[Editor's Note: Today's post is from WCI Network Partner Jimmy Turner, The Physician Philosopher. A coachee (playa?) turned coach, he's now a big fan of coaching. Learn more about his coaching service at the bottom of the post.]
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You go through training expecting that the light at the end of the tunnel – becoming an attending physician and the salary and opportunity that it brings – will make all that time you spent in training worth the energy, sleepless nights, and effort you put into becoming a high-earning doctor…
… and it does, for a time. Then, you get increasingly burned out in medicine. You find yourself in a world run by administrators, insurance companies, RVU goals, and patient satisfaction metrics. With little autonomy, you feel like there is nothing you can do. So, you start weighing your options. How quickly can you save to get to financial independence? Should you go part-time? Should you quit medicine altogether? What if you built non-clinical income so that you could get to financial independence sooner? Is there a way to fall back in love with medicine? Maybe medicine is actually fine for you, but you wonder how can you make it great?
The answers may not be clear. So, I want to introduce you to one way to help you sort it all out. You can view this as another tool to put in your arsenal in the ever-present fight to find personal and financial freedom.
What is Coaching?
You've probably heard all the buzz about coaching. Is it all it is cracked up to be? Is it just a sham? Does it really help doctors? In order to figure this out, we first need to define coaching. After all, coaching is an unregulated industry and so – if you aren't careful – you can land yourself with a “coach” who has no formal training in coaching but is more than happy to message you on Facebook and pocket any money you might provide them.
Life coaching and business coaching are not that different than coaching in sports. The purpose of coaching is to provide a non-judgmental mirror where doctors can see what is going on in their life and then to formulate a plan to address the problem. In other words, to make an assessment and then a game plan.
Coaching is Coaching
Life or business coaching are similar to coaching in fine arts (vocal coaches) or even sports (ever seen a professional sports team without a coach?).
For example, when I started to snap hook my driver on the golf course (picture a golf ball sailing straight into a house immediately on the left – sorry if that was your house!), getting a swing lesson where my coach showed me the problem on video helped me understand what was going on and what needed to be fixed.
In the same way, coaching for physicians by professional coaches (read: professional means additional cost, training, and certification were involved in learning how to coach) who are also physicians helps show doctors what is going on so that they can make the necessary changes to get the results they want.
In Life Coaching the client may want to decrease their burnout or find work-life balance as a partner, parent, and/or physician. Business Coaching for entrepreneurially-minded doctors, on the other hand, might involve working on creating financial freedom through an online side gig. The purpose and desired result of the coaching is up to the client. But the process is the same. In a nutshell, good coaching is called causal coaching (note: this is different than “advice” laden coaching where the coach simply “tells” clients what to do). Causal coaching involves looking into the thoughts our clients have. Why? Because everything we do in life starts with our thoughts. As Emerson points out, our thoughts are quite powerful:
“Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Through an examination of your thoughts, we can then spend time determining how these thoughts show up in your life. What feelings, actions, and results are manifested from these thoughts? Are they what we want? If not, the work of coaching is to note these thoughts and then transform our minds to produce the feelings, actions, and results we want.
Does Life Coaching Work for Physicians?
We all know the studies that have shown the cost of burnout on medicine. If you aren’t aware, a paper published by the American College of Physicians in 2019 showed that approximately $4.6 BILLION in cost can be attributed to physician turnover and burnout in the United States.
That’s Billion with a “B”.
When brought down to an individual physician level this amounted to $7,600 per physician per year in cost. These are conservative estimates because it has been shown the cost to replace a physician due to turnover is anywhere between $250,000 to $1 million, depending on experience and specialty.
In the end, this 4.6 billion dollar number got people’s attention. As I am sure it just got yours. So, many started looking into potential solutions.
Does Coaching Actually Work?
A 2019 JAMA Internal Medicine article out of the Mayo Clinic looked to answer this question. They took ~80 physicians and randomized them into one of two groups.
The intervention group received 6 coaching sessions from a professional coach via telephone. The first session was for an hour, and the following 5 were for 30-minutes. In total, they received 3.5 hours of professional coaching. This occurred over a 5 month period. Not to fear, though, the clinical machine must keep making money. So, all of the doctors in the intervention group were also required to MAKE-UP any patient volume they missed. In other words, the coaching group had work to do in addition to the coaching, which was added to their already busy schedule. They compared this to the control group who did not get any professional coaching. (Don’t worry. They provided these docs coaching after the study completed).
