The Worthy Physician Podcast
Reigniting your humanity and passion for medicine.
The Worthy Physician Podcast
The Healing Power of Coaching for Doctors with Dr. Michael Hersh, MD and Dr. Arpita Gupta DePalma, MD
What happens when two accomplished physicians decide to pivot from traditional medical practice to coaching? Our guests, Dr. Michael Hersch and Dr. Arpita Gupta DePalma, reveal the transformative power of coaching and how it has rekindled their passion for helping others. Dr. DePalma shares her poignant tale of choosing her family over a demanding medical career, eventually experiencing burnout in administrative roles. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic became a catalyst for her to discover coaching's true potential. Dr. Hersch, a seasoned gastroenterologist, gives us a glimpse into his own journey towards reintegrating humanity and compassion into his professional life.
Stigma surrounding mental health and coaching can be particularly challenging within certain cultural contexts. Over time, however, they found that coaching addressed long-standing issues like bottled-up anger and strained family ties, leading to newfound happiness and improved relationships. This section underscores the harmful belief that individuals should tackle life's challenges alone and how coaching helps dismantle these limiting paradigms for personal growth and fulfillment.
Focusing on the unique challenges faced by physicians, we delve into the societal and professional expectations that discourage vulnerability, especially among male doctors. The discussion broadens to compare coaching's acceptance in other fields, asserting that while not everyone may need a coach, everyone deserves one. Personal anecdotes illustrate the journey toward recognizing self-worth beyond professional achievements. We also touch upon the importance of community, therapy, and life coaching in fostering personal and professional development. Join us for this enlightening conversation that offers valuable lessons for anyone striving to balance professional success and personal well-being.
Connect with these docs!
https://thoughtworkmd.com/
https://www.betterphysicianlife.com/
Book mentioned:
Though I am a physician, this is not medical advice. This is only a tool that physicians can use to get ideas on how to deal with burnout and/or know they are not alone. If you are in need of medical assistance talk to your physician.
Learn more about female physicians' journey through burnout to thriving!
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/books
Let's connect for speaking opportunities!
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/dr-shahhaque-md-as-a-speaker
Check out the free resources from The Worthy Physician:
https://www.theworthyphysician.com/freebie-downloads
Battle of the Boxes
21 Day Self Focus Journal
As a physician. Have you ever considered coaching? If you have but have not acted upon it, or if you have reservations, then this episode is for you. I sit down and talk with Dr Michael Hirsch, as well as Dr Arbita De Palma, about their journeys as physicians turned coaches. Welcome to another episode of the Worthy Physician. I'm your host, dr Sapna Shah-Hawk. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to let the listener know that over the summer, I'm going to be doing a podcast every two weeks instead of weekly, just to slow down and allow for some travel.
Speaker 1:The second thing is that if you're still on the fence with coaching or doing the inner work even after this episode, or if you would like to explore more about what makes you, tick head over to theworthyphysiciancom and check out our new store and the From Loss to Legacy. Renewing your Sense of Self workbook. Loss is a state of not having something that you have cherished. This works on areas of self-loss evaluating feelings, triggers, re-evaluating what is important to you. Now let's get on to the episode. Today we have Dr De Palma and Dr Hirsch. We're going to be talking about how they've put humanity back in medicine for themselves. So thank you both for being on here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, really appreciate it.
Speaker 3:What are your specialties? Dimensional spine care. So I feel like I'm a pseudo I-spine doc as well, and then have moved on to coaching as well, so been all over the place in terms of career and learning curves.
Speaker 2:And I am a full-time practicing gastroenterologist. I work in the northwest suburbs of Chicago and been in my practice. This coming summer will be 15 years at the same practice. Finished med school in 2003 and GI fellowship in 2009 and have been at the same job ever since.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing that. The reason why I ask is because everybody has a different journey, and sometimes it's straight and sometimes it's like a bowl of spaghetti it's all over the place. One thing that we tend to do and pigeonhole ourselves is to say this is the path I want to take and really trying to hold ourselves to it, no matter the cost. Arpita, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how it's very different from Michael's, but I think both are beautiful.
