What is Physician Coaching ?
Are you struggling with any aspect of your medical career? Are you faced with demands that you are having trouble meeting? Are you trying to define which career path is the right one for you? Is work-life balance a problem? Career coaching can help!
Coaching is a journey of self-discovery and growth. While career coaching is specific to the concerns of your professional life, it works best in the context of your personal value system and a whole-life approach. It offers a framework to define your aspirations and put the steps into place to achieve your goals so you can tap into your intuitive strengths and thrive.
So what is coaching and how does it differ from psychotherapy? There are elements that both practices share, and I certainly believe that my work as a psychotherapist provides me with unique abilities as a coach: both fields are about self-understanding and personal growth, and both involve talking and listening! Psychotherapy, however, is about the diagnosis and treatment of disorders, the reduction of symptoms, and it often involves revisiting the past in depth to direct the future. Also, as a psychiatrist, I often prescribe medications.
Coaching is not about symptoms or illness. There is no diagnosis or treatment and no medications are prescribed. Instead, coaching uses inquiry to promote self-discovery so that well-functioning physicians can enhance their achievements and foster the growth of a more fulfilling career.
I do both performance and transitional coaching. We can work to make your current career better, or we can work to help you make a change to something that is better suited to you. Retirement can also be a great time to enlist the help of a coach.
Coaching is purpose-driven and each session has a specific direction.
The first four meetings will set the stage for defining your goals and the steps you will take to reach them. You can stop there, or you can continue if you’d like on-going support as you work through the process, or if you need the flexibility to reshape your aspirations. If your issues are complex, if you need me to meet with your supervisors or colleagues, if you need on-going coaching for very specific tasks such as interviewing, presenting your work, going through a promotion process, or getting through a difficult organizational barrier, you will likely want to continue on after the first four meetings.
Here is what to expect:
~Before we meet, I will ask you to fill out a questionnaire. This will help me to learn about you and your value system, and it will give you the opportunity to think about your life in a way that will help you to articulate what you’d like to achieve from coaching.
~The first meeting is an evaluation period: I will want to hear you talk about your career, what works and what doesn’t work for you, and especially about the areas where you excel.
~After that, each session will have a focus as we work to help you set goals and figure out the steps to achieve those goals.
Breaking down an overwhelming world often makes it much more manageable.