Hello Reader, Picture this. You're seven minutes into a patient visit. They've just told you what's wrong, and without even thinking, you do the thing every year of your training taught you to do. You fix it. You explain the plan. You hand it over and move on. Then later that night you wonder why you're so tired. Why none of it seemed to stick. Why that same patient is back next month with the same problem you already solved. This week I sat down with Hélène Theriault, a Master Certified...
5 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Surviving Isn't the Whole Story Rana Awdish was, by every measure, a heroic save. Critical care physician. Final days of fellowship. Hemorrhagic shock from a ruptured hepatic adenoma. Multi-system organ failure. And then — survival. The numbers came back. The crisis resolved. Medicine did what medicine does when it's working. And she felt like a stranger in her own body. That's where this week's conversation begins — not with the illness, but with what came after it. After...
14 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Gillian Faith said something on this week's episode that I think we can all relate to. We were talking about healthcare teams: why they get stuck, why communication breaks down, why a well-meaning group of skilled clinicians can still feel like they're spinning their wheels. And she said: "Sometimes you can't see the wood from the trees." That's it. That's the whole thing, really. When you're inside the system — really inside it, running codes, managing census, covering nights,...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, Klaus opened this week's episode with a scene I have watched play out again and again: a team doing everything right, and still feeling stuck. Staffing pressures. Policy changes nobody asked for. The handoff between two departments that breaks down at the worst possible moment. The instinct, when we are inside it, is to look around the table and decide the problem is us. Our team. Our communication. But often it isn't. Often the team is bumping into the larger system around it...
26 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, We train together. Then we scatter. I have to admit something. I'm an extrovert, and somewhere in the last few years I have been feeling more like an introvert. The quiet couch. The night in. The small relief of not having to show up anywhere. I caught myself thinking about that while I was talking with this week's guest, and what unsettled me wasn't the introvert tendencies. It was noticing how easily I'd renamed disconnecting as self-care, and how many of us have done the same...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Fail in advance. Dr. Krystal Sodaitis – pediatrician, health plan executive, certified coach, and neurodiversity specialist – describes it this way: we decide not to try something because we might fail. And in doing so, we’ve already failed. We just didn’t have to feel it. Physicians, she says, are especially prone to this. We set goals we’re reasonably certain we’ll reach. We don’t go out on a limb. I myself didn't notice this until I became a coach. Now I see that we...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Happy Mother's Day weekend, friend. This week's episode came to you live from Sedona, Arizona — and it felt like the right place to have a conversation we don't have often enough. I sat down with my colleague, co-coach, and friend Gillian Faith — healthcare leader, coach, and fellow mom — and we just... talked. About the real stuff. The spinning plates. The relationship that gets the least attention until it starts to crack. The moment your kid gives you completely unfiltered...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Hello Reader, There's a conversation you've been putting off. Maybe it's with that attending whose style grates on you every single shift. Maybe it's your department chair, a colleague who crossed a line, or a dynamic on your team that everyone feels but nobody names. You know the one. And every day you don't have it, you tell yourself some version of the same story: This is just how medicine is. It's not worth the fallout. I'll deal. But what if staying silent wasn't protecting you — what if...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader, Dr. Cindy Van Praag described something in this week’s podcast conversation that most physician mothers feel but rarely name out loud. Every day, you put on the doctor mask. Competent. In control. Confident. And people believe it — because you are those things. Then you get in the car, pick up the kids, and put on the mom mask. And somewhere underneath all of it, there’s a version of you that hasn’t just been in a long time. No mask. No role. Just you. Cindy asked: Wouldn’t it...
2 months ago • 3 min read