Neha Sangwan: Physician, Executive Coach & World Leading Authority on Stress & Burnout

Neha Sangwan - Bridging Head, Heart, and Body

Neha Sangwan, physician, engineer, author and CEO of Intuitive Intelligence, shares her fascinating journey and unique approach to wellness that bridges the mind-body connection. She discusses growing up as the daughter of Indian immigrants, studying engineering and medicine to fulfill her parents' dreams, and reaching a crisis point of burnout as a young doctor. 

This led Neha to realize that the medical system lacked tools to address root causes of illness beyond just physical symptoms. She began exploring integrative approaches like coaching to help people connect their mental, emotional and physical health. 

Neha explains that as a society, we over-value the brain and external accomplishments while ignoring the body's critical feedback. By learning to listen to our bodies, we can tap into incredible wisdom rather than numbing symptoms. Her work focuses on building the "invisible bridges" between our head, heart and body to achieve true wellness and transformation.

Transcript

Neha: Sometimes, we think our body is getting in the way of us accomplishing things rather than realizing its incredible wisdom, that it’s actually communicating with us, and when we don’t listen, we’re going to get into a crisis eventually.

(intro)

Alex: I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the founder and CEO of Intuitive Intelligence. She’s a physician, engineer, author, and communication expert and her work through the Bridging Me, We, World Program transforms communities by integrating corporate mental and emotional wellness. Please welcome Neha Sangwan

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Neha.

Neha: Hi. So good to be with you, Alex.

Alex: It’s so great to have you here. We have a lot of friends in common. We do a lot of work together but this is our first time having an actual conversation, which is awesome.

Neha: So good to put a face to a name.

Alex: It really is. It really is. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Neha: Well, not only do I have my favorite mug, I spent a week in India at Gandhi’s ashram and it just says, “My life is my message,” and inside is coconut milk chai. So I’m Indian and my father used to wake us up every morning, about 7:15 in the morning, I would start to smell ginger and cardamom. He’d be grating it and putting it in and about 10 minutes later on my bedside, chai would wake me up. But now I can’t have dairy so now I made my own version of it. Coconut milk chai. 

Alex: There you go. I love coconut milk —

Neha: And how about you?

Alex: Yeah. I usually make my own almond milk, but this week, I didn’t get to it yet so I have this local store here in LA, Erewhon, that’s awesome and they make really good almond milk so I’m having my chai tea with Erewhon almond milk, which is really delicious. 

Neha: Love it. Love it. 

Alex: Yeah, when you come to LA, I’ll take you there, we’ll have lunch. It’s good for people that don’t eat dairy. There’s a lot of options, you’ll see, but I love how your dad used to wake you up. That’s amazing. The traditional way, you know, it’s not like you pick up a little tea bag or something, it’s like the real thing.

Neha: This was the real thing. He’d grate fresh ginger and he’d crush the cardamom. And you know what I found is as I got older and I moved to the other side of the country, I lived in San Francisco for 15 years. By the way, this summer, we’ll be in Santa Barbara, for the summer so I actually will take you up on that chai experience. Whenever I feel alone, whenever I need to reconnect, I just need to have a hot cup of chai with someone and it brings me right back to family connection, belonging, all of that. So, yeah, being cared for.

Alex: It’s nice to have those connections and those roots and memories. It’s amazing how like a smell can take you back somewhere, isn’t it?

Neha: Huge. Smell is one of the biggest indicator, reminders of memories and all of that. So, yeah, absolutely. Just the smell of it is amazing. When I couldn’t have coffee, I used to go into coffee shops just to smell it and I started to actually get pleasure. Even though I was sensitive to it and I couldn’t have it for a few years, the smell of it started to give me real satisfaction, which is kind of interesting. I never knew.

Alex: Yeah, the smell of coffee is amazing. I don’t do as much coffee as I used to and I’ve never really been — I just liked it. I guess when we were naming the podcast, I was going through a coffee stage but sometimes when I buy it and I put it in kind of like the grinder in my espresso machine just sitting there and like the whole apartment smells of coffee, it’s energizing just to smell it so I totally get it.

Neha: And let’s be honest, I like coffee ice cream better than I like coffee, so I’m like a cream and sugar girl.

