On the Sustainable Clinical Medicine Podcast we are capturing the stories of physicians who have made clinical medicine sustainable in their own lives, including their before and after stories. I will also interview coaches who are helping Physicians create sustainable clinical medicine for themselves.
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She Moved Countries. The Charting Problem Followed | Episode 193
Monday, October 12, 2026 • Duration 47:22
Dr. Sarah Smith recently joined Dr. Andrea Austin on Heartline: Changemaking in Healthcare to talk about something that hits close to home for a lot of doctors: the charting problem that follows you no matter where you work, what system you're in, or what country you move to.
In this conversation, Dr. Smith shares practical emergency department charting strategies, her honest take on perfectionism and training trauma, and why the administrative burden is an "us problem, not a you problem."
This episode originally aired on Heartline: Changemaking in Healthcare, hosted by Dr. Andrea Austin, board-certified emergency doctor and doctor development coach. Visit andreaaustinmd.com to learn more.
Timestamped Highlights
[02:00]: Dr. Smith traces how she became interested in helping other doctors, starting with 15 years of working evenings and weekends before she finally figured out how to get home with the work done, and what it took to get there.
[07:00]: The emergency department gets specific attention here. Dr. Smith explains why doctors staying six hours after their shift is not a personal failing, and what it is actually costing the department.
[09:00]: A quick shift huddle at the start of every shift, done right, can reduce interruptions, improve teamwork, and set up the whole team to leave closer to on time. The logistics are simpler than you might think.
[11:00]: Real-time charting in a busy ED sounds impossible. Dr. Smith makes the case for why doing it imperfectly in the moment beats doing it perfectly at midnight.
[14:00]: C-minus. That is the charting standard Dr. Smith recommends when you are under pressure, and the reasoning behind it will resonate with anyone who has ever held their notes accountable to a voice from residency they do not even respect anymore.
[19:00]: Training trauma is real, and it shows up in documentation. Dr. Smith and Dr. Austin talk about the attendings, the fear of courtrooms, and the invisible audience doctors are still writing for years later.
[25:00]: What can a CMO or hospital leader actually do? Dr. Smith gives concrete, practical answers including one idea for how a department could restructure a shift to give doctors a protected hour to get caught up.
[31:00]: Dr. Smith lived and worked in both Australia and Canada, saw up to 40 patients a day across multiple practice settings, and was still working evenings and weekends in both countries. The problems followed her. What finally changed things was not the system; it was the skill set.
[39:00]: What does a sustainable clinical career actually look like? Dr. Smith closes with her own definition, and why the goal of leaving 10 minutes after the last patient once felt completely impossible.
Three Key Takeaways
1. The end-of-shift backlog is a system problem, not a personal one.
When doctors are staying six hours past their last patient to finish documentation, that is not a sign that those doctors are slow or disorganized. The electronic medical record was not designed for speed or ease, the click burden is heavy, and nobody hands clinicians the specific strategies to work differently inside it. Dr. Smith frames it plainly: this is an us problem, not a you problem, and that reframe matters because it puts the conversation where it belongs, at the level of the team and the department, not the individual.
2. Perfectionism around charting is often training trauma wearing a professional mask.
C-minus charting is not a shortcut. It is the right standard for a doctor who has not eaten in three hours, has a full waiting room, and knows something is coming through the door in five seconds. The reason so many doctors cannot let themselves chart to that standard is that they are still writing for an attending who intimidated them in residency, or bracing for a courtroom that is unlikely to ever materialize. Naming who you are imagining looking at your notes is one of the most practically useful things in this episode.
3. Moving countries does not fix the problem; changing your skill set does.
Dr. Smith left Australia for Canada and kept working evenings and weekends. Different system, different EMR, different patient volume structure, same problem. What changed things was not geography. It was learning a different way to interact with the system she was already in. For any doctor who is convinced their burnout is entirely environmental, this is worth sitting with: the system is broken, and it is also true that there is a skill set available that can make where you are right now more sustainable.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access program helping doctors get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support, and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Learn more at chartingcoach.ca/charting-champions
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don't forget to hit "follow" so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
The Research Is In! What 280 Doctors Proved About Physician Burnout | Episode 192
Monday, October 5, 2026 • Duration 32:37
Dr. Sarah Smith has always believed that getting home with the work of the day done was possible, and now there is published research to prove it. In this episode, she walks through the journal article that studied 280 Charting Champions members across a range of specialties and career stages, sharing exactly what the data found about hours spent charting outside clinical time, feelings of burnout and dread, and the number of patients doctors were still able to see. If you have ever wondered whether a coaching program can actually move the needle on physician administrative burden, or if you need something concrete to show your organization, this is the episode to send them.
