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 thing without ever saying it out loud.
We come up in cohorts, then the system sends us everywhere
Dr. Zhen Chan is a pediatrician in the DC area, an MD/MBA, and the founder of Grapevyne, a free peer-to-peer community he built for physicians who feel exactly that gap. Early in our conversation he named the shape of a medical career better than I could: we train in tight cohorts, and then everything pulls us apart.
Residency hands you a tribe whether you want one or not. The 7am breakfast after a 24-hour shift. The senior resident dragging the interns out "for your mental health." Then it ends, and most of us never rebuild anything close to it.
"We are such an isolated profession," Zhen told me. He doesn't think that's an accident. He thinks it's how we were trained.
What isolation does to us over time
Zhen's read, shaped by his business training, is that our isolation isn't only lonely. It's expensive.
The people who run health systems now (the administrators, the tech companies, the lawyers) came up in worlds that taught them to trade introductions and get each other into rooms. We came up in a world that rewarded test scores and solo performance. So clinicians end up outside the rooms where the decisions about our own work get made.
"If we banded together more," he said, "we start knowing more people who can get us into the right rooms, and maybe we get some of that autonomy back."
I don't think he means we all need MBAs. I think he means connection isn't the luxury we earn after the real work is done. It may be part of how we get the real work back.
Business isn't the dark side
As a coach, I notice how often we put on a particular pair of sunglasses and then forget we're wearing them. In medicine, one of those lenses insists the business side is "the dark side," that caring about systems or scale is somehow a betrayal of caring about patients.
Zhen gets that label thrown at him often. Some of the more traditional docs see his MBA and quietly wonder whether he's even there for the patients.
But good business, stripped down, is just helping a person solve a problem well enough that the solution is worth paying for. That isn't so far from what we already do. It's a different side.
"You should not burn out," he said. "You should be able to have control of your life, of your destiny, of your career."
The Practice
If this episode gives you one thing to actually do, let it be Zhen's networking pearl. It's small enough to keep.
Once every other month, six times a year, have a 30-minute conversation with someone new. Not for a deliverable. Just to know them.
And whenever you're on a call, end it by asking for one connection: "Do you know anyone who's built a private practice? Anyone working in the thing you're quietly curious about?" Most people say yes. Some will email you a name an hour later.
That's the whole practice. Two moves, repeated.
What's Inspiring Us This Week
Grapevyne, Zhen's free community for physicians, medical students, NPs, and PAs. It lives on Circle (the same home as our own medTHRIVE Connect community) and it's part resource library, part live events, part warm introductions. You can find it at Grapevyne.health.
It's also worth sitting with the bigger picture. The U.S. Surgeon General has named loneliness and isolation a real public health concern, not a soft one. The pull we feel toward each other isn't weakness. It's a need we keep treating as optional.
🎧 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
Also! Check out this past edition of The Thriving Healthcare Leader, our LinkedIn Newsletter!
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