Most doctors are trained to have answers. The higher the stakes, the more certainty is rewarded. But when those same doctors step into leadership roles, that certainty becomes the very thing that gets in their way. Dr. Debra Clary has spent nearly two decades developing leaders inside healthcare organizations, and what her research keeps showing is that the leaders with the highest curiosity have the highest performing teams.

In this episode, she talks about what curiosity actually looks like in clinical environments, why resistance to change is biological rather than personal, and what happens when doctors who have spent careers being the expert in the room are suddenly asked to lead people who need to be heard.

Timestamped Highlights

[04:00]: Dr. Clary shares the research behind The Curiosity Curve, and why the data connecting leader curiosity to team performance surprised even the researchers who set out to find it.

[08:00]: She describes the single most powerful thing a leader can say to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, and it is three words most high-achieving people rarely use.

[12:00]: The balance between certainty and curiosity in clinical medicine, and why the same trait that makes a doctor exceptional in an emergency can become an obstacle the moment they step into a leadership role.

[16:00]: Why resistance to change is not a character flaw but a biological response, and what leaders need to say before rolling out any new system or technology if they want it to actually work.

[20:00]: What AI can and cannot do, and why the differentiator that keeps doctors irreplaceable is not clinical knowledge but something more fundamental.

[25:00]: What happens when patients arrive armed with data from their own research, and how a doctor's relationship with curiosity determines everything about how that encounter goes.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Certainty narrows curiosity, and that is where dangerous things happen.

Dr. Clary's research found that leaders who created environments where questions were welcomed and the status quo could be challenged consistently outperformed those who did not. The same principle applies inside clinical environments. The doctor who is certain about how an encounter should go, how a system should work, or how a team should function stops asking questions, and the moment questions stop, so does learning. She is not arguing against clinical confidence. She is arguing that certainty and curiosity need to coexist, and that most leaders lean too heavily on one at the expense of the other.

2. Change resistance is biological, not personal, and leaders who understand that roll it out differently.

When something new arrives, the brain's first job is to assess threat. It is not interested in efficiency or innovation. It is interested in whether this is safe. Dr. Clary coaches leaders to work with that biology rather than against it, which means being transparent about the reason for a change, showing people how they fit into the future, and inviting them to help solve the implementation rather than handing them a directive. The organizations that skip that step, she says, pay for it in resistance, delay, and disengagement. The ones that do not skip it tend to move faster than they expected.

3. Leadership and culture are synonymous.

Dr. Clary's closing message is direct: so goes the top of the house, so goes the organization. A C-suite that does not model curiosity, collaboration, and psychological safety will not produce teams that offer those things either. For doctors moving into leadership roles, this reframe matters because it shifts the question from how do I get my team to perform differently to how do I need to show up differently first. The answer almost always involves asking more questions, saying I do not know more often, and being genuinely interested in what the person in front of you thinks. None of that is complicated. Most of it is just unfamiliar.

Guest Bio

Dr. Debra Clary is a leadership consultant, executive coach, and author based in the United States. With a doctorate in human behavior and organizational design and 18 years at Humana developing healthcare leaders, she works primarily with C-suite leaders and executive teams. She is the author of The Curiosity Curve, published in 2025. Find her at debraclary.com.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Dr. Bertina Hooks has been a hospitalist, a locums doctor, a private practice owner across three locations, a utilization management reviewer, a medical expert witness, and a physician coach. She built all of that intentionally, piece by piece, while raising a daughter and running a business with no roadmap. Then in December 2022, she was hospitalized with necrotizing fasciitis and woke up without her right leg below the knee.

In this episode, she talks about burnout recovery, career reinvention, and the non-clinical pathways most doctors do not know exist until they are desperate enough to start looking. Her message to every doctor who feels trapped is the same: you are not stuck, you are not broken, you just need clarity about what you are actually looking for.

Timestamped Highlights

[06:00]: Dr. Hooks describes how she set up her own outpatient practice from scratch, and the specific systems she built before she saw her first patient that kept charting inside clinic hours from day one.

[09:00]: She explains where she learned the delegation and workflow skills that most doctors never develop, and why hospitalist medicine was the unexpected training ground for running a sustainable practice.

