From Rural Medicine To Academia To Coaching With Dr. Sharon Hull

Ready to transform your career? In this episode, host J.R. Lowry interviews Dr. Sharon Hull, founder and chief coaching officer of Metta Solutions, and author of Professional Careers by Design. Sharon takes us on her journey from rural family medicine to academic medicine and executive coaching, sharing valuable insights along the way. Drawing from her book, she emphasizes the importance of discernment, managing change, and maintaining a lifelong perspective in career transitions. Plus, discover how “design thinking” can be applied to career development as Sharon encourages listeners to intentionally design their professional paths.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at  https://pathwise.io/podcasts/dr-sharon-hull/

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From Rural Medicine To Academia To Coaching With Dr. Sharon Hull

My guest is Sharon Hull. She is the Founder and Chief Coaching Officer of Metta Solutions. She’s a trained medical doctor and began her career as a solo practitioner in rural downstate Illinois where she grew up. She then transitioned into academia working at a variety of institutions in North Carolina, Ohio, and Illinois. Along the way, she began her coaching practice. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biology at the University of Evansville, her MD at Southern Illinois University, a Master’s in Public Health from the University of North Carolina, and an executive leadership degree in Academic Medicine from Drexel University. Sharon, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.

It’s great to be here. I’m excited to get a chance to talk with you. I’m looking forward to it.

I gave a quick overview in the intro to the show. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what’s keeping you busy professionally.

What’s keeping me busy is my encore career. I will explain that in the context of a little bit more about myself. I am a retired family physician who has had a circuitous path through medicine. A number of my colleagues got jaded about medicine many years ago. I’ve worked hard not to become that. That meant that I got flexible and looked for ways to make my career fit the needs of my life at the moment.

I had a career in solo rural private practice. I have been in academic medicine for most of my career. My encore is to become a professional executive coach. Those two overlapped for about ten years. For the last two years, I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur. My wife says I can’t tell you that I’m retired because I’m not. I’m in my encore career as a coach. I am looking forward to talking to you about that.

Transition To Full-Time Coaching

How has that transition gone to full-time coaching?

It has been interesting. I was coaching for the last decade before I retired from academia. I always knew it would be my retirement plan. What happened is my chance to do it full-time came about a decade earlier than I expected it to. Duke allowed me to build an internal program for the faculty at the medical school at Duke. As we stood that program up, it became apparent to me I was going to have to choose between my clinical life and my coaching life. For a variety of reasons, the season of my life was that it was time to go all in on coaching. I waited until I had 30 years in medicine before I did that, and I’m glad I did. I had a great clinical career and a great academic career. I’m also having a lot of fun coaching. It’s been a good transition.

Given the heritage that you have in working in academic medicine and doing that coaching in your time at Duke, are most of your clients medical professionals, or has your practice branched out since then?

My personal practice has branched out a little bit. I typically coach leaders and people who aspire to be leaders in healthcare, science, and academia in general. That’s a broad list. I do a lot of healthcare professionals and senior leaders in healthcare. One of the things that we’ve done in my transition is I’ve gone from being a solopreneur to having a team of coaches.

We work with professionals from all walks of life. We define professionals in a way that is open to anybody who feels that they treat the work they do in the world as a profession. We coach the classic professions of accounting, attorneys, medicine, and engineering. We have people in the creative arts and people who are stay-at-home parents. All of those things can be a profession. Our coaches coach all of them.

How many of you are there?

There are 25 coaches on my team. We have a broad range of clientele. All my coaches have expertise in coaching at the senior professional level, but we coach people from all walks of life.

You wrote a book.

It’s been in the making most of those 12 or 13 years I’ve been coaching. It’s a distillation of what I think of as my sweet spot in coaching, which is helping people make professional transitions, either of their own choosing or not. I kept looking for years for the guidebook for that and I couldn’t find one. I decided after a few years that I could start taking notes. Eventually, those notes became a book.

You’re not a What Color Is Your Parachute? fan?

