Replaceable thoughts and essential books to help you survive burnout [PODCAST]

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“If you don’t ask for something you want, then you have already accepted the answer of no. Go ahead and ask for what you want and need. You may not get it this time but ask again in the future.

We will change health care eventually. In the meantime, you can change your thoughts today. Reach out if I can help. Reach out to many resources on the internet, Facebook, your community. You are not alone.”

Dawn Sears is a gastroenterologist and can be reached on Twitter @GutGirlMD, YouTube, and at GutGirlMD Consulting.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “10 replaceable thoughts (and 15 books) to help you survive burnout.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today we welcome back on the show Dawn Sears. She is a gastroenterologist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “10 replaceable thoughts (and 15 books) to help you survive burnout.” Dawn, welcome back to the show.

Dawn Sears: Thanks so much for having me again, Kevin, and thanks for all your hard work.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but for those who didn’t get a chance to listen to our first episode, can you briefly tell the audience about your story and journey to where you are today?

Dawn Sears: So I’m a gastroenterologist, and I recently left my institution of 20-plus years due to burnout. I’ve taken a three-month sabbatical, which has been amazing. I’ve been producing things. I’ve written three articles for KevinMD. I’ve produced YouTube videos, a YouTube channel, LinkedIn blogs, other things, manuscripts, and a couple other well-being grants. And I’ve rested. I’ve gone out to lunch with friends, I’ve traveled, I’ve gardened, and I’ve just breathed. It’s been amazing.

Meanwhile, I also got a lot of coaching in the last six months, and I went ahead and got certified myself as an executive coach. Now I’m coaching colleagues and friends all over the world, trying to help us all survive burnout, and it has been amazing.

Kevin Pho: As you know, with the statistics on physician burnout, the number is about 50 percent, and who knows how high that number will go, even after the pandemic. Tell me about your introduction to coaching and how you got involved with, in fact, being a coach, because that’s a concept that a lot of physicians are just coming to terms with.

Dawn Sears: Absolutely, it’s a great question, because with coaching, I didn’t really understand what it was either. I think about Tiger Woods having a coach, I think about Andre Agassi having a coach, I think about athletes having coaches. And then I heard a little bit about some coaching in physician realms, about being a better gastroenterologist in my field, or a cardiologist, things like that. But actually coaching on mindset and stress and life-work balance and all of these things, it sounded like another well-being retreat to me, and I was not interested. I said, “I don’t need coaching. I know I just need to reframe things and think better.”

When I actually participated in it, I went, “Oh my gosh, there are so many wrong thoughts going through my head that are hurting me.” And then I learned about suffering: Suffering is pain amplified by resistance, and resistance is when we question reality and we fight with reality and say, “Well, gosh, you know, this is unfair that I have so many patients on my schedule,” or “unfair that I was given this task,” or “not given credit for this,” or “treated in this way.” And we can just drive ourselves crazy, or we can reframe.

So coaching through that, I learned that I have control over my thoughts, and other people have control over their thoughts and their words and their actions, and I no longer needed to let their words result in my behavior and my emotions and my words. So I really took charge of myself, my life, and my emotions, and it changed everything for me.

And now I’m able to engage with other physicians, nurses, and executives to help them reframe, especially right now, as we feel burnt out, stuck, and hopeless. At the end of conversations, often the person I’m coaching no longer feels like their only option is to quit. At the beginning of the conversation, that is where they start. So before you quit your job, I highly recommend you just experience some coaching. What have you got to lose? You could gain your whole career. Your whole life, your whole outlook could be different.

Kevin Pho: When should physicians consider coaches? Is it only at a point where they’re thinking of leaving their jobs? Can they consider coaches earlier on in their careers?

Dawn Sears: Absolutely, much earlier. Great question. So I would recommend it definitely before you actually resign. I would get coaching, but long before that. And many of my colleagues are working together with medical schools to incorporate coaching as soon as you enter medical school or nursing school or PA school or any other advanced degree, where you’re going to be in this really uncontrolled, toxic environment. You feel so out of control, but you’re given all these tools to care, and yet you can’t implement them. And there’s this disconnect and this frustration: “I want to be able to do this, but I can’t because of insurance or policy or whatever.”

So now the new thought process is to normalize coaching, that all of us should have a coach. Just like when you enter the NBA or the NFL, you automatically get multiple coaches, and you get specific coaches for specific areas of your life. So many of us have money coaches, parenting coaches, and relationship coaches, as well as business coaches and life coaching.

My passion is executive coaching, because I want to empower the leaders to be able to lead in a way that they feel is authentic, and so that they are meeting their outcomes and engaging those that they are leading at the time. Because leadership is so lonely: The further up you go, the fewer people really understand and kind of get you. And if you have a coach, that’s a safe place to bounce ideas and strategies off of, which is so much fun, to see those light bulb moments and see people realize they do have the answers. They just weren’t giving themselves permission to do it.

Kevin Pho: Another question I get is contrasting coaching with counseling. A lot of physicians don’t quite know what the difference is. So in your view, what is the difference between coaching and counseling?