Alex: I can tell. Well, you’re a doctor so you’re going to be able to tell me later in our episode if that’s a good or a bad thing. It’s interesting, so many clients that I’ve worked with throughout the years I noticed, you have an afternoon coaching session that they’re like getting some sugar or maybe some use a Diet Coke as an alternative to that to kind of be a little bit more perked up in the afternoon. But we’ll get to the physiological aspects of client work in a little bit, but it’s great to have you here and I’m fascinated by your journey. You are a physician, an engineer, a consultant. I mean, you do so many things, you write, you speak, so really curious to learn more about your journey. Where did you start and how was it that you ended up doing all of these different things that somehow come beautifully together to enable you to do the work that you do?

Neha: Sure. So, I am the middle daughter of Indian immigrants and they had an arranged marriage and came here to the US and I have a sister who’s 18 months elder to me and so my grandmother had come over to take care of us, right? Both my parents are immigrants, they’re both working full time, you got two kids under two. And, suddenly, my grandfather called and said, “Listen, I got stationed in Africa with the United Nations. I know how to do the work,” but, to my grandmother, who I called Nani, “Nani, you have to come over and take care of all the social aspect of the UN.” I don’t know how they figured it out but Nani scooped me up at three months old from Michigan and took me to Africa for two years with them so that my parents now could take care of Rithu, and so two years later, I had a wonderful experience, at least that’s what the pictures look like, I had a wonderful experience with my grandparents, etc., but in the Indian culture, they don’t think twice about the extended family taking care of the children. The problem came when my three-and-a-half-year-old sister came to pick me up and I was two years old, my mom and her came to pick me up and bring me back. That was a really tough reentry for me. And, apparently, after crying for nearly a month straight, I refused to call my dad Dad so called him, “Hey, you,” and after two weeks of vacation where he all he did was feed me, bathe me, spend time with me, play games with me, I upgraded him to uncle. So to say I was pretty upset would be an understatement. But what started to happen there really shaped the trajectory of my life. Because my older sister didn’t really want someone to share her parents with, she didn’t think I was very legit, what two-year-old just spontaneously shows up? So even if they tell her, “You’ve got a little sister,” we didn’t have the technology at the time to do FaceTime and all of these things so I was this person who got plopped in. So, the bullying began young and she really just was trying to figure out what way to get me out. And so I was pretty smart at that time in the sense that I shifted to scanning the external world and became a masterful people pleaser. I knew what everyone in the room wanted from me so that I would never be sent away again. So, you know how children at that age, a natural thought would be, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong to be sent away from my grandparents?” When that wasn’t the case at all, obviously, when you understand the bigger context, but for the next few decades, that dynamic played out where I knew what everyone in the world wanted besides me and I made it happen. Overheard my dad in his office at six, seven years old saying, “Yeah, just my luck,” to his buddy. “Yeah, just my luck. The second one was a girl too. All I ever wanted was a son who was an engineer.” And I don’t know that I consciously did it but I was like, “I can be an engineer,” and I started studying math, science, doing really well there. I overheard my mom talking to her friends saying, “Boy, it’s hard to be a woman growing up in a culture, the Indian culture. My parents didn’t let me become a physician. They said what kind of a wife and mother will you be if you have a pager on your hip and you’re always being called to the operating room?” So they didn’t let her do that and as soon as I figured out those two things weren’t mutually exclusive, I told everyone they could settle down, that I had it handled, I would go to mechanical and biomedical engineering first and then I would go on to medical school. So it wasn’t until I was 31 years old. I mean, I became an engineer, mechanical biomedical engineer, I worked for Motorola, I was head of one of their manufacturing lines. I went back to medical school, like every good Indian child does, and ended up coming out at 31 years old exhausted, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and a little bit disillusioned by the way that I was being taught really to use medications to numb symptoms rather than get to the root cause of what was happening. And so I love traditional medicine. Boy, when I get in an accident, I want an orthopedist to fix the bones. I take medication for thyroid because I have low thyroid. So there are many incredible ways that traditional medicine helps us but I also began to see its limitations.

Alex: It’s a lot about the symptoms, not necessarily the cost, right? 

Neha: Yeah. And traditional medicine’s credit, a lot of times, all patients want is to make this headache go away. “I don’t wanna know what’s underneath it, I don’t wanna know what’s going on. I just want you to give me something to make it go away.” And so we live in a culture that has us moving faster and faster and faster and sometimes we think our body is getting in the way of us accomplishing things rather than realizing its incredible wisdom, that it’s actually communicating with us and when we don’t listen, we’re going to get into a crisis eventually.