Timestamped Highlights
[02:00]: Dr. Smith traces the origin of the Charting Champions program, not to a business plan, but to a very specific moment in her own clinical life when she realized she could not keep going the way she was going.
[09:00]: On a remote cabin with no internet, a pencil, and a pad of paper, Dr. Smith did something that would eventually reach hundreds of doctors worldwide, and the simplicity of how it started may surprise you.
[13:00]: Before the program even launched, Dr. Smith knew she would need to measure what it actually did, and the way she set that up created some unexpected challenges for her research team.
[16:00]: The study found something that most organizations will immediately ask about: does doing less charting after hours come at the cost of seeing fewer patients? The answer is significant.
[22:00]: The data on dread, burnout, and resignation ideation before and after Charting Champions are numbers worth knowing, especially if you are working inside a healthcare organization looking for interventions that actually hold up.
[28:00]: Dr. Smith closes with a direct message to doctors who want to bring this evidence to their employers, and where to find the full journal article and its reference list.
Three Key Takeaways
1. The study didn't just show improvement. It showed clinically significant improvement. Two hundred and eighty doctors completed both pre- and post-program surveys, and what they reported wasn't marginal. Charting outside clinical hours decreased significantly. Feelings of dread, burnout, and thoughts of resigning all dropped. And the proportion of doctors who frequently had their evenings and weekends free of paperwork nearly doubled, from 16 to 30 percent. The phrase "clinically significant" is precise here: this wasn't a feel-good survey, it was a longitudinal study that met the bar for meaningful change.
The Clinical Day Was Never Built With You in Mind | Episode 191
Monday, September 28, 2026 • Duration 35:12
This episode was originally published on Designing Healthcare That Cares, hosted by Dr. Laura Suttin. We are grateful to Dr. Suttin for the conversation and for permission to share it here.
Episode Summary
Nobody ever walked down the corridor and asked a doctor to see fewer patients today. Nobody ever offered to take half their inbox. The clinical day was not designed with the clinician in mind, and most doctors have spent their careers working inside that reality without ever stopping to question it.
In this episode, originally recorded for Designing Healthcare That Cares with Dr. Laura Suttin, Dr. Sarah Smith talks about what it actually looks like to start reclaiming your day from the inside, how to work with your team differently, what AI can and cannot do for your charting, and why noticing without judgment is always the first move.
What This Episode Covers
Why the clinical day was never designed with the doctor in mind, and what to do about it now
How to identify which inbox messages are not doctor work and get them off your plate permanently
What it looks like to work with your team at the highest level, and how to have that conversation without adding to their load
Why everything you say yes to in the room has a time consequence, and how to start navigating that
A practical and honest look at where AI scribing helps and where it quietly creates new problems
Why noticing without judgment is the foundation of every sustainable change in clinical medicine
How to batch staff questions, protect thinking time, and reduce the interruptions that drain executive function
Key Moment Worth Hearing
Dr. Smith describes discovering that the clinic nurse was spending over an hour a day booking ultrasound appointments, creating a bottleneck that delayed patient vitals and backed up the entire morning. One conversation redirected that work to the ultrasound clinic's own secretaries. The hour came back. That is the noticing piece in action.
Stop Saying Yes to Homework Inside the Consultation | Episode 190
Monday, September 21, 2026 • Duration 35:08
This episode was originally published on Vital Signs: Thriving as a Woman in Medicine, hosted by Dr. Diane Shannon. We are grateful to Dr. Shannon for the conversation and for permission to share it here.
Episode Summary
Every time a doctor opens their mouth in a consultation, they are either shortening or lengthening their day. That is the lens Dr. Sarah Smith brings to clinical communication, and in this episode, originally recorded for Vital Signs: Thriving as a Woman in Medicine with Dr. Diane Shannon, she applies it to everything from how you greet a patient to how you handle the person who walks in with 17 problems. The conversation is practical, honest, and built around a single idea: you are the captain of the ship, and there are more choices available to you than you may have realized.
