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 Coach, occupational therapist, and creator of a method called Dive Into a Coach Approach. She has spent more than 20 years inside healthcare, and she said something on the show I haven't stopped thinking about: the problem isn't your patient, and the problem isn't you. The problem is the role you were handed, the all-knowing fixer, and most of us were never shown another way to be in the room.
The invisible backpack you were never told you'd carry
Hélène has a metaphor she uses with clinicians, and she says she always gets the room nodding. The day you graduate, you get your degree and an invisible backpack to go with it. And it starts filling up without your permission.
"Every single time that you're going to tell a patient what to do and not check in with them how they'll move forward, put that in your backpack. Every single time you're working harder than your patient, which I was very guilty of, put that in your backpack."
It compounds. Multiply it by the patients you see in a day, the days you work in a year, and the years you've been at this, and you get the weight a lot of us are quietly carrying around.
For Hélène, the backpack got full on a Thursday night, fourteen years in. She was driving home, dreading the next day, because the next day was report-writing day. And she knew that for every client she'd be writing the same three words: goal not achieved. Not one had followed through. She still remembers the car, what she was wearing, the full-body realization that she could actually picture leaving the profession she'd built her whole identity around.
The shift from doing for to doing with
Here's what Hélène worked out in a coaching training a few months later. She had been showing up as the expert. And if you're the expert, you're the fixer. You find the problem and you solve it, whether or not the person in front of you is ready to move.
The reframe is small, and it changes everything: see your patient as the expert in their own life. Believe, actually believe, that they hold part of the answer.
She told a story on the show about an occupational therapist working with a woman a few months out from a stroke. The OT started using a coach approach. A session or two in, the patient stopped and said something the OT never forgot.
"She shared with me that I was the first person to really trust that she could have the answer within herself."
The patient cried. She hadn't realized that capacity was still hers. And from that moment, she made gains she hadn't been making before. Same diagnosis, same body, a different way of being met.
One question. Seven minutes. A full clinic.
I asked Hélène the question I knew you'd be asking from the car: this sounds good, but I have a full clinic tomorrow and ten minutes a patient. What's the smallest possible shift?
Her answer was refreshingly doable.
"My invitation would be to catch yourself when you're stepping in that expert mindset."
Catch yourself reaching for the prescription pad, and add one thing. Instead of handing over the medication and the schedule and the "see you next time," ask how they actually feel about taking it. That one question surfaces the belief or the worry that decides whether they ever fill the script. Skip it, and the same person can come back nine months later with a much bigger problem in the chair.
Hélène dug into the research for a whitepaper she calls the symmetry of failure. Roughly six in ten of us want to leave healthcare. Roughly six in ten patients don't follow through on what we recommend. Different surface, same root: a fix-it approach applied to people who needed to be partners in the plan. So the real question isn't whether you have ten extra seconds. It's what the next nine months cost when you don't.
What's Inspiring Us This Week
Early in Hélène's teaching, a chiropractor sat through her course with a resignation letter tucked beside her, ready to hand in that week. Something shifted as she listened. She started doing things differently, trading the fixer mindset for a doing-with one. Four years later, she's still in the role she nearly walked away from. Another participant summed up the twelve-hour training in two words on the feedback form: burnout crusher.
That's the part that gives me hope. Not a sweeping overhaul of the whole system, but one clinician at a time choosing a different way to show up, and finding their way back to why they came in the first place.
Before you close this email
Hélène ended our conversation with a technique she teaches called "make a request," so I'll borrow it. Here's mine: think of one person who'd be better for hearing this episode, a colleague, or someone on your team who's running on empty, and send it their way today. You can accept, decline, or change the terms. It's yours to decide.
If you'd like her whitepaper, her article on coaching and AI, or her coaching culture quiz for leaders, she gathered it all in one place at https://diveintoacoachapproach.com/transforminghealthcarecoaching.
And if something here landed and you're wondering what a coach approach could look like for you or your team, let's chat. We're only one conversation away from something different.
🎧 Listen to the podcast sneak peek episode below and listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Podbean, or Amazon Music.
Stay mindful and keep leading,
Lillian
Founder & CEO
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