007: If You Don’t Know What You’d Do Remotely, Start Here

In this episode, Dr. Kristine explores how doctors can leverage their existing skills to create flexible, remote income streams without starting from scratch. Discover how to identify your true value, redefine your work, and increase visibility—key steps toward location independence.

Main Topics:

• The common misconception among physicians about needing to retrain or start over when considering remote work
• How medical training inadvertently limits the perception of possible career paths outside hospitals and clinics
• The three-step practice redesign method: breaking down work, defining it on your terms, and owning your expertise through visibility
• Recognizing the value of your clinical judgment, decision-making, and guidance outside traditional settings
• The importance of personal values, lived experience, and specific patient populations in shaping remote opportunities
• Separating work from system constraints and identifying new markets where your expertise is highly valued
• Strategies for increasing visibility independently of traditional medical institutions

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You're listening to Doctors Abroad, the podcast for doctors who want to build remote income and create location independence. I'm Dr. Christine Goint, founder of Nomadem Day. I've exceeded my hospital income while working part-time and living abroad, and on this show, we break down how to make hospital income optional. Let's get started. So I am actually recording this episode from the US, which is very uncommon for me in the last five years. But I am here for a conference with a group of coaches, not just physician coaches, but people across all different industries. And something that's been really interesting to observe being in a non-physician dominant environment is how easily people in other professions can think and talk about their work translating. You know, you'll hear someone say, oh yeah, I used to do this in corporate. Now I do this independently. Or I used to work in this industry sector, such as government. And now I've just applied that same skill in a different way, working with executives in the C-suite. And there's not much friction around it. And it really stands out to me because when I have conversations with physicians, even after we understand that remote work is possible, there's still this pause. And I know it because initially I had the same pause. Like, okay, opportunities exist, but what would I actually do? What would I want to do? And I think that question is less about a lack of options and more about how we've been trained to see our work. Because in medicine, we're taught very early on that our value exists inside very specific roles. If you're a primary care physician, you're just that. If you're an anesthesiologist, you know where you belong. And each of our roles are tied to a place, a system, a structure. You've never once during your training had a session where someone told you to even spend a moment thinking about how your skills and expertise could apply to other industries, how you could use other approaches to deliver your services, how to deliver your services outside of a hospital clinic or academic institution. Right. So over time, it's become very difficult to separate what you do from where you do it. And that is where the confusion starts. Because once you try to imagine doing something outside of that structure, the hospital or clinic, it feels like you'd have to become someone completely different or do something completely different. Like you'd have to retrain or start all over again or get another degree or certification. But if you really look at what you are doing every day at work, you're already doing work that has value. So instead of trying to figure this out by searching endlessly for options, I want to walk you through a way to think about this concretely using my three-step practice redesign method. Step one is to break down the work you're already doing. And I bet that you're currently or have in the past done the same work that you're doing in multiple different settings, in multiple different ways. There's aspects of your work that either you're already doing virtually or you have done virtually. There's work that has connected you with other professionals, teaching them what you know. Let's take something simple. Think about what happens when someone consults you. Not the formal structure of it, not the note or the billing, but what are they actually coming to you for? They're coming to you for your opinion, your clinical judgment, your ability to interpret complexity, your ability to guide a decision. That is the service, right? The rest of it, the hospital, the clinic, the system, it is just the container that your service exists in. And that container has done a lot of the work for you. It has created visibility. It's brought people to you, not even necessarily the people that you want to see, but the patients they want you to see, right? It has structured how you get paid. It's defined how that interaction happens. What buttons you need to click on your computer, right? So you've never really had to think about your work separate from that system. And this is where I see physicians get stuck because when you remove the system, it almost feels like the work disappears. Like your opportunities or access to be paid for that service or expertise has disappeared. But they haven't. They just have not been isolated yet. So when you ask yourself, oh, what would I do remotely? It feels like there are no answers because you're trying to imagine a new job. Instead of looking at the work that you are already doing, and often it can be a combination of your professional expertise and your lived experience that creates something very specific. Maybe it signals the community or population that you really want to speak to. Maybe it signals