'I feel like myself again': Small changes = big impact
Physician turned coach shares the power of micro changes to address burnout
The doctor was getting grumpy.
She would say yes to please others, said Dr. Diane Shannon, a former primary care physician who now works with women in medicine facing burnout as a professional coach. While the doctor’s volunteerism felt good in the moment, it was taking a toll. The staff noted she was “short” with them and she felt she was headed into burnout for a second time. A former triathlete, she would come home and lay on the couch, too exhausted to do anything else.
Working with Shannon as her coach, the doctor, an OB-GYN, made a change. Just a small adjustment. Instead of offering to come in and deliver babies for her own patients when she was not on call, she committed to staying off duty.
The difference was enormous. She could pick up hobbies, enjoy travel, and pursue a life outside of her career with her reclaimed energy.
“She said, ‘I feel like myself again,’” Shannon said. “‘I had lost myself and now I feel like I found myself again.’”
When working with her clients, Shannon starts with assessments to find where their clients’ thinking might be making their situation worse (perfectionism and people pleasing come up a lot). They find the topics they want to work on and come up with ways to measure progress: getting charts closed in time to get home for dinner with their family, for instance. They start experimenting to see what works.
"Through that process, they gain insight about what works for them and what they want," Shannon said. "It's so important, especially in a job change or career change, to try to be clear on where you're going so that you are pulled by something rather than pushed."
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Shannon suggests taking three steps when you’re feeling overwhelmed:
- Make a list of everything that is depleting you at work.
- Look at that list and identify where you have some power to change something, even if it's tiny: “What can I do today to make it more likely I'll be on an A game day tomorrow?”
- Pick one item on the list where you have some power and try a micro change as an experiment.
Shannon left her own medical career because of burnout. I asked her what advice she’d pass along to her previous self, if she could.
“I wish I’d known about microchanges and that I had the confidence to reach out for help, to be more vulnerable and let people know that I was struggling. That to me felt unacceptable,” she said.
“The other thing I wish I had done was to value self-care and to really prioritize my own well-being. It was almost like I was flinging parts of myself away. Like, ‘Oh, I don't need that hobby. Oh, I don't need to stay in touch with those friends. I don't need sleep.’”
The beauty of small changes is that you can quickly tell whether something’s working. For Shannon’s clients, within the first month of working together, they start to have hope that change is possible. “That hope,” Shannon said, “makes everything feel better.”
Happy navigating,
Bridget
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