What This Episode Covers
Why the way you communicate inside the consultation is one of the biggest drivers of after-hours work
The real cost of not having efficient patient communication, including financial costs most doctors do not track
Why saying yes to everything in the room means saying yes to homework
How to handle the patient with 17 problems without abandoning good care
Practical strategies for reducing interruptions, batching staff questions, and protecting thinking time
Why noticing without judgment is the first and most important step toward change
How small, incremental pivots compound into a very different clinical day
Key Moment Worth Hearing
Dr. Smith describes what happens when a patient walks in and fills the silence while you are still mid-thought about their diabetes management. Her response to that moment, warm, direct, and completely unapologetic, is one of the most useful things in this episode.
She Woke Up at 2AM to Chart. Here Is What She Did About It | Episode 189
Monday, September 14, 2026 • Duration 39:26
This episode was originally published on the Doctors Crossing Carpe Diem Podcast, hosted by Dr. Heather Fork. We are grateful to Dr. Fork for the conversation and for permission to share it here on the Sustainable Clinical Medicine Podcast.
Episode Summary
Dr. Sarah Smith spent the first 15 years of family medicine asking her mentors the same question: how do you do the paperwork part? The answer was always the same. Come in on Sundays. It was not until she was walking past the living room one evening, hearing her son talk about university, and realizing she was on her way to the computer again, that something shifted. In this episode, originally recorded for the Doctors Crossing Carpe Diem Podcast with Dr. Heather Fork, Dr. Smith talks about the moment everything changed, what she actually did differently, and what she now teaches doctors who are stuck in the same cycle she was.
What This Episode Covers
The moment Dr. Smith realized charting chaos was costing her more than just time
Why noticing your patterns without judgment is where change begins
How perfectionism and imposter syndrome slow charting down in ways most doctors never connect
Practical strategies for charting in real time and managing the clinical day more intentionally
How to reduce interruptions, set boundaries, and get notes done before the next patient
What good enough documentation actually looks like, and why it is more than enough
How AI is changing the charting landscape and where it still falls short
Key Moment Worth Hearing
Dr. Smith describes the preceptor she was unconsciously writing five-page notes for, years after training ended. When she realized who she was trying to please and what it was actually costing her, everything about her approach to documentation changed.
Conflict Resolution for Doctors: Why Conflict Is a Vital Sign, Not a Disease | Episode 188
Monday, September 7, 2026 • Duration 49:26
Most doctors were never taught how to handle conflict. They were taught to avoid it, outlast it, or hand it to someone else. Dr. Lee Sharma is a gynecologist who completed a master's degree in conflict resolution in the middle of a busy clinical career and discovered something that changed everything: it was not medicine she did not like. It was the unresolved conflict happening around it. In this episode, she introduces a reframe that shifts the entire conversation, treating conflict not as a disease to eliminate but as a vital sign to investigate, and makes the case that learning to do that is one of the most direct paths to a sustainable clinical career.
Six Timestamped Highlights
[04:00]: Dr. Sharma describes the Monday morning meetings where nobody said anything, the same problems plagued the practice for years, and what she now understands about what was actually happening in that room.
[13:00]: She introduces the vital sign reframe for conflict, and explains why thinking of conflict as a disease is the very reason most doctors run from it rather than move toward it.
[20:00]: The doctor who is 45 minutes behind, the patient who is furious, and the specific words that can shift that encounter without abandoning your boundaries or your dignity.
[26:00]: How to navigate conflict with administration when goals feel completely opposed, and the one place to start that makes every difficult conversation easier to have.
[36:00]: The direct line Dr. Sharma draws between unresolved conflict and burnout, and why closing the charts does not mean you have gone home if you are still replaying a conversation at 8pm.
[41:00]: What doctors are and are not responsible for when the system is the problem, and why learning to make that distinction clearly is one of the most important things a doctor can do for their own sustainability.
Three Key Takeaways
Therapy for Doctors: Why You Do Not Have to Be in Crisis to Ask for Help | Episode 187
Monday, August 31, 2026 • Duration 30:24
Most burnout conversations focus on systems, strategies, and workflow. And those things matter. But what happens when the inbox is clear, the charting is done, and something still feels wrong? Dr. Annia Raja is a clinical psychologist whose practice is almost entirely dedicated to serving doctors in therapy, and she sees this pattern regularly. The practical strategies work, until they reveal something underneath that the strategies were never going to reach.