[21:00]: The hybrid approach she used to start her private practice without financial risk, running hospitalist shifts alongside building her own panel, and why it allowed her to ramp up slowly and intentionally.

[22:00]: Dr. Hooks describes the health emergency that changed everything, and what it forced her to ask herself about medicine, identity, and what she actually wanted.

[25:00]: She maps out the three non-clinical career paths she coaches doctors through most often, including one that most physicians misunderstand entirely.

[33:00]: The values energy audit she uses with every coaching client, and why she believes alignment between values and career is the foundation of burnout recovery.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Sustainable practice requires intentional systems, not just goodwill.

Dr. Hooks did not stumble into an efficient clinical day. She designed it, deliberately, before she opened her doors. Pre-visit labs ordered a week in advance. Huddles with staff before morning and afternoon sessions. Templates for normal inbox results handled by the nurse, with anything flagged coming directly to her. Scribes from early on. Delegation structured around scope of practice. She knew what had made her exhausted as a resident and as a hospitalist, and she made different decisions. The lesson is not that her system is the right one. It is that she had one, and most doctors never build theirs.

2. Your medical degree is portable in more directions than you think.

Dr. Hooks has built income streams across clinical medicine, utilization management, medical expert work, and physician coaching. None of the non-clinical work required an additional degree. What it required was a willingness to see her existing skills differently, and a mindset shift around what counts as using her training. She coaches doctors who are considering a pivot and consistently finds the same thing: the barrier is almost never competence. It is imagination. The belief that there is only one way to be a doctor, and that stepping outside it means starting from scratch.

3. Burnout recovery starts with recognizing the signals before they become a crisis.

Dr. Hooks describes burnout as a spectrum, and the early signals are easy to miss or explain away. The clearest early sign she names: coming back from a break and not feeling the return of motivation that used to be automatic. She teaches a values energy audit as one of her foundational coaching tools, built on a simple question: when you look at where your energy is going, how much of it is actually aligned with what you care about? That audit, she says, is often the first time a doctor has been asked that question. And the answer is almost always the beginning of everything that needs to change.

Guest Bio

Dr. Bertina Hooks is a board-certified internal medicine physician, entrepreneur, and physician coach based in Texas. After building a multi-location private practice, navigating a serious health emergency that resulted in a below-knee amputation, and exploring careers across utilization management, medical expert work, and telemedicine, she founded Pinnacle Business Academy to help doctors navigate burnout recovery and career reinvention. Her memoir, From Fire to Freedom: A Memoir of Transformation, Renewal, and Resilience, launches September 23rd, 2026. Find her at pinnaclebusinessacademy.org and bertinamhooksmd.org.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Most doctors believe they are good communicators. Most of them are right. But there is a difference between compassion, doing everything in your power to help someone, and empathy, letting them know for one moment that you genuinely understand what they are going through.

Dr. Chantal Lorio spent seven years as medical director of patient experience at Ochsner Health, has observed hundreds of clinical encounters firsthand, and has coached physicians on the specific connection between how they communicate with patients and how they feel at the end of the day.

In this episode, she makes a case that most doctors find counterintuitive: a five-second moment of empathy does not add time to a consultation. Done right, it actually shortens it.

Timestamped Highlights

[03:00]: Dr. Lorio describes the moment she first saw her own patient survey data and what she noticed that convinced her better communication was not about being nicer. It was about outcomes.

[11:00]: She introduces the concept of the bubble, the one thing a patient keeps repeating until someone acknowledges it, and explains exactly what it costs when a doctor tries to redirect past it instead.

[13:00]: A neighbor versus a doctor. Dr. Lorio uses a simple example to demonstrate the difference between compassion and empathy, and why patients can feel the difference even when both are present.

[20:00]: The retreat exercise that revealed to her how she was showing up at home versus at work, and why showing up in body is not the same as being present.

[27:00]: She describes pajama time, the data healthcare systems can now access showing which doctors are charting at 3AM, and what she believes organizations should do with that information rather than ignore it.

[33:00]: What Ochsner invested a million dollars in that had nothing to do with training or wellness programs, and why it saved doctors more time than almost anything else.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Empathy and compassion are not the same thing, and patients know the difference.

