Attending to Self — Professional Identity Formation for Physicians

A great deal of what gets diagnosed as burnout in medicine has an identity problem sitting underneath it. The exhaustion, the cynicism, the fading sense of accomplishment are real — but they're often the surface presentation of something else: an identity that stopped fitting the life it was supposed to serve.

A great deal of what gets diagnosed as burnout in medicine has an identity problem sitting underneath it.

Training reshapes you in ways no one warns you about. Belonging to a department, a specialty, a rank, can feel conditional — something you have to keep earning rather than something dependable. Some physicians arrive at mid-career and don't recognize who they've become. Others feel the gap between the role they're asked to play and the person they actually are widen, year after year, until something ruptures.

I lived it for more than a decade before I decided to study it directly. My doctoral research sat with physicians one conversation at a time, tracing early career struggles, proving themselves, finding where they belong, and eventually asking what “arriving” was even supposed to feel like. Attending to Self grew out of those conversations.

Here's the premise: every physician is on a journey of becoming, whether deliberate or not. What determines whether identity holds through a real transition — or breaks under it — is trustworthy belonging. Coaching, workshops, and consulting all follow from that one idea.

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