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Episode: Resiliency

Author: Michelle Chestovich MD
Duration: 00:14:39

Episode Shownotes

Physician coach Michelle Chestovich MD explores this loaded word in medicine and gives you a new way to think about this topic.

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Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
You are listening to Episode 163 of the Remind Yourself Podcast. Welcome to the Remind Yourself Podcast, the podcast for physician moms just like you who want to ditch mom guilt, stop yelling, and start enjoying their lives today.

00:00:22 Speaker_00
I'm your host, Michelle Chestovich, certified life coach, family physician, and mom of four. If you want to overcome overwhelm for once and for all, this is the place for you. Hello, Mama Docs, and welcome back.

00:00:40 Speaker_00
I hope you are having a most wonderful day and week wherever you are. Today, I'm going to talk about a subject that I've alluded to several times in the past, but I've never dug in completely.

00:00:52 Speaker_00
And I'm going to warn you that I could get a little feisty. Today, I'm going to talk about resiliency. For many of us, this is a very loaded word, and for me, it feels, in fact, like a four-letter word.

00:01:04 Speaker_00
And when I hear talk about resiliency in medicine, I often feel very offended when it comes from the point of view of an organization saying, hey, our docs and healthcare workers are having difficulty, are having some symptoms of burnout, so we need to do resiliency training.

00:01:22 Speaker_00
Has anyone heard anything like this before? Raise your hand, right? If this was a lecture that I was giving in a crowded room, most people would raise their hand. And I think that that is the crux of the problem.

00:01:35 Speaker_00
Blaming physicians for having symptoms of burnout because they're less than resilient is absolute gaslighting and is completely not the way that we should be looking at it.

00:01:46 Speaker_00
So before I speak a little bit more about this, I'm going to take a pause, take a breath, and give you the definition that I looked up on resiliency. And this is what I found. The capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties.

00:02:01 Speaker_00
Sounds to me like a physician. And I think that physicians are some of the most resilient people on the planet.

00:02:11 Speaker_00
You don't go through all of the hard work in college to get all the straight A's, all of the hard work in medical school, the lack of sleep, the not going out with our friends, residency training, fellowship training, without being resilient.

00:02:25 Speaker_00
And so I think that when we as physicians feel that we are being blamed because we're struggling in the workplace, it feels just very offensive. And I think that's why for many of us, resiliency is just like I said, a four letter word.

00:02:41 Speaker_00
I have been told to my face, well, not exactly told, but I was handed a book entitled Resiliency years ago when I was struggling with burnout. I was at a meeting and it was supposed to be about solutions for burnout.

00:02:56 Speaker_00
And I was handed this book called Resiliency. And I wanted to scream and throw the book back in the person's face and run out of the room. because I thought to myself, I am a physician.

00:03:09 Speaker_00
I've gone through medical training, I've run multiple marathons, and I've given birth to four children. Don't tell me that I'm not resilient. This was years ago, and I just remember so much how it hit me to the core that I felt so offended, right?

00:03:27 Speaker_00
And so again, I never want people to think that we're the problem when we're struggling, right? Burnout is a huge issue. You hear me talk about it all the time. Nearly 63% of physicians have one component of burnout.

00:03:42 Speaker_00
And I like to use the World Health Organization definition that calls burnout an occupational phenomenon from chronic, unrelenting stress in the workplace that has not been successfully managed.

00:03:56 Speaker_00
And this shows up as emotional exhaustion, compassion fatigue, or a feeling of lack of efficacy, like I don't really know if what I'm doing really matters anymore. Think to yourself, have you had those feelings, those thoughts before?

00:04:10 Speaker_00
Most likely, you have at some point. And again, those are components of burnout. And it's not a problem that you are creating.

00:04:19 Speaker_00
It's because we deal in very difficult situations, we are understaffed, and oh, by the way, we deal with trauma on the regular, and no one really helps us resolve that, right? That is the problem. It's not a lack of your resiliency.

00:04:36 Speaker_00
I've been at conferences before, and I'm sure you've heard this analogy as well, but when we think about burnout and tell the physician that they need to be more resilient, it's the canary in the coal mine analogy.