Speaker 3:We finished our residency. I finished in 2003. My husband in 2004. It was a four-year to Philadelphia for a year for him to do his fellowship and then right after that, we moved to Richmond, which we are now, and I practice in a private practice Actually, I was in two different practices before I finalized, ultimately for about 10 years and my senior partner was retiring and they asked me to go full-time to replace her because they couldn't afford her buyout as well as me being part-time and hiring a new full-time, and so I had to make a decision there.
Speaker 3:That was my first crossroads where I decided that I really wanted to be home with the kids and I had the luxury of being able to do that with my husband and his career being what it is, and so I chose to do that with the intent to go back part-time. But ultimately I was not really able to find anything that worked with what I was envisioning and dreaming about in my life, and that's, I think, a little bit of a testament. I I realize now to recognize that I stood my ground there, because I think a lot of times people feel the pressure right that this is what your career looks like and you work so hard, and it's not that I didn't feel that way. My challenge for myself was that low self-worth that I was not even recognizing I was feeling by not practicing Granted, I was doing other things. And I was feeling by not practicing Granted, I was doing other things and I was ending up trying to prove my worth elsewhere, but I still stood my ground, not recognizing what I was creating for myself. I was still creating help for myself, but in a different way, and so I went on and became more of an administrator in my husband's practice. He broke off and created his own private practice that we built together, and I became a full-time admin there, up to crazy hours.
Speaker 3:Again, now I recognize that as me wanting to prove my worth and show hey, I'm not working clinically as a physician, but I still can do amazing things and this is the value that I'm bringing to my family, this is how I'm contributing to my family, so I'm going to work there instead. And that ultimately led to my burnout, my anger, my discontentment with everything, and it impacted how I was showing up at home and showing up with the people that I love the most, and it ultimately boils down to COVID happening, where it was a hard stop because we had to close the practice for eight weeks as we were elective procedures there. And that was the gift now that I see the opportunity to be able to reflect and realize that we really weren't happy. We were running through the rat race of what we should be doing in life, should be doing air quotes, but we weren't really happy. We had everything we wanted we had a house, we had dogs, we had kids, we had cars, we had friends, family, everything. And we weren't happy.
Speaker 3:And so I started my journey there with coaching for myself and again I was a skeptic my best friend being a coach, physician and a coach and thought me thinking she was crazy. And finally, when it came to that head with COVID, I realized something needed to change. That's when my curiosity about it, my ability to give an open perspective to it, really came to fruition and that's when everything changed. It didn't happen overnight, but things did start to change when I started allowing myself to consider other things.
Speaker 1:I'll come right back to that about the topic of coaching, because it's talked about. We have physician coaches and it's one of those things where some people talk about and they're very comfortable about talking with it and there are others that it's still taboo. We're still at that crux of culture change. And, michael, what was your journey?
Speaker 2:like Michael, what was your journey like? Yeah, so interestingly, even though Arpita and I have had very different journeys, there's so many similarities. So I, when I finished my fellowship, joined a small multi-specialty group in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I was the second gastroenterologist in a primarily primary care-oriented multi-specialty group and just hit the ground running. I was got very busy very quickly and did the typical young physician new attending thing of joining every committee and group and everything that was put in front of me. It was just yes and I didn't spend a ton of time thinking about the things I was saying yes to. I just was just yes and I didn't spend a ton of time thinking about the things I was saying yes to. I just was doing everything and eventually that really started to take its toll. I had moved my way up into medical group leadership and some hospital leadership positions and my practice was super busy. There was always a wait list, there was always people trying to get in and it really just started taking its toll. I had an experience with medical malpractice litigation that kind of really started to was kerosene on my burnout flame. It just started to make everything feel so difficult.
Speaker 2:And then, as Arpita was just alluding to COVID happened and I just started struggling with the question of is this it? Is this just what I do for the rest of my life? And just felt stuck and didn't really know what was next for me, hadn't ever really spent any time exploring who am I outside of medicine, what am I outside of medicine? And so, very similarly, that was around the time where I first started seeing people talk about physician coaching as an option and I was incredibly skeptical. I am a born and bred New Yorker, skepticism is in my blood, and I did not see people talk about physician coaching and just automatically think, oh, here's the solution for me, this is what I need. And it turned out. It was exactly what I needed and the path to realizing that was a little bit of time and, as I tell people now, I wish I had found coaching so much sooner. And the truth is is I was not ready for it any sooner than when I found it.
