Why I Coach Physicians

The answer surprised even me when I first realized it.

I'm often asked: "Why do you specialize in coaching physicians? How did they end up being your people?" It's not always easy to answer because I'm not a physician myself, and no one in my direct family or friend groups was a doc. I didn't have many exposures to physicians growing up, and wasn't one of those psychologists who secretly wanted to go to med school.

However, what I did have for years was an undiagnosed medical condition. A few actually. But the one that has impacted me the most is Ehlers-Danlos Hypermobility Syndrome.

EDS and my associated condition, Mixed Connective Tissue Disorder, occurs when a person's fascia, ligaments, tendons, and all connective tissues are lax and overly stretchy. People with EDS are hyperflexible and accumulate a constellation of injuries and risk factors and incorrect diagnoses on the typically 10-15 year path before they receive the correct diagnosis.

Along the way, they encounter and wrestle with a lot of their own (and society's) beliefs about willpower, about pushing themselves through and past pain, about what's "normal" and what's unique to their condition.

Before my EDS diagnosis, I ran a marathon, rowed crew, did Krav Maga and kickboxing, logged thousands of hours on tracks, treadmills, and elliptical machines. I did hot yoga and got into such deep stretches that my normally stoic instructors expressed glee. I did all these despite frequent and bizarre injuries: multiple joint dislocations, thin velvety soft stretchy skin that looked like a melted candle sometimes and didn't heal well, constant bursitis and tendonitis and early onset arthritis, costochondritis, a separated pelvis.

Through it all, I was a deep and adherent believer in willpower. I thought because I could push through, because I could endure and tolerate what seemed to make others quit, I should. I believed it would pay dividends, and that ignoring my pain would lead to greater resilience and strength and accomplishment.

And I didn't have anyone outside of me pushing me. This was all internal. 100% intrinsic motivation. It actually felt good to feel the pain of effort and pushing through after awhile because I believed it would get me where I wanted to be eventually.

But where it got me, each and every time, was injured.

That initial "hurt so good" sensation on the days of pushing myself led to a medical record thick with imaging results showing that my limitations were not about my character, but about a real condition that would disable me if I didn't attend to it—if I didn't attend deeply to the messages my body had been sending me for years.

By the time I got my official diagnosis from Johns Hopkins in 2016, I was ready to listen.

Here's where everything clicked for me professionally.

By this time, I had already been focusing on the wellbeing of my clinician peers for years, but in an "othering" kind of way, where I felt some sort of healthy-psychologist-hero obligation to save them from the medical culture. But sitting with that diagnosis, I was flooded with all the ways that I could understand very deeply the psyche of someone who feels compelled to explore their own limits, to push themselves as far as they can, and to lose touch with the wiser parts of self that contain the boundaries and the brakes.

The parallels became undeniable: physicians pushing through emotional exhaustion the way I pushed through physical pain. Both of us believing that endurance equaled virtue. Both of us ignoring the very signals designed to protect us.

So in the years since, I've come to see my medical condition and my responses to it in the earlier years of my life as something that connects me deeply to my physician colleagues. There's a paradox in that somewhere—that a medical diagnosis and not getting it quickly enough is the very thing that ultimately bonded me to physicians—but I'll take it because it feels so undeniably deep and real.

In my coaching work, this understanding shows up everywhere. I recognize the familiar pattern when a physician describes working through migraine headaches, or dismissing their own anxiety because "everyone else has it worse," or believing that their worth is measured by how much they can endure without breaking.

I understand how good it feels to push too hard for too long. And I also know the exquisite and deeply meaningful process of turning up the volume on other parts of ourselves that need to be heard—this is what changes our lives, what makes our lives sustainable and even beautiful.

The physicians I work with don't need someone to rescue them from medical culture. They need someone who gets it—who understands the seductive pull of pushing past limits and the profound courage it takes to start listening to the quieter, wiser voices within.

It's such a privilege to walk with my clients as they crack open these parts of themselves, whether in therapy or coaching. Watching them reclaim their full humanity while remaining the dedicated healers they are? That's the work that chose me.