Results: Professional Coaching for Physicians
The results of this study were pretty enlightening. Despite having coaching added on to their already busy schedules, coaching proved effective. Specifically, professional coaching was shown to:
- Decrease Emotional Exhaustion by 30% compared to the control group.
- Decreased Burnout by 20% compared to control group.
- Improve Quality of Life and Resilience among physicians who received coaching.
Simply put… professional life coaching for physicians works for burnout.
Add this to the evidence for peer-to-peer support in small-group physician settings (JAMA 2014), and it seems that the most effective models might consist of physicians – with professional coach training – coaching other physicians.
What About Business Coaching?
The case for professional life coaching for doctors looking to improve work-life balance is pretty compelling. What about business coaching? Can business coaching really help physicians create financial freedom?
Making the case for business coaching isn't quite as difficult. After all, this is not a new idea. Executive, leadership, and business coaching have been around for years. Particularly in business worlds outside of medicine.
What is new is the access to business coaching in medicine, in particular for everyday physicians who don't work in the C-suite. For example, business coaching is now accessible for doctors looking to build physician side gigs.
It turns out that business coaching can help speed up the learning curve for others, particularly if you are receiving coaching from someone who has already successfully done what you're looking to do.
The cool part? If you own a business, business coaching is usually considered a business consulting expense. So, you can often write it off come tax time. (Note: I've also seen instances where organizations/groups allow physicians to use CME, book, or wellness funds to pay for life coaching, too).
How Would I Benefit from Business Coaching?
You are reading this post on the White Coat Investor. So, chances are that you care about financial independence. Well, my friend, broadly speaking there are only two ways to get to financial freedom, at least freedom from medicine.
One way is through savings and investments in order to have enough money such that you can safely withdraw your retirement needs once there. This is the slow and steady method to wealth – a method of which I am a big fan. The other way to have financial freedom from medicine is to create monthly non-clinical income. This method diversifies our income streams and (if successful) can speed your journey to financial freedom. Common examples of this include real estate or other entrepreneurial efforts like physician side gigs.
This is where business coaching comes in. Coaching can help you get past the mental roadblocks that have kept you “stuck” from starting that side-gig, whether it was an online business, consulting for industry, or doing medicolegal work. What's stopping you from starting that business? I'll save you the time. It isn't because you “don't know what to do”… we live in the information age where you can search for literally anything you want to know on the internet. Knowledge is never the problem.
The problem is some thought that is holding you hostage to starting the business of your dreams. A fear of failure. Of putting yourself out there. Of getting it wrong somehow. These are all things business coaching can solve. Business coaching can also help you speed up the process to make your side gig more profitable. And faster. How? By letting someone who has the experience show you the ropes. It is the same reason we all reach out to mentors and advisors. It is why I am willing to pay for my own coach. I've seen the return on investment in my own life.
Where Can I Get Life and Business Coaching?
My own journey through burnout and overwhelm (and getting hosed by the financial industry) led me to create The Physician Philosopher in November of 2017. The purpose was – and always has been – to help doctors create the life they deserve through personal and financial freedom. Yet, it wasn't until becoming a client myself that I found balance, and my burnout finally faded with the help of life coaching. It was for this reason that I became a coach myself. Whether you choose to get life and/or business coaching through the Alpha Coaching Experience or somewhere else, I want you to know that coaching is available. And it helps.
As you look for life coaching that can help you find work-life balance, or business coaching to help you build an online physician side gig, I want you to remember one thing: it is an investment. As one of the Alpha clients put it in their review of the program, if coaching helps you decrease burnout and improve your quality of life… if it adds even six-months or one year to your career… if it allows you to enjoy life more at home and at work… it is well worth the investment.
YOU are worth the investment. You and your family deserve for you to become the best partner, parent, and physician that you can be. Coaching can help you do that.
I really don’t understand the benefits of something like this. If you are suffering from burnout, the cure is always the same: Save more money so you can retire sooner, decrease your hours and stop doing things you don’t want to do and outsource that to other administrative staff or another doctor. Starting your own business and working for yourself can help. How do you get over the fear of starting a business? Have a long runway of savings, have a realistic timeline of when you will be profitable, keep expenses low, decrease risk as much as possible and many times not jumping in full time until things are steady and keep working your other job full time until you are ready.
What am I missing?
There are three arguments that motivated to me to get a career/development coach.
1) The best investment you’ve ever made was investing in your education. Investing in yourself and developing yourself is something that will always have indefinite returns. Not just in terms of burnout, but the way you interact with loved ones, family members, peers. If paying someone 300 dollars a month makes you actively focus on being a better person because of the hawthorne effect it’s well worth it.