Dr. Lorio draws a distinction that most medical training never makes explicit. Compassion is wanting to help and acting on it. Empathy is stepping into someone's shoes for a moment and letting them know you did. Doctors are typically excellent at compassion. They ask the right questions, order the right tests, and do everything clinically necessary. But when a patient feels like the doctor did not quite get them, it is usually because the empathy moment was skipped. That moment, she argues, does not require extra time. It requires a single sentence, delivered once, at the right moment.

2. Acknowledging the bubble is faster than working around it.

Every consultation has one. A patient says something unrelated to the chief complaint, and keeps saying it, slightly louder and with more detail each time, until someone acknowledges it. Dr. Lorio calls it the bubble. The doctor who tries to redirect past it will spend more time on the visit than the doctor who pauses for five seconds and says you must be exhausted or things must be really tough right now. The acknowledgment puts it to rest. The patient feels heard. The conversation moves forward. What sounds like an extra step is actually a shortcut, and she has watched it play out in hundreds of observed encounters.

3. Sense of control is the most common thing doctors come to coaching for.

Dr. Lorio has worked with doctors across private practice and large health systems, and the theme that comes up most consistently is not workload or communication. It is a feeling of having no control over the clinic, the career, or life at home. She coaches around all three areas, helping doctors identify where they actually do have agency, exploring career possibilities beyond the current role even if they never act on them, and working on presence at home rather than just hours spent there. The shift from I am stuck to I have options, she says, is often the single most powerful thing coaching produces.

Guest Bio

Dr. Chantal Lorio is a podiatric surgeon, executive coach, and patient experience consultant based in New Orleans. After 16 years in private practice and 12 years as department chair at Ochsner Health, she served as medical director of patient experience for seven years before moving into independent coaching and consulting. She works with doctors and healthcare organizations on the connection between patient communication, physician wellbeing, and clinical outcomes, and is the author of I Get You, I Got You, available on Amazon. Explore her website here.

Would you like to view a transcript of this episode?  Click Here

Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

The data couldn't be ignored, and it was so shocking it stopped her in her tracks.

When burnout data came back showing 53% of providers in her institution were burned out, Dr. Susan MacLellan-Tobert did not wait for someone else to fix it. She flew to Denver for a weekend coaching course, came back with a business plan, and helped build an internal coaching program that served over 300 staff members in two years, right in the middle of a pandemic.

In this episode, the retired pediatric cardiologist talks about what coaching actually does for doctors inside systems that are not changing anytime soon, why some doctors chose to leave after completing the program rather than stay, and what any clinician can take from coaching even if their organization never invests a single dollar in it.

Timestamped Highlights

[03:00]: Dr. MacLellan-Tobert describes what it felt like to watch medicine shift from team-based care where everyone contributed to a system of standardization and efficiency targets, and why that shift was the beginning of the end of her clinical career.

[12:00]: A burnout survey came back at 53%. She describes what happened next, including a weekend in Denver that changed the direction of her remaining years in medicine.

[16:00]: She explains what she had to fight to establish before the internal coaching program could even get started, and it was not funding or time. It was the perception of what coaching actually is.

[18:00]: Why some doctors who completed the coaching program chose to leave medicine rather than stay, and why she considers that a success rather than a failure of the program.

[22:00]: The difference between a coaching client who is paying for the program and one who receives it for free through their institution, and what that difference reveals about commitment and change.

[33:00]: A short list of the most common reasons doctors come to coaching, including one that surprises people who assume coaching is only for those in crisis.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Coaching does not fix the system. It changes what you can see inside it.

Dr. MacLellan-Tobert is clear about what coaching can and cannot do. It does not change the appointment template, the staffing ratios, or the corporate directives. What it does is shift the question a doctor is asking from why is this happening to me to what do I actually have agency over here. For some doctors that leads to a way of staying that feels more sustainable. For others it clarifies that the fit is no longer right. Both outcomes, she argues, are exactly what the program is supposed to produce.

2. Internal coaching programs work when they are protected, not bolted on.

When Dr. MacLellan-Tobert built the program at her institution, coaches were given 0.1 FTE each, and the institution accommodated scheduling so that providers could access coaching during the working day without it simply becoming another drain on their time. She has seen what happens when that structure is not in place, and the results are predictable: participation drops, commitment wavers, and the program becomes another initiative nobody has time for. The logistics matter as much as the intention.