00:04:47 Speaker_00
We don't say, hey, this canary died, we need stronger canaries. We think, no, there's a problem in the coal mine. We need to fix the coal mine. That, my friends, is exactly what's going on with physicians and burnout and the medical system.

00:05:01 Speaker_00
We don't need stronger, more resilient physicians. We are already very resilient. We need a better workplace environment. So why am I so passionate about this?

00:05:13 Speaker_00
Because I talk to so many physician women who tell me how they're struggling with notes at night, and they're struggling with just feeling that they're not doing a good enough job for their patients.

00:05:23 Speaker_00
They're not able to handle all of their problems because of the short visits. They're being asked to round on more patients. They're being asked to see more complex patients in a shorter period of time, so on and so forth.

00:05:33 Speaker_00
And oh, by the way, they feel that they're missing out on a lot of things at home with their kids. And they think that they're the problem. I need to become more efficient.

00:05:42 Speaker_00
I need to figure out maybe how to get less sleep, how to get more organized so that I can get more done. And I'm going to remind you again and again. You are high achieving women. You've got a lot going on. It's not that you need to be better at it.

00:05:58 Speaker_00
It's not that you need to be more resilient. That is absolutely not the solution.

00:06:03 Speaker_00
And the solution that I often offer is we actually need to learn how to say no and not feel bad about the fact that we aren't doing 500 things in order to move forward and feel more content and joy in our life.

00:06:17 Speaker_00
Now, I know that sounds like, oh my god, but I can't do that. Yeah, it's because we're in this system where we're asked to do more and more. You ask high achievers to do more and more, we do. And if we can't handle it, we think that we're the problem.

00:06:30 Speaker_00
The organization often makes it feel like we're the problem. And they say, hey, let's bring in some resiliency training. Now, there may be some things that are beneficial in resiliency training.

00:06:41 Speaker_00
If you've been around me for long, you know I love talking about 4-7-8 breathing. And yet, breathing and getting out of the sympathetic overload into parasympathetic is not the solution to overwork, right?

00:06:54 Speaker_00
It can be a helpful tool that can help calm you down. It can help you emotionally regulate in tough situations. And yet, it's not the solution to doing way too much. The problem is not that physicians aren't resilient.

00:07:10 Speaker_00
It's that we are trying to hold together this broken medical system by overworking. That's the real problem. So if your organization ever comes to you and says, hey, we need to do some resiliency training,

00:07:24 Speaker_00
Just, you know, casually send them this episode because we are not the problem. The physicians are so resilient. So like, what if we just start, everyone starts with that basic premise.

00:07:34 Speaker_00
Physicians are so resilient and they're having some problems right now. They're feeling emotionally exhausted. They're feeling compassion fatigue. How can we help them? That's how solutions should come to be. We need more staff.

00:07:50 Speaker_00
We need to take some of this stuff off their plate that it does not need a medical degree to deal with. Right? A lot of us are working hours at night dealing with stuff that you don't need a medical degree to deal with. Why?

00:08:04 Speaker_00
Because we don't punch a clock, and so we're cheap labor. I mean, that's a little bit harsh, but that's often how I think about it, because we're going to keep doing the work. We don't want to drop the ball and have our patients suffer.

00:08:16 Speaker_00
And yet, the broken medical system running on the altruistic backs of physicians is not going so well. Physicians are stretched so thin and not enjoying medicine at all. And I fear for what's going to happen.

00:08:30 Speaker_00
Again, if you need to leave medicine in order to stay safe, please do so. But our community really would benefit from having great physicians like yourself. So how do we solve this problem of burnout?

00:08:44 Speaker_00
I really, you know, again, I'm a coach and yet it's not just me anecdotally feeling better with coaching and seeing my clients feeling better. There are actual studies in JAMA that show that coaching reduces burnout.

00:09:02 Speaker_00
Statistically significant reduction in burnout and increase in self-compassion. When are organizations just gonna provide this for their workers?