In this episode, she talks about the deeper psychological dynamics that underpin burnout in medicine, why the traits that made someone an excellent doctor often have roots that go much further back than medical school, and why therapy does not have to wait for a crisis.
Timestamped Highlights
[05:00]: Dr. Raja describes what happens when a doctor finally clears their inbox and gets their clinical day under control, and why for some of them the relief they expected does not arrive.
[09:00]: She introduces the tangled ball of yarn as a more honest metaphor than the onion for understanding how medicine, personality, childhood, and relationships interweave in burnout, and what it means for how recovery actually works.
[12:00]: Why rest is not a destination you arrive at, and what she keeps finding in therapy when doctors finally create time away and discover they do not know what to do with it.
[16:00]: The ruminative pattern she sees most often in female doctors, where it comes from, and why telling someone to simply stop replaying an interaction is never going to work.
[20:00]: The real reason most doctors wait until crisis to seek therapy, including the specific fears around credentialing and licensing boards, and what has changed in the US that most doctors do not know about.
[26:00]: The difference between symptom-focused therapy and depth-oriented therapy, and why she makes a specific case for the latter with high-achieving doctors who have already tried every other fix.
Curiosity in Medical Leadership: Why Asking Questions Outperforms Having Answers | Episode 186
Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 32:52
Most doctors are trained to have answers. The higher the stakes, the more certainty is rewarded. But when those same doctors step into leadership roles, that certainty becomes the very thing that gets in their way. Dr. Debra Clary has spent nearly two decades developing leaders inside healthcare organizations, and what her research keeps showing is that the leaders with the highest curiosity have the highest performing teams.
In this episode, she talks about what curiosity actually looks like in clinical environments, why resistance to change is biological rather than personal, and what happens when doctors who have spent careers being the expert in the room are suddenly asked to lead people who need to be heard.
Timestamped Highlights
[04:00]: Dr. Clary shares the research behind The Curiosity Curve, and why the data connecting leader curiosity to team performance surprised even the researchers who set out to find it.
[08:00]: She describes the single most powerful thing a leader can say to create a culture where people feel safe to speak up, and it is three words most high-achieving people rarely use.
[12:00]: The balance between certainty and curiosity in clinical medicine, and why the same trait that makes a doctor exceptional in an emergency can become an obstacle the moment they step into a leadership role.
[16:00]: Why resistance to change is not a character flaw but a biological response, and what leaders need to say before rolling out any new system or technology if they want it to actually work.
[20:00]: What AI can and cannot do, and why the differentiator that keeps doctors irreplaceable is not clinical knowledge but something more fundamental.
[25:00]: What happens when patients arrive armed with data from their own research, and how a doctor's relationship with curiosity determines everything about how that encounter goes.
Three Key Takeaways
How to Design a Clinical Day That Works: Intentional Systems With Dr. Bertina Hooks | Episode 185
Monday, August 17, 2026 • Duration 38:10
Dr. Bertina Hooks has been a hospitalist, a locums doctor, a private practice owner across three locations, a utilization management reviewer, a medical expert witness, and a physician coach. She built all of that intentionally, piece by piece, while raising a daughter and running a business with no roadmap. Then in December 2022, she was hospitalized with necrotizing fasciitis and woke up without her right leg below the knee.
In this episode, she talks about burnout recovery, career reinvention, and the non-clinical pathways most doctors do not know exist until they are desperate enough to start looking. Her message to every doctor who feels trapped is the same: you are not stuck, you are not broken, you just need clarity about what you are actually looking for.
Timestamped Highlights
[06:00]: Dr. Hooks describes how she set up her own outpatient practice from scratch, and the specific systems she built before she saw her first patient that kept charting inside clinic hours from day one.
[09:00]: She explains where she learned the delegation and workflow skills that most doctors never develop, and why hospitalist medicine was the unexpected training ground for running a sustainable practice.
[21:00]: The hybrid approach she used to start her private practice without financial risk, running hospitalist shifts alongside building her own panel, and why it allowed her to ramp up slowly and intentionally.
[22:00]: Dr. Hooks describes the health emergency that changed everything, and what it forced her to ask herself about medicine, identity, and what she actually wanted.
