Surgeons with Purpose

Surgeons, text topics you want me to cover here. ****SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING******* ****This episode discusses suicide, which can be distressing for some. If this subject is triggering for you, please consider skipping this one. If you are going to listen, make sure to listen carefully and take good care of yourself. If you are feeling hopeless or suicidal, please find support, call the suicide...

Surgeons, text topics you want me to cover here. "I think we need to stay relentlessly curious. And we need to understand what we're working in and recognize there is nobody who comes to work everyday and thinks I'm going to make somebody else miserable. " - Dr. Wendy Dean When service members returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were not responding to PTSD treatments, it became clear that they wer...

Surgeons, text topics you want me to cover here. Nobody in your audience, including your patients, wants your CV shoved down their throat. They don't care. They want to know if and how you can help them. Steph Sheldon is a website designer, former architect, and master at helping people reconnect with their creative side. Creativity is the emotion we generate to solve problems. We tell ourselves w...

Surgeons, text topics you want me to cover here. As a society, we are collectively dealing with an epidemic of anxiety. And no, we can’t just calm down. In today’s episode you will learn 3 important characteristics of anxiety 1. Anxiety lives in the left hemisphere, which has been strengthened by cultural messages 2. Anxiety is contagious 3. Anxiety must be replaced, not erased We are all born wit...

Surgeons, text topics you want me to cover here. Facial plastic surgeon, entrepreneur, and life coach, Dr. Dan Ward, comes on the podcast to share his story. He offers his insights on the struggles of parenting, what makes it difficult for surgeons to show up as our best selves, and the power of understanding our human brain and human emotions. In this episode you'll learn: - Thoughts are real but...

Get on-demand, lifetime, risk-free access to the Empowered Surgeons Group here . ***SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING*** This episode discusses eating disorders and suicidal ideation. If these topics are triggering for you, please listen carefully or skip this episode all together. Take care of yourselves. And if you are struggling, please seek out professional help. A person I consider my soul sister, Dr...

Get on-demand, lifetime, risk-free access to the Empowered Surgeons Group here . Enjoy salient snippets from 2024. I left out episodes #1 and #2, which are foundational and need to be listened to from start to finish. If you haven't checked them out, go back and listen. Have a great New Year and see you all in 2025!

Get on-demand, lifetime, risk-free access to the Empowered Surgeons Group here . Good surgeons get sued. That’s the hard truth. Even if you do everything right. Even if you establish “know, like, and trust”. When the stars align, patients sue. And, as surgeons, the cards are stacked against us. Dr. Pensa has experienced malpractice first hand and explains what it’s like to go through the misery of...

Get on-demand, lifetime, risk-free access to the Empowered Surgeons Group here . ***SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING. This podcast discusses addiction and may be triggering for some. That said, most of us are addicted to something, be it behaviors like overworking, overeating, overspending, numbing out on socials, or some other substance or behavior that creates feel-good neurotransmitters. There is no s...

Get on-demand, lifetime, risk-free access to the Empowered Surgeons Group here . Surgeons are humans, and all humans err. In this episode you’ll learn how to become the “architect of your experience” in the face of intraoperative mistakes. You'll also learn how fear and anxiety shrink cognitive capacity, and what you can do instead to expand your brain space. Take these immediately actionable and...

Creating connections with patients can be fun and easy...if you know a few simple hacks. In this episode, otolaryngologist and veteran podcaster, Dr. Brad Block, enlightens us on how to give patients our presence simply and easily. Use these tips and you'll create relationships in which 1. patients feel seen, heard, and cared for, 2. you protect your time, and 3. you get rave reviews and explode y...

Physician contract lawyer, Michael Johnson, comes on the podcast to talk about protecting your freedom and your value, and getting it in writing. First, you must get clear on what you want. You may think it’s a big paycheck, but your desires often evolve, and you do yourself a service to make room for future changes of heart. Then, make sure you understand your employer's motivations. What do they...