3. You do not need to become a certified coach to use coaching skills.

Dr. MacLellan-Tobert now teaches with the Physician Coaching Institute, and one of the things she is most direct about is this: learning to listen fully, ask better questions, and be genuinely present with a colleague for 10 minutes is a coaching skill. It does not require a program, a credential, or a formal role. In a system where time and energy are in short supply, those skills are among the most valuable things a clinician can develop, both for the people they lead and for the patients sitting in front of them.

Guest Bio

Dr. Susan MacLellan-Tobert is a retired pediatric cardiologist, certified coach, and faculty member with the Physician Coaching Institute based in the United States. After nearly 30 years of clinical practice, she co-built an internal coaching program that served over 300 providers at her institution and now works as an independent coaching contractor with organizations and individuals across healthcare. She can be found at healingedgecoaching.com and on LinkedIn.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Medical training produces a particular kind of identity. Responsible, accountable, self-sufficient, always proving competence. Those traits are useful in the clinic. They are quietly destructive everywhere else.

Dr. Nondumiso Makhunga-Stevenson is a doctor with 25 years of experience across clinical medicine, public health, nonprofit leadership, and pharma who now coaches doctors through career transitions and leadership challenges. In this episode, she introduces the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a lens for sustainable medical careers, and asks a question most doctors have never been given space to consider: what would it look like to measure your success not by what you personally can do, but by what your team can do together?

Timestamped Highlights

[06:00]: Dr. Makhunga-Stevenson describes the moment she told her sister she had made a mistake joining her dream job in pharma, and what her sister said that changed everything.

[12:00]: She unpacks the specific friction she experienced moving from mission-driven nonprofit work into a for-profit pharmaceutical company, and why it forced her to examine whether her values were actually incompatible with the sector or whether her thinking about the sector needed to change.

[20:00]: Three things medical training instils that serve doctors well in clinical roles and create significant problems everywhere else, including leadership and charting.

[22:00]: Dr. Makhunga-Stevenson makes an observation about charting that connects documentation avoidance directly to professional identity and the need to prove competence, and it reframes the charting problem in a way that is hard to unsee.

[30:00]: She introduces Ubuntu, the African relational philosophy, as a framework for medical leadership, and explains why the shift from what can I do to what can we do is not just a mindset change but an unlearning.

[35:00]: Her closing message on relational wholeness as the foundation of a sustainable medical career, and why connection with patients, colleagues, and yourself is not a soft extra but the core of what keeps doctors in medicine.

Three Key Takeaways

1. The traits that make great clinicians make difficult leaders.

Dr. Makhunga-Stevenson identifies three qualities that medical training reliably produces: putting work first, personal responsibility and accountability, and a constant drive to prove competence through external validation. In clinical roles, these traits are functional. In leadership, they become obstacles. The doctor who cannot delegate because they feel personally responsible for every outcome, or who measures their worth by how much work they personally complete rather than how much the team achieves, is living out their clinical training in an environment where it no longer serves them. Awareness of that pattern, she argues, is where change begins.

2. Charting avoidance is often about identity, not complexity.

This is one of the most precise observations in the episode. Dr. Makhunga-Stevenson draws a direct line between the need to prove competence, which is baked into medical training, and the way some doctors approach their notes. The chart becomes a place to demonstrate how thorough, how careful, how clinically excellent they are, not because the clinical or legal record requires it, but because somewhere along the way it became a proxy for proving themselves. She uses her own experience of a routine travel expense form to show how the same pattern plays out beyond clinical settings, and why coaching is often the only thing that makes the blind spot visible.

3. Ubuntu reframes what sustainable medical leadership actually looks like.

The philosophy of Ubuntu, often translated as I am because we are, sits at the heart of Dr. Makhunga-Stevenson's coaching practice. She applies it specifically to the transition from clinician to leader, arguing that a doctor who leads through a relational lens understands that their growth as a leader is inseparable from the growth of their team. The question shifts from what can I do to what can we do together, and that shift, she says, is not just a strategy. It is a form of relational wholeness that makes sustainable careers in medicine possible.

Guest Bio

Dr. Nondumiso Makhunga-Stevenson is a South African-trained doctor and ICF PCC-accredited coach who works with doctors navigating career transitions, leadership, and burnout through her practice Ubuntu Doctor Coaching at ubuntudoctorcoaching.com.

