What Is Physician Life Coaching? (And Is It Right For You?)
Physician Life Coaching, Physician Burnout Coaching, Physician Career Transition Coaching and Physician Leadership Coaching are areas of coaching for medical professionals that lead to personal and professional growth, and helps doctors and other clinicians cope with stress, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and improve their professional effectiveness. These coaches often provide advice about balancing personal and professional goals, developing leadership skills, and managing relationships with patients, colleagues and personal connections.
Many doctors turn to physician life coaches when they feel overwhelmed by the demands of practicing medicine, or when they need help coping with specific challenges like burnout. However, coaching doctors and other healthcare professionals can prevent these problems, and prevent burnout; physician coaching can be used as a way to help with envisioning the life one wants to live, and accelerating the path to get there, while incorporating lifelong beneficial tools to identify and build on character strengths, manage stress, manage time, better communicate and lead, set boundaries to maintain the ideal work-life balance, improve self awareness and emotional agility, and strengthen resilience.
In other words, choosing the right coaching program and the right coaches can be life changing, and can be a normal part of enjoying an illustrious career and personal life.
Why Hire a Physician Life Coach?
Physician life coaching is an emerging profession that offers help to physicians and other healthcare providers through a range of services. These services include helping physicians and other healthcare providers such as PAs, NPs and nurses, as well as healthcare executives, overcome challenges in their work, personal lives, professional relationships, and career development. Physicians often seek out life coaching because they may need help dealing with stress and burnout, overwhelm, balancing work and family, improving communication skills. Life coaching helps doctors manage their emotions, gain emotional agility, and focus on what matters most in their lives and careers. Coaching is an excellent tool for prioritizing self care, and improving your skills and knowledge.
There are many different types of coaches available depending on what you need help with. For doctors and other medical professionals, examples include life coaches, peer coaches, burnout coaches, wellness coaches, career coaches, charting coaches, leadership coaches, career transition coaches, business coaches, entrepreneur coaches, side gig coaches, writing coaches, public speaking coaches, finance coaches, real estate coaches, relationship coaches and even parenting coaches. Coaches provide guidance and motivation to help you identify, prioritize and achieve goals. They are an accountability partner and a trusted thinking partner. They help you to troubleshoot areas that you want to improve in your life, and help to shift your perspective so you can see options you may not have recognized otherwise. Once you are able to see these additional options, you often can achieve your goals faster, and thus, working with coaches can accelerate achievement of your personal value-based goals. This is why it is common to see the most high achieving people in our society utilize ongoing coaching.
What Are the Benefits of Life Coaching for Physicians?
Physicians report feeling motivated, comfortable, and confident after working with a coach. Studies find that physician burnout rates decrease significantly when physicians are coached. In one study, after receiving coaching, the group reported the following benefits:
Emotional exhaustion decreased by 19%, burnout symptoms decreased by 17%, and overall quality of life improved by 20%. There were increases in resilience among those who participated in the coaching group compared to those in the control group.
Who Should Consider Physician Coaching?
Everyone can benefit from working with a coach. Physician life coaching is not a magic bullet, though. You need to commit to putting in the time and effort to get results. If you are going to invest in yourself, then you will need to put in the time and energy required to see real and lasting change.
Those who experience burnout are unlikely to benefit or improve, or at best, make very slow progress, when struggling on their own. Burnout coaching can be transformational for this growing percentage of physicians and other healthcare workers.
Coaching improves productivity and quality of life, and it’s not uncommon for coaching to increase happiness by at least 10%. A study showed that if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you could get up to 50% more done at work after working with an experienced coach.
When we talk about coaching, we’re talking about someone helping us identify, clarify, focus, and achieve our goals. We might need help getting started, to clarify our goals while identifying our values (what means the most to us personally), we may need help staying motivated or help to make important choices. This is the help we receive when we meet regularly with an experienced dynamic coach who knows how to ask the right questions and guide us to the answers we seek.
What to Look for in a Physician Coach
Focus
If you’re burned out, you need an experienced coach who understands what it takes to help you keep yourself going when you feel like giving up, and how to reignite the spark that puts light back in our lives. Someone who knows what to say when you’re feeling down, to help you gain the skills and mindset to pick yourself back up. Someone who knows what will help you get back on track and stay there, and helps you to choose the right track for you, to keep you moving forward in a meaningful way. Someone who has worked with many others who were burned out before you, and who knows how to help.
If you also struggle with depression, anxiety, PTSD or another psychological disorder, you may also need a therapist or psychiatrist. A coach is not a therapist or psychiatrist. Coaches do not diagnose or treat mental illness, nor do they prescribe medication, even if the coaches are physicians themselves. Therapy is an important part of recovery from mental illness and can be of great benefit even without a diagnosis of mental illness. Coaching can happen alongside therapy, but it does not fill the same role, and it does not replace therapy.
Experience
There are many many physician coaches in the world. Having a certificate on the wall does not make a good coach in and of itself. Experience is what you should be looking for in an excellent coach. Reputation matters. The more time someone has spent coaching, and the more clients they’ve coached, the better. There are many coaches who come and go as they experiment with different approaches, or try out being a coach to see if they will like it. Being a coach is hard work, and you want a coach, and coaching team, who has put in the hours coaching real people so that they have likely already helped many clients with similar problems and struggles to the ones you face. And they have seen the good results to know what works.
Certification
There are plenty of coaching organizations out there that offer coaching certificates. There are no legal requirements for coaches, so the buyer must always do due diligence and ensure that the coach is qualified. And in addition to being certified, reputation and experience are the gold standard.
Availability
If the gym doesn’t have an opening schedule, you won’t get any workouts. Similarly, it’s important to find a coach, or team of coaches, to support you in an ongoing fashion. Look for the capability to receive questions from you 24-7, coaching that comes with a peer support community so you can benefit from avoiding isolation and benefit from meeting people with similar goals and values, a coaching program or group of coaches that provides additional resources to help you solidify the concepts you are learning during your coaching sessions, in order to create lasting change for the better in your life and career, and avoid burnout. Look for a program created by experienced coaches, and that has depth for long term personal and professional growth and support.
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