[25:00]: She maps out the three non-clinical career paths she coaches doctors through most often, including one that most physicians misunderstand entirely.
[33:00]: The values energy audit she uses with every coaching client, and why she believes alignment between values and career is the foundation of burnout recovery.
Why Better Patient Communication Takes Less Time, Not More With Dr. Chantal Lorio
Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 38:08
Most doctors believe they are good communicators. Most of them are right. But there is a difference between compassion, doing everything in your power to help someone, and empathy, letting them know for one moment that you genuinely understand what they are going through.
Dr. Chantal Lorio spent seven years as medical director of patient experience at Ochsner Health, has observed hundreds of clinical encounters firsthand, and has coached physicians on the specific connection between how they communicate with patients and how they feel at the end of the day.
In this episode, she makes a case that most doctors find counterintuitive: a five-second moment of empathy does not add time to a consultation. Done right, it actually shortens it.
Timestamped Highlights
[03:00]: Dr. Lorio describes the moment she first saw her own patient survey data and what she noticed that convinced her better communication was not about being nicer. It was about outcomes.
[11:00]: She introduces the concept of the bubble, the one thing a patient keeps repeating until someone acknowledges it, and explains exactly what it costs when a doctor tries to redirect past it instead.
[13:00]: A neighbor versus a doctor. Dr. Lorio uses a simple example to demonstrate the difference between compassion and empathy, and why patients can feel the difference even when both are present.
[20:00]: The retreat exercise that revealed to her how she was showing up at home versus at work, and why showing up in body is not the same as being present.
[27:00]: She describes pajama time, the data healthcare systems can now access showing which doctors are charting at 3AM, and what she believes organizations should do with that information rather than ignore it.
[33:00]: What Ochsner invested a million dollars in that had nothing to do with training or wellness programs, and why it saved doctors more time than almost anything else.
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2. Productivity did not take a hit, and that matters for the organizational argument. One of the most common objections to any administrative burden intervention is that reducing paperwork time means reducing patient volume. This study directly addressed that, and found no significant difference in the number of patients seen per day before and after the program. For doctors trying to make the case to their hospital, clinic, or health system that coaching is worth supporting, this finding removes the most common counter-argument.
3. This program was built from one doctor's lived experience, then tested against evidence. The Charting Champions program did not begin as a curriculum or a product. It began as Dr. Sarah Smith spending two years working through every aspect of her own clinical day to solve a problem that was quietly making her miserable. What makes this research meaningful is that the intervention is grounded in something real, not top-down efficiency consulting, but a process developed by a doctor who had the same problem the participants had, and figured out a way through it.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
1. Conflict is a vital sign, not a disease.
Dr. Sharma's central reframe is this: when a patient has a fever, you do not blame yourself or the patient. You use the fever to look harder. Conflict works the same way. It is a sign that something underneath needs attention, not evidence that someone is bad, wrong, or failing. When doctors stop treating conflict as something to be eliminated and start treating it as information to be investigated, the fear around it shifts. Curiosity replaces avoidance. And curiosity, she argues, is the single most effective tool for moving through a difficult encounter without losing the relationship on the other side.
2. Unresolved conflict does not stay at work.
Dr. Sharma is direct about the burnout connection. A doctor can close every chart and leave on time and still not have gone home if they are replaying a difficult patient interaction at the dinner table. Those thousand small cuts of the clinical day, the nurse who seemed unhappy with an order, the colleague who made a comment in the corridor, the patient who challenged a treatment plan, accumulate in the body and do not switch off just because the clinic is locked. Learning to engage with conflict constructively means fewer things get carried home. And fewer things carried home is one of the most underrated contributions to a sustainable clinical career.
3. With administration, start where you agree, not where you differ.
When conflict involves a power differential, most doctors walk in defending their position against someone defending theirs. Dr. Sharma calls this positional bargaining, and it almost never works. What she coaches instead is finding the single thing both parties can agree on and starting the conversation there. In a dispute about appointment numbers or supply budgets, that shared point is almost always quality of patient care. Starting from shared ground does not guarantee the outcome a doctor wants. But it preserves the relationship for the next conflict, which is always coming.