Would you like to view a transcript of this episode?  Click Here

Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

There is a version of professionalism in medicine that looks like competence from the outside and feels like self-erasure from the inside. Dr. Kathleen Muldoon is an anthropologist who teaches in a medical school, coaches doctors through burnout, and navigates the healthcare system daily as the mother of a medically complex child with 22 specialists on his care team.

In this episode, she brings all of those lenses to a conversation about psychological safety, curiosity, and what it actually costs doctors when they are trained to hide who they are. The question she keeps coming back to is one worth sitting with: what kind of clinical environment are you co-constructing, and what small things could you do differently starting today?

Highlights

[04:00]: Dr. Muldoon explains what burnout looks like from her vantage point, and why she sees it less as exhaustion and more as a detachment that builds quietly in environments where asking questions does not feel safe.

[08:00]: She describes what it is like to be a parent of a medically complex child navigating a care team of 22 specialists, and why staying curious in clinical encounters matters to her in a way that is deeply personal.

[14:00]: Dr. Muldoon defines psychological safety in clinical environments, and why the ability to ask a question or challenge a protocol without it being received as a threat is the foundation of both good learning and good medicine.

[19:00]: She introduces improv theater as a tool for practicing psychological safety in low-stakes environments, and explains why the techniques were originally developed for building empathy across difference, not for getting laughs.

[27:00]: The hidden cost of professionalism. Dr. Muldoon describes what happens when the cultural ceremonies of becoming a doctor teach students to erase themselves, and why that self-erasure may be one of the least examined drivers of burnout.

[36:00]: A five-second check-in practice she uses at the start of every workshop she runs, and why something that small can shift the entire dynamic of a clinical team.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Psychological safety is not about being comfortable. It is about being able to ask the question.

Dr. Muldoon is precise about what she means by psychological safety in clinical settings. It is not warmth, friendliness, or the absence of conflict. It is the specific experience of being able to ask a question, name a concern, or push back on a protocol without it being received as a challenge to someone's authority. In hierarchical environments like medicine, that experience is rarer than most people acknowledge. And without it, doctors stop asking, students stop questioning, and teams stop learning. The cost is not just cultural. It is clinical.

2. The hidden cost of professionalism is self-erasure.

Dr. Muldoon uses the language of anthropology to describe something doctors will recognize immediately. The white coat ceremony, the board exams, the residency rituals, all of the cultural markers that induct someone into the profession of medicine also teach a specific lesson: hide what you are feeling, perform competence, and leave the full version of yourself outside the clinic door. She argues that this inculcation of professionalism, however well-intentioned, is masking emotional suppression on a systemic scale. And that suppression, accumulated over years of training and practice, is one of the most underexamined contributors to burnout.

3. Change in a system that feels immovable starts with influence, not control.

Dr. Muldoon is clear that she is not asking anyone to burn the system down. What she offers instead is a reframe: trade control for influence. You may not be able to change the appointment schedule, the EMR, or the staffing model. But you can ask a better question in a difficult encounter, check in with your team before a shift, keep a parallel chart of moments that did not feel right, and model a different way of being in the room. Those small acts compound. And in her experience, they matter more than most people expect.

Guest Bio

Dr. Kathleen Muldoon is an anthropologist, medical educator, and coach based in Arizona. She is a professor at a medical school where she teaches anatomy and human development, and brings her training in applied improvisational theater into workshops designed to build psychological safety, team connection, and humane clinical environments. Dr. Muldoon coaches doctors and medical students navigating burnout and career transitions, and writes about humanity in medicine through her Substack publication and on KevinMD. She also draws on her experience as the mother of a medically complex child to bring a patient and caregiver perspective to her work with clinical teams.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Most doctors experiencing burnout look completely fine from the outside. They are professional, put together, and still showing up. On the inside, they have been quietly disconnecting from their own emotions, dreams, and values for years, often without realizing it is happening.

Dr. Jeannie Lawrence is a board-certified psychiatrist who now coaches women doctors through burnout, and she has a name for what is driving it. In this episode, she talks about the misalignment at the core of burnout, why guilt about setting boundaries is not a problem to solve, and what emotional mastery actually looks like for a doctor who has spent years learning to switch their feelings off.

