127. Overcoming the Fear of Failure with Sports Medicine Physician Veronica Jow

127. Overcoming the Fear of Failure with Sports Medicine Physician Veronica Jow

Introducing Veronica Jow

Today I’m talking to sports medicine physician Dr. Veronica Jow about overcoming the fear of failure.

Her Career Journey

Veronica studied biological anthropology at Harvard and earned her MD at Case Western Reserve University. She completed her residency in internal medicine at New York Presbyterian-Cornell and her fellowship in sports medicine at UConn. She worked as a sports medicine physician within large healthcare systems including time as a team physician at UC Berkeley before venturing into private practice. She is the founder of and a physician with Avid Sports Medicine, a multi-disciplinary practice that helps patients live healthier active lives.

Overcoming the Fear of Failure

Through her current venture, Avid Sports Medicine, Veronica is following her vision for how sports medicine-driven health care could function and who should get to benefit from it. She’s built up a successful practice in the Bay Area but wants more people to be able to access the multi-disciplinary model of care that she has seen successfully used for college athletes. Veronica is practicing overcoming the fear of failure, an accepted, common part of the business world that’s still taboo in medicine, to build a platform that connects patients to information on both the how and why of living healthier lives.

Inside this episode:

  • Through early mentorship and her anthropology coursework, Veronica was able to see a different way of being a doctor and carries this spirit into her practice now.
  • After college, she decided to briefly step off the runaway train that is becoming a doctor to evaluate if this is really what she wanted. After a year of living a normal, adult life, she felt confident in her decision to go to med school. 
  • By looking at careers outside of medicine, Veronica appreciates how common it is for people to switch directions or jobs in other professions. Quitting quickly when something isn’t working is viewed as a desirable skill in business and tech because it allows you to get to something that could work.
  • During residency, Veronica was drawn to sports medicine as a field that could help patients before they got to the ICU. This attitude shows up in the philosophy of her current practice.
  • She talks about the microaggressions women face in sports medicine, from covering games while wearing men’s clothing that doesn’t fit right to finding any spare moment to pump breast milk while nursing. 
  • Veronica looked at the time she spent as medical director for a sports med start-up as a “residency for business,” which allowed her to accept the failure of this company with grace and gave her the confidence to start her own sports med clinic. 
  • As she begins to expand the model of her practice, Veronica is at peace with the idea that she might fail but won’t let the fear of failure hold her back.

Resources

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