Blog

1. Acceptance is not acquiescence

2. Courage is an act of love

3. Self compassion is the seed for everything

4. Happiness is your birthright

I am not going to tell you how to be a better doctor (or banker or lawyer).

I am not going to give you fancy career assessments.

I am not going to tell you how to get your next job.

I'm not going to advise you to retire or not retire.

But 9 out of 10 times, people hire me to help them with their jobs.

This is a true story about a doctor who lost almost everything to his mistress.

Dr. Van Winkle, a pseudonym, loved his medical career with a passion.

Medicine was an all-consuming lover -- sometimes harsh, and always exciting.

1. You berate yourself for years ago not marrying the woman you now think was "the one".

2. You believe you would have been happier if you'd said...No to the money, yes to the other job, stayed in the other city, etc.

Ted, a physician, was terrified.

He felt he might fall off the edge of the earth, if he did what was expected of him.

There was a steady drumbeat of pressure, expectation.

He’s 67, after all.

1. You feel stuck

2. Everything is humming along, but a spark is missing.

1. How to listen with my eyes.

2. How to listen with my heart.

I didn’t know how bad it was.

Not until the grocery store clerk yelled at me.

I’d asked him several times to repeat the total. But each time he turned away from me so I couldn’t see his face.

Then he shouted it at me.

1. You stayed up late arguing with your spouse about your long hours and how the kids miss you. A patient tells you you look tired. But you don't tell anyone — certainly not patients — what you're struggling with at home.

1.     Abbreviating or eliminating your morning self-care routine

2.     Scrolling on your phone at night

3.     Nighttime binge watching

Stuck.

Stuck at work. Stuck on a call. Stuck in a meeting.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard this over the years.

The sound of doctor’s not being in control of their daily lives.

Small stuck-ness that can and often does eventually translate to something much bigger and more entrenched: Stuck in life.

Here’s true story of one physician who struggled with all three…

Aaron, an orthopedic surgeon, waited over a year to call me.

My ex-husband, a physician, was always late. And his patients loved him for it.

This was documented year after year on his patient evaluations. He was consistently one of the favorite physicians in his group.

There was a prize for patients who waited that is rare in today’s medical world: They got fully engaged physician, who seemed to have all the time in the world for their questions and concerns.

Being late and struggling to stay on time is the bane of being a physician.

1. I am not going to fix you. You’re not broken and I’m not a mechanic.

2. I do not have a plan for you.

"So much of my day-to-day struggle is battling against The Clock,” Norman, a physician tells me. “And by that I mean being told what to do, when to do it, how long I have, and even how to do it. There’s so little time to just be.”

Once the kids are in bed, he gets to do what he wants. Finally.

He can scroll on his phone, waste time any way he wants.

It’s a sort of rebellion against having so little autonomy over the rest of his day.

1. How he’d tell me a 6-hour night was a “good” night of sleep.

2. Or that he wasn’t tired, then falling asleep at the kids’ plays.

3. Never going to sleep or waking up together.

I have always hated swimming in cold water.

I am a strong swimmer, thanks to my mother, who never learned to swim, requiring that I take swimming lessons through Junior Life Savers.

But I was always freezing cold.

A little girl without body fat, my knees knocked, my teeth chattered as I sat hunched beneath my tiny no-nonsense towel on foggy Bay Area mornings to get into an unheated pool.

It became part of my identity: “I’m not a cold-water girl.”

I was a strong swimming who didn't really love the water.

But recently that story changed.

Wearing my red bathing suit, I waded into the Mediterranean Sea.

“Ever since I began praying before I go into each patient’s room,” Sanjana Tasneem Karim, MD told me, “I have not suffered from burnout.”

Did Karim really have to magic pill for physician burnout which, according to several studies, is at an all-time high?

I circle back to talk with the Georgetown-trained psychiatrist to find out.

She is Muslim. I am not affiliated with any religion, but carry the spirit of many. She is 21. I am 60. She is African. I am American. She is black. I am white.

Maimouna Diop and I met through LinkedIn. Or, more accurately, LinkedIn was the vehicle through which we connected.

Over thousands of miles, time zones, continents, oceans, cultures, a little voice told her that life coaching might be the answer for her troubles.

Her friends thought I might be trying to scam her. Why, they asked, would you want to tell this white lady across the world about your life?

For my part, I wondered, Why would this young woman — not a physician — from the west coast of Africa want to hire me as a life coach?

It turns out that everyone yearns, as some point in their lives, to transform, to be more, to lift up toward the light, to be their highest and best self.

I did not know what a “spirit animal” was in 1979.

And if I did, I would have scoffed at the very idea.

Even though I grew up in Berkeley, Calif., arguably the birth place of woo-woo, I was also raised to be a skeptic.

But sometimes you don’t know what you need until it’s right in front of you.

It turns out I needed a spirit animal that day.

I was 17, alone in the Sierra Nevada wilderness, my weight hovering around 100 pounds.

I hadn’t eaten in two days. I had one more to go.