Highlights

[04:00]: Dr. Lawrence describes the community mental health center where she was seeing 25 psychiatric patients a day, five to seven minutes each, and the moment she realized she could keep up with that pace but no longer wanted to.

[10:00]: She was in the middle of an overbooked clinic day when she answered a call that changed everything. What happened next broke through what she calls the mirage that the work always has to come first.

[17:00]: She explains what she is doing now and why coaching lets her take a patient from stable to thriving in a way that clinical psychiatry, even at its best, never quite could.

[20:00]: Dr. Lawrence reframes burnout entirely. Not as an occupational hazard or a workload problem, but as a misalignment between who a doctor is and how they are living.

[27:00]: She describes two clients on opposite ends of the burnout spectrum and what it actually looked like for each of them to come out the other side.

[34:00]: She explains why waiting until the guilt goes away before setting a boundary is the wrong strategy, and what to do instead.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Burnout is a misalignment, not just a workload problem.

Dr. Lawrence does not see burnout as something that happens to doctors because they are too busy. She sees it as what happens when the distance between who a doctor is at their core and how they are actually practicing becomes too wide to ignore. It shows up as moral injury when the system asks them to practice in ways that conflict with their values. It shows up as disconnection when years of stuffing down emotion to stay professional have left them unsure what they even want anymore. And it shows up as depletion when they have been at the bottom of their own priority list for so long that the idea of mattering to themselves feels unfamiliar. The path out, she argues, starts with closing that gap.

2. The guilt of setting a boundary is not a sign something is wrong. It is a sign of your values.

Dr. Lawrence is direct about this. Most doctors know they need to say no more often. Knowing is not the problem. The problem is what to do with the flood of guilt that arrives the moment they try. Her answer is counterintuitive. Stop trying to get rid of the guilt, and stop waiting for it to disappear before you act. The guilt is there because you care about your patients and your team, and those are good things. When you understand what the guilt is actually telling you about yourself, it stops having the same grip. You can feel it and still choose differently.

3. Emotional mastery is not about expressing your emotions at work. It is about not being controlled by avoiding them.

Dr. Lawrence trained in psychiatry and cognitive behavioral therapy, and she is precise about what she means by emotional mastery. It is not crying in the clinic or processing feelings in the middle of a busy day. It is the ability to turn towards your emotional experience in a structured, self-compassionate way rather than pushing it further down. For doctors who have spent years conditioning themselves to disconnect from their inner world in order to function, this is often the piece that has been missing longest. And it is the piece, she says, that makes everything else possible.

Guest Bio

Dr. Jeannie Lawrence is a board-certified psychiatrist, burnout coach, and founder of The Sanctuary, a coaching program for women doctors. After 16 years in clinical psychiatry across community mental health, telehealth, and locums settings, she now works with women doctors navigating burnout, helping them move from depletion and stuckness to what she calls thriving and flourishing. She draws on her background in psychiatry and cognitive behavioral therapy to bring a clinical lens to coaching without medicalizing the process. She works with her clients longitudinally and can be found at jeannielawrencemd.com/sanctuary.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Dr. Jenny Brockis was the first one in and the last one out. She was dictating notes into her phone on the drive home. Her patients were asking the receptionist whether she had cancer because of how much weight she had lost. And she was still telling everyone she was fine. It took collapsing on the floor of an osteopath's rooms to stop her completely, and 12 months of recovery before she could see clearly what had actually happened.

In this episode, Dr. Brockis traces her journey from burnout in general practice to lifestyle medicine and health coaching, and asks a question that every driven doctor needs someone to ask them: what is actually realistic and sustainable here?

Highlights

[03:00]: Dr. Brockis describes the moment her burnout became impossible to ignore, and why the first thing she felt when she walked out of her practice for the last time was not relief but shame.

[08:00]: She set up her own general practice from scratch with no business training, no template, and no one to tell her that running it the way she imagined would cost her everything.

[13:00]: Her husband bought her a mobile phone so she could dictate notes in the car on the way home. She thought it was a solution. It was a warning sign she drove straight past.

[19:00]: A psychologist told her something about herself that she had never once considered in over two decades of clinical practice, and it reframed everything she thought she knew about why she burned out.