I like What Color Is Your Parachute? The world is changing and giving people a toolkit that builds agency and that builds an individual’s ability to be intentional themselves that they can come back to without having to crack a book. Some of it is common sense, but some of it is you need to go figure out, “Where’s the guide about how to do an interview? Where’s the guide if I don’t know if it’s time to go?” I wanted those tools out there. Most of the process is thinking through how to communicate with yourself, about yourself, and with others. I wanted something I could put in people’s hands and then meet them where they were. That’s the reason for the book.

Spark Behind The Book

You were thinking about this and decided to distill it. What was the spark that got you sitting down in front of the computer and starting to write?

I have to give my wife credit for that. She said, “You keep talking about this and you like writing. You should put this down on paper.” It took me longer than it should have to listen. She and a number of friends, colleagues, and some of my clients said, “Are you going to write a book? Where is this going to be?” I finally decided they were right, and then I had to make time and space to do that.

Good for you. The title is Professional Careers by Design. The words “By design” were included deliberately because you’re evoking design thinking.

That is correct. The idea behind design thinking doesn’t come from medicine or coaching. It comes from the design industry. The idea that you try something and go back and tweak it is innate to creators. It’s innate to my art friends. It’s innate to my engineering friends. It’s innate for a variety of folks but not the folks I was coaching. Many of them think once they get where they’re going, they have to stay there.

I wanted to create permission, not my permission, but create space for permission to make a change even if you were deep into a professional career. A lot of people think of it as a sunk cost that they went to medical school or went to law school and they got to stick it out. What I wanted to do was invite people to be able to use that training to open doors that mattered to them and design a life that fit them.

Whether you call it job crafting or some of the experiential ways that people will go out and get a sense of whether they would like to do something, like these vacation internships that people will do where they’ll go try two weeks in a different company and take time off from their current job to try before they buy. There’s a lot more opportunity to do that. There’s a lot more acceptance of doing those things. You’ve made a decision. It’s a life choice. Talk about antiquated.

The world of work and the way that we look at work as a society is changing. You asked what sparked me to put the book together. I have to be honest. In addition to those who personally motivated me, going through the pandemic and watching what was happening with work was fascinating to me. I watched frontline workers that we called essential workers defined in a way that I’d never heard society define them. Other people were saying, “I don’t have to do X. I’ve got to make my life work because I have to homeschool now for my kids and I can’t go outside. What do I want?”

I started hearing that question from my clients. It was like, “It’s time to put your thoughts down on paper because the world is shifting.” The people who made the decisions during the pandemic, the Great Resignation folks, were the front wave. The essential workers couldn’t quit, and that was a different group of people who came to make their changes later when some of the chaos settled down. I see in the professions and academics that it’s still rolling through in a slower way. The way that we’re looking at whether you have a choice or not is shifting.

You make the point in the book that this is not the same as a traditional 5 or 10-year career plan. How so?

As young as in high school, people asked me to map out, “What do you want to be doing in three years? What do you want to do in five years?” In today’s world, we can barely see around the corner, let alone see 3 or 5 years down. I was listening to people in my coaching practice who said, “I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next three months, let alone a year. I can’t even talk about that. How do I even think about this?”

What I hoped to do with the book and hope that I have done is give people a toolkit where no matter what happens, whether we have a pandemic, whether we have a major world conflict, or whether climate change is rolling forward, whatever is happening, you can come back to the basic discernment questions in the book and use those as a foundation for making a decision for that moment. The idea that you have to revisit those decisions regularly and certainly in a time of crisis is different than a 3 or 5-year career plan.

Let’s talk about the three foundational career challenges. In a way, it’s like carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Everything is made up of those three things. You argue that any career challenge you make up or that you have to face is a mix of discernment, managing change, and the lifelong perspective. I summarized it, but maybe give us a little bit more detail on that and then we’ll go into each of them.

I’d be happy to. You distilled right into a single sentence the whole premise of the book. If you’re facing a career change, you’re either having to figure out what matters, you’re having to implement a change, or you’re trying to put it all into perspective while you make a decision, while you implement, or after you implement it. Those three buckets of tasks are the things I watch clients struggle with.