00:09:13 Speaker_00
I hope for the day, and I think it will come, that organizations say, welcome, here's your badge, here's your parking card, and here's your coach that you're going to be working with a couple of times a month. Many other organizations have this.

00:09:28 Speaker_00
Many C-suite executives, many huge corporations have coaches for their employees. Why? Because it helps them function better. It helps them feel better. It helps them really focus on what's important and get rid of the rest.

00:09:45 Speaker_00
We docs are just told, do it all. And if you're having trouble, it's this gaslighting, like maybe you need to be more resilient. And this is where I stop my foot and say, this needs to stop. You do not need to be more resilient.

00:09:58 Speaker_00
What you in fact need to learn to do is to say no. Yes, it's hard and it's possible. You literally can't do all of the things for everybody that they want you to do. Just look at patients for an example.

00:10:13 Speaker_00
We love our patients, but they come in with a back of the envelope full of all the things that they want help with that day. You're not a bad physician if you don't deal with all the things. It absolutely doesn't work that way.

00:10:26 Speaker_00
So we need to learn to say no and set some boundaries with our patients, with our staff, with all of their interruptions, with our families. That is just the beginning of the work. And there's so much more, I think, that you can do to feel better.

00:10:43 Speaker_00
And it's not about learning how to bounce back, right? Not learning how to be more resilient. But I do think that sometimes we docs take pride in, I can do so much. I can do all the things. And we forget to take care of some of our basic human needs.

00:11:04 Speaker_00
So my caveat with resiliency, like, yes, we can do all these things. When we forget to get regular sleep, like a good amount of sleep that we actually need, and we forget to move our bodies, We forget to nourish ourselves with healthy food.

00:11:21 Speaker_00
We forget to take time for ourselves and we forget to make time for love and connection because all of those things seem like, you know, extra and like to do at the end of all of the other work.

00:11:37 Speaker_00
That, my friends, is when we do diminish our resiliency because we're human. We need sleep. We need to have connection. We need to take care of these incredible human bodies that we have and our human minds.

00:11:55 Speaker_00
And so if there's ever, you know, a stretch so thin and not being able to bounce back in resiliency that I see in physicians, it's when they're forgetting to take care of their human needs. So you do not need to be more resilient.

00:12:10 Speaker_00
But in order to allow yourself to be resilient, you need to take care of these basic human needs. Sounds so basic. And we all know this. As physicians, we tell our patients this all the time. So why are we not doing it?

00:12:25 Speaker_00
I think we're told that we're just have to keep going. We have to keep going even when we're exhausted. This is the way it is. The patient comes first. We have to get all the work done first. And I'm just thinking, what would it be like? How would our

00:12:40 Speaker_00
energy increase and our mood increase and our joy of medicine increase if we actually started taking care of us first, and then we're able to help others.

00:12:51 Speaker_00
Okay, my friends, little bit of a rant today about resiliency, but the main takeaway I want you to hear is that you are resilient. You're amazing. And you're being asked to do an awful lot if you feel like you're struggling.

00:13:08 Speaker_00
And it's okay to take care of you, because that's going to bolster your resiliency. And when organizations come to you and say, Hey, we have resiliency training that you need to take, just smile and send them this episode so they can take a listen.

00:13:26 Speaker_00
and realize like, hey, let's not put blame and more work on an already stretched thin workforce of physicians. Let's honor them as the resilient humans that they are and help them to feel better.

00:13:41 Speaker_00
Okay, dear friends, that's what I have for you this week. If you haven't already signed up for my How to Get Your Notes Done Faster Masterclass, click on the link in the show notes. That's coming up on Sunday, April 27th, 7 p.m.

00:13:53 Speaker_00
A replay will be sent if you are unable to make it. So make sure that you sign up so you can learn very simple strategies that can get you back hours per week. because this is your one precious life and you deserve to have your evenings free.

00:14:11 Speaker_00
Okay, friends, until next week, peace and love to all of you. Are you ready to take control of your life and put these tools into action? I'm here to help.

00:14:21 Speaker_00
I offer free consultations for physician moms to see if my one-on-one coaching package is right for you. You can sign up for a free consult at www.MamaDocLifeCoach.com.