certain aspects of your skills that really call out to a specific age group, a particular condition. For example, I would have never built Nomad MD if I wasn't already someone who had certain values, who valued travel, different cultures, living abroad. And that wasn't something I ever was trained in, right? It's nothing that I learned in medicine. It was something that I already cared about, that I was willing to tap into and join in when it comes to work. And it has shaped who I help, what I talk about, what I've built. And so when you're thinking about the work that you want to do remotely, you don't have to limit yourself to your specialty, your job title, your current role. You can also ask, what parts of my work do I enjoy the most? What kinds of patients or problems do I naturally gravitate towards? What experiences, even outside of medicine, shape how I think? Because that is where your specificity comes from. And this is where I want you to pause for a second. If you stripped away the hospital, the clinic, the academic center, the title, what is left? What is the actual value you provide? Because that is what translates, not the role. Right? And it's also where the idea of retraining comes in, because if you believe that your value is tied to the actual role, then of course it feels like you'd have to learn something new in a different setting. But if your value is really the expertise, then you're never going to be starting over. You're just going to be applying it differently. And so once you know this, step two is to separate your work from the system and define it on your own terms. So right now, all of the work that you do is happening inside of a structure, let's say an institution, right? It is bringing in the patient. It's controlling how you spend your time and how you get paid. And so it starts to feel like, okay, this is where the opportunity is. This is where it lives. But the opportunity is actually coming from the work that you're doing inside that system. So if we strip that structure away and just look at the work itself, what are you actually being paid to do? And so the question becomes where else is that valuable? And who specifically would want that? Because right now, many of us are trained to think patients just come through insurance. Opportunities just come through those institutions, but that is just one pathway. Because there are absolutely patients, clients, and even organizations who value direct access, privacy, efficiency, depth of expertise, time to thoroughly understand not only their problem, but the most impactful solution that you can offer. And unfortunately, many of those things are not well supported by insurance. There are patients who will pay for a second opinion, a deeper level of guidance and treatment, personalization, more time with their physician, quicker evaluations or follow-up. Because what they're looking for most is not just coverage, it is quality, it's clarity, it's access. And those things already exist in the current way that you work. They're just embedded in a system that controls how they're delivered. So when you're thinking, I don't know what I would do. I don't want you to start with what's out there and scrolling and finding lists and lists of jobs. I want you to start with what you already do, what people already pay you for, and what problems you already solve. And then the question to ask is if this is the work I've been doing, who specifically would value this and in what context? And this is where your answer starts to really take shape, not from having to start your career all over again, but from refining what's already there. Step three is to own your expertise by becoming visible for it. Right now, most of your visibility, if not all of it, comes through an institution, right? Or an academic center, a hospital. The hospital is known, the clinic is known, the academic center is known. And because of that, it feels like that's where the credibility lives. But that visibility is literally built on the work of physicians. It's built on your knowledge, your skills, your expertise. You paid for your degree. You spent a decade training. But who do you allow to own your skills? When you step outside of that system, it's not that your expertise loses any value. It's that you haven't been visible for it independently yet. And that is really the difference. Not in needing to retrain, we're all very highly qualified and trained, but it's in learning how to clearly communicate what you do, who it's for, and why it matters so that the right people can find you and pay you. Because once you've broken down your work and you understand that it is not tied to a particular healthcare system or institution, then visibility becomes the bridge between your expertise and the people who need it. And so that's how this starts to all come together. If you have been feeling stuck in I don't know what I would do, I want you to come back to this. You do not need to start over, you do not need to retrain, and you don't need to figure out something completely new unless you want to. You need to see your current work more clearly because once you can separate what you do from where you do it, you start to realize that you already have something that works. It just hasn't been defined on your terms yet. And that is where the process starts. If you want support translating your medical expertise and life experience into a six-figure remote income stream that gives you more flexibility, more control, and more optionality, you can book a one-to-one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. Thanks for listening to Doctors Abroad. If this episode was helpful, share it with a colleague who's been thinking about building more freedom and flexibility in medicine. And if you're ready to make hospital income optional, book a one to one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. I'll see you in the next episode.