Have you grown up a little too much? Lost the natural child-like ability to just have fun on a daily basis? I think that, as adults, we have to cultivate and create fun for ourselves. We’re quite good at thinking about this and making it happen for the children in our lives, but not so good at making it happen for ourselves. And let’s face it, fun doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes some intentionality.

Why is this important and why am I talking about it? Bottom line: It’s healthy. We need the rejuvenation that doing something we enjoy – something just for the pure fun of it – offers. Our lives are busy, hectic, stressful… and without making time for recreation, we will burn out. So let’s talk about how to have more fun! And if you have difficulty thinking of things you might like to do, I have some thought-starters that may help.

“Life is a series of challenges and events and things that happen… Do we feel like we have enough of a buffer or surplus to cultivate the good stuff…To allow us and enable us to meet all those challenges and not to feel wiped out?”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Reasons we lack fun
• Why we need fun
• Remember what you used to like
• Some thought-starters
• Intentionality of challenge

Small Group Physician Coaching starting soon! Sign up at saradill.com/coaching. Have questions about the group? Email me at [email protected].

• Why Self-Care Matters (and isn’t selfish)
• Enjoying Time Off From Work
• Life is Short and Why This Matters

• Website: saradill.com
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Looking back over all that has occurred the past couple of years has reminded me of how precious life and time are. We’ve all had things drastically change in our lives and in the lives of those around us. And all this change has me pondering the depth of what it means to live the moment, and to appreciate the time we have. 

Through this episode, I want to encourage you to examine the truth that life is short. And to dive into why this matters. This is absolutely not in a “life is short and then you die” kind of way, but rather in a way of cherishing one another and the time we have together. I hope to help each of us embrace more fully the gifts of living wisely, aligning with purpose, and especially, loving and being loved.

“Is there a way in which someone who was observing how you spend your days… would they get what’s really valuable to you?... I don’t believe in just living FOR the moment, but living IN the moment… I would just encourage all of us to not miss out on our actual life while maybe worrying about or thinking about our future life or maybe even our past life.”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Daily appreciation
• Cherishing time and other people
• Living wisely
• Embracing the moment
• Aligning with purpose
• Fully loving

Small Group Physician Coaching starting soon! Sign up at saradill.com/coaching. Have questions about the group? Email me at [email protected].

• What if the Good Ole Days are Now?
• Choose Again
• What You Can Control (And What You Can't)

• Website: saradill.com
• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
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As physicians, as business owners, as human beings, we all struggle with jealousy and/or envy from time to time. Those feelings like others have more or that we want something they have. I’m here to tell you, it’s normal. But if it’s just a natural human emotion, why bother to think much about it?

Because I believe examining jealousy and envy gives us deep and valuable insight into how we think about ourselves. Hand in hand with that, it reveals our perceptions of what we believe we can have, what we can achieve, even our place in the world. When we can step back and objectively examine times of jealousy or envy, we can turn that normally negative experience to our advantage. Let’s talk about what to do when you feel jealousy or envy.

“A lot of people notice that when they feel envious or jealous, then they also sort of add on a layer of shame or wrongness for even feeling it… I just want to say it’s totally normal. And that layer of shame or embarrassment or denying it or resisting it… that's super unnecessary. That is just gonna block you from actually working with it, from actually getting the information that jealousy and envy are there to provide for us.”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Differences between jealousy and envy
• Value of examining our thoughts
• Steps for what to do when you feel jealousy or envy
• Notice when or what causes it
• Identify your thoughts
• Question your thoughts
• Come up with 3 ways
• Discover how you would feel
• Go on assignment

Small Group Physician Coaching starting soon! Sign up at saradill.com/coaching. Have questions about the group? Email me at [email protected].

• Fear: Friend or Faux?
• Self-Confidence
• Believing New Things

• Website: saradill.com
• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
• Get a FREE consultation with Sara! Sign up here: saradill.com/schedule
• Get Dr. Dill’s book The Doctor Dilemma: How to Quit Being Miserable Without Quitting Medicine
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As physicians, we all want to be viewed as a good doctor. But how do you really know? What can you measure to find out? Whether we think of them in this way or not, we have metrics we typically use. We might look at obvious things such as awards or achievements or patient feedback, or we may even have metrics we’re not aware we’re internally using. And surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, none of those metrics are really the best way to know if you’re a good doctor.

