Coaching
What actually happens to a person's identity over a career in medicine? Most run on unexamined, unnamed forces that shape you, rather than something you shape. Naming them is the first step. This practice is built for what follows.
This isn't therapy, and it isn't life coaching. It's identity work, grounded in research.
Underneath that first question sit deeper ones: Why does training reshape you in ways nobody warns you about? Why does belonging in a department feel like something that has to be re-earned every day? Why do some physicians keep practicing years after they meant to stop?
I built my PhD research around these questions, studying Professional Identity Formation across the full arc of an academic physician's career. But I didn't come to it as a researcher first. I came to it as someone living inside the same arc, watching my own sense of who I was shift under the weight of the job.
I still practice surgery. I still teach residents and faculty. And through Attending to Self, I coach physicians and medical educators working through exactly this — not burnout as a checklist to fix, but as an identity challenge to navigate — the difference between a career you're in and one that's yours.
What Coaching Looks Like
Sessions run biweekly or monthly and typically continue for three to six months. They are conducted by video. Each conversation starts from where you actually are that week. There is no fixed curriculum, though patterns tend to surface: the roles you're inhabiting, where and what they cost you, and what it would take to feel trustworthy belonging. This isn't advice about your career. It's attention to the identities doing the work — and whether they still fit.
Who This Is For
Physicians at any career stage who sense a gap between the role they're asked to play and who they actually are, or are facing a transition (new role, new institution, retirement) that's surfacing questions you haven't had to ask before.
Some of the physicians I work with are approaching the end of clinical practice, or have recently left it. When a role has organized your days and your sense of worth for decades, many find that retirement feels less like rest than like loss. That transition deserves the same deliberate attention we give to the start of a career.
If this sounds like where you are, let's talk.
Schedule a conversation →Or write first — it doesn't have to explain much: [email protected]