Heal The Burn

Sometimes we just feel stuck. Stuck in a job, stuck in a role, stuck in a story about who we are supposed to be, or stuck in the belief that because we worked so hard to get here, we should probably just keep going.

In this episode of Heal the Burn, I talk with Dr. Elaine Schulte, Professor of Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Vice Chair for Academic Affairs and Faculty Development at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, Director of the CHAM Peer Mentoring Program, Director of the L.E.A.D. Program, and a board-certified physician coach.

We talk about coaching, mentoring, physician development, possibility, and the question: am I staying because this is still where I belong, or am I staying because I forgot I could grow?

What would it take to build a better day in medical practice? Not a perfect day. Not an easy day. Just a day designed well enough that physicians and teams can care for patients without feeling consumed by the work around the work.

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Kevin Hopkins, a family physician at Cleveland Clinic and Physician Director of Health System Engagement at the American Medical Association. Through his work with AMA STEPS Forward, Kevin has become a national voice in physician well-being, team-based care, and ambulatory practice redesign. We talk about access, capacity, trust, agency, and what local physician leaders can still influence when they do not control the larger system. Maybe we cannot fix all of medicine by next week. But maybe we can make next week just a little more humane.

Burnout doesn’t stay at work.

We bring home the exhaustion, the frustration, and sometimes the short fuse. And the people closest to us can end up carrying the weight of a job they never signed up for.

But can that work in the other direction, too? Can healthy relationships actually protect us when work gets hard?

In this episode, I talk with Steven Cohn, PhD, LMFT, MBA, a relationship specialist who has spent more than 25 years working with couples. We explore the “crossover effect” of work stress, why feeling heard and understood matters, how couples can support each other without becoming responsible for fixing each other, and why even a strong relationship can’t make an unsustainable job sustainable.

Steven also gives us a wonderfully simple way to think about relationships: two people in their own boats, learning how to navigate the same pond.

Because maybe sustainability at work isn’t only about our relationship with work. Maybe it’s also about taking care of the people who keep us whole.

Are physicians islands? We spend years learning to be self-sufficient, to have answers, and to keep moving forward when things get hard. But what happens when the weight of the work becomes too much to carry alone? In this episode, Dr. Natalie Bowersox joins me for a conversation about teamwork, conflict, difficult outcomes, coaching, and the moments that remind us we were never meant to do this work by ourselves. It's a thoughtful discussion about connection, vulnerability, and why asking for help may be one of the strongest things we can do.

In this episode of Heal the Burn, I talk with Dr. Carrie Hersh, a neurologist and multiple sclerosis specialist at Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas, about burnout, identity, and what it means to “buy back time.”

Carrie shares the story of reaching a point where she seriously wondered whether she could stay in medicine at all. She shares how, with time, support, and a lot of reflection, she realized that medicine itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was trying to do everything, all at once, without enough room to breathe.

We talk about the hidden stories physicians carry about productivity, seriousness, and success — and how changing the shape of a career can sometimes be the thing that allows us to stay connected to the work we still love.

You can work with the same people every day and still feel like you don’t really know them sometimes. Even worse, they may feel like they really don’t really know you either.

So, how does our sense of belonging in the work place affect us? Turns out important studies show this to be profoundly important in terms of burnout.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Sofya Asfaw, whose leadership work focuses on safety, quality, physician wellness, and the human side of healthcare. Together we explore something that likely fuels a lot of burnout: the simple (and not so simple) idea of belonging.

Join us as we discuss what this means and why it matters.
And how something as small as saying hello can be

costless, but priceless.

We often talk about resilience as if it appears the moment crisis arrives.

In this episode of Heal the Burn, I speak with Dr. Prema Samy, an otolaryngologist from Ontario, Canada, whose husband, also a surgeon, suffered a life-changing stroke.

Overnight, she found herself not only a physician and mother but also a caregiver, all while trying to recreate herself and discover what it takes to survive in her new reality.

We discuss identity, control, empathy, and why resilience may be best created long before we need it. This conversation is less about stroke than what remains when certainty disappears.

She wrote a book about this experience that encompasses her voice, as well as her husband's, as they try to figure out what new normal looks like that you can check out here:

Frontiers: The Journey of Two Surgeons Through Stroke

In this episode, physician coach Anne Hirsch, MD talks with me about communication shifts and behavior changes that often appear long before burnout gets identified. Drawing on more than three decades in medicine and years of coaching experience, Anne explains why high-performing physicians often struggle to see these changes in themselves, and how we can help each other.

Today I sit down with communication researcher Richard Frankel, PhD, whose decades of work have helped define listening as a clinical skill. We talk about this as not only structured and teachable, but, more importantly, deeply tied to outcomes and our well-being. Together, we explore how small moments of attention shape trust, efficiency, and meaning in medicine, and why the simple act of hearing a patient fully is more impactful than we often think.

In this episode of Heal the Burn, I speak with Dr Leonard Calabrese, a rheumatologist and clinical immunologist at Cleveland Clinic who has spent years studying empathy in medicine. We explore the practitioner–patient relationship, the biology of human connection, and why empathy may actually protect physicians from burnout rather than cause it. We discuss how tools like ambient AI can help physicians reconnect with their patients by freeing them from the computer.