VIDEO: Create an 'ecosystem’ of mentors, allies for better work-life balance
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In this Healio video exclusive, Anita Afzali, MD, and Aline Charabaty, MD, co-founders of Scrubs & Heels, encourage women in gastroenterology to create an allyship, mentorship or sponsorship to achieve successful work-life integration.
In a joint presentation at NASPGHAN, Charabaty, clinical director of gastroenterology and the IBD Center at Johns Hopkins Sibley Memorial Hospital, noted that women physicians often leave the profession because of poor work-life balance. To shift that dynamic, Charabaty encouraged women to set healthy boundaries, learn to say no and focus on tasks that “bring you joy, advance your career or your financial health” or that are aligned with how you want to practice medicine.
“Choose the things that you feel are important for yourself and for your family, and let go of everything else,” Charabaty told Healio.
Having allies both at work and at home “to divide and conquer” tasks can enhance professional life while also allowing women more time to do what matters most.
“You do not have to do everything from A to Z by yourself. It’s important to find members of your team who can help you elevate a project, help you complete a project, help you take the project to the next level,” Charabaty said. “I do not think of this as dumping things on other people: It’s allowing everybody to work at the best of their capacity and their interests and coming together with a project. I look at this as team building, as leadership work.”
Charabaty and Afzali agreed that building personal and professional relationships with colleagues can help successfully integrate work and home life.
“We need to learn how to build a network, our own ecosystem, and this ecosystem comes with our friends, our allies, our colleagues, our coach [and] our gurus,” Afzali, professor and executive vice chair of internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told Healio. “This is not necessarily a journey you need to take alone.’”
It also is critical to have mentors in your network who “are involved in your career journey” but also sponsors who are “promoting your name,” Afzali noted. These mentors and sponsors can help pave the way for new and different opportunities.
“There’s an overlap of mentors, sponsors, allies and ‘friendtors,’ and knowing and recognizing that we all need to be able to create our own ecosystem for that allows that integration between our work and our home life,” Afzali said. “It is not one face at work and the other at home, but true integration.”
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Afzali A, et al. Women in medicine: Creating allyship at work and at home: The key ingredient for a successful career in Pediatric GI. Presented at: NASPGHAN; Oct. 4-7, 2023; San Diego.
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