Doctors are sharing the benefits of their coaching with each other
As a Professional Coach working outside the subsystem where my doctor clients work, as an external coach, there are many challenges. Internal coaches working inside medicine have their own challenges too. This is a note about my personal experience and is not a comment on anyone else coaching doctors.
I have been offering coaching services specifically to doctors for over 13 years. I was the first coach in Australasia to provide a specialist coaching practice for doctors only. My clients are individual doctors, there are no third parties in the contract as a general rule (with a couple of notable exceptions for their rarity). They live and work in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, in the main.
In the corporate world this direct contracting is less often the case. Mostly in corporate environments (and in the C-Suite of health too) the employer offers coaching to their staff from about middle leadership up. Those coaches are often external providers who have a contract describing a relationship with the employer, and with their coachee (the individual employee working with the coach). The goals of the coaching are two fold, including organisational goals for their employee, and the employee’s own goals. There is a triangulated relationship.
Over the past 13 years, I have delivered workshops and presented at conferences for many medical colleges. Each one with the intention to educate doctors about what coaching is and how it can help them in their work and their wellbeing. These have been well received and usually resulted in a few new individual clients.
I have also hoped that the medical Colleges might adopt a more systemic approach to coaching as part of what they encourage their trainees and members to do because the benefits are very clear on a performance and wellbeing basis. I have come scintillatingly close several times, only to find that the person I am in relationship with is leaving the college. One of the consequences of this college staff churn, is that the hope of systemically embedding coaching into what doctors do and have access to, vanishes or is delayed by a couple of YEARS!
Over the years we have also sought to talk about coaching with employers of doctors. This has been a dead end in every respect, with Chief Medical Officers, HR and L&D, with CEOs. Most are polite, some have accepted my book, none have been curious about collaborating on a coaching pilot. A couple of hospitals have coaching panels. We are privileged to be listed, however we have absolutely no feedback about if any doctors know these lists exist or how often the coaches are recommended. And certainly no idea of whether the hospital is collecting feedback from their staff about how they experienced coaching. It’s a vortex when it comes to informing the development of coaching for clinicians.
In 2025 we at last had the privilege of collaborating with a hospital department. Five coaches, 10% of the department’s doctors, one curious HoD. Together we wanted to know what happens when multiple doctors are knowingly having individual coaching at the same time? Does coaching become more “normal”, are other doctors curious about coaching, do those having coaching talk about it to their colleagues? Does anything change in the system that is noticeable, beyond the individuals?
It’s too early to tell yet and we cannot tell you all the details and protect confidentiality which is our most important commitment. What we can say is that other doctors in that department (system) have inquired about coaching, some intend to have more coaching because of the value it added and a couple have taken action with other services that they had been avoiding but recognised their importance during coaching.
And one other curious thing has started to happen in 2026. Doctors are arriving to have a discovery call with me saying “I know you coach Dr XYZ so I wondered if we might also work together.”
Doctors are recognising the value of coaching and benefiting from the work they are doing with their coaches. Frustratingly the systems they work in, their leaders – employers and colleges, do not yet appear to. Thank fully doctors continue to take action for their benefit and are now openly sharing what they have discovered with each other.
Start by booking a call or sending me an email and let’s talk about how you or your team can experience the value and impact of professional coaching.
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Sharee Johnson’s book The Thriving Doctor is available in all good bookstores or online.
Sharee has been coaching doctors since 2014, find out more about her work