Like so many things we face in life, all of this starts with how we think. We take our perception of what we believe others think about us, gathered from various outward indicators, and from those we decide if we’re a good doctor. But there is a pretty big problem with this. Let’s talk about it.

“So often being a good doctor for me means NOT making patients happy. If I disagree with what they want, it might mean saying no.”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• What do you think
• Sources of outside metrics
• The problem with outside metrics
• Tap dancing and over-responsibility
• Choosing metrics you can control
• Metrics suggestions and a challenge

Small Group Physician Coaching starting soon! Sign up at saradill.com/coaching. Have questions about the group? Email me at [email protected].

• What You Can Control (And What You Can’t)
• Thought Work: The Most Important Work You Can Ever Do
• Boundaries

• Website: saradill.com
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For a variety of reasons, we say yes more often than we should. This triggers excess stress and stifles honest communication. But what if saying yes is actually the poorer choice? The truth is, we cannot excel at everything. So knowing how and when to say no is not only personally healthy but it can actually be the kindest answer we can give.

Intellectually understanding the value of saying no is much easier than the actual execution of it. Faced with a request, in the moment, it can be hard to not just say yes. That’s why I wanted to share several helpful insights, exercises, and ways to reframe both your answer, and your thinking, around how to say no.

“I feel like being honest in my yeses and nos allows me to be more kind. It might not always be perceived as nice but it’s kind in that it’s honest... I like the question of: What if love, what if acting out of love, might look like a yes and a no?”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Honest communication
• Reasons we say yes
• Identifying worries
• Practicing saying no
• Gently framing your no

A Mind at Home with Itself: How Asking Four Questions Can Free Your Mind, Open Your Heart and Turn Your World Around by Byron Katie

• Choose Again
• Unwritten Rules That Keep Us Stuck
• How to Make Decisions

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• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
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When we’re mentally in someone else’s business, or in God’s business, we’re not present in our own lives. And we’re taking on an incredible amount of stress and accountability. Along with personal overwhelm, this can create strain and negatively affect our relationships.

But as physicians, it’s our very job to help people. Add to that the normal relationships of being a friend, child, parent, spouse or colleague… and the number of people for whom we have some measure of responsibility can be pretty high. So how can we know when we’ve moved out of healthy boundaries and into other people’s business? In this episode, I give you several examples to identify being in other people’s business, along with suggestions for how to move back into healthier boundaries. It’s not only personally freeing but you can actually improve your relationships by minding your own business. 

“What I’ve discovered is that most of the time, we’re often in other people’s business… We’re disconnected from ourselves because no one’s home. No one’s minding our own business… So this can be a practice where you just keep coming back to yourself... What’s my business here?”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• 3 types of business
• Examples of being in someone’s business
• Define your own business
• Offering advice without undue responsibility
• Taking our own advice
• Coming back to yourself

Byron Katie: The Work

• Website: saradill.com
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We tend to reflect on certain things in the past as being better, aka “the old good days”. That reflection typically revolves around experiencing things a certain way that we no longer can now. An example is one I’ve been thinking about lately: how much has changed since the pandemic. Things I had once taken for granted, such as going out to eat or making vacation plans aren’t as easy or certain anymore.

As I reminisced a little, I was reminded of a technique involving reflecting on current times as being the good old days. This technique involves imagining your future self thinking back on today. And it is a powerful method for focusing on what you might miss in the future if it were (or when it is) gone. This exercise harkens to both Hedonic Adaptation and the Stoic Philosophy of viewing events and processing emotion. And it holds some potential framework for cultivating positivity and gratitude now.

“Picture yourself in five years or ten years or twenty years, forty years… What might you wish you had appreciated more now? What might you miss in the future that you, perhaps, are taking for granted now?... Can we live today with the appreciation that one day, this is gonna be one of the good old days?”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Reflecting as the future you
• Hedonic adaptation
• Appreciating your current ‘good old days’
• Stoic philosophy
• Cultivating gratitude and awe

• Books and articles about Stoic Philosophy:  William B. Irvine

• Website: saradill.com
• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
• Get a FREE consultation with Sara! Sign up here: saradill.com/schedule
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Setting aside time each day to literally do nothing is a fundamental practice to cultivating awareness. In order to coach ourselves to more fully understand our own thoughts and emotions, we need some quiet. We need to create space in our lives to calmly reflect. Busyness and distractions don’t allow for the deeper reflection sometimes needed to work on our beliefs, attachments and typical reactions.