Alex: Such an important reframe. At the very deep, kind of you go through the layers, it’s even how we relate to ourselves. It’s interesting, our bodies are not necessarily us, sometimes when you see people and we talk about our bodies, it’s like this other entity that you’re somehow related to but what you really truly are is not really the body and you’re asking the body for all these things and sometimes the body kind of pushes back. Being human is a very interesting experience. You’re totally, when I see you, like you are you, you are in your body, you are your body, right? But the way we relate to ourselves sometimes, it’s like, ugh, the body’s getting in the way. In the way of what? What is that voice that’s coming in from the body? You experience everything through the body but there’s this disconnect from we’re not just our bodies, we’re more than that. It’s always been one of my — non-duality has always been kind of one of the things that appeals to me. When I hear you talk about medicine, it kind of connects me with that. Well, sometimes, you have to be more connected with the body because, if not, you hit a wall.

Neha: You bet. And it’s a little bit of just my life philosophy, from being a doctor ushering in so many new lives and ushering out so many people from this life that I developed a perspective that I call Life School and it’s really that we are a soul that is inhabiting a body so that we can play on Earth and play with each other. And the body is this data gathering machine, right? Not just outside in the world, like I can see you, hear you, all of these things, I’m gathering data, but also inside us, our own physiology, our own heart racing, stomach turning, jaw clenching, and I call that your body map. And, oftentimes, what I will say to you is the reason this is so important to me is that little two-year-old I told you about was in so much pain when she left her grandparents that it exceeded my ability to stay connected to my body. So what I ended up doing was disconnecting from my own body and checking into the outside world and performing for whoever needed me to perform, for whatever reason, I would push right through my body rather than partner with it and I think the magic of being a soul in a body and the reason I say that is after being a hospital doctor for so many years, back in the early 2000s, like 2000 to 2008, I would be writing in the charts literally in a patient’s room and I could feel when the energy shifted and they were no longer in their body. I could feel it when I wasn’t looking at them and I would literally call the nurse and I’d say, “Can you please come in? Can you guys please come here?” and after a few years, I started to understand that I started to feel the energy, the shift. There’s literally a shift that happens in the room and I wish this on no one that they ever have enough experience with this to literally be able to feel it but I got to the point that I could feel that happening. And what I have realized is what if, what if we’re all in life school? What if what this is is life school? We come in and our soul has a curriculum to learn and, sometimes, for me, my early life school lesson was in order to survive the bullying, in order to survive the pain, I figured out some cool strategies of pleasing the world around me and became this master people pleaser. I accomplished a lot of things in the world, and I’ll tell you, what I love about engineering is root cause problem solving. The practicality of it. What’s the drawback? Most people say engineers can’t communicate. They’re not good communicators. They’re just in their head. They’re not in their heart. So what I’d say is I’m an engineer who doesn’t just build the physical bridges out in the world, I know how we do that now, but I built the invisible bridges within us and between us, the ones that connect our head and our heart, the ones that connect our body and our spirit, the ones that we don’t necessarily think about but when things go wrong, people will show up in the ER, the OR, my office to get things fixed, and, sometimes, it’s a physical cause but many other times, it’s something unresolved on a mental, emotional, social, spiritual level showing up in their physical body to get their attention. So, yeah, I’m not a typical engineer or doctor.

Alex: No, but that’s so needed in the world. What you’re describing is so needed in the world today because the world is becoming more mechanistic, more technology, science driven, but there’s an aspect of existence that is like that heart connection and almost seems like we have hyper rationalized the world and I think that’s why a lot of people kind of do planned medicine and try to connect with some more of that kind of ethereal element because the world today is incredible and magical in so many ways but it is dry and it is hyper rational. And that hyper rationality that comes from that engineering perspective can do so much but, at the end of the day, what are you living for if you can’t tap into that heart connection? And when people look back at this stages of human development, they will probably see that we were in a transitionary period where we use technology to improve so much of our surroundings but yet there was this missing piece which was exactly like those bridges that you’re describing. So, it is wonderful that you embody that. And it’s not easy to — most people are either task or relationship oriented and when you coach engineers, you typically see people that are very task oriented and, oftentimes, the ones that are good with people treat their relationships as a task, and if that works, that works, but bridging those is not usually super easy with people that have that task orientation so it’s really interesting that people that are kind of ambivert, that can navigate through those worlds in a way that is really aligned with those values, and nothing wrong having a task orientation for relationship competence development but it has a different feel to it. So it’s very interesting. So you were 31 years old, you became — you’re coming out of grad school, you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, what was next? You have all these backgrounds —

