Summary: <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/PA-without-boarders-590.jpg"></a><br> So many PAs I meet are unsatisfied with their careers.<br> I have met many a <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/why-choose-pa-over-np-heres-the-perfect-answer/">PA or NP</a> who has become entangled in a web of profit-driven, <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/cookie-cutter-medicine-the-future-of-pas-and-the-future-of-medicine/">incentivized-by-the-numbers healthcare</a>. They have forgotten why they became a physician associate (PA) to begin with.<br> We all become PAs with a great <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/cookie-cutter-medicine-the-future-of-pas-and-the-future-of-medicine/">desire to help people</a>, but it often doesn't end that way.<br> PA Jekyll and Mr. Hide<br> <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/jekyll.jpg"></a><br> The transformation happens sometime around graduation... Once the <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/salary-report/">salary figures</a> start being tossed around.<br> It's amazing how our priorities can shift so rapidly. We tend to focus on competition, numbers, earnings, and benefits, sometimes neglecting the true worth of our abilities in helping those who rely on us.<br> We succumb to social pressures, and after a while, when money and profit run dry, we are left unsatisfied.<br> This level of dissatisfaction is measured by the degree to which you have succumbed to another pressure in life:<br> Social Pressures to Conform<br> <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/conforming590.jpg"></a><br> This counterforce can be very powerful, and you want to fit into a group. Unconsciously you feel that what makes you different is embarrassing or painful. Your parents often act as a counterforce as well. They may seek to direct you to a career path that is lucrative and comfortable.<br> If these counterforces become strong enough, you can lose complete contact with your uniqueness, <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/why-i-love-being-a-pa-my-letter-to-a-prospective-md/">the reason you went into medicine</a>, and who you really are.<br> Your inclinations and desires become modeled on those of others. This can set you off on a very dangerous path, and you end up <a href="https://www.thepalife.com/surgeon-speaks-7-reasons-to-choose-pa-over-md/">choosing a career path that does not really suit you</a>, your desire and interest slowly wane and your work suffers for it.<br> You come to see pleasure and fulfillment as something that comes from outside of work.<br> Because you are increasingly less engaged in your career, you fail to pay attention to changes going on in the field, and you fall behind the times and pay a price for this.<br> At moments when you must make important decisions, you flounder or follow what others are doing because you have no sense of your inner radar or direction to guide you. You have broken contact with your destiny, the one you aspired to when you started PA school.<br> At all costs, you must avoid such a fate! The process of following your life task all the way to mastery can begin at any point in life.<br> The hidden force that drove you into a career in medicine, into this career as a physician assistant, is always in you and ready to be engaged.<br> Three Steps to Realign With Your Goals as a Physician Assistant<br> First: Connect or reconnect with your inclinations.<br> The first step is inward, search the past for your inner voice, clear away the voices that confuse you such as parents or peers, and look for an underlying pattern, a chord to your character that you must understand as deeply as possible.<br> Second: With this connection established, you must look at the career path you are already on or about to begin.<br> The choice of this path or redirection of it is critical. To help in this stage, you will need to enlarge your concept of work itself.<br> Too often,