Guest Bio
Dr. Lee Sharma is a gynecologist, conflict resolution specialist, and co-founder of Lintel Health, based in Auburn, Alabama. After completing a master's degree in conflict resolution while practicing full-time OBGYN, she opened her own solo practice in 2001 and has spent over two decades consulting with hospital systems, residency programs, and clinical offices on conflict resolution in medicine. She is the creator of the SPARC system for addressing conflict in real time and co-hosts the podcast Scalpel and Sword. Find her at lintelhealth.com.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Three Key Takeaways
1. Practical strategies work until they reveal what they cannot fix.
Dr. Raja is not dismissive of workflow strategies, charting systems, or inbox management. She sees their value. What she also sees, regularly, is doctors who have implemented all of those things and still feel something is off. When the busyness clears, what is left? Who are you when you are not overwhelmed? For some doctors, that question is more confronting than the overwork ever was. The strategies address the surface. Therapy, she argues, addresses what is underneath it.
2. The traits that make doctors vulnerable to burnout usually started long before medical school.
Dr. Raja describes burnout not as something medicine creates from scratch but as something medicine builds on top of. Perfectionism, people-pleasing, hypervigilance, martyrdom tendencies, these patterns often have roots in family environments, childhood experiences, and personal histories that preceded medicine by decades. Medical training did not create them. It found them, rewarded them, and amplified them. Understanding that changes what recovery needs to look like.
3. You do not have to be in crisis to go to therapy.
Dr. Raja uses the gym as her analogy, and it is a good one. You do not go to the gym only when something is broken. You go to maintain, to build capacity, to stay ahead of what would otherwise accumulate. Mental and emotional care works the same way. She is direct about the credentialing fears that keep doctors from seeking help and equally direct about what has changed. Over 40 US state boards have now removed the intrusive mental health history questions from their applications. The barrier many doctors think is there may no longer exist.
Guest Bio
Dr. Annia Raja is a clinical psychologist based in California whose practice is dedicated almost entirely to serving doctors in therapy. She practices across multiple US states through PSYPACT and offers private pay sessions specifically to protect her clients' confidentiality and privacy. She will be speaking at the White Coat Investor Conference in February 2027. Find her at helmpsychologygroup.com and on Instagram at Helm Psychology.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
1. Certainty narrows curiosity, and that is where dangerous things happen.
Dr. Clary's research found that leaders who created environments where questions were welcomed and the status quo could be challenged consistently outperformed those who did not. The same principle applies inside clinical environments. The doctor who is certain about how an encounter should go, how a system should work, or how a team should function stops asking questions, and the moment questions stop, so does learning. She is not arguing against clinical confidence. She is arguing that certainty and curiosity need to coexist, and that most leaders lean too heavily on one at the expense of the other.
2. Change resistance is biological, not personal, and leaders who understand that roll it out differently.
When something new arrives, the brain's first job is to assess threat. It is not interested in efficiency or innovation. It is interested in whether this is safe. Dr. Clary coaches leaders to work with that biology rather than against it, which means being transparent about the reason for a change, showing people how they fit into the future, and inviting them to help solve the implementation rather than handing them a directive. The organizations that skip that step, she says, pay for it in resistance, delay, and disengagement. The ones that do not skip it tend to move faster than they expected.
3. Leadership and culture are synonymous.
Dr. Clary's closing message is direct: so goes the top of the house, so goes the organization. A C-suite that does not model curiosity, collaboration, and psychological safety will not produce teams that offer those things either. For doctors moving into leadership roles, this reframe matters because it shifts the question from how do I get my team to perform differently to how do I need to show up differently first. The answer almost always involves asking more questions, saying I do not know more often, and being genuinely interested in what the person in front of you thinks. None of that is complicated. Most of it is just unfamiliar.
Guest Bio
Dr. Debra Clary is a leadership consultant, executive coach, and author based in the United States. With a doctorate in human behavior and organizational design and 18 years at Humana developing healthcare leaders, she works primarily with C-suite leaders and executive teams. She is the author of The Curiosity Curve, published in 2025. Find her at debraclary.com.
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Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Three Key Takeaways
1. Sustainable practice requires intentional systems, not just goodwill.
Dr. Hooks did not stumble into an efficient clinical day. She designed it, deliberately, before she opened her doors. Pre-visit labs ordered a week in advance. Huddles with staff before morning and afternoon sessions. Templates for normal inbox results handled by the nurse, with anything flagged coming directly to her. Scribes from early on. Delegation structured around scope of practice. She knew what had made her exhausted as a resident and as a hospitalist, and she made different decisions. The lesson is not that her system is the right one. It is that she had one, and most doctors never build theirs.
