Confessions of a Leadership Junkie

I’m a leadership junkie.

I held a lot of leadership roles during my physician career.

Many of them at the same time. I stepped into leadership because I cared and because I wanted things to be better—for my patients, my colleagues, medicine itself, and yes, for me too.

When a problem showed up, I jumped in to solve it.

You know exactly what happens when you do that in medicine

I went to leadership training. Chief School. Workshops. Courses.

I learned how to manage people, lead teams, and move initiatives forward.

What I didn’t learn was how to lead without being constantly activated.

How to stay grounded while holding responsibility.

How to care deeply without becoming a martyr.

Medicine doesn’t teach that.

What I learned instead came later—through experience, coaching training, mindfulness and yoga, neuroscience, psychology, and a lot of hard-earned self-awareness.

Mostly, I learned it by noticing what leadership was costing me.

Over time, it became clear that leadership itself wasn’t the problem.

The way I was leading was.

Leading from urgency. From over-responsibility. From the belief that if I didn’t step in, things would fall apart.

That approach exhausts your nervous system, strains relationships, and quietly erodes your capacity to lead well.

Heart-centered leadership isn’t about being soft or hands-off.

It’s about being regulated, clear, and intentional.

It’s walking into a hard conversation without your body already bracing and running meetings that don’t drain everyone—writing emails that don’t trigger a spiral.

Speaking publicly without performing or over-preparing. Handling difficult colleagues without replaying the interaction for days afterward.

It’s also being honest about where leadership has become emotionally and energetically expensive. Where you’re carrying more than your share. Where frustration, irritability, doubt, and reactivity have become part of the job description.

Most leaders I work with already sense this.

They don’t want another framework or productivity hack.

They want leadership to feel more sustainable. More grounded. More human.

This is the work I now do with leaders—creating space to unlearn what’s making leadership harder than it needs to be.

To stop leading from martyrdom and start leading from authenticity and wholeness.

To interrupt the patterns in medicine that normalize burnout and pass it on to the next generation.

If leadership continues to drain you, the answer isn’t to try harder or care less. It’s to lead differently.

Leadership doesn’t have to cost you your nervous system, your relationships, or your sense of self.

Heart-centered leadership isn’t optional if you want to stay in this work without burning out yourself—or everyone around you.

There is another way to lead.