very different. My eldest daughter Rebecca was born about a year after I’d successfully passed my 1^st part exam. I had many more distractions and responsibilities in my life but I also knew that I didn’t ever want to experience that feeling of failure.

This required a new strategy for study. I was extremely focussed, and planned my time carefully. I scheduled work-time, family time and study time and I wrote a timetable of exactly which topic had to be completed every week. I was diligent and took every opportunity for exam practice that was offered. I wanted to pass first time round and I did.

Determination, focus, perseverance, hard-work and exceptional time-management paid off and I passed my final examination in anaesthesia at the first attempt!

So onto the next challenge……

It is now 1987 and I have just graduated from the University of Melbourne and have now earned the right to add the letters M.B.B.S. (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery) behind my name. I have worked hard and now I am called Dr. Anne even thought technically speaking I’m not a real doctor. A real doctor has completed a PHD.

The medical course in Australia is six years long. The first 3 years are called the pre-clinical years and they are spent at uni studying the basic sciences such as anatomy, biochemistry, physiology and pharmacology. After 3 years of being a normal uni student we continued our medical education in the public hospital system. We still had lectures and tutorials but we also learnt about illness and disease by studying real patients. We learnt how to talk to patients and examine them so that we could, from their symptoms, diagnose their problems.

I was fortunate to meet my husband Michael when I was doing my 2^nd year at uni and we married before I finished my studies. During my 5^th year as a medical student a new system was introduced. As well as all of our regular tutorials, we were assigned a mentor for the year who we met with on a regular basis and we were able to discuss career options and ask any questions that we had.

This was my first exposure to a mentor and I found it an invaluable experience especially since it was my mentor who suggested anaesthesia as a possible career for me. There are many benefits to anaesthesia not the least of which is an ability to control one’s own work-life balance.

The importance of a good mentor in all aspects of life cannot be emphasised enough. As I embark on my new endeavour of virtual education I have been told many times, find someone who is already successful and model them. There is also a strategy to getting a busy, successful person to become your mentor. You can’t just call them and ask them. Firstly, you probably wouldn’t be able to get past their gate-keeper and secondly if you asked them upfront to be your mentor they would probably say no they are too busy. The key, as always, is build a relationship first, take it slowly but do everything with intent. Then, before you know it, you have the mentor you always wanted.

So after discussion with Michael, I decided to aim for anaesthesia as my career. It was not a decision that we made lightly because post-graduate medical training is long and arduous. For anaesthesia one has to complete a minimum of 2 years as a hospital medical officer before one can be accepted into the anaesthesia training program. There are a limited number of training positions in Australia so sometimes there is a backlog and it takes even longer than that to begin training. In my case I did 3 years as a resident medical officer in the public hospital system before I embarked on my anaesthesia training.

When I had just graduated from medical school and began working as an intern in the public hospital system at the ripe old age of 23 it seems like almost every patient was asking me if I was really old enough to be a doctor. I found this to be mildly insulting as I thought that after 6 long years of study no-one had the right to doubt my qualifications.

It was a gradual process and it wasn’t till a couple of years later that I noticed that no-one had asked me in a while, was I really old enough to be a doctor. Upon reflection I came up with an interesting learning. At 25 I’m sure I didn’t physically look any older than I did when I was 23. There were certainly not the fine line and grey hairs that have to be hidden today. I wondered why people no longer thought that I was too young to perform my job. I guess it was the way that I approached my patients that was different. You see, although I didn’t look much different I had seen and experienced a lot over those first couple of years and it was reflected in my confidence and the way I appeared to people. I’m sure that my communication skills had improved out of sight!

We just don’t realise how much of our communication is non-verbal. In my current job as an anaesthetist many people think that I don’t need good communication skills because most of the time that I spend with my patients, they are unconscious but on the contrary I need to gain someone’s confidence in me in a very short period of time. Therefore I need to be a master of communication both verbal and non-verbal.

During my early years as a doctor there were several people that offered me very timely advice and I’m sure that those helpful souls don’t even remember what they have done but I will always remember their acts of kindness.

The best piece of advice that I ever got was from Michael – Never make the same mistake twice.

I have lived my life by this motto.

It can be turned around in other ways….

There’s no such thing as failure only feedback…

Success comes with failing longer than anyone else (just ask Thomas Eddison)

More about focus and perseverance – 2 keys to success next time.

I recently picked up a book called the Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.

Randy was an innovative American College Professor who taught computer science student at Carnegie Melton. He specialised in virtual reality. This struck a chord with me since I have a passion for virtual communication.

He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in his late 40’s and this book is about his final lecture to his students and colleagues.

Here is the lecture from YouTube…..

It is a traditional in the USA for retiring college professors to give a special last lecture where they impart the wisdom that they have gathered to the next generation.

What makes Randy’s last lecture so special is that by most people’s standards he did not receive his full entitlement this time on Earth especially when you consider that amongst those he left behind were his wife and 3 young children (ages 6, 3 and 18 months). Randy delivered his last lecture to a live audience of over 400 and over 7 million people have watched the replay on the internet.