Neha: And now I’m an official internal medicine physician at that time. What happened then is when you go into a job, I became a hospitalist meaning in the hospital, when somebody comes into the emergency department, the ER doc decides, “Oh, yeah, this is someone who’s sick enough to be admitted,” I was the doctor who would come down to the emergency department and admit them for their heart attack, stroke, pneumonia, whatever it was, and carry them through their hospital stay. So I become the doctor that the family is meeting with, I’m the one taking care of everything. So, that started in the early 2000s where there were clinic doctors who just saw people in clinic and then there were hospital doctors who took care of the emergencies and all of this started happening as we were trying to maximize profit. People were getting sicker so we were only letting in people who were really ill. So, when you do that, you have to have people there all the time. They can’t be in clinic seeing people and be called over. So that was a big shift in medicine at that time.

Alex: How did you connect that background in medicine with this organizational development side of your career? This is a very interesting kind of next path.

Neha: Sure. So, what ended up happening is I went full force into being a physician and I started — there’s something called continuity of care so even if I have a full patient load, if somebody gets readmitted to the hospital, like I know them already, I’ve taken care of them, they go on my roster. So I’m taking care of patients, I’m getting cards, chocolates, flowers, thank you for saving my dad, for saving my mom, my grandma, whatever it is, I thought this was like a pretty awesome gig. Somebody’s paying me and all the patients’ families are so I’m grateful for what I’m doing. And then I burned out. So three years in, I literally burned out. I walked in one day and I said to the nurse, “Hey, Nina, can you please get me 40 mEq of IV potassium for the gentleman in 636?” and she paused and she said, “Dr. Sangwan, are you okay?” And that was really my first indication I might not be. And I said, “Yeah, why?” and she said, “That’s the fourth time in under five minutes you’ve asked me that same question and I’ve answered you every time,” and I had no recollection that that was the case. So I knew something was wrong so I contacted a colleague, a psychiatric colleague, and I said, “Hey, when’s the soonest I can see you?” He said, “Yeah, why don’t you swing by five o’clock today?” It was like 11 in the morning. I said, “How about now?” and he said, “Sure, come on over.” That’s like 911 for doctors. We never asked for help and say right now. An hour later in his office, he had diagnosed me with a severe case of people pleasing, which we have already given you the whole history for. 

Alex: Yes. 

Neha: And he said to me, “You cannot singlehandedly change healthcare, Neha, and you cannot be the one when a hospital makes their budget by understaffing people, you’re the one who always raises your hand and says you’ll work the night shift. Even if you’ve worked the day and you’re gonna work tomorrow, you are taking responsibility for things that are not yours and you have literally burned yourself out.” So he wrote me a prescription for time off and he also wrote me a prescription for Prozac. I’m driving home and I’m trying to understand how in one hour I go from running the clinical hospital to standing in line for my own prescription and on my way for time off, going home. And I look at the Prozac, something I had prescribed many times for people, and I’m driving thinking to myself, “I don’t know what’s going on here but I’m pretty sure it’s not a Prozac deficiency,” and that’s how little I knew about burnout. And so I went home and I put that medication up in my top drawer of my dresser. This is the problem with having a doctor as a patient. I put it up there because I started freaking out a little bit about side effects that were going to happen with this and I thought, “Well, I’m gonna meet with him every week. Let’s see if those meetings help me understand what’s happening. And if they don’t, I’ll take that medication.” So five weeks later, I walk into his office and I say to him, “My throat isn’t constricted anymore. I slept through the night. This is amazing.” And he says, “Yeah, that Prozac is kicking in right on time.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I forgot to tell you. I didn’t take it because I wanted to see if our sessions would be more helpful. I was afraid of the side effects.” And the craziest thing happened, Alex. He said to me, “Neha, I can’t build for patients who aren’t met on medications so would you like to start taking the Prozac or would you like to find a different provider?” And that was the moment I committed myself to understanding how crazy things can be when we don’t have answers to what’s happening. And I left, he said, “You still need time off, you’re not done, but I’m gonna give you this time off but you’re gonna have to find another provider,” and that is when I started exploring coaching, mental health, starting to understand that I didn’t have the toolkit to help me and my own profession that writes for time off and writes for medications didn’t know what to do with me. 