Dawn Sears: Yeah, counseling is going with my advice. That’s more of a mentorship kind of thing, or even advocacy: my experience, my connections, what I would suggest you do. Coaching is not that at all. Coaching is that you already have the answer within you, for instance, Kevin, and saying, “What are the possibilities that you are thinking about but not giving yourself permission to do?” So it’s pulling the answers out of you, and at the end of the conversation, you’re the hero.

I am simply a tour guide through your mind, through your thought process, through your problem. And I can help you reframe if you get caught down a rabbit trail here, a rabbit trail there, and say, “No, no, I think you said this is the problem you want to solve. We can think about these other thoughts or options, but this is where you are.” So we’re really tour guides getting you closer to your answer and to your desire, not my desire for you, which is what we can get otherwise if we’re in counseling or in another relationship.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s transition into the KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “10 replaceable thoughts (and 15 books) to help you survive burnout.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Dawn Sears: Yeah, the further I was getting into coaching, I was seeing that this is in so many great works of literacy out there, and in leadership books. So the first one is Carol Dweck’s Mindset, talking about how we can think about all the different options, and we’re not necessarily stuck in the first one that we pick up. So this one was paramount, and for those that are looking at actually changing, neuroplasticity, and changing the old habits and the old thought processes, “He’s always a jerk, it’ll always be that way,” to other possibilities, it is a great place to start.

And then the common complaint I hear in coaching: “I hate my job.” Well, we’ve got to remember why we did our job. So Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom, an old book that I found. I actually read this back in medical school, when I pulled out the brochure that I had stuck in there for another meeting at the same time. And of course Simon Sinek, Start With Why. Why did you become a physician in the first place? Why did you become a nurse? Why did you become a PA? When you get back to that, that can reframe you: You probably don’t really hate your job. You probably don’t hate curing cancer or setting people free from addiction, but you’re just frustrated with the system.

And then The One Thing by Gary Keller, to talk about getting one thing done every day. That gave me the power to put a sticky note on my door to say, “I’m on a telephone conference.” It may or may not have been, but then it allowed me to write that email that was poisoning me, that was frustrating me, and giving yourself permission to get that done.

“I feel so alone” is an incorrect thought that we have. We’re literally surrounded by so many people, but we don’t realize that they’re there. I was just counseling a friend recently, and he said, “Well, I want men in my life who can do this, this, and this.” I said, “OK, who are the men in your life right now?” He’s like, “Oh,” and he named six. And I said, “Guess what? You already have your team.” And so it’s giving yourself self-compassion to realize that you already have so many blessings around you. You just may not have noticed them.

The next thought: “Everyone’s taking advantage of me.” Especially women, we constantly feel like we’re serving, serving, serving, and that people are taking advantage of us. But if we do the hard work, like Katie Byron’s The Work, where we say, “Is it true? Is there really nobody helping you? Is it absolutely true?” “Well, no, people offer to help, but they don’t do it the way I want to.” And then, if it’s true, so what? “Well, they can help or not help.” And then, what if the opposite is true? “Oh my goodness, all these people want to help me, but I keep telling them no.” And then once you reframe that for all your areas of frustration, you can be so full of gratefulness and no longer feel that anyone’s taking advantage of you. And then of course there’s Brené Brown’s The Gift of Imperfection: just showing gratitude, just sending an email to somebody, “Thank you for being there during the pandemic. Thank you for understanding me.”

And then, “I feel unappreciated.” We go back to the classic Townsend and Cloud, Boundaries. I forgot that on audiobook; I listen to that at least three times a year, and I have to remind myself of the boundaries I need to have with family or friends or patients. “I don’t have enough time in the day”: Atomic Habits will change your life one degree at a time. One degree, and you’ll end up in a different place six months from now, which is so fun. So I go through a bunch of these other books.

And then one of my last ones I just want to highlight at the end is The Gift, and this one is by Edith Eger, as well as Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning. These are both Holocaust survivors. When we talk about “I feel trapped” or “I have no control,” when you read the story of Holocaust survivors who are looking at a blade of grass and deciding, “I can eat it or not,” in the middle of cannibalism, you realize we always have a choice. And so it’s resetting our mind to that, and coaching can open up those possibilities. So in the meantime, before you hire your coach, here are some books and here are some thoughts that you can reframe, and that’s why I wrote the article.

Kevin Pho: So what are some common scenarios that physicians have when they come to you, or that you’ve seen in your colleagues? You’ve provided so many statements that are said to physicians. You provided so many resources. What would you say are the top one or two that physicians typically feel?

Dawn Sears: “I feel overwhelmed” and “I feel stuck.” Those are the two absolute most prevalent thoughts. And so it’s walking them through: What are you really overwhelmed with? Is it real, or is it in your mind? And usually it’s in their minds. And then it’s setting them free from their own personal expectations. We have these personal expectations of perfectionism, which is why we stay in the office or after hours charting until 9 p.m. “We need to have that perfect note.”