The key is to practice it before we need it. Not when we’re already in crisis mode. That’s why I wanted to share with you some ideas and steps I’ve learned about how we can cultivate awareness by doing nothing. This practice is the one that really helps all of the other self-coaching tools designed to guide change.

“So the entire basis of being able to be coached, and coach oneself – and change one’s thoughts… navigate our emotions… create that space between when things happen and how we respond – is based on cultivating awareness, on having awareness of what’s going on in our mind, in our brain.”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Value of doing nothing
• Practicing equanimity
• 3 Steps to do nothing
• Time, location, dedication
• Movement or none
• Disengage and gently label

Buddha's Brain: the practical neuroscience of happiness, love and wisdom by Rick Hansen, Ph.D.

• Website: saradill.com
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• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
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Throughout our lives, how and when something is presented affects us differently. We’re always growing and changing and how we think about things and process situations evolves over time. Furthermore, I believe there really are not that many new ideas, there are simply different ways of presenting them. One person’s manner of speaking appeals to one group while another person’s style appeals more to another group.

I pondered this after recently perusing my book shelves (which are full of nonfiction volumes, mostly self-help and mindfulness), and I was drawn to my Eckhart Tolle volumes. Some people really like him, others not so much. Personally, I like Eckhart Tolle and much of what he says goes very well with what I teach. Eckhart speaks a lot about how our thinking affects everything from our emotions to our physical well being, and I wanted to share some lessons I’ve learned from him.

“[Eckhart Tolle says], ‘Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you.’ In coaching, we also refer to that as ‘If you spot it, you got it’... I would say I also like the converse idea: That the things you admire in other people are likely also characteristics that you yourself have. Often we don’t see that.”  – Dr. Sara Dill

• Our thinking affects
• Our emotions 
• Our physical body
• Our emotions are not who we are
• Freedom from unhappiness
• Giving away our power
• Past and future
• Pithy Tolle quotes
• The tool of thought
• Recognizing yourself in others
• Ease in unknowing
• Making a new decision

• The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
• A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
• Stillness Speaks

• Clean Pain vs Dirty Pain
• Thought Work: The Most Important Work You Can Ever Do
• When NOT to do Thought Work
• Believing New Things
• How to Make Decisions

• Website: saradill.com
• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
• Get a FREE consultation with Sara! Sign up here: saradill.com/schedule
• Get Dr. Dill’s book The Doctor Dilemma: How to Quit Being Miserable Without Quitting Medicine
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The quest to increase productivity and stop procrastinating is seemingly never ending. We all struggle in one fashion or another to accomplish everything we need to. And like so many struggles in life, how we think about, and thus approach tasks greatly impacts our results.

As I sought to restructure my thinking, I discovered that flipping my thought process about the enormity of tasks was liberating. I learned I could reduce my procrastination and increase my productivity by first mentally reframing all I needed to accomplish into more manageable parts. To help guide me in this, I discovered three very empowering concepts: David Allen’s Two Minute Rule, James Clear’s Optimal vs Needed, and Martha Beck’s “turtle steps”. In this episode, I outline each of them for you and how they can help us all to procrastinate less and accomplish more.

“If you just decide that, ‘If it’s taking me less than 2 minutes, I’m just gonna do it. No questions. No debate. No decision making…’ It frees up all that energy for things that you do need to think about… This is the beauty of making one decision that then frees you up from making all these other little decisions… decisions that create so much mental overwhelm and mental fatigue for us.” – Dr. Sara Dill

• The Two Minute Rule
• Standardize before you optimize
• “Turtle steps”
• Freeing up willpower and decision energy  

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Atomic Habits by James Clear

The Power of Imperfect Starts by James Clear

Do Less, Fail More by Martha Beck

• How to Beat Burnout
• How to Drop Your Manual
• Thought Work: The Most Important Work You Can Ever Do
• Believing New Things

• Website: saradill.com
• Work with me: saradill.com/coaching
• I read all my own email and I’d love to hear from you! Please write to me at [email protected]. 
• Get a FREE consultation with Sara! Sign up here: saradill.com/schedule
• Get Dr. Dill’s book The Doctor Dilemma: How to Quit Being Miserable Without Quitting Medicine
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