2) The major obstacles in your life are things that you dont expect – these black swans – illness, divorce, bad decisions, COVID, etc. Preparing yourself for resilience and the ability to handle those challeneges is akin to working out and being able to physically be able to run a block. Coaching helps reframe your decision making and helps make sure that you’re able to deal with it.
3) Coaching is similar to having a trainer in the gym or any sport. Yes, you can probably figure it all out on your own, and do well alone- and of course many people become great without having coaches. That being said – the best athletes in the world all still have coaches, and I think we as physicians benefit from looking at ourselves like athletes – we’re not finished products at the end of residency.
Last thing – this article talks about coaching in terms of medicine/leadership. I think coaching and therapy are on a spectrum based on what they’re focusing. The principle is a dedicated time to cognitively focus on you as a human being and how to become better.
Just like therapy, controlling your finances, etc – you have to be mentally ready and committed to trying to make it work and getting the most out of it.
Good luck!
I just realized I sounded awfully biased – I dont know anything about these guys or how they work. My company paid for my leadership coaching early in my career through Vistage and that’s what made me such a believer.
okay…if people really think they need it. People just need to get better control over their life and schedule and most of these things resolve on their own. Have a vision for your life. Know what you want and the type of person you are. Doesn’t take a coach for that, just some common sense steps I outlined above and some self-reflection.
I hear that tired analogy all the time about an athlete and a coach. Very cliche and not really applicable for something as simple as figuring out what you want and controlling your life a little better.
If people can’t do it on their own, then who am I to judge, just seems silly to me.
You’re probably both right. Coaching is right for some people (presumably a tiny minority based on the percentage of my readers buying it) but not for others. Like with anything, if the value for you is not greater than the price, don’t buy it.
It’s like our premium products here at WCI- our online courses and our live conference. Less than 1% of website visitors buy these things, but that’s still a lot of people they’re helping and it makes enough money to be worth our time to do. And for everyone else, heck the blog, podcast, newsletter etc are all free so we can help them too.
Thanks Jimmy. A few questions:
What is approximate cost/fee structure of such a thing?
Any chance at offering a free initial one time coaching session to see if there is a benefit/fit?
Thanks
Jimmy’s Alpha Coaching charges $5K. There is a money back guarantee that should get you a “free initial session” to try it out.
Hey Duke33,
Jim answered the prior question (it costs $5,000 for the 12 week program). This includes a lot of coaching, which I’d encourage you to check out through the link in the post.
As for the coaching, I’ve provided opportunities to my email readers to get one-on-one coaching calls with the Alpha coaches (or me), and you can also snag one of those by attending any of our launch webinars.
If you are interested, just shoot me an email ([email protected]) and I’d be happy to set one up for you Sunday or Monday.
Jimmy
I worked with a physician career transition coach (Dr. Heather Fork – Doctor’s Crossing) for several year, starting in mid-2015. I spent about $8500 on coaching service, and it is probably the best investment I have made in myself over the course of my professional life. It was a bargain at twice the price. If you are feeling burned out, trapped, and unhappy with your professional life, it is very difficult to have the confidence and wherewithal to make the necessary changes to put yourself on a better path. Heather helped me tremendously, and while I cannot say that I could not have done it without her, I am not sure that I would have ended up in as good a place.
What general steps did you end up taking as a result of the coaching to improve your life?
I have no dog in this fight. Also, I’m not a Dr, but I do own my own business. I have coached high school sports for several years (soccer, XCountry, Sprints). The athletes need help with several aspects depending on their current level. Some of the soccer players were a lot more skilled at playing then me. I didn’t have a lot to offer them skill wise, but I did have game play and team play skills that I taught them. This made them a better player of the overall game, not just fancy dribbling down the field.
Most of the runners are faster than me, but through strength training, proper form, proper nutrition, proper motivation, they in fact get even faster.
I do, do a lot of things on my own, or so I think. I trained for a marathon without a coach, except I found a running plan on line. I trained for several Spartan races, including the Ultra Beast on my own except I read a lot online about strength and endurance training and then put it into practice.
Ultimately, some people can learn and do things on their own. Some people have the ability to internally motivate themselves. I seem, too. But some people don’t. They need external motivation. A good coach provides this along with the additional ability to teach the necessary skills and accountability.
What makes one qualified to become a coach? Wayne Gretzky (still the greatest hockey player to put on skates) had a terrible coaching record with the Phoenix Coyotes.
How could any of us become a coach?
I guess if someone will hire you to be a coach, you’re a coach. Now whether you’re a good coach or not depends on your natural abilities, your effort, and your training.