It seemed to me important to say, “This is not just a guide about how to do an interview. This is about my career as a living dynamic thing. How am I going to be a steward of it for my whole lifetime?” My passion is to get this book in the hands of the youngest possible people in the professions or coming in as trainees. If we’re giving people tools to think about it from the beginning, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in mid-career or senior career. People will feel less stuck as they hit those common milestones.

You and I are somewhat aligned in the view that you have to take ownership of your career. The sooner you figure that out, the better off you’re going to be. You do later in the book, and we’ll come to your early stage when you go through that questioning stage, and all those different things onto the encore career that you’re in right now.

The problems that you face and the way that you think in your life situation will change over the point in time, but there’s a set of tools. If you build that set of tools as is the case in your job or many other aspects of your life, if you’ve got the right tools, you can figure out your way through most things. Ultimately, that’s the piece that hit me in looking at the book. This is ultimately the way you need to be thinking about it right from the get-go.

I appreciate how you succinctly summarized it. I’m thinking, “Why is this book important now?” I’ve thought about the fact that in my professional lifetime, we’ve lived through the 9/11 attacks, a couple of wars that have involved our country, several wars that have not involved our country but have had an impact around the world, and the pandemic. All of a sudden, you can’t write a game plan for that five years out.

My life experience has said we have to be more flexible. We have to be able to iterate, which is the heart of design thinking. If you can bring your courage to the place where you can iterate with your career, those are the folks who are going to find that elusive concept of work-life balance or work-life alignment which is my preference as I would call it.

Work-life integration, I talked to somebody else who prefers that expression. Everybody has their favorite twist on work-life balance.

I don’t even know what my favorite is anymore. I figured out a long time ago that it’s not a teeter-totter. We’re never at full balance for more than a few seconds. What we have to do is keep the amplitude small on that teeter-totter and be able to shift.

It’s not an either-or thing. In past episodes, I’ve talked with people about the Apple TV show, Severance. You come to work and forget your personal life. You leave work and forget your work life. It’s not that simple.

One of my favorite quotes in the book comes from a mentor of mine, personal and professional, “It’s all one life. What you do with it is up to you. It’s one thing.”

Discernment Questions

It’s very true. The first of those is discernment. What are the types of things that we need to be discerning for ourselves as we progress through our careers?

The kinds of discernment questions I put forward are built on the traditional values of reviewing what matters and what values you hold close. I phrase the question differently. The question for me that’s at the core of this whole model is what matters the most to you right now at this season of your life? In the discernment section, I talk about asking yourself that question first, figuring out who the people around you that will be impacted by your choices, and assessing what matters to them.

Sometimes, you ask them what matters to them and have them make their own list. Sometimes if they’re young children, aging parents, people you’re caretaking, or your friends, you might not go ask everybody to give you their list. Comparing notes about what matters to you and matters to those people who have a stake in what you’re going to decide is at the heart of this.

Once you have a sense of that, I also encourage people to say, “What matters to the organization you’re working in or the one you’re thinking about working in? What are their priorities? Not just the mission statement on the website, but what are they prioritizing their efforts around, their investments around, and their culture around? Do those priorities line up with yours?”

Once you’ve asked about those three entities yourself, your stakeholders, and your organization, then the discernment question is are there any misalignments between those three? If there aren’t, then how do you want to grow where you are? Do you want to move for the sake of a new experience? If there are no misalignments, you’re probably looking at, “How do I grow where I am?” If there are misalignments, then the question is what are you ready, willing, and able to do about them?

That brings you to the place where you either can make a move within the organization or beyond it or you have to decide how you are going to thrive or sustain yourself until you can make a change. Those are the discernment questions. I call them the hip pocket questions. You write them on an index card, carry them in your wallet, and pull them out.

