Episode 129 Hello Reader, Communication Skills in Critical Care with Dr. Tessie October This week on the podcast I spoke with Dr. Tessie October, a pediatric intensivist and palliative care physician. Her research records real family meetings in the pediatric ICU to learn what makes those conversations go well. She is also Distinguished Faculty and a board member at VitalTalk, and the two of us have taught communication skills together for more than ten years. We started with why...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Episode 128 Hello Reader, What I've Learned As an Experienced Beginner This week's episode is a solo one, about learning as an experienced beginner. My career in medicine came with a syllabus: residency, fellowship, boards, and someone always telling me what to learn next. Four years into building Transforming Healthcare Coaching®, and eight months into learning AI and software development, there is no syllabus. I organized the episode around three things that have helped. The first is that...
15 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, This week on the podcast I spoke with Patrick O'Malley, MD, an emergency physician with more than 20 years of clinical experience, an inventor, and a clinical educator. He developed a wound irrigation device, built laceration and abscess courses in partnership with EB Medicine, and founded ShiftChange, a private community for emergency, urgent care, and critical care clinicians who are building something alongside their clinical work. The first idea came in residency. He was...
22 days ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, After a change in administration and a government shutdown, Dr. Jess Bunin's institution rewrote policy after policy. At a meeting afterward, a senior leader said no one was coming to them with questions anymore, so everything must be okay. Jess was hearing the opposite. As dean of community, she had become an unofficial ombuds, and the complaints were coming to her instead. This week on the podcast I spoke with Jess, a retired Army colonel and West Point graduate trained in...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Suppose I give you directions to my house. From my front door, go one block down and turn left. At the light, go right, past Target, then left again, and you're there. You will never arrive. The directions start where I am, not where you are. Salvatore Manzi uses that example to explain the principle his new book, Clear and Compelling, is built on. He calls it "you then me." Before your agenda, your data, or your talking points, you start with the listener's world: their...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, "Just wait." It is one of the most common pieces of career advice in medicine, and most of the time it is offered kindly. Wait until you have more experience. Wait until your kids are older. Wait for the next cycle, when the timing will be better for you. Dr. Shikha Jain has been given that advice for most of her career. Pregnant with twins, she was told she had ruined her chances at leadership. Interviewing for her first job with one child at home, she was advised to go...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello Reader, Alison Conklin was 42 years old when her doctor told her she had six months to live without a new heart. It was the same age her mother had been when she died of the same disease — hypertrophic cardiomyopathy — right in front of her. Alison was 14. Months later, she was living inside an NYU hospital room with floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the Empire State Building change colors every night. She had no idea if a matching heart would come in time. She had no idea if she'd...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, Somewhere between deliveries, on call overnight as a pediatrics resident, Morgan Leafe sat in a quiet delivery room and typed into Google: “What other jobs can a doctor do?” She loved her patients. She had known she’d be a pediatrician since before medical school. And she was quietly looking for the door. Mandy Armitage had been circling the same question even longer — since medical school, actually. Everyone told her the same thing: it gets better in residency, it gets better...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, This week on the podcast I spoke with Vicki Landers, one of our coaches at Transforming Healthcare Coaching®. Vicki spent eighteen years as a clinician inside a single health system before moving into coaching, and she now works with healthcare professionals through career transitions. The question we took on was a simple one: where does confidence actually come from? We started with the definition, because that is where most of us get stuck. Somewhere in our training,...
2 months ago • 2 min read