🐧 From Googler to Psychedelics Researcher & Executive Coach | Fayzan Rab

‍Today, in 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

• 🔬 How a former Google Product Lead transitioned from tech worker to becoming a Psychedelics Researcher and Executive Coach
• 🥘 The unexpected dinner conversation that sparked a major career pivot
• 🔮 Why aiming for an "80% happy vision" of your life isn't enough
• 🩺 His counterintuitive approach to excelling in both medical school and coaching

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🧑‍⚕️ From Googler to Psychedelics Researcher & Executive Coach | Fayzan Rab

Fayzan is a child of immigrants, MD candidate at Emory University, and certified executive coach. Previously, Fayzan worked in product at Google and a mental health startup as well as organized for a presidential campaign.

He writes about the intersection of transformational leadership, religiously and culturally sensitive care, and the evolving landscape of MDMA and psilocybin.

You can find him in Atlanta, Georgia with his fiance and cat!

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Tell us about your career journey.

I spent most of my 20’s flirting with one direction for my career and then another. I went from Google to considering law school then a mission-driven startup to a political campaign and finally to medical school. In that journey, I was always looking for what a long-term direction would look like for my life.

The only problem was that I never felt like any of the paths I chose ever spoke to all of me. I was constantly trading one part of me for another. After doing 3 or 4 of these transitions, I started to grow disillusioned. I had dinner one night with a former Googler-turned-coach who thought I had the makings of a great coach. 

Me? 

I felt so lost and confused but something inside me felt like she was onto something.

I signed up for a sample coaching session and something lit up for the first time in a decade: I could hear my own voice.

I decided to take a leap of faith and sign up for an accredited coach training program through the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

For the last 5 years, coaching has become a vehicle for me to integrate the different aspects of my identity to create something that will truly serve the world. I am now creating something at the intersection of medicine, entrepreneurship, coaching, religion, and psychedelics and I could not be more excited and clear. 

This is quite profound for me. 

I went from feeling confused most days to life feeling simple, organic, and natural.

I have clarity on what my long-term commitments are and they seem coalescing towards a unified vision of my life.

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When did you decide to make each transition?

I was repeating a pattern in my early 20’s around my career. 

It would go something like this: 

1. Get super excited about the next thing I am getting involved in (working at Google, being a PM at a mission-driven startup, becoming a criminal justice lawyer, etc), 
2. Hit a point of disappointment, skepticism, or disillusionment (“oh man, I am still behind a computer filling out google docs”)
3. Put a ton of pressure on myself to make a change or I was “not being authentic”

It’s hard to get long-term clarity when you are feeling urgency or pressure to make a change.

I knew that the every 2-years-make-a-switch cycle was unsustainable. Working with a coach was my breakthrough moment where I could slow down, get supported, and work through my own resistance to thinking long-term.

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What are 1-2 things you did to navigate these transitions? How did you handle fear and imposter syndrome?

I did a lot of internal work at each of these transition points. I mean a lot. 

I bought every book under the sun about career clarity and personal development (i.e, Design Your Life, Atomic Habits, Brene Brown’s full collection). 

I spoke to friends and parents about my aspirations. I consulted with mentors in terms of what they thought was best for me.

I was taking in a lot of information but ironically I was becoming less clear. 

I had a ton of voices in my head of what others thought was best for me. 

When those voices conflicted (i.e., you would make a great political organizer vs you would make an amazing doctor), I would feel stuck. 

I found myself ruminating, intellectualizing, and rationalizing every step I was taking. It was exhausting.

Something that helped immensely was getting clear on the experience I wanted to be having in my career. Even if the vision felt unclear, I could often articulate what I would want my day-to-day experience to be like.

In my opinion, being able to articulate the experience I want matters much more than the specific job or career.

Most people I talk to know the former (“I want to be a VP in Product next year”) but they are less clear on the experience (“I want to be in a job where I am maximally using my gifts and talents and my contributions are being valued by my peers”). 

Sometimes when we aim too much for the goal, we miss what we really want (i.e, the experience).

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How do you balance psychedelic research and executive coaching?

When people hear that I went through medical school and grew a coaching business, they always ask how I did it.