My experience of the day of 9/11 was profound. If we have time, I’m happy to share the story with you. I wanted something I could pull out of my wallet when the next big crisis happens or I’m watching the chyron on the newsfeed going, “The world shifted. What matters to me now?” The short version of that story is I was the dean of students for a medical school that morning. I had students coming to my office saying, “I used to work on Wall Street. I don’t belong here anymore. I’m going home and I won’t come back.”

I had students who were Muslim who were trying to get to their families and be with them. I had students who were Military who said, “I’m going to be called up. I don’t know what’s next.” In a microcosm of about six hours that day, I watched this massive humanity try to struggle with, “What matters now?” It all changed. That’s probably one of the early sparks of my thinking. I won’t say I was ready to write a book that day, but it was a spark.

What People Are Afraid To Ask Themselves

What have you found in the course of your coaching that people are afraid to ask themselves in this discernment process?

I have two answers. One is not what they’re afraid of, but what they’re surprised by. I’ll tell you the question I think is most challenging for people. The thing that surprises them is I ask people to make a top ten list of the things that matter. My only requirement is that it must include some personal and some professional things. It doesn’t matter what the ratio is. You know what that list is. It has to have both.

I have them come back and tell me what they learned. They can share their list if they want to, but they don’t have to. I ask, “What have you learned?” The thing that surprises almost everyone who does that exercise is that the top 3, 5, or 7 items have nothing to do with work. They’re personal. There are seasons in people’s lives where it’s all professional all the time, and it has to be. For most of the people who find their way to me, they’re surprised by that.

The thing that challenges them is, “What are you ready, willing, and able to do about misalignments?” I don’t think my clients are afraid to ask that, but the answers to those questions are hard. It’s hard to go there. Fear is not usually part of it, but they need a little bit of time to pass while they cook with that question before they can start thinking about it.

I wrote an article. I called it Do You Have A Case of the Should-dos? A lot of people, particularly people who are younger in their careers but also people who have families that they feel like they have to support. They end up doing things that they feel like it becomes more of an obligation than what they want to do. They end up sacrificing themselves a bit in the process of honoring their stakeholders. I won’t say that that’s the wrong answer. I think a lot of people wrestle with that misalignment. There’s a misalignment as well between “I’d love to do this, but I need to make money,” which is the environmental misalignment. The alignment questions I’m sure are very difficult for people.

I do want to speak to the one issue that you brought up, which is sacrificing what matters to you for the sake of others or for the sake of making a living, which is saying, “I’ve got to take care of those around me.” I don’t even think that’s an either-or question. If I hear people either-or-ing that question, I will say, “What could you be doing right now while you’re caring for those around you that would move you toward more of what matters to you when you can get there?”

It’s opening the window to say, “What could you do today that would get you 5% down the road?” It doesn’t mean you have to leave your job. Just because you’re having these conversations or reading this book doesn’t mean you have to uproot everything tomorrow. It’s an iterative change. It’s intentional and usually incremental.

I have people look for small changes that will make them feel a little bit better. It gives people something to hope about, latch onto, and practice. I have a lot of clients who are in this situation. They have kids at a particular stage in their education. They don’t want to move them during middle school or they have a college tuition benefit and they’re not going to give that up so they’re going to stay put until kids are through college. That doesn’t have to be a time of martyrdom. That’s the either-or thinking that I try to help people move through.

You talk about curveballs that will come despite whatever amount of discernment that you have done. What forms might some of those curve balls take positive or negative?

You bring up an important point. There are both kinds of curveballs. I used to say it would be a huge curveball for me if someone offered me a full-time, well-paying job in Fiji because that might be my dream but it would sure impact a lot of my stakeholders. Having your dream job and your dream place is a positive curveball. Having there be a global pandemic is a challenging curveball.

Nobody could have predicted having a toxic boss or hitting a ceiling of, “I’ve gone as far as I can go in this role or this organization.” Those are all the kinds of curveballs that are not necessarily positive feelings but they’re the kinds of things that people hit. They come to a coach saying, “What do I do?” That book was written for them.

The second career challenge is around managing change. With people more regularly changing jobs or even careers, getting good at managing change is becoming more important for us to master. Given that, what do you see people struggle with in your coaching experience?