Speaker 1:So I hear both of you saying that you're, yes, your journeys are different, but coming back to a lot of what you're doing being tied to being a physician, covid happened forced a time to pause and look at things from a different perspective. Is that correct? Yeah, it's crazy to think that the world had to be put on pause for us to think about something that is so important. Looking back, something that's so important and vital to human nature is not so much career, but whom I as a person, if it's not tied to my career. So almost re-engineering the question that we have. And so where did why? Why is coaching? Why was it questionable? I know that when I first heard about coaching, this was a few years ago, before COVID and I had a family member from the West Coast say everybody needs a life coach and I thought why? Yeah? So why do you think that we approach coaching that way?
Speaker 3:First, I will be frank, I think partially for us and for physicians, as well as in my culture. My parents are first generation coming over here from India and I was the first generation born in the US and there's a lot of stigma around any sort of mental health type of services in general, even though coaching is more future-focused. The way we describe coaching versus the difference between coaching versus therapy is therapy is more past-focused. We look at things that have occurred in the past and how that's impacting how you're behaving in your day-to-day today, whereas coaching looks at where you are today and maybe helps you recognize what's stopping you from getting to where you want to be and how you can maximize your potential to get you there and, if not, figure out where you want to be. Also, along the way, and although coaching is not free of having stigma, there still is stigma around what it is and I know personally for me I was mentioning my was my best friend from residency, my very first rotation with her, so we were equally in terms of competency and capability together. But when I found out she was coaching, I was like, oh, maybe this just has to do with the fact that she doesn't have the self-confidence that I have. Maybe this has to do with the fact she might be trying to lose weight or she's working on her marriage like things that I didn't think were really applicable to me, so it didn't really feel like it was necessary.
Speaker 3:It finally came to me, recognizing that something needed to change, and I really wasn't keen or aware of what that was. I knew I wasn't happy where I was at, but it wasn't going to be sustainable to keep going that way forever. And it might be sustainable, but I didn't want to keep going that way. I wanted to be more happy. I wanted to be more joyful and enjoying the things that I was experiencing in my life Because, like I said, from the outside it looked like I had everything right For me.
Speaker 3:Specifically, also, I had a lot of anger, so I would keep all of my emotions bottled up with all the crap that I had everything right For me specifically. Also, I had a lot of anger, so I would keep all of my emotions bottled up with all the crap that I had to deal with during the day with the office and staffing and all the things, and then my family, family members, were the ones that got the brunt of it, so I kept it all bottled up and then I would explode at home at things that were very minuscule or not even relevant at all, because that was my outlet and that became a habit and that became more and more intense and easily I was more easily activated with the minuscule things that would happen in my day and so for me, one of the areas that I recognized I really wanted to improve was my relationship with my children, because at that point my daughter was a junior in high school and she was going off to college and I recognized that if I continued the path, down the path that I was going, with the anger, just not being the best mom I could be, I wasn't going to probably have a relationship with her when she left for college. I would probably be in the dark. She wasn't going to want to spend time with me and want to come home and want to talk to me on her own, and that was part of what ignited the flame for me that I needed to make a change because that was so valuable to me.
Speaker 3:So I think we have to get to a point where we recognize that this isn't making me happy, this isn't good, this is not how I want to live the rest of my life. This is not even how I want to live the next year or two years or whatever. I want to change something now and start really enjoying my life now from where I'm at. So I think that kind of is a lot around, it's a stigma, and then just even the skepticism of what it is. I'll let Michael Hirsch I'll ramble, but I'll let Michael Hirsch make me talk also about the skepticism around if it's even going to work. But I think that's a big piece of it too. What the heck is this woo stuff?
Speaker 2:I think another piece here is that people believe fundamentally that they should be able to figure this stuff out on their own. This is just how life is. Everybody has to deal with this, and I should just know how to deal with this. And there's also this fundamental belief that this is as good as it gets, and I think what coaching did for me was allow me to start questioning all of those beliefs, because the truth is, when you believe that everything is exactly how this is the best it can be, you don't look for ways of changing or making things different.