Who says you need to have that perfect note? Because the payers say you just have to meet these minimum criteria. What would happen if you met the minimum criteria? “Well, then I’d get off the bad girl or bad boy list for not filling out my charts, not completing them.” I said, “How would that feel?” “That would feel amazing. I would no longer feel overwhelmed.” I said, “Well, tomorrow, why don’t you do it? Deliver a B-plus note instead of an A-plus note. I give you permission, because nobody’s grading it except you.” And when they realize that, those light bulbs go off, and then I get text messages the next day saying, “Guess who is home by five o’clock, cooking dinner with the kids,” or whatever.

And then, “I feel stuck.” We’re able to walk through: What are your real options? You can absolutely quit your job tomorrow. That is an option for you. And how will you make money? Are you going to be homeless? Odds are low. You have an MD. You can get creative. And going through just the idea of possibilities, then they go, “Oh, my job’s not so bad. I do love it.” And we try to make it even better, so that they thrive, their patients thrive, and their colleagues thrive during their time at their job. And it’s so fun, so fun.

Kevin Pho: So in the typical physician cases that you see, those doctors who do go to coaching in general, how long does it normally take for them to change their mindset, to one of these examples that you cite?

Dawn Sears: Yeah, it’s so great to ask that question. It depends on, you know, how solid they are, and of course where they are. In certain specialties, surgeons might be a little bit more stuck for a minute, and they really want to be coached by other physicians. So we’ve got other people in HR and others, counseling psychologists that want to get into counseling, but a lot of time is spent explaining how we’re different. We’re unicorns; our stress is different. So if you get coached by someone in your similar specialty, I find that we get to the answer a lot faster, because there’s not as much time explaining and validating your experience.

And I’ve seen it transform in as little as two sessions. With most of the people that I work with, that’s when we start the transformation, but it’s solid within three to six months. And they are literally new beings: new people, new spouses, new parents, new friends, and new physicians. They are a new being that is a light in the world, and it is just amazing. And I hate that I was so ignorant about coaching for so much of my life. I wish it would have been there during other major transitions in my life. And during COVID, as we emerge out of COVID and find that new reality, it’s a great time to get coached, as in: Who do you want to be for the next decade?

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Dawn Sears. She is a gastroenterologist, and she wrote the KevinMD article “10 replaceable thoughts (and 15 books) to help you survive burnout.” Dawn, I’m going to take even a step further back. So how does a physician decide to look for a coach, and what are some of the traits that physicians should look for in that particular coach to ensure that’s the right match?

Dawn Sears: Yeah, most coaches have free discovery sessions. And so for myself, I had probably five discovery sessions with different coaches that had different specialties. I was trying to decide, well, really, do I want a life coach? Do I want a career coach? Do I want a family coach? And doing each of those five segments, I was able to discuss what was valuable to me, what was most important to me. And for me, it was my personal growth, becoming my authentic self, things like that. For others of my clients, it has been respecting their religion, respecting their heritage, their family background, their cultural backgrounds.

So you’ll find out what’s important to you, and you’ll be able to interview the coaches, and they will also be interviewing you for a great fit. Nobody wants to have an agreement together with someone where you’re forcing each other into this. It’s a mutual relationship. And several of my initial interactions with my coaches, they are now my friends, and I still communicate with them regularly on a social basis, just bouncing ideas off of each other. Because people who go into coaching are the ultimate physicians. They really want to heal each other, and they’ve probably been traumatized themselves. They’ve been through a lot. And if you’re someone who’s been through suffering or some really bad things, you find out that other people who’ve been through suffering and bad things give you the most authentic, loving, encouraging advice and can really walk beside you.

So you can just Google coaches. I can send you different websites, but there are several: coachingforphysicians.com. There are directories and lists. There are lots of different ways people are certified as coaches. The Life Coach School does a lot of those. I’m going through the executive coaching certification, so I’m going through the International Coaching Federation and the board of coaching. So there are lots of different ways, if you’re into certifications and those kinds of things; you can go through those groups. There are a lot of different groups out on the internet, and Facebook groups, so you can find a great coach. But I highly recommend you interview four before you find your match. It’s kind of like dating: You don’t need to marry the first person you date.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Dawn Sears: That you don’t have to stay dysregulated, you don’t have to stay stuck, and you don’t have to stay frustrated. Just reach out and grab some help. A lot of us have been trained and are ready to help pull each other out of the pit and to make the house of medicine better. And my whole goal is to stop the hemorrhaging of women physicians. So if I can do that through coaching, and by getting my colleagues partnered up with coaching, let’s do it.

Kevin Pho: And how can people reach you?

Dawn Sears: They can reach me at GutGirlMD on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and my KevinMD author page. You can buy me at gutgirlconsulting.com, or you can email me, my name, Dawn Sears, at dawnsearsmd.com.

Kevin Pho: Dawn, thanks again for coming back on the show, and again, thanks for your insight.

Dawn Sears: Thanks so much, Kevin. I appreciate you so much. Take care.

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