Twenty years ago, a colleague told me that she couldn’t tell another woman she had breast cancer. Her experience of medical compassion fatigue, which is sadly increasingly common, sparked my interest in workplace health and eventually led me to my own current role working with doctors in leadership roles and in career difficulty.
I believe that with a triple approach of mental health care, occupational health, and expert career coaching, this dedicated clinician could have been successfully rehabilitated back to work, on her own terms.
I spent the first half of my career working in the field of mental health improvement and workplace health as a public health physician, fully grounded in evidence based interventions. Over the last few years of working as a medical career coach with scores of doctors experiencing career difficulty, I’ve seen first hand that developing self empathy is one of the first steps to prevent or recover from physician burnout.
Empathy for oneself is a skill to be learned, and can be taught at any age or career stage. Like any new skill, it requires a degree of conscious effort in the early stages until it becomes ‘second nature’ ie the neural pathways are laid down to be more self compassionate. This is also one aspect of ‘compassion training’ for clinicians.
It’s actually one of my favourite career coaching interventions, I love seeing clients ‘light up’ when they gain insight into what is available to them in terms of relating to themselves in a different way.
An exercise to try…
Try the ‘compassionate hand’ exercise, for example, on yourself today. When you notice that something feels difficult for you, place your hand over your heart and simply acknowledge ‘this is difficult for me’. Take a moment before rushing into a finding a solution, so that you have time to connect with the difficult feeling, and then ask yourself ‘what can I do right now that would be helpful for me to move forwards?’. This action step is personal to you and your context, and could be anything from a discussion with your managers about the situation, to making a cup of tea for yourself and a colleague, to reminding yourself about what you love about your work.
Medical burnout can have a domino effect in a team and impact on morale and patient outcomes. By learning some simple techniques through expert medical career coaching, you can take skillful action to protect yourself and your colleagues, build greater connection with your family and your patients, and regain the emotional energy you need to thrive in today’s workplace.
Dr Fiona Day is the world’s only Leadership Coach with advanced coaching psychology, medical and public health qualifications (MBChB, FFPH, BPS Chartered Psychologist in Coaching Psychology, EMCC Master Practitioner Coach & Mentor) and is in a unique position to help you and your teams to flourish. Fiona specialises in coaching medical and public health leaders, is a coach Supervisor, and an EQA Foundation Award Holder. Get 3 hours of FREE CPD with Fiona’s Health Career Success Programme here. Book a free confidential 30 minute Consultation with Fiona here.