Speaker 2:If you knew how to make your life the way that you wanted it to be, you would have already done it, and I think that is the gift of coaching is both Arpita and I have coaches and we are coaches, and the reason why, even though we are coaches and we still need coaches, is because we still have our brains and if we already knew how to do all of the things, we would already have the life, the ultimate life, that we wanted for ourselves.
Speaker 2:And the truth is, as we evolve, the things that we want in our life evolves and changes, and it's so one of the one of the mottos that I've heard used when people talk about coaching is you can't read the label from inside the jar. And so here we are in our heads all the time, just used to the things that we're constantly thinking and throwing at ourselves, and we don't really have the skill to hold a mirror up to ourselves and try to figure out like why are things going this way, why am I reacting this way, why is this making me frustrated or angry? And so a great coach really just helps us hold that mirror up to be like oh, that's why they help us to read the label I love how both of you said that, because there's skepticism, but I can also see where you know.
Speaker 1:By saying that you need a coach or that you would find the value, you also have to be very comfortable with looking at the reflection, and that might be a big hill to swallow, because that says that, okay, I'm not perfect, I need help, and that really goes against what we're taught to do as physicians to be all knowing at all times. Never admit that you don't know. With the acknowledgement that, okay, this is going to be, okay, I'm getting myself the help that I need to become a better version of myself. Instead of framing it as, okay, I need a coach, this might mean and I'm not saying that this is For some, if you admit that you need help, it might be seen as being a failure. That's not the way I see it. I see it as, again, trying to be an adult, and adulting is hard. And at what point did you make that transition?
Speaker 3:For me. It got to a point where I think I just felt like something needed to change and I was really worried that I wouldn't have that relationship with our daughter. But I think, more importantly, I have always been somewhat of the person that I don't really give a flying flip what somebody thinks of me. I do. We all have that self-conscious that we're worried. Are we going to fit in or are we going to be accepted or what are like? Are they going to like us?
Speaker 3:But as I think we get older, we start to give a little bit less of a poop about that. I'm going to keep it clean because I don't like it. Like shoot, I really reined that in. But yeah, I just that's part of it is not giving a crap about what people think. I'm going to do this for my own sake because ultimately that's going to make me the best person I can be and then I can pay that forward to my family and my friends and my clients and my people, because if I'm not filling my cup and taking care of myself first, there is no way I'm going to show up in a way that's doing that for other people. So that was like the first part is just being okay in your skin and not giving a crap about what other people think.
Speaker 3:And there are still people today and friends that I have, that have no idea what coaching is. They think they know what coaching is and they think they're just like me. I can see me and them now like me five years ago and them now that, oh, whatever, dude, I don't know what that is, but she's happy doing that, whatever. It's so crazy because in my mind I'm like I know they don't know what they don't know and maybe they don't need a coach. Not everybody needs a coach, right, but anybody who has any sort of negativity, comparisonitis, just any area that they feel like they could improve, even if you just ask yourself secretly, is an area that I wish I could really improve myself that person's going to benefit from a coach. It's just being able to be vulnerable enough to admit to it and then be humble enough to say, yeah, this is an area I'm not great at and then, part of it, just not giving a crap about what other people think and it's none of their business, quite frankly.
Speaker 1:Thank you. No, I love the honesty and their brutal truth because I share a lot of the same points as what you have pointed out. Um, what other people think is not my business and, quite frankly, I don't care unless I'm asking their opinion, and that's what a coach is for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll provide kind of the opposite viewpoint, right? So for many physicians, and I will say for male physicians in particular, the vulnerability piece is tremendously challenging. Right in order to lean right. So we as physicians are taught that vulnerability is a weakness. We are taught to put on our armor before we go to work, to be impenetrable when it comes to what is happening around us all day. Never let them see a sweat, always come in as confident and decisive. And so to come to coaching and allow yourself to take down some of the armor, to be vulnerable and to allow people to judge you.
Speaker 2:Both of you were just saying, oh, I don't really care what other people think. And I had tremendous issues with the feelings of judgment and what were other people thinking and admitting to people that I had a coach, was seeking coaching. I now am a physician coach. These were all barriers to me in originally to seeking coaching and then to me building a physician coaching business where I felt like I could support physicians who are having the same struggles.
Speaker 2:I think the vulnerability piece when we were talking about what holds physicians back from seeking coaching, skepticism is huge. But the vulnerability piece for a lot of us for me definitely is huge and, I think, also pointing out when it comes to coaching. In so many other professions coaching is just accepted right. A professional athlete never gets to a point in their career where they don't need a coach, where they know all the things. They always need somebody kind of making suggestions and recommendations and telling them how to up-level their game, and I think the same is true for all of us. So maybe not everyone needs a coach, but everybody deserves one for sure.
Speaker 1:No, thank you for that, and it took me a while to. I don't know about you, arbita. Did it take you a while to get to the point of not caring what people think? Because first thing is, as humans, we don't want to feel judged right. We want to belong to our cohort, which also means being part of the community of physicians, whether we practice or not. So did you, did it take some work, or did it take some time in order to say I don't give a flip about what you think?
Speaker 3:No, it took some work and I think the thing is I didn't even realize that's what was going on when I transitioned from my part-time PEDS job to I'm looking for another part-time PEDS job and I started working in my husband's office. It was very. I went from 20 hours a week in PEDS to maybe about the same in the medical practice, but that quickly increased up to 60, 40, 60, 80 hours a week and I didn't even realize the reason I was doing that is because that made me feel like I was contributing to my family. My is because that made me feel like I was contributing to my family. My working like that made me feel like I was valuable and worthy. That's what my thought was, and so I didn't recognize till later that overworking was my way of showing that I am valuable and worthy, I can prove that I am contributing. And I didn't recognize how low my self-worth actually was because I wasn't practicing. I was tying my self-worth to the fact that I wasn't working anymore as a physician and that's simply. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was doing this. So that's what my coach helped me recognize. But then after that, I started to realize that what I learned and what I started believing is that doesn't matter what I do, I'm always worthy. I'm always born. I was born worthy. I'm always worthy. And, yeah, I am a physician. I am no longer clinically practicing, but I'm always going to be a physician.
Speaker 3:And the hardest thing was that some of the people that were closest to me, some of my friends who are the closest to me, would come up to me and say so, what are you going to do now? You can't throw that away. And I'm like, okay, I can understand that my parents might come up, and they did. They said what are you doing? You can't just be an office manager like you're a doctor, no-transcript was a bad doctor, or that I had malpractice, multiple malpractice suits against me, or that I just couldn't cut it. That was all that dialogue was all running in the back of my mind. I just wasn't really aware of it, and so that's what my coach helped me see was going on.
Speaker 3:And then, slowly, after I worked through that, helped me decide do I really want to believe that? Is it really true? Is that really helping me be the best person I want to be, or is it just making me feel like crap about myself, which that's what it was doing and that's why, instead of feeling crappy about myself, I worked more and more to try to prove my worth and feel better. So that's like how, and it's like peeling I always say it's like peeling away the layers of an onion to get to the center core of what really is, a root cause of what you're doing and why you're doing it. And it can be so complicated because it seems like it's one thing, but when you really dive deep, that's when you figure out what's going on and then you can make the decision if you wanna shift a little, if you really wanna keep going that way, or if you wanna make small changes to create something else. And I think so. That's where I started to have more of a belief that I am the only person that knows what is right for me. Nobody else is going to know that. They may think they know that, but they don't. I am the only one who knows what's right for me and I get to decide if I'm going to honor that. And that's where that belief in the growth of I don't really give a crap about what other people think started growing and flourishing. Right, and can you tell us about ThoughtWorkMD. Sure, yes, thoughtworkmd.
Speaker 3:So what I ended up doing, like I said, my best friend told me about coaching and I just consumed lots of podcasts and really submerged myself in the self-development and growth for myself. And after about I think, eight weeks, 10 weeks, of doing that, I started a certification program for that. And when I started that, immediately I knew that I wanted to help other physicians and other women professionals really up-level their game. And Michael Hirsch said right and because so impactful when we start to recognize the product of this work, when we apply it regularly and consistently just the awareness that we can build, our awareness of how we're choosing to think about things. So I opened it thinking I'll help here and there people. Maybe it'll be mostly for myself. I want to really up-level my skills with thought work and it just blew up from there.
Speaker 3:I started realizing I really liked working with women physicians in particular. Working with women physicians who are dealing with anger. If they're mama docs, that makes a lot of sense. We resonate because I can, I understand, like what all the crap that we have to go through, and it just blew up from there. So I do group coaching for organizations, I do private group coaching. I don't have a group launching for a while, though. Now I'm taking a little break with my son being a senior and I do one-on-one coaching. That, honestly, that's where my heart is. Even though I've done everything, I've really found that the one-to-one coaching with women physicians is my favorite, because I really get to know them well and I love that connection that we get to build as we help them on their journey.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, will be in the show notes. And so thank you for highlighting your journey because, again, I love the story of how your thoughts shifted and evolved, because, again, we don't have to stick on the same path and even though your path, your all, our, everybody's trip or journey through life is different, it's interesting to see how different they are, about how much similarities there are and that these things that we struggle with in medicine and not getting the answer right the first time for life is it's okay. I think that's part of life, that's part of the journey.
Speaker 2:I'll just interject in what you were just saying. It's so true that our journeys can look totally different, yet there's so much about our different journeys that can resonate with each other. It's one of the main reasons why Arpita went out and decided to create our podcast Doctors Living Deliberately, Because if you look at Arpita and I, what did I miss?
Speaker 3:I'm like I decide Michael Hurt, that was you.
Speaker 2:It was my idea and then I wrangled you into it because, externally, arpita and I have completely different lives. Right, she is retired from pediatrics and has spent a decent amount of time running her husband's private practice, and I am a full-time practicing gastroenterologist. Her kids are a little bit older than mine, and so much of our journey is aligned. I am a full-time practicing gastroenterologist, her kids are a little bit older than mine, and so much of our journey is aligned. And so, when we speak to each other, so much of our daily experiences resonated with one another and we just thought it would be so great to be able to put out into the universe yes, your journey doesn't have to look like mine for you to learn from so many of the experiences that we have had along the way, and that's why we decided to get together and put out this podcast for a year. It was really a fun journey.
Speaker 3:It was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really enjoyed doing it and I always give him props that if it wasn't for him it wouldn't have happened, because he pushed me along to do Doctors Living Deliberately, so it's been fun just thank you for being very vulnerable, because I know that takes a lot of courage, but also thank you for being, for showing how, even though the journeys are different, there's so many so and so much, just like you said. Thank you for highlighting that and for what you're doing for physicians needing a coach, leaning into coaching For male physicians. It can be difficult being vulnerable. How did you become comfortable with that? I?
Speaker 2:didn't. I didn't. When I signed up for physician coaching, it was from a place of near desperation, from a place of wanting to escape medicine and I'm just running away, and I hadn't ever really explored what it would be like to be running toward something. I was just running away. It wasn't until I was in that physician coaching experience that I recognized the difficulties I was having with vulnerability. And it came on after a group coaching call. I went to a group coaching call. I had had a rough day at an endoscopy center that I worked at. I raised my hand. I elected to get some coaching from the physician coach and it was great. I finished that call and I was like, oh, that was so helpful. I finished that call and I was like, oh, that was so helpful.
Speaker 2:Did you just allow yourself to be seen in all of those ways? A relatively mundane topic that any physician could relate to. That I realized like, oh, that's where the discomfort is right. That is why you need to kind of work on the vulnerabilities. This is a muscle that needs to be exercised. I have slowly leaned into the discomfort of doing different things. I started with a blog because I could get my thoughts out into the world without really being seen. And then eventually that led to a podcast and a YouTube channel and being present on social media. But it wasn't automatic and there certainly was no switch that flipped and, honestly, even today, there are times when I show up and I say things and then I finish and I'm like, oh my goodness, what did you just do? And it's all part of it. And each time you lean into that discomfort and allow yourself to be seen, you get a little bit more of the life that you genuinely want want.
Speaker 1:No, thank you for that, because it is something that I think we, as humans, need to work as or work at. Understand that it's okay to not have all the answers up front. Now tell us about better physician life coaching. How did you get into life coaching on top of a busy practice?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think, as, as I was mentioning, physician coaching for me transformational and what I noticed was that the majority of the physician coaches were women and they were incredible. I had an amazing experience in my physician coaching experience but there really weren't a lot of men talking to male physicians Right, and my med school class was 50% men, and I just thought that there needed to be more male physicians out in the world talking about these things, and I think a lot of female physician coaches also prefer to coach other female physicians. That's not a hard and fast rule, but there is some of that and so I wanted to be out there talking about this work in a way that kind of could be heard by everybody, and I wanted more male physician voices in the mix. So I went out and created Better Physician Life Coaching, which I coach both male and female physicians.