In the book, I lay out a model for thinking about change visually and thinking about a cycle of change that we go through multiple times in our lives. For my parents’ generation, that would’ve been a foreign concept. There wasn’t a cycle of change. There wasn’t a change. You stayed for 40 years and got your gold watch and your pension. That’s gone. Unless they’re of my generation or older, most of the people who land with me are aware that doesn’t exist anymore. The people who came in on the tail end of that struggle with, “I didn’t think I’d ever have to change. The world has gone weird around me.” That’s one set of challenges.

The other set of challenges comes on the front end. People know they’re itching to change but they don’t know how. That’s the part of the process that I call search targeting. You’re trying to figure out what you’re looking for. That is probably the hardest psychospiritually and intellectually for people. The rest of it’s nuts and bolts. There are techniques for interviewing. There are techniques for tracking, how you’re going to communicate, and all of that. I lay those out.

Figuring out what you’re looking for can come out of that discernment process. Sometimes, people get so overwhelmed by trying to narrow down their choices. If there’s a sense of urgency about the decision, like they’ve been downsized and they need to make money, that can be a hard stage. I don’t know if I answered your question.

You’ve given examples of some of the things that people wrestle with. One of them that you cover in more detail in the book is the decision of “Should I stay or should I go?” You have a framework, a 2×2, that you counsel people to use. Perhaps you could talk about that.

I’d be happy to do that. I have people draw 4 box grids with 2 columns and 2 rows. On the top, you label the column Stay and Go. On the sides, you label the rows Survive and Thrive. I lay out a description of what each of those quadrants looks like and ask people to tell me where they think they are on that grid, and then draw an arrow to where they’d like to move.

Many times, I get clients who are in Stay and Survive until the kids get old enough to move, or Stay and Survive until my spouse finishes their degree, or Stay and Survive until I can find a job that fits my profile. There’s an element of figuring out what the stay and keep your head in the game looks like and then what the move is.

It helps people realize that it’s a staged process. You might not be ready to walk out, empty your desk, go to the parking lot, and take your chances today. There’s a time period between even an urgent need to change and when you execute. What do you do in that stay period to at least survive professionally? Physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially, how do you keep all of that together while you’re trying to make a move?

In that Stay and Go grid, sometimes people figure out that they’re pretty happy. What they want to do is Stay and Thrive. We go looking for ways to thrive where you are. Sometimes, it might be a new role or a new project. The dream job is the Go and Thrive box on that grid. It’s like, “I got a great way to thrive, but it’s not here. I’ve got to make the transition.” That’s a different thing than, “I got to stay here until my boss retires,” or “I get my kids out of school,” or whatever. Each of those boxes has a different set of challenges. I hope I’m not rambling about that.

Not at all. You bring the four Es into this too. You have a slightly different four Es than I’ve seen. Walk through yours and talk about how they play in.

I will not claim that mine are the only Es that matter. It’s four that seem to make sense in my coaching practice. I tell people that in any work situation or any professional situation, there are four kinds of things we can get from the job, getting your goodies from the job. One is you can be learning new skills or new things. That’s Education. It might not be formal education, but you’re learning.

The second is Experience, a chance to practice new things that you’ve learned about, but you’re having to do them. The third is Exposure, being seen doing those new things. It’s that visibility piece that helps you network and move toward perhaps a new opportunity. Exposure matters. The fourth is probably one of the more important ones. It’s Enthusiasm. Do you still want to get up, get out of bed, and go do that job today?

Most of us rarely have all four for more than a few days at a time. I don’t coach people to go try to get all four and keep them. If you have zero, it’s probably time to look at that Stay and Go grid. If you have 1 or 2, the question is is that enough for staying and thriving? What do you need to add to get a little more of the ones you don’t have if you have to stay?

That’s the way I have that conversation about staying. What could you get from the four Es that would either boost your morale or prepare you for when you’re ready to go? It’s a way to help people think about how not every career decision is an uprooting, changing jobs, or quitting. Sometimes it’s intentionally planning to grow.

