I sit beside my mother in her close room, the shades drawn against the August heat in Minneapolis. Outside, I know the lake is glistening. Birds are resting.

She is comfortably reclined in her Cadillac of a wheel chair that she got as soon as she began losing enough weight to trigger hospice care.

She is wisp of her former body. Light as a feather.

When I was a young girl, I used to sit beside her while she read

I’ve done some weird things in my life.

How weird?

Boundary-pushing, assumption-challenging weird.

When you’re a physician, seeking support is a radical act.

The barriers are both internal and external.

The culture, business and regulation of medicine are to blame externally, while there are internal attitudes that also make asking for help difficult for physicians…

15 years ago, Marco was hit by a drunk driver.

You cannot tell by looking at him. But it changed him forever.

“I am a student of fear,” he says matter-of-factly.

Successful in his industry — one that is based on keeping information secure — Marco has found himself at a standstill. Stalled out.

He’s come to me to help him ignite the fire of inspiration again.

Many years ago, when my husband was an intern at Cook County Medical Center in Chicago, he called to let me he’d be home in 23 minutes.

That’s what he said.

He liked to use exact numbers like that, as if the specificity would some how make it true; that this exactness would ensure that he really did have some control over his life.

But it would not be 23 minutes. Nor even 30.

• Are you looking for guarantees or promises from a coach that you would never give your patients?

• Are you really in the market for a therapist rather than a life coach — someone to address mental health issues, like depression or anxiety from a clinical perspective?

• Are you in the market for a consultant — someone to give you advice or tell you what to do?

• Are you looking for an accountability buddy? Someone to only hold you to your word?

Dr. Dominic Corrigan appeared to have it all.

He’d wanted to be a doctor since he was young.

So he worked hard, got the right results for med school, took out a loan and did what it took to realize his dream.

“I was high functioning, upwardly mobile, respected specialist leading a department, doing international research, sitting on charity boards and the PTA,” says Corrigan — a pseudonym for the founder of Physicians Anonymous, an international doctors-for-doctors support platform.

Raising this young woman has taught me everything about being a coach. But not the way you’d think..

From the moment she was born, coming down the birth canal into the light, my daughter has called me forth.

Not to be her savior, or to take credit as her creator — who people become is too mysterious and wild for one mom to take credit (or blame) for all that.

There was a moment where the cord was wrapped around her neck. Every time I pushed, it tightened. I could see her heart rate directly effected by this on the monitor.

Swearing Makes it Real — @*$# yes!

There’s no delicate way to ask. So I just blurt out the question.

You don’t like a lot of hand gestures.

You have a problem with whole-hearted laughter.

You think one must have an M.D. or a D.O. to understand a doctor's life.

You believe change is an outside job.

You think change will take years.

You think change will be instantaneous.

You’re looking for someone to tell you what to do…

When I first learned that my son was in jail, I cheered.

It was five days after I’d seen him, wild-eyed, head shaved, emaciated. He was 23 years old.

We’d just had a cup of coffee at Starbucks where he’d been contrite about the latest brush with the police. Just five minutes later, he was sitting in my car on the passenger side, no longer sorry.

Kouros Farro MD, MBA, FAAFP knows how to survive.

Farro escaped Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in the early 1980s, walked across the border to Turkey, where he slept on the street, stealing food for months; then he lightened his hair, obtained a Danish passport and defected to Germany.

He knows perseverance.

So, this January, when Kouros left his job as a primary care physician with the largest urgent care in his town, it was not as a quitter.

It was in protest.

Rushing to stay on time.

Trying to get caught up on your notes so you can return to less work in the morning.

Missing your family.

Worrying about patients.

Praying you don’t get called.

Jumping in full-heartedly when you do.

I went to see my mother in memory care this week.

She is not well.

The nurse was feeding her and upon seeing me, he quickly turned the task over to me — as if I wanted to spoon feed my mother. I took his seat.

“Hi, mom,” I said in my best sing-songy voice, reserved for children and her.

1. I’ve been married twice.

2. My fear of being alone taught me to love my own company.

3. I forgive myself. Again and again.

4. That’s when I found my life partner.

5. Raising children taught me the most important things about being a coach and an entrepreneur.

6. Being with my mother in her Alzheimer’s disease has taught me how to listen to silence.

For 27 years, Rob Olson, MD lived the rewards and the constant stress of being an OBGYN solo practitioner, pulled between family and work; and between the clinic and hospital. “You’re feeling guilty that you’re not with your family or

If you’re like me — though I’ve devoted my life to it — your eyes glaze over when you read the little hyphenated phrase, self-care. Meaning everything from a bubble bath to psychotherapy, or a vacation to the Bahamas, it started in the yoga/therapy/spa community and has naturally permeated the medical world as an antidote to burnout which, by many accounts, is at an all-time high.

“You cannot pour from an empty cup,” says Jeevan Sekhar MD, who is boarded in four medical specialties. “It took me a while to internalize this concept.”

Yet, physicians try to do the impossible, day after day. It’s as if they, the purveyors of medical science, are themselves somehow impervious to the laws of that same science.

So why don’t more physicians prioritize their own self-care?

When people we love are hurting, just listening seems fruitless. But think about what you want most in the world. So many physicians tell me they yearn to come home to a partner who understands them. This is, in fact, what we all want. Even your patients — especially when they cannot be fixed — want to be heard and seen. Indeed, studies have shown that the best patient outcomes happen when doctors listen without judgement, even if there is no medical cure for what ails them.

Our greatest teachers are those we cannot fix.

Hint: I am not your buddy. I am not your colleague.

I am not a doctor. That is your expertise.

Mine expertise is life. Not because I am living it perfectly, but because it is my life’s work to help you live as fully and truly as you can — as a doctor and most importantly, as a human being.