Speaker 2:I am in the process of creating a men's group community call, because I think one of the huge pieces that is missing for physicians in modern day medicine are communities where we feel like we can come together and be heard and working to connect these dots and help physicians realize you don't have to escape medicine to be happy, and I say that because that was me. I thought I needed to escape medicine to be happy, and what I recognized was I can be happy right now and I can be practicing medicine or not practicing medicine, and these are not all one decision, these are multiple decisions and I can make each one at different times.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that For Kandandia, who is out of Canada, and he does a lot of support for men's mental health by bringing together a group of men to talk, and so the link will be in the show notes as well. Thank you for being showing how you've maintained your humanity and how you're helping others to both of you how you've maintained your humanity and how you're helping others.
Speaker 2:To both of you, thank you. And just to piggyback on that, one of the topics that I think you always like to discuss is bringing the humanity back to medicine, and I'll just offer that one of the most effective ways of bringing humanity back to medicine is by bringing humanity back to ourselves. I think that is how I regained and refound the humanity in medicine was by allowing myself to be human, by allowing myself to be curious with myself, by allowing myself to observe areas where there may have been a lot of self-judgment and self-doubt, and by allowing myself to explore and be curious about these things, I brought humanity back to me. And then that allows me to bring the humanity back in clinic, back into my patient care, back into my daily interactions, and so don't underestimate the impact of personal growth on professional growth and how you get to show up to work every single day absolutely, and I'm glad that you brought that up.
Speaker 1:I've worked with a therapist and life coach and by going through that and looking at my the weak points and being vulnerable, I it's made me a better human being, a better contributor to society, and I think it's changed the way I definitely interact with patients and start asking the hard questions okay, where's what's the cause? Like what arpica was saying what's? Let's get down to the root of what's going on. It's amazing how just transformational it can be. So thank you so much for just both. Everything that you're doing, what's a pearl of wisdom each of you could share with our listeners?
Speaker 3:I would offer that.
Speaker 3:I love the book by Glennon Doyle Untamed.
Speaker 3:She refers to it in one chapter her inner knowing and that really resonated with me because I think we all have an inner knowing.
Speaker 3:We just don't give it a moment to manifest.
Speaker 3:In a sense we don't give ourselves a quiet moment to be the visionary and tune into that.
Speaker 3:So if you could give yourself a moment to manifest in a sense we don't give ourselves a quiet moment to be the visionary and tune into that.
Speaker 3:So if you could give yourself a moment to really settle into a space and be by yourself and just reflect and notice what your inner knowing is telling you what do you want in your life, what, ultimately, is a representation of what your purpose is, what's your meaning, what's your purpose in life and what do you want to do to make that happen, to get there and then listening to what comes for you and honoring that and slowly making that happen. I think that's really hard for people physicians to do, it's really hard for, I think, a lot of women in our culture to do, also because there are so many expectations, external expectations of how we should look and how it should be done and when we can instead just start to recognize, if we can pay attention to the inner knowing and just honor that instead. It's not easy, it's not going to be easy, but that's what ultimately brings us pure joy and just peace, quite frankly.
Speaker 1:Thank you for that. That's beautifully said, and I will have a link to that book in the show notes as well. Yeah, and Michael, how about you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what physician coaching has done for me is gotten me to learn to lean into discomfort All of the areas where I was digging my heels in, where I was incredibly resistant to instit, resisting the change why was it so difficult for me to want the thing? And learning to finally accept that discomfort was part of growth and that by leaning into that discomfort that I would get to get the things that I really wanted in my life. That was genuinely transformational for me, and I don't think I valued discomfort. I think I avoided it at all costs, and so I would encourage your listeners if there is something in life that feels uncomfortable, start leaning into like why? What is it about it that makes it so uncomfortable? What are your beliefs about the thing that are making it feel uncomfortable to you?
Speaker 1:Thank you very much for that. If you have found this episode helpful, like share with a friend, because we can all use camaraderie.