Key Steps In The Job Search Process

When you’ve made that decision, you’ve gone through whatever process of getting to the Stay or Go decision, and decide that you need to go find your next role or your next career, what are the key steps in that process from your perspective? Which ones do people skip to their peril?

It’s interesting that people almost don’t enter searches until 1 of 2 things happens. They’re forced to because they lost a job for whatever reason. It’s either being pushed or being pulled. Somebody gives you an offer, an opportunity to apply to something. There’s a step in between or before you get to that, and that is saying, “If I were going to go, where geographically do I want to be?”

I give people the task of going and buying a US map or a world map if they’re so inclined and two colors of markers. Usually, red and green is what I suggest. I say, “Put a big red X through any part of the world you don’t want to live in. Put a green circle around places you’re curious about. If you have a significant other, have them get their own map and do the same thing, and then lay them on top of each other.”

Come up with the geography first because that’s about lifestyle. That’s about who you are as a human. You then say, “What is the work that I want to do?” That’s where the four Es come in. You’re like, “What is the work that I want to do to make a difference in the world, have an impact in the world, or make a living?” You then say, “Who in those green-circled areas has jobs like that? If I don’t know, how can I find out?” That’s the homework that people skip the intentional piece of. For people who are in that search targeting phase, I’ll ask them to go through that exercise and spend some time with it, sometimes several weeks or a few months if they’re not in an urgent situation.

One of my colleagues talks about going slow to go fast. Not rushing, throwing 1,000 applications out there, and seeing what comes back. Even if you’re reasonably certain about what you want to do next, which in some cases, you are, you should still take a little bit of time to step back, reflect, and stew on it enough to make sure that you don’t end up spending a lot of time and energy looking for something that you then get into and say, “This wasn’t what I thought it would be. I need to find something new again.”

That’s an important point. I’ve seen people expend a lot of energy in searches. It’s a grueling process. I’ve had people come who’ve done 5, 7, or 10 job interview cycles and they haven’t found the right fit yet. For those people, I say, “Let’s step back. Let’s do some search targeting. What is it you want? What has kept those things that you’ve experienced from being the right fit for the organization or you?” I push them to dig into what they learned by expending all that energy before they keep expending energy.

Capstone Plan

We won’t have time to go into more detail on that, but I would say to the audience there was a ton of great job search advice covered in that part of the book. I leave our audience with that. Let’s cover the third one, which is about lifelong context. Let’s start with the obvious. Careers are long. They’re getting longer. Life expectancy is increasing. How does that affect how we should be thinking about the arc of our careers over our lifetime?

This is one of the places where that societal look at work is shifting. In my parents’ era, you had one job and you stayed with it. If you didn’t, you were flighty. There was something wrong with you. Now, the average adult can expect to have 12 jobs and maybe as many as 3 or 4 careers. When I say that to a Baby Boomer like me, they recoil.

Our younger colleagues get it. They’re like, “I’ve already had 5 jobs and I’m 30. If the next one doesn’t get me where I want to go in 2 or 3 years, I’m going.” They’re already intentional. They could write the next edition of this book. Sometimes, helping them harness that energy for being willing to change and giving them some tools is why I want to hear that generation’s take on this book.

If I think about lifelong context, there is an arc. If your arc is 40 years long and you retire and go fly fishing for the rest of your life, that’s great. That’s an arc. If your arc is to be a serial entrepreneur with your career, do a new career every 5 to 7 years, and keep moving toward things that matter to you, that’s a different arc but it’s still an arc. The first thing is to know that there is a trajectory. Figure out what your ideal trajectory is based on what matters to you.

I probably grew up with the idea that there ought to be a long career. I was told in medicine, “Society is invested in your education. You owe them at least 40 years to practice and pay back what they invested in you.” That was a model that came out of the greatest generation of people older than me. I don’t think it applies in medicine or almost any career anymore.