Alex: Let’s not even talk about how broken the healthcare system is.

Neha: Well, you know what it is? I think it’s that, yes, I think the system needs a lot of help. I also think that we are a society that collectively uses our brain to think that faster is better, do more with less every year. We collectively make our money by speeding up the external world. AI, digital, right? Everything in our world is about faster is better.

Alex: Immediate gratification. I mean, that is how we’re wired these days, isn’t it? I mean, you get your packages same day or next day, everything in life is about —

Neha: That’s right.

Alex: I mean, there’s an acceleration and a compression of time and, I mean, access to information 24/7, we have supercomputers our pockets. I mean, the whole system is driving us to look for that instant hit, right?

Neha: Yeah, and I think this is the key that we have decided that what we value the most are our brains and ways to make things faster in the world. And if that’s what we value, then that’s what creates success and money in the world. So, how do you do that as a biological being when nature, we are part of nature, right? We breathe out, we exhale, nature, trees breathe in, trees breathe out and we breathe in. I mean, we could not be more nature than that. And yet, we behave as if we are super computers. We behave as if we don’t need to be plugged in. Even a device needs to be plugged in. Even the fanciest vehicle or technology relies on feedback loops of error messages telling you that something’s wrong. But what we’ve done is we’ve blocked our body’s signals of fatigue. When we get tired, we say, “Make it a double today, give me more coffee, give me a Red Bull or a drink, an energy drink.” So what we do is we override those error signals in ourselves, we stamp out what our heart cries, a cry for connection and emotion, our souls longing for purpose. We’ve numbed out all of those things, body, heart, and spirit, in the name of being successful in the world that we have created. But I think burnout is becoming a much, much, much bigger issue because in all of our smarts of making the world faster and faster, we forgot about the biological beings that must exist in that super computer world.

Alex: I mean, 100 percent. Silicon Valley, right? It’s right there in the name.

Neha: I mean, honestly, I don’t think burnout is going to slow down anytime soon. In fact, I think we’re all going to have to metaphorically have the moment that I had in June of 2004, the moment that I realized I can’t push through my body, I need to partner with it. And so I think we’re in the middle of a pretty hard global lesson right now. We’ve sped up the world faster than we know how to live in it. 

Alex: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting when you think about what is global warming. In a metaphorical way, you can see this acceleration and acceleration creates friction, friction creates heat, so the fact that global warming is one of the second order effects of the way we’re living our lives, like that says something. It’s like the over acceleration. We experience it as burnout in our careers, but that excessiveness that hits us as burnout, it’s also hitting the planet in a different way. It is all interconnected. Making those connections is so vital for making the right decisions in our world. The problem with science is — one of the problems, and, look, science is incredible but one of the problems is the super hyper specialization that is the natural consequence of scientific understanding, so when you have these little pockets of knowledge that don’t necessarily connect with each other and you have a lot of useful information and a strong inability to connect that information to pathways that will lead that information to be as helpful for humanity, so you have everyone kind of digging a hole in a separate direction and we’re not coming closer together. I think that’s kind of what happened with the idea of Facebook, right? Facebook was supposed to bring us all together and, in fact, the algorithmic nature of the way social media evolved, it actually created, everyone has their own little perspective and their own little bubble and it’s drifting us apart. So, our ability to use technology to connect at a distance doesn’t necessarily equate to us actually connecting. And those are some of the lessons from the way we deploy technology. And as I’m hearing you talk, it’s really a lot around this thing, right? And I think that’s how we connect it to that next stage in your career where it’s like, okay, you have this recognition of burnout and it’s probably pervasive in individuals and organizations and creates other problems in society at large so how do you go and tap into that from an organizational development perspective? So I’m very curious how you went from that recognition of the fact that you had been experiencing burnout and Prozac was probably not the best way to treat it to that other stage in your career?

