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Welcome to Thriving in Healthcare

Live well. Lead well. Grow Together. Weekly conversations to help you stay human in healthcare. We share practical ideas, podcast pearls, and curated reads that help you grow. Together, we can transform healthcare, one person at a time.®

Drs. Morgan Leafe and Mandy Armitage on physician nonclinical careers
Featured Post

Nobody is going to knight you

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...

Vicki Landers on where confidence comes from for healthcare professionals

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,...

Podcast episode 120: Cory Jenks, PharmD, on muscle, micro recovery, and clinician health

Hello Reader, Before we talk about this week's podcast, we wanted to let you know about things we have coming up, the Clear & Caring Communication virtual workshop on September 3, 2026 2pm EST, 90 minutes, $45 with recordings: It's a sneak peek into what we're hoping to plan for our March 6, 2027 in-person event in Miami Beach! Stay tuned and keep reading these newsletters, we'll share here first! This week on the podcast I spoke with Cory Jenks, PharmD, a clinical pharmacist who has spent...

lillian liang emlet on what coaching really is in helathcare

Somewhere in a hospital right now, someone just heard the words “we’re going to get you a coach” — and their stomach dropped. That reaction tells you almost everything about what’s gone wrong. In healthcare, we’ve quietly turned coaching into punishment: the thing that happens to people who are struggling, a box you check before you manage someone out. And the fact that most of us couldn’t actually explain how coaching differs from mentoring, advising, or therapy is exactly why the confusion...

klaus grim on being caregiver and advocate on other side of healthcare

Hello Reader, We need your input! We are planning an in person event in Miami Beach in March 6, 2027! Which one would you attend? Write, Reflect and Renew: A guided writing retreat Speak with Clarity and Impact: An interactive leadership communication experience with speaker coach Salvatore Manzi RESET Miami: A restorative experience for healthcare leaders to pause & connect You can also hit reply and just tell us what you'd love to see in an in-person half day retreat! Save the date! Now...

lillian emlet rebecca n. thompson transforming healthcare coaching podcast

Hello Reader, Held together: on carrying our stories into the room I’ve been thinking about what it means to show up whole. Not perfect, not unburdened, just whole. Meaning: the version of you that has been through something, learned from it, and hasn’t completely sealed it away behind a professional face. That’s the thread running through this week’s episode, and it’s one I keep returning to. Dr. Rebecca Thompson is a family medicine and public health physician in Portland, Oregon. She’s...

Podcast episode 116: Natalie Holder, Esq., on exclusion and belonging in healthcare leadership

Hello Reader, Natalie Holder's grandmother almost died in a waiting room. She'd come in with sepsis. But the physician that day was overwhelmed, took one look — older, an immigrant, not obviously "important" — and decided, without really deciding, that she could wait. She nearly didn't survive it. Later, that doctor called to apologize. Natalie's mother, a nurse who knew the system well enough to fight for a bed, said something I haven't stopped thinking about: "You did not see your patient....

Hello Reader, Difference is a design feature, not a defect I keep meeting leaders who are exhausted by a very particular kind of effort: the work of getting everyone on a team to just get along. Get the disagreement to settle. Get everyone rowing the same direction. Then, finally, do the real work. I understand the pull. When you are short on people and time, friction feels like the thing standing between you and getting it done. But the personality differences you are working so hard to...

why are patients not listening helene thierault

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...

rana awdish on why doctors can't heal themselves new book after shock

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...