I was talking to some legal colleagues who said, “The young folks come in and they want three years with a white shoe firm so they can soak up all the learning and then they’re going to go do what they want and have a lifestyle career.” The old gray-haired people like me go, “How could they do that? Don’t they know there’s longevity that they need to do?” The young folks are saying, “I don’t think so. That’s not the deal I’m buying into.”

Whatever your arc is, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end to the cycle. The end of a cycle doesn’t mean the end of work, the end of meaning, the end of money, or the end of life. It means you’re closing out a chapter. That’s what that last section is about. Here’s the arc of the chapters. Whether you have a 5-year career in X, a 7-year career in Y, and a 20-year career in Z because you finally built your own business, or whether you stay at something for 40 years, there is still a set of things you have to go through.

You’re learning the ropes and figuring out how to be successful. You’re being recognized for your success and then you’re building your legacy, and then you’re planning for the next thing, whether that’s fly fishing for the rest of your life or going and starting a business. That section of the book is meant to give people that context. I don’t hear many people talking about that now, so I’m trying to contribute to that conversation.

I don’t see a lot out there on the notion of the arc of your career. There’s designing your life. Clay Christensen wrote a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? Marshall Goldsmith has one, which is The Earned Life. They are out there. This idea of what you do in retirement, I don’t think there are a lot of books on that because the whole definition is changing and changing rapidly.

Whether you want to work or need to work but don’t want to do it full-time, there are more options available to you than what used to be the case. That’s an interesting space for our generation. That’s hitting that point in what they want to do. Do they want to go fly fishing or do they want to start a company? Do they want to do coaching part-time or whatever it is?

You’re right. On some level, this is a book for those of us who didn’t grow up thinking we had choices. In some ways, it’s a bridge to our younger colleagues who figured this out and can teach us how to be entrepreneurial and intentional at the same time. I hope that this is a bridge across generations. It’s not written for Boomers. It’s not written for people who are at the end of their careers or in the middle. It’s written for the lifespan and to create conversation amongst us across the lifespan.

You talk about creating a capstone plan in this part of the book. What do you mean by a capstone plan?

Others might call it a retirement plan. It’s an invitation to plan for what you want at the end of this cycle in your career. It might be planning how to fly fish and live in Montana for the rest of your life. It might be planning for how to do that two months out of the year while you have an encore career. It might be planning for working enough to supplement your retirement but having a lot of flexibility in your schedule. One of the big challenges I see with people in their mid to senior careers is they haven’t thought about that.

Particularly in medicine but in many professions, the identity of the individual is tied up so much in what their title is and what their profession is. It’s an invitation to plan beyond that one identity. Think about what you want your life to look like, who’s in it, and how you want to spend your time. I can’t tell you how many people I know who didn’t do that, particularly in medicine, and they struggle.

Watching friends start to retire, some of them have very clear plans and others want to not work anymore. You’re going to hit a wall at some point if you don’t have a good plan for how you want to spend that time. I’ve certainly heard that from my contemporaries who have hit that wall.

I’ve seen some people do it well by saying, “I’m going to take six months and I’m going to sleep as long as I want and go to the movies in the middle of the day, but I need a plan for six months from now. Six months is enough of that.” I’ve seen people with no plan who spent a couple of years spinning their wheels with at least angst, if not depression, and get paralyzed by it. That capstone plan in this book is an invitation to think ahead so that you don’t get there and fall off a cliff mentally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Let’s spend the last few minutes talking about your earlier career. You got your medical degree. How did you decide to go to rural downstate Illinois and practice rural medicine?

I grew up there. I am the only physician to date in my family, not the only doctoral degree. I went to a medical school that was part of a group of schools built in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to be based on the community that they were built. The mission of my school was to create physicians to serve the population of central and southern Illinois. I went and did what I was supposed to do.

I had a wonderful time. I took care of people that I’d known for years. The night before my practice opened, my childhood babysitter, my best friend, her parents, and one of the nurses I knew from the hospital helped me paint the trim in the office the night before we opened for the first patient. You won’t have those experiences today if you don’t go to a very small place.

