Why I Coach Doctors

I am often asked, "Why do you coach doctors?"

I was married to one for 24 years. That’s the short answer.

The marriage did not work out, though we are great friends and consider each other family to this day.

Many marriages don't work out, but in our case and in many ways, medicine killed our marriage.

It was the mistress from the moment he came home not smelling of another woman's perfume, but of formaldehyde from anatomy class.

That was the beginning no only of training, but of indoctrination into a profession that is far more than that.

To be a good doctor is has to live in every cell, in your bones, in your heart.

To be a good doctor, medicine has to change you. And it does almost from Day 1.

As a young wife, with no physicians in the family, I had not idea that marrying my husband was marrying the profession and the culture of medicine too.

And yet, medicine wasn’t really my spouse. It was his. I couldn’t see her. But every day he not only went to see her, but lived with her at the hospital. She cried on his shoulder. He slept with her. Sometimes more than he slept with me.

She was always there. The scent of her clung to his clothes in the form of grief and frustration and, on good days, joy.

I desperately wanted to know her. She was consuming my husband, after all. What was it that occupied his mind and heart? I begged for stories. I’ve always loved stories and believe they are the bridge between people, the way we see our common humanity.

I believe the telling and the listening is a healing exchange; a powerful way of being heard and seen. The way to compassion.

But he was tired.

By the time he got home to us, he was wrung out. He squeezed a bit out for our dog, got down on her level and talked to her in the sweetest voice. I was jealous. And then ashamed that I was jealous of my dog.

We were both so deeply lonely. We moved around each other in the house, unable to bridge the chasm between hospital and home. I was raising our kids and he would try to fit into a family structure that had been largely formed in his absence.

In loneliness there is longing.

I longed to learn about myself, what my heart was crying out for, what my purpose was – beyond waiting for my exhausted husband to finally come home and join the fold of our human family.

I began therapy, meditation and eventually coaching. I consumed self-help books, wrote like an emotional archeologist, digging and digging for the essence, the truth.

He could see that I was changing and we both saw that if he didn’t somehow learn about his own heart, too, we would not last. I was leaving him behind, transforming in my discovery of who I was – a very different person than I was when I married him at the age of 22.

Years later, I see that we both paid the price for his dedication to medicine.

While I had the luxury of trying to figure out who I was, he was practicing medicine. He was healing others, not himself. That level of dedication can stunt emotional growth.

The honor of coaching doctors for me is that I get to circle back, touch those lives that struggle with the mistress of medicine with the compassion that comes from having suffered myself as the spouse of a doctor.

But there was a love child to that complex relationship: Coaching physicians.

To help physicians know themselves is to not only help them be better doctors, but to help them really come home to their lives, their people outside of the clinic; to come home to themselves.