The Physician Whisperer

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Ok friends, here's the list:

10 Shifts That Make My Life Easier:

1. Take 2 minutes now to make it easier later
2. Simplify by deciding once
3. Decide on your own internal policies
4. Don’t overload other people (don’t give others constipation)
5. Allow travel (transition) time
6. Known when good enough is good enough
7. Speak up if you care/have an opinion
8. Trust yourself
9. Write it down
10. You are the asset (protect the asset)

Bonus: “I’m not their mom”

That is all.

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

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@MeganMeloMD

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I really had a hard time naming this episode...a more appropriate title might have been "Those Patients Who Annoy You Just By Showing Up on Your Schedule or By Their Chief Complaint"

And yet, that wouldn't have captured it quite either.

Today we are talking about the experience of have anticipatory emotions (annoyance, anger, dread, worry) over particular patients, particular chief complaints or just more generic anticipatory anxiety/dread about your upcoming shift. We've all been there.

Join me as I use some coaching tools on myself in order to get unstuck. Let's do this together!

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

I'm weirdly excited to share this episode with you because today I am joined by Dr Christy Gibson, a fellow Family Medicine Physician, Speaker and Change Agent who is on the forefront of advocating for better trauma education for clinicians, and working as a trauma clinician herself.

Join us as we dive into how we as physicians experience trauma throughout our work in healthcare, and how we can start to develop tools that not only help our patients, but more critically help ourselves. You don't want to miss this episode!

Dr. Christine Gibson is a family physician, trauma therapist, and author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit. You can find her on TiKTok with the handle TikTokTraumaDoc with >130k followers. Dr. Gibson has a passion for Health Equity and systems change, having created a residency and run programs for and with equity-deserving communities. She runs an international non-profit called the Global Familymed Foundation and a company where she trains professionals on how to manage workplace trauma - Safer Spaces Training (and The Belong Foundation).

Book: The Modern Trauma Toolkit 

Company: Safer Spaces Training 

Website: ModernTrauma.com | ChristineGibson.net | SaferSpacesTraining.com 

TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@tiktoktraumadoc?lang=en 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gibtrotterMD 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-gibson-md/

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

What gets you activated (not in a good way?)

Today, we're diving into reconnecting with our human emotions and mammalian nervous systems to recognized when we feel triggered, activated, dysregulated. Please note this is not a dive into deep trauma responses; we are focusing on times when we have a bigger response to something (words someone has said, a text we received, etc) than we would like. Our default is usually to shove down the feelings, thinking it will go away, but of course we know it doesn't.

Join me (from my car!) as I share some recent experiences I have, and some ways that you can learn to help yourself in similar situations.

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

Alright, let's settle this right now. We could jump right to feeling like terrible people for feeling overwhelmed and resentful by the work that we do providing care to other humans. We're going to skip that.

It's really NOT about the patients.

All humans need medical care at some point, and we have chosen to provide said care. 

And yet, few of us realize the COST of doing this until we are in the thick of it. And for most of us, it isn't that we don't like or value the work that we do.

But, every time we see a patient we:
1.) Need to be "on," thoughtful and focused, even if we were up all night
2.) Have to write an essay describing the encounter
3.) Are greeted by at least one other human who has some feelings and some expectations and usually some distress about being there needing care
4.) Might get bombarded with messages, chats, knocks on the door and "urgent paperwork" so Tommy can go to camp

In this episode, I show you the reasons why you feel the way that you do if you both love taking care of patients AND dread going to work as a physician. And, let's talk about how to make this better. 

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

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Continuing on my theme for May of "ugh," stuff that we don't like, slowing us down.

It's normal to feel doubt; it's a normal human emotion, designed to keep us safe. But crippling self-doubt? Failing to believe that we are capable to make a next-best-step decision? It paralyzes us, keeps us overworking, adds to our cognitive and emotional burdens and JUST FEELS TERRIBLE.

Today we talk about all the places this shows up for people, and how we start to choose a different path. We can ABSOLUTELY change these thought patterns.

Reach me at [email protected], or schedule your free intro call today at https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

When it comes to procrastination, we've all been there! It's such a common human behavior, yet it often comes with so much guilt and self-judgement. Why is this?

In this week's episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm Podcast, we're going to be exploring the 5 places where procrastination most frequently shows up so that we can better understand how it manifests and what to make of the feelings that arise as a result. We'll also explore various ways to overcome procrastination, and as luck will have it, these strategies also tie into how we can put aside our perfectionistic habits.

My hope is that this episode will help you to approach procrastination with self-compassion, curiosity, and a proactive mindset, so that you can find peace in the tasks that you have at hand. Simply by listening today you've taken a great first step to bringing attention to the habit that we all have in one way or another, and this goes a long way. I hope you enjoy!

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

One of the things that many of my clients and I have in common is that feedback feels really scary, really dangerous, and generally just really difficult to navigate. I know... it might seem weird to some of you, but it's just how I and many others are wired.

As a high achiever who had aspirations of becoming a doctor, became a doctor, then started a business, this aversion to feedback has made these processes extra difficult. Because at every step of the way in order to grow and learn, we rely on the feedback from others who came before us. I'm sure you can see the conundrum here!

So in this episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm Podcast, I'm going to share three tips that can allow us to navigate feedback in a way that can help to rewire our natural response to feedback. These are things that I wish I had known years ago as I was starting off on my journey, so I really hope they resonate with those of you who, like me, have struggled with feedback over the years. 

I hope you enjoy and please be sure to leave a rating of the podcast if you like the episode. It means a lot and helps the podcast to reach others like yourself.

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

As physicians, we like to believe that we are fact driven and that we operate based on evidence, science, data, and knowledge. And this is true.... to a certain extent thanks to our training.

But as humans, our brains are wired for story. We are meant to connect pieces of factual information with emotional overlay, and use it to interpret events that are going on now or in the future.

Put it all together and what do we get? A reality that is mixed with objective truth as well as some undeniable fiction that we create for ourselves based on our emotions. So in this episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm we're going to be asking ourselves, "what are the stories in my head?"

We'll take a look at where this often arises for physician, how to help to differentiate fact from fiction, and we'll discuss strategies for taking control of our own narrative. Because after all, while the stories we tell ourselves often serve a purpose of keeping us in a perceived state of safety and comfort, they also can very easily keep us stuck in a place that makes life more difficult for us.

I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. It really helps me to spread the message to new listeners like yourself!

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

In this week's episode of the Ending Physician Overwhelm Podcast, I had the pleasure of chatting with the always wonderful Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown. We talked about her journey with burnout, from her rigorous medical training in Nigeria, to becoming a triple board-certified Sleep Medicine Physician in the US, and ultimately founding and running her own practice, Restful Sleep MD. 

Through her lived experience with burnout, she saw first-hand what an impact sleep can have on an individual's well-being. She now helps parents and their children prioritize sleep, achieve optimal health, thrive, and live to their fullest potential.

As you'll hear, prioritizing sleep was a big component of how Dr. Funke got through burnout, but another major component was aligning her work with her values, which required a transition from academic medicine to starting her own practice. We'll discuss the challenges and planning that went into making this move, as well as the joys that have come as a result. I had such a great time recording with Dr. Funke and I'm sure that you're going to enjoy this conversation as much as I did! 

If after listening you're interested in learning more about Dr. Funke Afolabi-Brown's work, be sure to check out any of her links below. Enjoy! 

• Website: https://www.restfulsleepmd.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/restfulsleepmd/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drfunkebrown/
• Facebook: restfulsleepmd

Support the show

To learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.

Want to contact me directly?
Email: [email protected]

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD