“You know, to be a unicorn, I think you have to be willing to stand out from the pack and sometimes take a different pathway forward. You can also pay a price for this. The vast majority of people will take the high road. They’ll be supportive, encouraging. But there are also others who may not be so kind and may want you to conform. They may also display petty jealousies. They may help to create obstacles in your pathway. But I think for me as a unicorn, I think you have to understand that standing apart from the crowd can attract negative attention. But thankfully, most of the time it is positive.”
– Dr. Camelia Lawrence
Dr. Camelia Lawrence, MD, FACS, is a board-certified surgeon specializing in benign and malignant breast disease. She has fellowship training in advanced breast cancer surgery, including skin- and nipple-sparing mastectomy, sentinel node biopsy, and oncoplastic techniques. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Fordham University and her medical degree from the University of Rochester School of Medicine. She completed her residency at New York Medical College and then entered her fellowship training in breast surgical oncology at the John Wayne Cancer Institute in Santa Monica, CA. She currently serves as director of breast surgery for the Hospital of Central Connecticut and Midstate Medical Center, responsible for further developing their breast programs.
Dr. Lawrence has always been intrigued by the power of healing. Ever since she was a little girl, she believed that medicine impacts the heart and soul of people, and that it’s truly special and amazing to be a part of that. In terms of physician leadership, as a female, woman of color, and a surgeon who has a visible presence, she had an obligation to help others traverse the climb, to inspire others in their career to reach for the stars, regardless of where they may have originated. We discuss what it means to truly be a unicorn and what it means to be ready and prepared, inside and outside of the operating room.
Dr. Lawrence shares the importance of listening to your intuition. Throughout her career, she’s developed her emotional intelligence and stresses self-exploration and self-discovery. She also shares why she believes that the most impactful leadership style is one that is collaborative and why she tells her mentees that they need to take risks and be willing to fail to succeed. We discuss the importance of being in a supportive environment and going where you’re celebrated, not just tolerated. Today, Dr. Lawrence is enjoying the current phase of her journey, where she’s focused on advocacy, community empowerment, and education.
What’s Inside:
- What it means to be a unicorn as a physician and what it means to be ready and prepared.
- The importance of self-discovery and listening to your intuition.
- How being in a supporting environment and taking risks helps you succeed.
Mentioned In This Episode:
The past few weeks have been busy at DocWorking! We have been working behind the scenes to add more CME credits to the THRIVE memberships. Now you can get a credit for each small group coaching session as well as for each 1:1 coaching session, so 12 credits/year from monthly small group coaching sessions plus 8 credits for our foundational StressPal course+community coaching. That means there are now up to 32 credits in our THRIVE Platinum subscription!
How many coaches do you think your favorite actors and athletes have worked with over the years in order to achieve such extraordinary success? What if you had a team of trusted thinking partners, experienced coaches who have helped hundreds of physicians overcome obstacles and who know what works?
What if you were part of a community of like-minded physicians from across the nation, across specialties and career stages? Your collective brain trust, sharing ideas and experiences, so you would no longer feel like an island, surrounded by people yet alone?
What if you had small group coaching sessions, could interact with your coaches and community as often as you wish, and had virtual courses at your fingertips 24-7 that could help you with things like time and stress management, resilience, and mapping out your future to achieve what matters most to you?
What if you could have all of this for less than the cost of a single 1:1 coaching session per month?
DocWorking THRIVE is the Physician Coaching and Community Subscription Package that Guides You as a Doctor to Embrace Life in the way that is most meaningful to you, integrate that with your work so you can truly thrive, and be a valued member of our growing private community of doctors from across the nation.
Join our community by clicking here.
Coaches and Courses at DocWorking Please check out our Trusted Resources! The Trusted Resources businesses are paid advertisers or have an affiliate relationship with DocWorking. An affiliate relationship means that DocWorking may receive a commission if you use their service by clicking through our link. Thank you for supporting businesses that support DocWorking’s mission of prioritizing Physician wellness.
Are you a physician who would like to tell your story? Please email Amanda, our producer, at [email protected] to be considered.
And if you like our podcast and would like to subscribe and leave us a 5-star review, we would be extremely grateful!
You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Some links in our blogs and show notes are affiliate links, and purchases made via those links may result in payments to DocWorking. These help toward our production costs. Thank you for supporting DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast!
Occasionally, we discuss financial and legal topics. We are not financial or legal professionals. Please consult a licensed professional for financial or legal advice regarding your specific situation. We’re everywhere you like to get your podcasts! Apple iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Google, Pandora, PlayerFM, ListenNotes, Amazon, YouTube, Podbean
Please enjoy the full transcript below
Dr. Lawrence: Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s actually a part of success.
Gabriella: Hi. My name is Gabriella Dennery, M.D., life coach at DocWorking and co-host of DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast and welcome to today’s episode. I’m so excited to introduce to you Dr. Camelia Lawrence and Dr. Lawrence, you are a board-certified surgeon specializing in benign and malignant breast disease, currently serving as Director of Breast Surgery for the Hospital of Central Connecticut and Mid-State Medical Center. And you are responsible for developing and the further development of their breast programs. Dr. Lawrence, you’re also a really staunch advocate for women’s health, and you are a passionate public servant. And I wanted to get to that in a minute. But before we get to that, welcome.
Dr. Lawrence: Well, thank you so much for having me, Gabriella. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Gabriella: Thank you. So before we get started, in terms of your passion for public service and advocacy for women’s health, can you tell us a little bit about your journey in medicine and what inspired you to become a physician and what inspired you to be where you are today?
Dr. Lawrence: You know, I’ve always been intrigued by the power of healing and wanted to be a part of that. Ever since I can remember being a little girl, you know, I’ve always believed that medicine alone, perhaps with the exception of the priestly ministry, impacts the heart and soul of people. And it’s truly special and amazing to be a part of that. As it pertains to physician leadership, I felt that as a female, as a woman of color and a woman of color that’s also a surgeon who has a visible presence, if you will, that I had an obligation to help others traverse the climb, to inspire others in their career to reach for the stars, irrespective from where they may have originated.
Gabriella: I think that is a great segway into my next question, because the reason I reached out to you is because you had a fabulous post on LinkedIn and I said, I have got to have Dr. Lawrence as a guest on the DocWorking podcast. It was a picture of you in your surgical scrubs, and it had to do with being ready and at the corner on the bottom, it said something like, “be a unicorn”. And so I wanted to ask you, what does it mean to you to be ready?
Dr. Lawrence: To be prepared for the moment and being able to rise to the occasion. It took a long journey for us as a whole or any individual to become a physician. And once you get to that point and even while you’re preparing to get there, you want to embody excellence. And the way in which you do so is acknowledging that you don’t know everything and that you have an obligation to yourself as a professional, to those who you care for, to be prepared to offer the best possible care that’s available. So that photo and the quote on LinkedIn embodies that. I had been out the evening before, I reviewed my cases. I’m already anticipating what am I going to do in the operating room and I’m blessed to be in an environment where they’re like minded folks, where the O.R. team is always prepped and ready to go to ensure that we have a successful operative day.
Gabriella: So anticipation of what happens the next day. Are there other aspects of readiness that you also delve into before you go into the O.R.?
Dr. Lawrence: In terms of challenges, you do. I mean, everything that we do in life there is sometimes you often encounter roadblocks and hurdles along the way. So I’m always looking to see what are the possible obstacles and roadblocks that I can encounter, not just to do with the O.R., but in life in general, and being prepared and realizing that my reaction is what’s going to empower that situation. And I choose how to respond to whatever those challenges are. And in fact, I use them to help build my resiliency muscle, to enhance my talent and to widen my horizon in my perspective.
Gabriella: Excellent point. So how do you define that unicorn?
Dr. Lawrence: It’s something or someone that’s highly desirable but very difficult to be found or to be attained. And for me as a woman and as a woman of color in surgery, when you look at the data, you know, someone like myself represents less than 2% of physicians in the United States as a whole. So that’s really that entire term in terms of unicorn originated from.
Gabriella: You mentioned something about your team being prepared and that you are working with like minded people and in a trajectory in medicine. It’s not always that case that medicine can be pretty traditional nonconformist environment. And so my question to you over the years and you’ve had a pretty nice, long, exciting trajectory in medicine, how have you maintained and cultivated your unicorn status over the years?
Dr. Lawrence: You know, to be a unicorn, I think you have to be willing to stand out from the pack and sometimes take a different pathway forward. You can also pay a price for this. The vast majority of people will take the high road. They’ll be supportive, encouraging. But there are also others who may not be so kind and may want you to conform. They may also display petty jealousies. They may help to create obstacles in your pathway. But I think for me as a unicorn, I think you have to understand that standing apart from the crowd can attract negative attention. But thankfully, most of the time it is positive.
Gabriella: And you talk about building those resiliency skills because at times, although the negative usually tends to be, as you said, the minority, the smaller percentage of situations, the larger percentage usually are built on good. And I firmly believe that as well. But you’ve got to be ready also for that smaller percentage. And so I think that that relates back to readiness. As you talked about earlier and as you mentioned, the word resilience and building that resilience muscle is for those situations and then some. Did you want to add anything to that?
Dr. Lawrence: I always say you listen to your intuition, your gut instinct. When I started out in medicine, I will tell you when it comes to interaction and perhaps my level of emotional intelligence was definitely innately not where it is today, there was a sense of naiveness that comes along and quickly over time you learned that that will not benefit you. So I have done a lot of self-exploration, self-discovery. I try to learn from experiences that I’ve had both the good as well as the bad and build from there. When it comes to validation, if you are somebody who thrive in an environment where you’re consistently been validated, that may not happen for you. And you have to understand that your value is intrinsic. That you may not get that external validation doesn’t mean that you are of any less value or importance in the role or task that you have ahead of you. And I tell folks, go for it. Manifest your greatness, because we all have a talent, we have a God given talent, and we can all develop it and we can use it for the better good of humanity as a whole. My infamous quote is just keep climbing and you have to be prepared to fall. But you get back up and you keep going.
Gabriella: So how would you at this point in your career, Dr. Lawrence, describe your leadership style, given all that you’ve learned and all that you bring to the table?
Dr. Lawrence: I think over the years, what I’ve realized is that my most impactful leadership style would be one that is collaborative. You know, there’s an old African proverb that said, if you want to go fast, go it alone, but if you want to go far, you go with others. And it has been said that success has a thousand parents, but failure is an orphan, so winning feels good. Though if you’re going to be effective in leadership and make an impact, you have to be willing to take risk and you have to be willing to fail. And that’s one message I would try to get out to my mentees is that you have to be willing to take risks and you have to be willing to fail, and you’re going to fail at times. But failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s actually a part of success. It’s about getting back up and learning from those obstacles and setbacks, going back to the drawing board and then moving forward with that newfound knowledge that you’ve acquired.
Gabriella: You touched on my next question. What other words of encouragement would you offer to physician leaders, physician community, younger physicians at this point, given everything that they’ve dealt with in the last year and a half and moving forward?
Dr. Lawrence: It’s important to attempt to position yourself in a supportive environment. I remember I was in a challenging work environment a few years ago, and one of my mentors said to me, “Camelia, you’re always going upstream. You’re always positioning yourself in these spaces where you’re going upstream”. It is very hard to find success in spaces where you’re not supported and you don’t have the resources. And it basically is that you’re not a tree, move you know, and I think sometimes there are hesitations on our part. It’s the devil that we know. We think we can change things, we can make it work, and we overextend ourselves and unhappiness finds us in our profession, not necessarily the day to day clinical work that we do. We love to do that, but all the other bureaucracies that get laid on to that can be discouraging. So I would impart to any young physician, if you find yourself in such an environment, a toxic space, move on, you will thrive in a much healthier, supportive environment. Go where you’re celebrated, not just tolerated.
Gabriella: Oh, I love that. Those are words to live by. Because you’re right, it’s easy to kind of stay put and just hope to get through it and just tug along. And it may take a few years. It took me a few years, for example, to finally do that, to move on because of toxic environments. But it’s a valuable lesson. And thank you very much for sharing that. What is next for you, Dr. Lawrence?
Dr. Lawrence: I like to think of myself at this juncture, mid-career and going through this transformation of trying to figure out where can I have an impact on a much larger scale. I love what I do. I think I will always find myself in the operating room. That’s where I do my best work and where I think I’m most impactful in helping women in their fight against breast cancer. I’m also interested in growing the advocacy piece, the community empowerment and educational piece, and I’m quite fond of. So I’m exploring opportunities and pathways in which I can do so. So yeah, I’m at the infancy of that journey, so we’ll see where I end up.
Gabriella: Excellent. And we will keep tabs on you. I mean, we’re connected on LinkedIn. I check your posts almost every day and I’m inspired by your quotes and they actually help me as well. And so are you open to people connecting with you?
Dr. Lawrence: Absolutely. Every and anyone. Please do connect, my posts, they’re as helpful to you as they are to me. I meditate and when I wake up in the morning, whatever comes to mind that I find uplifting an inspiring for myself, I often share it on LinkedIn to encourage others. We’re also on this journey of growth and development.
Gabriella: So speaking of which, I have one last question that just popped into my head. Where do you see the future of medicine at this point?
Dr. Lawrence: That’s the million dollar question. I think there are several unknowns, but I think we’re at a breaking point. I think the pandemic has exposed some of the weaknesses within our professions. I’m excited about the future. We know that we can’t go back to what we considered as normal. We need to be better than normal. And there are several avenues on the horizon. What I like is the attention that the pandemic has brought to these issues. I don’t know what all the answers are, and I don’t know where all the solutions are, but I think we have the best minds now at the table and the importance of supporting physicians. Physicians, despite the fact that we are the scientists, we are the medical experts, over the years, we’ve sort of been boxed in, in a little corner. And there are different drivers of health care, which I think needs to change and should be more of a collaborative approach in terms of decision making.
Gabriella: I share the same hopes that because of the exposure the pandemic provided, that we are headed in a different direction in terms of not just patient care, but physician care and health care, professional care in general. So, Dr. Lawrence, thank you so much for being a guest on DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast. You bring up some incredible pearls of wisdom which we will be posting and sharing as well. Thank you so much.
Dr. Lawrence: Well, thank you for having me, Gabriella. It’s been fantastic.
Jill: I have great news. At DocWorking, we have put together a new subscription service called DocWorking THRIVE and it basically is all of the things that you as physicians have asked us for in one package. So it is group coaching by professional coaches around problems and challenges specifically for you that is completely private and confidential. We also have a private and confidential Facebook group, so you can join in community with other physicians. And also there it is facilitated by professional coaches, physician coaches who are physicians themselves or people who’ve been coaching physicians like me for a really long time. We have three self-paced courses. You can take them totally on your own time. No grades. Chock full of information on how you can become a better leader, a better communicator, or how you can have quick wins to get your life back around time and stress management issues. We have guided meditations and ways for you to become more mindful in your life as well that are included in this package and more. So if you are interested in getting some support already designed for you, just for physicians, you’ve got to go over to DocWorking.com. Check out the information on our DocWorking THRIVE subscription and I think you’ll really be glad you did. We’d love to have you. Until next time on The Whole Physician Podcast.
Outro: At DocWorking, we’re here to help you maximize your potential on your own terms and help you live your best life. Top executives, athletes, actors all achieve greatness with the support of professional coaches. As a health care professional, you deserve ongoing coaching towards success in your career and in your life outside of work, helping you to balance and integrate work and life in the personalized way that is specific to you. At DocWorking, your success is defined by you and our coaching programs help accelerate your path to get you there. And since our programs come with CME credit, you can let your CME budget help you to prioritize your own well-being. Please check us out at DocWorking.com. And until next time, thank you for listening to DocWorking: The Whole Physician Podcast.
Life Coach Gabriella Dennery, MD OMD is passionate about helping busy physicians rediscover the joy of their calling. She draws on her training as a physician, a musician, and an ordained non-denominational minister in addition to health & wellness and life coaching to offer professionals from all walks of life the benefit of her broad experience and deep insights.
You can find Gabriella as one of the co-creators of STAT: Quick Wins To Get Your Life Back.
The daughter of a psychiatrist mother and a neurosurgeon father, both from Haiti, Gabriella and her five siblings were expected to choose from five noble callings: Medicine, Dentistry, Engineering, Law, or Agronomy (caring for the delicate soil of Haiti).
Gabriella, an innately gifted healer and teacher, chose Medicine and graduated with honors from Howard University College of Medicine, “The Mecca.” Following her residency in internal medicine at Duke University Medical Center, Gabriella moved to New York City to serve as an attending physician and clinical instructor in Harlem and later as medical director and attending physician at SUNY Downstate Bedford-Stuyvesant satellite clinic in Brooklyn.
Her greatest joy as a primary care physician was supporting her patients, shepherding them to Aha moments, and nurturing positive shifts in perspective that measurably improved their health and wellbeing–a strength that makes Gabriella so effective as a coach.
After more than ten years of practicing internal medicine, Gabriella chose to explore the integration of medicine, music, and ministry to promote better health of her fellow physicians by becoming a physician coach. She successfully coaches physicians to prevent and/or navigate through physician burnout, reach career and personal goals, clarify and take actionable steps to achieve their own personal vision, and is well known for helping doctors at all stages of their careers, from students to residents/fellows to practicing physicians. She maintains her work-life balance by playing percussion and violin, composing music, and enjoying a very fun and fulfilling marriage.