[28:00]: Dr. Sarah Smith asks her to coach her former self. What Dr. Brockis says she would have needed to hear is something most doctors never get told.

[43:00]: She closes with three things she wishes someone had given her permission to do much earlier, and the question she now asks every doctor she works with.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Burnout does not happen overnight, and it does not announce itself.

Dr. Brockis lost nearly 10 kilos. Her patients were whispering to her receptionist that she looked unwell. Her colleagues were watching and waiting. She was exhausted before she got out of bed in the morning. And she kept going, because she had built an identity around pushing through. By the time she collapsed, burnout had been building for months, possibly years. The warning signs were visible to everyone around her long before she could see them herself, which is why she now argues that reflection needs to be a scheduled practice, not something that happens by accident.

2. The sustainability skills that could prevent burnout are not taught in medical training.

Dr. Brockis set up her own general practice with no business training, no boundaries framework, and no one to ask what a sustainable clinical day actually looked like for her specifically. She is now working to get lifestyle medicine and behavioral change into medical school curricula, not because it is one more thing to teach, but because she believes it is the missing piece that keeps excellent doctors in medicine. The skills are learnable. They just need to be taught before the collapse, not after.

3. Connection was the thing that made recovery possible.

When Dr. Brockis finally stopped pushing, it was not just professional support that brought her back. It was colleagues from other practices reaching out. It was sitting in a friend's kitchen drinking tea. It was the basic human experience of being with people who were not asking anything of her. She had spent years filtering connection out of her day without realizing it, and rebuilding it was not a secondary part of her recovery. It was the foundation.

Guest Bio

Dr. Jenny Brockis is a UK-trained doctor, lifestyle medicine advocate, and health coach based in Perth, Western Australia. After burning out completely from running her own general practice and spending 12 months in recovery, she spent over 16 years as a health and wellbeing consultant before training in lifestyle medicine and adding her fellowship to her accreditation.

She now works with doctors and healthcare professionals who are burnt out, stuck, or navigating career transitions, and advocates for lifestyle medicine to be integrated into medical and allied health training. She is the author of Thriving Mind and writes a weekly blog at drjennybrockis.com.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

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Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

Dr. Judy Wright burned out more than once before she started paying attention to what was actually driving it. As a family doctor who spent years staying two hours after her last patient to finish charting, she knows firsthand what it costs to keep grinding without ever stopping to ask what you actually need.

In this episode, she talks about burnout prevention, energy management, and the quiet belief that saying yes is just part of being a good doctor and a good person. For high-achieving women in medicine who are still doing everything for everyone, her PACE method and her very honest account of learning to say no offer something more useful than another list of self-care tips.

Highlights

[02:00]: Her residency director told her she was slow because she cared too much about her penmanship. Dr. Wright explains what was actually going on, and why nobody gave her anything useful to work with.

[06:00]: She spent years leaving clinic two hours after her last patient before a single conversation with a colleague cracked something open for her.

[11:00]: The moment she came back from maternity leave, she walked into her clinic and asked for something she had never asked for before. What she asked for, and how she asked for it, is worth hearing in full.

[19:00]: Dr. Wright introduces the PACE method and makes a distinction between time and energy that reframes what sustainable clinical medicine actually requires.

[23:00]: She moved from clinical practice into leadership and immediately repeated every pattern she had spent years trying to break. She explains why, and what finally shifted.

[40:00]: A free stress assessment she has built specifically for doctors who think they are managing fine, because that is exactly where she was every time she burned out.

Three Key Takeaways

1. The problem is rarely time. It is almost always energy.

Most doctors who feel overwhelmed reach immediately for a time management solution. Dr. Wright argues that time is the wrong lens. Everyone has 24 hours. What varies is energy, and energy is renewable in a way that time is not. When she started working with groups of high-achieving women, she found that underneath the complaints about not having enough time was something else entirely: exhaustion, depletion, and a capacity that had been quietly shrinking for years. Protecting your energy, she argues, is not a luxury. It is the prerequisite for everything else.

2. Saying no is a skill that has to be practiced, not a decision you make once.

Dr. Wright is clear that she was not a people pleaser, but she still had work to do around saying no. For doctors who are socialized to help first and for women who are socialized to say yes, declining a request carries a weight of guilt that does not disappear just because you know it is the right call. She offers several practical ways to say no that do not require a single-word answer, and makes the case that every yes has a cost. The question is simply whether the cost is one you can afford.

