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Hi friend,
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Six weeks after her first-ever surgery, Fedna Morency, PA-C, was on call for four facilities with one PA and one surgeon.
Her knee didn’t have full range of motion yet. She was scared. She was not well — physically or mentally. And she told them so.
Nobody listened.
So she turned in her two weeks’ notice from inside that fear. Not because she had a plan. Because her body had run out of ways to ask nicely.
“I was not well. Physically or mentally. But they expected you to do the job.”
I sat with that line for a long time after we recorded this episode with Fedna. Because if you’ve worked in healthcare for more than about eleven minutes, you know that feeling — the one where your own exhaustion, your own surgery, your own grief, your own limits somehow became an inconvenience to the schedule.
This week on Transforming Healthcare Coaching, Klaus sits down with Fedna — PA-C since 2014, locum tenens traveler since 2018, creator of The Travel PA Course and the Travel PA Your Way to Wealth community — for a conversation that, honestly, reframed a few things for me too.
The line I want you to read twice
Fedna said something partway through this episode that I keep coming back to:
“If you want to change your life, you’ve got to change your mind.”
She’s not talking about positive thinking. She’s talking about the mental architecture underneath every career decision you’ve ever made in medicine:
- The system was banking on our compassion.
- We were trained not to advocate for ourselves in interviews.
- We were told to just keep going, even when our bodies were telling us no.
Her point isn’t that you need to leave clinical work. Fedna loves being a clinical PA. Her point is that the story you’ve been handed about how to be a “good” clinician — quiet, agreeable, self-sacrificing, grateful — isn’t the only story available to you.
And once you notice the story, you can start to leverage your degree instead of feeling leashed to it.
Three shifts from this conversation worth sitting with
1. Stay uncomfortable on purpose. Fedna says comfort is where growth dies. Every bold move she made — leaving the toxic job, trying locum tenens, investing, building a course — started with a choice to stay in the discomfort long enough to let something new take shape.
2. Your degree is leverage, not a limit. Too many clinicians treat their credential like a fixed identity. Fedna treats hers like a tool: how much can this degree earn me while I continue to serve patients? That’s not a cynical question. It’s a sustainability question.
3. Community isn’t a bonus. It’s a strategy. When Fedna went locum, she didn’t do it alone. A travel nurse told her PAs travel too. A recruiter became a mentor. A real estate friend became a wealth strategist. The through-line of her career is that she kept building rooms full of people who could see what she couldn’t see yet.
A question to carry with you this week
Where in your career right now are you mistaking comfort for alignment?
Sometimes the thing that feels stable is actually just familiar. And familiar isn’t the same as right.
You don’t have to quit. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to burn it down.
But you might need to ask a better question than the one your program, your employer, or your internalized “good clinician” story is currently asking for you.
🎧 Listen to the podcast sneak peek episode below and listen to the full episode on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, Podbean, or Amazon Music.
What's inspiring us this week:
People saying yes to change. We were able to get some yeses from people interested in bringing us in the help their teams become more aligned, to invest in the people, and to explore what coaching can do for them. We are inspired by the leaders and their teams being willing to learn, explore, and discover
The Practice: Celebrating Wins
We get more of what we focus on. The practice of gratitude and celebrating the goodness of life is the first step in changing our brains, mindsets, and circumstances for the better.
Grateful to be able to move my body! Getting back into my usual routine of hot yoga is everything. Showing up, scheduling in the time, and getting a good sweat on!
Stay mindful and keep leading,
Lillian
Founder & CEO
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