Latest Posts

Doctors celebrate the value of having a Professional Coach

Being in a room where doctors are openly celebrating the value of having a professional coach is a novel experience for me. We had the pleasure in March of attending the Creative Careers in Medicine Conference. A gathering of medical creatives and curiosos. The speakers were inspiring and really showcased a breadth and depth of […]

Is there an archetypal doctor mindset?

Your mindset has an impact on your experience and your results, because it affects what you notice. In a continuous feedback loop, what you notice can get narrower and narrower, if you live in the red zone of fight-flight, sympathetic dominance as many doctors do.  In this mindset, a stressed state, your body produces cortisol, […]

Personal Agency is Key to Individual Wellbeing and to Organisational Change

According to the Stanford WellMD model of healthcare, healthcare worker well being1 is achieved from 20% personal resilience and 80% organisational responsibility (changing systems and structures in the workplace). The Stanford research is impressive and guides a great deal of our work. It’s impact in helping healthcare organisations to get serious about their responsibilities to […]

Medicine is an inexact science.

Researchers and clinicians work hard to bring evidence to the table, to notice and measure patterns, to share information in the service of everyone. And medicine has done an extraordinary job of this. For example:   🌱Average global life expectancy has more than doubled   🌱Child mortality and maternal mortality rates are lower  🌱We are […]

Why doctors and coaches need to retreat for balance

In retreat, in the quiet, we can listen for our true selves and reconnect to our own meaning. The world is incredibly noisy. There is so much junk to sift through. I find it tricky to work out what to attend to, what to read, listen to, watch. Is it just me? Doctors in the […]

Compassionate Care Competencies need our attention

Bedside manner and communication skills are the ‘tip of the compassion iceberg’ according to Dominic O. Vachon. In the big machine that is modern day healthcare, we have prioritised throughput, technical wizardry and the financial bottom line. In other words, we still talk a lot about compassion, but we are not walking the talk often […]

I see you, tell me what you truly need

  Being seen is the foundation of wellbeing AND therefore the foundation of high performance. Before 2011 I said things like ‘as long as the surgeon is skilled and competent, we don’t care about the rest’. Let me be clear I was talking about his technical, surgical skills. I was wrong in two important ways. […]

The Well-Being Index Partner

What does make a difference to doctor wellbeing and performance? We are interested in how coaching can alter doctor wellbeing and performance. So we are constantly seeking ways to measure the impact of our work.We are really delighted to be partnering with Beamtree who offer the Well-Being Index (WBI) to healthcare workers in Australia and […]

Love in Medicine

Love has a place in medicine and the care is so much better July is perhaps the most sacred time of the year for me. A time to slow down, reflect, remember. To pause and honour, to walk and write. In the space of a quieter pace and the dark, I have found myself immersed […]

It’s the system you say…

Systemic and structural changes are required within healthcare.   It’s the system you say. I agree there are systemic and structural changes required within healthcare. Who is in charge of these systems? Who can orchestrate the changes? Who has the power and capacity to change them so that doctors’ lives can be enhanced by their […]

Coaching is often described as counter-cutural

It is designed to create new thinking, to widen the field of vision we are working in. The work I do in medicine coaching, facilitating workshops and speaking, is sometimes described as counter-cultural. I am curious about the doctor’s experience of our conversation or what they are hearing from me. I often ask medics to […]

It’s meaningful because I choose it

The Joy of missing out… Recently I was in the slow lane, immersed in nature and gentle silence for five days – such luxury!There is no accident in such an arrangement. I chose to prioritise and organise so that I could step out of my habituated life, out of the hustle and bustle. In order […]