I had a great experience, but I came out at a time when the pressures on private practice medicine were high and pressures on solo primary care were very high. I’m proud that I made it through two and a half years of that. That was the first time I had to get intentional and say, “I need a landing pad to extract from this. I’m not quitting medicine, but this is not tenable.” I made my next move as a way to have a landing pad. I ended up staying at that institution for ten years and moving from clinical work to academic and clinical work. None of that was planned, but at the moment, it was intentional. It was still reactive, but it was intentional.

You spent some time along the way in Akron, Ohio, which is where I am from.

Mid-career, I went back to school and got training in public health and preventive medicine. From there, I got recruited to follow in the footsteps of somebody who I think is a giant in public health, Dr. Bill Keck. He retired as a department chair of a department of community health. That idea of serving a community was what had resonated for me at mid-career.

I got the chance to be the department chair. I always told him, and I still do, “I can’t fill your shoes, Bill, but I’d be happy to follow in your footsteps.” I got to spend some time there at a community-based medical school working with public health, preventive medicine, and family medicine. It was a rewarding place.

I am not born for snow. I needed to move south and we got the chance. I had done my mid-career retraining at Carolina. We liked it here in the triangle and decided that’s where we would retire. I wasn’t ready to quit working or quit medicine or academia yet. I told my family, “Let’s get where you want to be because you don’t like to move and I’ll finish out my career here.” That’s what we’ve done and I’m continuing to do.

I can remember having grown up in that area during the tail end of the Industrial Age of that part of the US and then going to school down at Duke in North Carolina. The first week I was there, I looked up at the sky and said, “That’s what a blue sky looks like,” because it was never that blue. There was always a bit of haze even on a perfectly sunny day in Ohio. It’s probably better now than it used to be, but I was like, “That’s a blue sky. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

I came to Akron after that transition had happened. It was a devastating transition for the area. I’m sure it made the skies clearer but it was an economically challenging transition. Coming down here, you know what they say about the sky down here. If God weren’t from UNC, the sky wouldn’t be Carolina Blue. I had to work that in somehow. It is a beautiful area. One of the most beautiful campuses I’ve ever been on is Duke. I had a wonderful time at Duke.

They’re both beautiful campuses.

It’s a great area to be in. We’re happy here. That idea of getting out the map came from what happened in my family when I said, “Where do you want to live?” My wife said, “I’m not making this decision alone. You make your list and I’ll make mine.” It turned out that our top three were in the same order, and the triangle was at the top. That made life easy.

One Thing Sharon Hull Wishes She Had Known

This is the last question that I usually ask people. What’s one thing you wish someone had pulled you aside and told you at the beginning of your career journey?

It is that every decision you make prepares you for the next thing that comes along, whether that’s a new job, a world crisis, or a dream opportunity of a lifetime. Everything you’ve done to date will make you ready for that if you pay attention. The whole book is about paying attention and being willing to have the courage to say, “What does matter right now?”

That’s a good way to close. Thank you for doing the show with me.

Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. It’s great to meet you.

You as well. Enjoy the rest of your day.

You too. Thank you.

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I want to thank Sharon for joining me to discuss her book, Professional Careers by Design, and a little bit about her own career journey as well right at the end. If you’d like to focus more on your career journey, visit PathWise.io and become a member. Basic Membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise Newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

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• Professional Careers by Design
• What Color Is Your Parachute?
• How Will You Measure Your Life?
• The Earned Life
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About Dr. Sharon Hull

Dr. Sharon Hull is the Founder and Chief Coaching Officer at Metta Solutions. Sharon is a trained medical doctor, and she began her career as a solo practitioner in rural, downstate Illinois. She then transitioned into academia, working at a variety of institutions in North Carolina, Ohio, and Illinois. Along the way, she began her coaching practice. She is also the author of Professional Careers by Design.

Sharon earned a Bachelor’s in Biology at the University of Evansville, her MD at Southern Illinois University, a Master’s in Public Health from the University of North Carolina, and an executive leadership degree in academic medicine from Drexel University.