Neha: Well, I think what people have to decide is on what level they would like to heal something that they’re facing in their life. So I really think of it on three levels. Either you would like me to help you avert a crisis, and, by the way, traditional medicine is pretty good at that. They can help you in crisis. Or you want me to help you stay afloat, so you want to stay in the same job, stay in the same relationship, but you want some tips and tricks and strategies to kind of stay doggy paddling in the ocean. Or do you want to heal the root cause of what’s happening? And so as a doctor, I remember after I came back from burnout, a couple important things happened that really shifted me. One was I’ve researched and found that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80 percent of all illness, and as soon as I figured that out, I came back and asked my colleagues, many, many of them I asked, if stress is what causes or exacerbates physical illness, why are we at the end of our stay once we’ve stabilized our patients from their heart attack or whatever it is, the night before we discharge them, why are we not asking them what’s at the root of their stress? And each one of them said to me in a different way, “Neha, just like you wouldn’t order a diagnostic test that you didn’t know what to do with the result, why would you ever ask a question that you didn’t know what to do with the answer?” And this really — I mean, this infuriated me because I thought, well, people are depending on us to figure this out. We’re the ones who have to solve this. And so then what happened was a gentleman, Mr. Jones, someone said to me, “Neha, your patient, Mr. Jones, is back in bed 9 with a heart attack, another heart attack,” and that was the moment the engineer in me realized I had just Band-Aided him through a crisis and now the revolving door was back and it was my job to get him through this next crisis. And that wasn’t going to be fulfilling to me. So as I started, I started doing the experiment. The night before I discharge my patients from the hospital once they were stable, I would say to them, “So I want you to know that stress causes or exacerbates more than 80 percent of all illness, I’m gonna give you five questions to get to the root of your stress. If you fill this out and the nurse pages me, tomorrow, I’m gonna give you an extra 20 to 30 minutes and you and I are gonna get to the root of the stress so that I’d love to see you again at the theater or in the park but not here. I don’t want to see you in the emergency department again.” I stopped counting, Alex, after 2,700 patients all in a row did the exercise and all knew what was at the root of their stress. So I call this the awareness prescription and it’s five quick questions and you don’t have to just do this in relation to your health. You can do this in relation to whatever problem you’re facing. So anyone listening is going to get a new tool here. So it’s called the awareness prescription and this is what I would ask them. Question number one, why a heart attack? Why not your liver or your left leg? Tell me why this. Why did your body break down here? What’s the significance of that? Question number two, why now? Why not three years ago? Why not two weeks from now? What’s the message your body needed you to get in this moment that you were not getting? Question number three, since hindsight is 2020, what signals, clues, patterns might you have missed that make perfect sense now? Question number four, what else in your life needs to be healed? And question number five, if you spoke from the heart, what would you say to me? My God, every single one of them knew what was wrong, knew what was at the root of their illness, knew why they were there, and I stopped counting after thousands and thousands of them in a row just knew it. And I thought, wow, we’re missing a sacred exchange here when someone has to have their perspective opened and expanded to help them heal. So I went off and started learning mind body medicine, mindfulness, and I became faculty for the Center for Mind Body Medicine and I started to see how we could heal veterans coming back from war, we could heal people’s mental and emotional health. I went on to get a two for two years and trained as an executive coach and learned also about conscious capitalism, ways in which we don’t just say faster is better and do more with less than profit next quarter is all that matters. I learned that there’s a way where everybody matters and everybody can win. And when you put all these perspectives together, what I will tell you is I sit at the intersection of disciplines people don’t even know go together. The doctor in me understands your physical health and what stress does, the engineer in me wants to get to the root cause and make sure it’s really practical, the executive coach in me knows when something is physical or when it’s mental, emotional, social, and spiritual, when it’s about our inability to communicate with ourselves and each other. And so when I started doing this with CEOs and organizations and healthcare and hospitals, I started to see the interplay on teams and leadership and now I can pretty quickly diagnose the root cause of the dysfunction or stressful cultures and help them transform into healing organizations.

Alex: That’s beautiful. It’s so needed. I like where it came from, just relating to patients and not trying just to look at the surface level, “Oh, this person had a heart attack, oh, we put a stent, there you go, keep doing what you’re doing,” and patients do that, they’ll probably be back or they won’t be back but it won’t be for a good reason. So really trying to tap into, and in a system that doesn’t really reward or focus on that. I mean, you’re a rebel of the best kind. I love it.

