The Coaching Conversation You Need to Have With Yourself
You Talk to Patients All Day. When Did You Last Talk to Yourself?
Not the running mental checklist. Not the 2 a.m. loop about the grant deadline or the awkward exchange with your department chair. I mean an actual honest conversation where you ask yourself a hard question and sit with the answer.
Most physicians I work with have never done this. Not because they lack introspection. Because nobody taught them how, and the culture of academic medicine never asked them to.
The Questions You Are Probably Avoiding
A good coach asks questions you would never ask yourself. But you can start with a few of them right now. Not rhetorical ones. Real ones that deserve real answers.
- What do I actually want from my career in the next three years -- not what I think I should want?
- Where am I performing out of obligation instead of intention?
- What feedback have I dismissed that might be worth revisiting?
- If I were coaching someone in my exact position, what would I tell them to change?
That last one is the most revealing. Physicians are excellent at giving advice. They are remarkably bad at taking their own.
Why Self-Coaching Is Hard for Physicians
Michael Bungay Stanier, in The Coaching Habit, argues that the single most important coaching skill is learning to stay curious a little longer before jumping to advice and action. That is the opposite of how physicians are trained. You are rewarded for fast answers, pattern recognition, and decisive action.
Those instincts are lifesaving at the bedside. They are counterproductive when the subject is your own career. You diagnose yourself in thirty seconds, prescribe a solution, and move on. The problem is that you skipped the part where you actually listened.
Start With Five Minutes of Honesty
You do not need a journaling practice or a meditation app. You need five minutes where you drop the performance and get honest.
Pick one of those questions above. Sit with it on a walk to your car or during a quiet moment between meetings. Do not rush to an answer. Let the discomfort of not knowing sit there for a minute. That discomfort is the signal that you are in the right territory.
The Limit of the Internal Conversation
Self-coaching has real value. It builds the muscle of self-awareness that makes everything else -- leadership, mentoring, career decisions -- work better. But it also has a ceiling. We all have blind spots that, by definition, we cannot see on our own.
That is where an external conversation picks up where the internal one leaves off. The best time to start working with a coach is after you have already started asking yourself the hard questions.
Explore our individual coaching options to take the next step.