How did you manage both without getting burnt out? 

How did you afford it? 

How did you find the time? 

When I started out, I didn’t have answers to all of these specific questions.

What I did have was an amazing level of support that helped me work through my doubt.

“What would be possible if you didn’t have to choose one or the other?”

That question would be repeated to me countless times by my coach. As I got present to the vision (and experience) of having both coaching and medicine in my life, the “how can I make this work” shifted to “what will it take to make this happen.” 

I needed to take such a big bet on myself that the how became insignificant. 

I believe Tim Ferriss said, there is no point in having a 80% happy vision for your life. If you are up to something novel and entrepreneurial, 80% will not motivate you to get up on the hardest days. 

Getting to be a pioneer in psychedelic research while building my coaching practice was big and juicy enough that I kept finding ways to innovate, partner, and ensure I was making good on both paths.

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What changed about how I save, invest, and spend money?

Going to medical school and working for myself was a major pay cut from my big tech salary. I took money I had invested and used it to pay tuition. I used my coaching revenue to cover my cost of living and invest minimally (i.e., max out a personal Roth-IRA). 

Undeniably, that was hard. There were many days I woke up wishing I had my big tech salary. Going from multiple six figures to making no to negative money is a hard pill to swallow but the payoff is well worth it.

The dollars I am investing today in my career and personal development are paying exponential dividends both in terms of quality of life and future financial stability.

One interesting observation is when I felt better about the trajectory of my career, the stuff I needed to do to placate my malaise (random shopping, eating out excessively, etc) went down. My cost of living became quite manageable and that conservatism actually helped me hone in on what truly was a priority for me.

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What are 1-2 mistakes in a portfolio career?

I would have taken less open-ended advice. Early on, I would approach my roommates, mentors, and therapists in these big questions: what should I be doing with my life, what would be a fulfilling experience of work, what’s the next thing I want to create. 

Those questions are a n=1 and can only be answered by you.

The best thing I can advise---acknowledging the irony here---is to do whatever it takes to reduce pressure, give space for clarity to arise, and trust a process.

Too often, I would interrupt my own process out of a need to have certainty rather than fully flesh out one of the opportunities I was pursuing (side note: it’s really hard to reflect and learn if a possible career path is considered theoretically or half-pursued).

Looking back, I would have hired my coach sooner. 

While I don’t regret the wealth of experience I got in my 20s, it came with a lot of anguish and suffering.

Great coaches are trained not to give you advice. 

My first coach was like a clean mirror who kept reflecting back my own thinking and working through the self-doubt that would inevitably show up and interrupt my process.

I would have saved a lot of time, energy, and money if I had been willing to pull the trigger on hiring a coach sooner.

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What is one non-traditional piece of advice you would give to others looking to build a portfolio career?

In 2021, I was in my second full-time year as a coach and studying for the first medical board exam.

I woke up every morning doing hours of lecture, studying by myself in my room, and putting a ton of pressure on how I would make my coaching business work. 

I was going no-where. 

No one wanted to work with me and my scores were stagnating.  

The bet I had taken on myself to integrate coaching and medicine felt like some fantasy I bought into. 

I was exhausted, isolated, and miserable.

Thankfully, I had a call with my coach that day. He reflected back to me how bad of a boss I was being to myself. 

That if I was an employee working for myself, I would quit. 

I remember him reflecting that no one wants a doctor who is unhealthy or a coach that is burnt out.

I decided to put my computer away and leave my house. I spent the rest of the day in the park throwing a frisbee with a buddy. I went to the movie theater for the first time in a year and I spent the weekend reconnecting with friends. I didn’t study or check my email for the rest of that weekend.

A few months later, I passed my medical boards with ease. I had more people who wanted to work with me than I had availability for.

I learned that day that my one and only job is to be a great boss to myself. When I practice that, the rest of my life---no matter how complex---tends to work out.

For those considering a portfolio career, you inherit the responsibility of working for yourself. Be the best boss to yourself you can be. It’s much harder than people expect but the dividends on treating yourself the way a great boss would are massive.

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Where can I learn more?

I coach purpose-driven high performers to go to the next level of their career.

You can reach me at my website or email.

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