FAQ’s

Physicians Are the Only High Performers Who Don’t Routinely Have Coaches, and it shows!

Coaching is standard for high performers in almost every demanding field. Athletes, executives, and military leaders work with coaches not because they’re struggling, but because the stakes are high and excellence requires skilled support.

Professional athletes train to regulate their bodies and minds because their bodies and minds are their instruments. Executives train for strategic thinking and communication because teams and culture depend on it. Military leaders train for adaptability and emotional control because lives are at stake.

Physicians sit at the intersection of all three—physical demands, strategic complexity, and the responsibility for human lives—yet we are expected to perform without comparable support.

It shows.

It shows in burnout, attrition, moral injury, and exhaustion. It shows in strained relationships, isolation, and self-sacrifice disguised as professionalism. It shows in a culture that teaches us to power through rather than skillfully navigate the realities of our work and physiology.

Coaching gives physicians access to strategic thinking, emotional regulation, communication skills, boundaries, leadership development, values-aligned decision-making, and nervous system awareness.

We don’t need this because we are fragile; we need it because the work and our systems are both complex and broken.

If medicine is going to evolve, we have to stop pretending we can outwork or out-sacrifice the system and start learning how to practice sustainable excellence.

Is Physician Coaching Real?

Coaching is not a scam. It is a skillset for modern medicine.

Physicians are trained to doubt anything unfamiliar.

We are taught to defer to evidence, protocols, hierarchy, and systems — and to distrust anything that doesn’t fit those structures.

This skepticism keeps patients safe in medicine, but it also keeps physicians from considering tools that could help them tremendously that don’t look like medicine.

Coaching is evidence-based. Multiple randomized controlled trials show that coaching reduces burnout and emotional exhaustion and improves fulfillment, performance, and quality of life. In one recent study, burnout dropped from 77% to 33% in just eight weeks of virtual coaching. Fulfillment doubled. Energy, clarity, and joy also increased significantly.

Coaching is also structured very differently from medicine.

Thankfully, it doesn’t follow the same billing models, visit templates, documentation practices, or insurance-driven cost structures. It isn’t algorithmic, diagnostic, or prescriptive.

Because it doesn’t resemble what we know, the medical brain often tries to put it in a box. The unfortunate consequence is that some physicians have interpreted the difference as illegitimacy.

The word “scam” appears when something doesn’t fit the mental model we have for what help is supposed to look like. As a result, many physicians avoid coaching or judge it from the sidelines.

That avoidance causes harm, not because coaching is essential, but because the skills coaching teaches are desperately needed in medicine and are not being learned elsewhere.

I didn’t pursue coaching because I was burned out.

I pursued it because after decades of clinical work and physician wellness leadership, it was clear that traditional wellness efforts were not shifting how physicians actually felt or functioned in their daily lives. Coaching did.

Over the last six years, I have coached more than a thousand physicians — 1:1, in small groups, and at retreats. The work was so effective and meaningful that I chose to leave clinical pediatrics, a pension, and a predictable path to bring these tools to colleagues across the country.

Coaching is not a substitute for therapy, medicine, or system change — but it is a missing layer of support physicians deserve. Not because we are fragile, but because we are human in a profession that routinely asks us to be superhuman.