3. Delegation only works when you know the people you are delegating to.

Dr. Wright is not interested in getting things off her plate for the sake of it. She watched leaders hand tasks to whoever was available and then spend more energy managing the fallout than the task would have taken. What she learned, both in clinical teams and at home with her own children, is that effective delegation starts with knowing people well enough to match the right task to the right person. That takes time upfront. It also, eventually, creates something that no amount of personal effort can build alone.

Guest Bio

Dr. Judy Wright is a board-certified family doctor, burnout prevention strategist, and performance coach based in the United States. She works primarily with high-achieving women leaders, helping them protect their energy, set meaningful boundaries, and continue performing at a high level without burning out in the process. Her PACE method, which stands for Pause, Awareness, Calibrate, Execute and Excel, gives doctors and leaders a practical framework for sustainable performance.
Connect with Dr. Wright on Linkedin.

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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.

When Dr. Maggie Kang's nine-year-old daughter was diagnosed with a rare, incurable autoimmune disease, she was the radiologist who first saw the images. What followed was not just the grief of a mother watching her child suffer. It was two years of silent, suffocating guilt built on a story that made no logical sense but felt completely true.

In this episode, Dr. Kang talks about the difference between pain and suffering, why doctors are particularly vulnerable to the stories that keep them stuck, and what it actually takes to let those stories go. The insight she shares is one that applies far beyond rare disease diagnosis, and doctors who have ever blamed themselves for a bad outcome will recognize it immediately.

Episode Highlights

[01:00]: Dr. Kang describes the moment she first saw her daughter's images as a radiologist, and what the following five weeks in hospital looked like for their family.

[06:00]: She had tried thinking her way through the guilt for two years before coaching surfaced a belief she had never once said out loud to another person.

[11:00]: Dr. Kang explains why this particular belief was so hard to release, and how cultural background, professional identity, and motherhood all collided in ways she had not anticipated.

[15:00]: The moment she stopped asking what had gone wrong and started asking a different kind of question entirely set off a chain of events that is still unfolding today.

[25:00]: She draws a clear line between pain and suffering that reframes how doctors might think about everything from a difficult diagnosis to a bad clinical outcome.

[31:00]: A lobster metaphor that her whole family now uses to talk about growth, uncertainty, and what it actually means to let go of a story that is no longer serving you.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is the story we add to it.

Dr. Kang makes a distinction that sounds simple and lands hard. Pain is the actual experience: a child who is sick, a patient outcome that did not go as hoped, a career that suddenly changes course. Suffering is the additional layer of blame and guilt that doctors quietly construct around that pain, often without ever examining it or saying it aloud. For doctors, who are trained to believe that good outcomes follow from doing everything right, this distinction is particularly important. When things go wrong despite their best efforts, the story they reach for is often the harshest one available.

2. The stories that keep doctors stuck rarely survive being questioned out loud.

Dr. Kang spent two years convinced she should have caught her daughter's diagnosis earlier, even though the pediatric presentation of the disease she knew was entirely different from what she had trained on. It was not logic that kept that belief in place. It was shame. Shame keeps stories in the dark, and stories in the dark grow. What coaching gave her was not an answer, but a question: are you sure? That single question, asked with genuine curiosity by someone else, was the beginning of everything that followed.

3. Letting go of a story means tolerating not having one.

Dr. Kang uses the lobster as her metaphor, and it is a good one. When a lobster grows, it has to shed its shell and endure a period of complete vulnerability before the new shell forms. The discomfort of that transition is not a sign something is wrong. It is the growth itself. For doctors, releasing a long-held belief about what they should have done or who they should be does not feel like freedom at first. It feels like losing ground. Dr. Kang describes that period honestly and what she found on the other side of it.

Guest Bio

Dr. Maggie Kang is a TEDx speaker and certified coach who works with mothers navigating life with a child's chronic or rare disease diagnosis. She runs the Lobster Lessons newsletter and advocates for the neuroimmune disease community alongside her daughter Nell at maggiekangmd.com.

Would you like to view a transcript of this episode?  Click Here

Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.

Learn more at https://www.chartingcoach.ca

Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.

Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.

Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you.