2. Your medical degree is portable in more directions than you think.
Dr. Hooks has built income streams across clinical medicine, utilization management, medical expert work, and physician coaching. None of the non-clinical work required an additional degree. What it required was a willingness to see her existing skills differently, and a mindset shift around what counts as using her training. She coaches doctors who are considering a pivot and consistently finds the same thing: the barrier is almost never competence. It is imagination. The belief that there is only one way to be a doctor, and that stepping outside it means starting from scratch.
3. Burnout recovery starts with recognizing the signals before they become a crisis.
Dr. Hooks describes burnout as a spectrum, and the early signals are easy to miss or explain away. The clearest early sign she names: coming back from a break and not feeling the return of motivation that used to be automatic. She teaches a values energy audit as one of her foundational coaching tools, built on a simple question: when you look at where your energy is going, how much of it is actually aligned with what you care about? That audit, she says, is often the first time a doctor has been asked that question. And the answer is almost always the beginning of everything that needs to change.
Guest Bio
Dr. Bertina Hooks is a board-certified internal medicine physician, entrepreneur, and physician coach based in Texas. After building a multi-location private practice, navigating a serious health emergency that resulted in a below-knee amputation, and exploring careers across utilization management, medical expert work, and telemedicine, she founded Pinnacle Business Academy to help doctors navigate burnout recovery and career reinvention. Her memoir, From Fire to Freedom: A Memoir of Transformation, Renewal, and Resilience, launches September 23rd, 2026. Find her at pinnaclebusinessacademy.org and bertinamhooksmd.org.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
Three Key Takeaways
1. Empathy and compassion are not the same thing, and patients know the difference.
Dr. Lorio draws a distinction that most medical training never makes explicit. Compassion is wanting to help and acting on it. Empathy is stepping into someone's shoes for a moment and letting them know you did. Doctors are typically excellent at compassion. They ask the right questions, order the right tests, and do everything clinically necessary. But when a patient feels like the doctor did not quite get them, it is usually because the empathy moment was skipped. That moment, she argues, does not require extra time. It requires a single sentence, delivered once, at the right moment.
2. Acknowledging the bubble is faster than working around it.
Every consultation has one. A patient says something unrelated to the chief complaint, and keeps saying it, slightly louder and with more detail each time, until someone acknowledges it. Dr. Lorio calls it the bubble. The doctor who tries to redirect past it will spend more time on the visit than the doctor who pauses for five seconds and says you must be exhausted or things must be really tough right now. The acknowledgment puts it to rest. The patient feels heard. The conversation moves forward. What sounds like an extra step is actually a shortcut, and she has watched it play out in hundreds of observed encounters.
3. Sense of control is the most common thing doctors come to coaching for.
Dr. Lorio has worked with doctors across private practice and large health systems, and the theme that comes up most consistently is not workload or communication. It is a feeling of having no control over the clinic, the career, or life at home. She coaches around all three areas, helping doctors identify where they actually do have agency, exploring career possibilities beyond the current role even if they never act on them, and working on presence at home rather than just hours spent there. The shift from I am stuck to I have options, she says, is often the single most powerful thing coaching produces.
Guest Bio
Dr. Chantal Lorio is a podiatric surgeon, executive coach, and patient experience consultant based in New Orleans. After 16 years in private practice and 12 years as department chair at Ochsner Health, she served as medical director of patient experience for seven years before moving into independent coaching and consulting. She works with doctors and healthcare organizations on the connection between patient communication, physician wellbeing, and clinical outcomes, and is the author of I Get You, I Got You, available on Amazon. Explore her website here.
Would you like to view a transcript of this episode? Click Here
Charting Champions is a premiere, lifetime access Physician only program that is helping Physicians get home with today's work done. All the proven tools, support and community you need to create time for your life outside of medicine.
Enjoying this podcast? Please share it with someone who would benefit. Also, don’t forget to hit “follow” so you get all the new episodes as soon as they are released.
Come hang out with me on Facebook or Instagram. Follow me @thechartingcoach to get more practical tools to help you create sustainable clinical medicine in your life.
Questions? Comments? Want to share how this podcast has helped you? Shoot me an email at admin@reachcareercoaching.ca. I would love to hear from you.