Author, speaker, and coach, Brad Stulberg comes on the podcast to talk about what surgeons can learn from performance athletes. He researches and writes about mental health, mastery, meaning, and excellence. He is bestselling author of the books The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change . He regularly contributes to the New York Times and his work has also been featured in the Atlantic and...

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”-Viktor Frankl. This episode is all about the space between stimulus and response, circumstance and action, event and reaction. That space is an opportunity. In this podcast, I discuss what happens internally when you get the dreaded postop call, "Doct...

If you get the pre-OR jitters or you deal with anxiety on a daily basis, these two lessons on anxiety will be exceptionally useful for you. As someone who has dealt with anxiety my entire life, standing on the TEDx stage was a pinnacle moment for me where my self concept evolved from someone who is terrified of public speaking to someone who can deliver a powerful speech for an audience of humans....

Becoming an emotional adult as a surgeon is essential, but it's not easy. You are working in a high-stress, high-stakes industry, and it's so much easier to act out and throw tantrums like a toddler. Perhaps that's been modeled for you in training. Perhaps you think you have to throw a fit to take good care of your patients. Well, you don't. You'll learn why a lot of adults—including surgeons—live...

The best way to insulate ourselves against patient retaliation is to cultivate "know, like, and trust". But how do we do that? In this episode, I'll tell you how I used to do it right, then, in a state of burnout, I did it very wrong (2 patients complained about me to the board of medicine during that time), and now I'm creating "know, like, and trust" with everyone, "difficult" patients included....

**This episode discusses sensitive topics including sexual assault** Today's episode features Dr. Francis Mei Hardin, an otolaryngologist, host of "Promising Young Surgeon", and a pioneer of culture change. She interviewed me about being sexually assaulted when I was a 4th year resident. We talk about power dynamics in training, the importance of compassion and support for trainees, and how my pro...

Short and sweet, I will give you ONE thought that can become the foundation of your surgeon self concept. Adopt this belief and you’ll remember why you became a surgeon in the first place. With a solid self concept, you can grow confidence, curiosity, creativity, and connection. Empowered Surgeons Group is available now! This program will teach you everything you wished you learned but didn't in t...

You don’t have to hunker down in a basement bunker (your "surgeon room"). You actually have the freedom to explore the rest of your beautiful home. Consider your identity a multi-room house, and you’ve merely ignored the other parts/rooms of yourself for so long that you’ve forgotten they exist. Consider detaching from your surgeon identity and reconnecting with other parts of your multifaceted se...

The key to creating wealth is learning how to engage with and manage your emotions. Emotions are vibrational frequencies in your body. As a surgeon, you have been taught to ignore your body. That's BS. It's time to reconnect with your body and realize the power of your intuition. In this episode, I discuss how emotions are the key to unlocking your potential, how to engage with emotions as though...

Life is not all or none. Black or white. This or that. There is overlap between two contradictory sides of ourselves. When we see the world this way, we are able to accept ourselves in whatever realm we tend toward and consciously shift ourselves to the realm that best serves our goals. From the system's perspective, we should be unemotional, selfless martyrs. The truth is: we are complex, feeling...

Humans love drama. But when we indulge in drama, we keep ourselves stuck in our current lived experience. In this episode, you will learn a language you can use to recognize drama in your life and a new lens through which to see the world that will help you exit the drama triangle and become empowered. You can create whatever you want in your life, and in order to do that, you have to redefine the...

According to Byron Katie, there are three businesses: your business, other people's business, and the universe's business. Surgical complications are none of your business. They are the universe's business. What do I mean by this? NOT that you shouldn't take action to help your patients when they have a complication. You absolutely should. I say this to mean that you do not own a complication as s...

Our training has taught us to rely on white swans and fear red swans. In this episode you'll learn why approaching your patients this way creates roadblocks, can lead to misdiagnosis and mistreatment of the patient, causes you distress, and distracts you from reality. The way to reduce medical errors, build rapport with patients, and increase efficiency is to identify the black swans--the unknown...