When I bring up feelings and emotions with residents, I can almost sense the suppressed cringe.  It’s actually very easy for me to imagine it, since I had that very same cringe whenever one of our didactics was on, let’s say, ‘softer topics.’  As a resident, I was there to learn straight up clinical medicine - not touchy-feely things. 

It’s actually really interesting that it’s common among physicians to equate emotions with touchy-feely.  There’s a wide range of emotions present in everyday...

Can we talk about all things feedback? Feedback can be beneficial for doctors to gain awareness of strengths and opportunities for improvement.  As physicians who went through innumerable tests and critiques before and during medical school, we can fall into some unhealthy patterns around evaluations throughout training and in ongoing board certification and quality measures.  The impact of any feedback actually depends not only on the methods and the giver but on how it’s received. 

Thankfu...

How many of you in residency feel (felt) that perfection is (was) your standard?  Do you recognize the sensation of defeat or inadequacy when you realize you didn’t execute something flawlessly? Do any of you ruminate on constructive feedback as evidence of failure? For those who are parents, do you always feel less than? Maybe you can glean a couple of small tips from my past growth lessons. (I like that word better than failures).

As a married resident with 2 children and a husband who was...

Let’s talk guilt.  Many in medicine excel in this emotion, especially residents. Mom guilt. Partner guilt. Friend guilt. Doctor guilt.  Food guilt. Work-out guilt. It stems from a couple of places. 

One root is that many of us high achievers are wracked with unhealthy perfectionism.  We want to be perfect as a physician – and for family medicine, that means cradle to grave, inpatient, outpatient, prenatal care and labor and delivery, rural and urban.  We want to be perfect as a friend, partn...

(Updated to point you toward a blog series that gives much more detail about physician coaching, evidence, methods, and much more. You can check it out here). 

Coaching has been around in other fields for decades. Leaders in the C-suites of large corporations have long since used coaching to keep up their A-game. And though a small subset of physicians has found the benefits of coaching over the years, it was only in the last 5 years that data has been published about physician coaching's benef...