Our brains naturally focus on the negatives and when we are stressed, that is even more true.  Gratefulness practices help us right-size it. 

Have a joy-filled week! Tonya

Now is a great time to see how I partner with family medicine residency programs to help physicians enjoy their chosen careers. Learn more here. 

Begin recognizing your automatic stories that include fact and assumptions. This creates room for you to break common thought distortions. And shift your perspective towards one that serves you better. 

Have a joy-filled month - Tonya

Our Individual Physician Coaching Course walks you through detailed steps of ditching of how our thoughts work. You learn how to decrease unnecessary suffering, protecting and increasing your energy, and fostering your ideal future. 

Let’s explore external validation. I believe it’s an important topic since it, along with unhealthy perfectionism and a couple of other issues, played a role in my burnout story. Residents, and faculty alike, often fall prey to an unhealthy desire for others' approval.

The satisfaction of external validation is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. It’s a natural occurrence with some adaptive consequences historically.  Wanting to belong and a desire for external validation go hand-in-hand. Th...

Oh, the elusive yet promising search for work-life balance. I hear people say it's not possible. I listen to others proclaim it is absolutely possible.  Once I found a few different ways to view it – I learned I lean more toward the latter camp than the former.  I offer you the three ways of viewing it that have helped me.  Two of which appear in my brain as novel thoughts (though it's possible it's not original – my brain is funny that way) and one which I re-package from a thought-leader from ...

I first heard this great concept of developing your own personal board of directors from Dr. Sasha Shillcutt, who accomplishes more than most people on any given day. If you think of your life as an extraordinary company that can impact the world – and you as its CEO, great benefit can be uncovered by developing your own board of directors that help guide you forward to thrive.

When I had the opportunity, early in my career, to help develop and become the medical director for a clinic servin...

Listen Here as Dr. Woo-Ming and I discuss why it's essential that residency programs have coaching. 

This weekend, while I am cultivating friendships and life skills at the Brave Enough Conference (all of us vaccinated and masked), I decided to model protecting my rejuvenation time and take a week off from writing. I pulled from my favorites in the archives. 

Who doesn't love a good story?  Well, it really depends on the story, right?  Many of us make up stories in our heads and believe them.  I like to think of these narratives as massive Lego buildings – like skyscrapers or elaborate mansion...

Friendships are important in life. It's natural that the nature of our work sets some obstacles in place to those friendships. This month's blog discusses the secret of cultivating and maintaining those friendships - intentionality and creativity. 

Have a joy-filled, friendship-cultivating month! Tonya

Residency programs can benefit from our Flagship 6-week hybrid coaching course for resident or faculty groups. Learn more here https://www.joyinfamilymedicine.com/residency-programs

Today, we are talking about boundaries. Boundaries are the next natural thing to explore once we have started letting go of manuals for other people (see last week’s blog). Our brains like to worry that if we let go of all the spoken and unspoken rules for everyone and every situation, we will be taken advantage of (ironically – no matter how many manuals/rules we have, we actually have no control of others).  So, what protections are in place that we have control over? Boundaries!

Boundarie...

Today, we are talking about manuals. You've likely not heard of this concept, but stick with me, and you'll understand.  We know stressors are everywhere in medicine and, sometimes, we have more control than we realize in improving our experience.

Here's a scenario. Let's say you are checking your inbox before clinic starts, and you see a refill request with a lengthy explanation of why it's needed early. But you had only seen the patient once 18 months ago. They have seen your partner twice...