Little agreement exists in defining medical educators, and attempts to delineate the profession include long and varied lists of responsibilities. What is known is the important role these professionals play in academic medicine. Providing education to future generations is high stakes. Additional pressures arise in medical education through the exponential increase in knowledge. Medical educators must provide quality education while maintaining sustained motivation for other endeavors such as clinical practice, education, and research. These demands are compounded by changes in the medical education landscape, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding medical educator well-being and motivation provides an opportunity to engage in simultaneous and synergistic systematic and individual actions to protect, promote, and grow well-being within the complex learning ecosystem.

At the conclusion of this session participants will be able to:
1. Make explicit the subsurface struggles of being a medical science educator (i.e. professional identity ambiguity and competing demands).
2. Describe self-determination theory and its three constructs.
3. Discuss how each need of self-determination theory has thus far contributed to their professional identity development and journey.
4. Share resources at the institutional and national level that may facilitate need fulfillment for the individual and the profession.
5. Create a three-item personal actionable plan that will facilitate leveraging any or all of the needs including autonomy, competence, and relatedness in their own learning ecosystem.