Despite his early passing, Randy managed to deliver a lecture full of inspiration and optimism. He used a combination of humour, inspiration and intelligence to deliver many important and timeless messages.

After reading his book and seeing him on YouTube I started thinking about many different aspects of his life and by extension my life.

Firstly, he had a list of 5 of his childhood dreams all of which he completed although not always in the way he expected. I tried to remember my childhood dreams and I couldn’t come up with a very comprehensive list just some vague recollections. After chatting with a few others and learning that they too had difficulty remembering childhood dreams, I wonder do we let go of our dreams too easily? Or do they get replaced with bigger and brighter plans? Do we let life’s realities and setbacks push our dreams out of our conscious thoughts?

I believe that for something to happen in our lives we first have to dream it and if we make our dreams smaller because it is easier then we are short-changing ourselves in the long run.

Children have such wonderful dreams and expectations in life because they have no fear of failure and their dreams become smaller as people tell them things can’t be done….

Think about recapturing the child inside you and allow yourself to dream big dreams you’ll be surprised at the things that are around the corner.

I was sent an email today (Thank you, Leon) entitled “May you live a wonderful life”.

3 things stood out for me…..

…dream more while you are awake

…spend more time with people under age 6 and over age 70

…realise that life is a school and you are here simply to learn. Problems are part of the curriculum that appear and fade away but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.

The second thing that stood out for me from Randy’s lecture was a story he recounted about a course that he set up in conjunction with other Faculties within Carnegie Melton. He collaborated with the head of the drama faculty to design a course which put creative and scientific students together in teams to design and produce virtual reality worlds. The groups of 4-6 were given 2 weeks to complete the project and the only ground rules were no violence and no pornography.

In the book, Randy gives a detailed description of the things to learn when working together in teams. The stuff that he has observed and distilled into a few simple guidelines is amazing and I recommend you read that part of his book.

The combination of team-members with complimentary talents lead to work of such high standard that Randy had to go back to his mentor and ask how to grade the projects. His mentor told him to tell his students that they had done a great job but that he was sure that they could do better next time. Never set the bar too low!

Thanks for reading please leave me a comment if you have something to share.

How did you choose your job/career?

Was it something that you were passionate about?

Did you choose your path in life?

Did you do what you thought your parents wanted you to do?

Before I share with you my thoughts on this matter I want you to watch this short video of an amazing book by one of my favourite authors, Dr Seuss.

I was fortunate to discover Dr Seuss early in life and still enjoy his timeless rhymes and silliness. This book has many life lessons that we all can learn from. Dr Seuss essentially distils life challenges, pleasures and achievements into a wonderfully illustrated storybook which takes about 5 mins to read. This book is for kids of all ages……

Many of us fall into a career via a series of non-choices. What do I mean by this? We don’t really make an informed decision about our future we just kind of “go with the flow”.

Perhaps things are different now and for some, there are psychological tests and career counsellors at school but certainly in the past we did what other people thought was best for us.

Following our parents’ professions or continuing on their businesses was very common.

As I try and advise my teenage daughter about subject choices in high school and help her decide on what university course would be most suitable I remember how I ended up doing medicine.

Now I must stop here and say that I love my job and find it satisfying to help people who are sick become well again but I didn’t initially pick medicine as my career because of a burning desire to be a healer.

I fell into medicine because I was good at maths and sciences and a teacher along the way said that I’d probably get into medicine.

I got the marks and so I embarked on a medical career.

At the ripe old age of 17 it’s difficult to choose how to spend the next 40 years of one’s working life.

The medical course was challenging and I got to see many aspects of other people’s lives that I hadn’t experienced before. Birth, death, and chronic illness made me see just how lucky I was and am.

I had always been told that good health was paramount but now I was seeing it with my own eyes.

The hardships that some of us have to endure during this life made me much more grateful for what I have.

As much as I still get satisfaction from my career, there are things that 20 years later I now find tedious and not as stimulating as when I embarked on my medical career.

As I reflect now, there are other career paths that I could have taken had I known that they existed.

What would my life be like now if I had made active choices at the age of 17 instead of choosing to road of least resistance?

This is a question that can never be answered and although I choose not to live in the past regretful of past choices, it is still an interesting thought to ponder…

As I have now taken the time to reflect on careers choices both for myself and for my children I have learnt that the most important thing to consider is what you are passionate about. If you chose to spend your time following your passions then work is definitely NOT a 4-letter word.

When you are passionate about how you spend your time you don’t perceive yourself to be stuck or trapped – you have all of the freedom that you want. Where passion flows prosperity follows.

I think that Richard Branson said it best: “I don’t think of work as work and play as play. It’s all living.”

Chris Howard has written a book on this very topic “Turning Passions into Profits” – check it out. There are many ideas in this book that I had never previously considered.

Tell me what you think.