Neha: Yeah, I’m like the doctor that does heart surgery without a knife and the doctor who gets to the root of your stress and gets you off medications, not on them. But I will tell you, Alex, that this made me an atypical coach. An atypical coach. I have all these different tools in my toolbox because I come from so many different disciplines that people have always said to me, “You don’t follow the straight coaching model,” and I said, “Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. But I love it. It’s one of my toolkits that I use,” but I think moving in our world right now, for coaches to be able to understand when something is burnout and recognize how to help people steer in what direction they need to be moving in is the key for the future. We’re moving in a world faster and faster. AI is becoming much more mainstream and now people are really starting to get afraid of how are we going to do this? What level of consciousness are we doing this with? All sorts of questions. And it’s our job to understand how to guide people to where they need to be. And so that’s one of the big, in the books I write and in the talks I give, I really try to expand people’s perspective so anytime you’re looking at something complicated that you want to solve, I think about it on a me, we, world level. So it’s like what’s my role in it? Oh, I know why I burned out. I burned out because I was drinking two ice-cold 16-ounce Mountain Dews plus a king-sized Snickers bar to stay awake for 36 hours in a row. Now, that’s the me part of it but is burnout my fault? No, it’s not my fault. I think me staying awake for 36 hours going against my own biology, I’m glad I stayed awake and patients didn’t die on my watch but did I have a role in it? Yes, I did. And, no, it was not my fault. Next, we, there was like dysfunctional dynamics, passive aggressiveness, all sorts of things going on in the hospital culture, and then the system itself was focused mostly on profit and so they would understaff us to make their budget. So it’s like when you start to understand my people pleaser caused me to make choices, culture I was in had its own stresses and pressures, and the system I’m in was broken, and so you start to understand, oh, if we’re going to solve this, let’s help each individual take personal accountability, step in their personal power, get clear about what they need and what they want, and that will start to shift our world.

Alex: What is it about coaching that you find interesting? Well, what is it that gets you so excited about it? Because I know you love coaching. So, someone that has such a diverse background and access to different methodologies and lenses, ways of looking at the world, ways of helping other people, what is it about coaching that appeals to you?

Neha: So I’m going to talk to you a little bit about what I’ve discovered here as well. So I think about us healing in different ways, like there’s past, present, future, right? And so when I think of the past and I think of our family upbringing and our traumas and our belief systems and all of that, oftentimes, people go to therapy as the past, like how do I connect the dots to the blueprint that got me here? Then there’s the mindfulness sector, which is like, oh, that’s the present moment. When something’s hard, how do I self manage, breathing exercises, meditation, all these things to regulate me? Then there’s coaching. It’s like the future. It’s like how do I change an outcome? How do I shift into personal accountability? How do I get curious, not furious? How do I change the outcome and create something that I want? And so when I can see how these kinds of disciplines integrate and how they can change the outcome, to me, coaching is about curiosity. Coaching is about accountability. It’s about communication and changing the outcome of getting what you want. And so the brilliance of coaching is we get the honor of serving as a catalyst long before someone’s in an emergency department. We get to do things upstream. We get to help them change the outcome so that maybe they never end up there. So, to me, it was like an upstream way for prevention and healing. And so I know what to do. If I’m on the sidewalk and someone’s having a heart attack, listen, I’ve got it down. And I now had a toolkit that could help me much earlier help them avert their stress, help them get what they wanted, help them take personal accountability. And in our world of divisiveness, coaching is a bridge to bridging the divide. It’s a bridge of expanding our awareness and our perspective to a new way of being rather than just taking sides. We have to heal ourselves in order to elevate our relationships and deepen our connections. And I think coaching is one of the biggest tools we’ve got. 

Alex: Neha, I so enjoyed learning about your story today. We’re going to have to have you back in the podcast so that we can explore so many different concepts that you brought up today in more depth but I think this is a good first chapter for coaches to get to know more about you and we’ll definitely have you back and explore a lot of really exciting topics that you brought forth and I know we’re doing some really cool work together too that the world will know about very soon as well. So, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure and looking forward to the next one.

Neha: Awesome, Alex, and thanks for the work that you do bringing all these healers together. 

Alex: My pleasure. Thank you