Dr. Jessie Mahoney shares a sustainable approach to physician leadership, nervous-system regulation, boundaries, and leading with wellness in medicine.

I thought I was a Kaiser lifer. Until I wasn’t. In this episode, Jessie shares why leaving was terrifying, why she could not not do it, and why she now understands that she is still practicing medicine—just with different people, in different places, and with a wider radius of impact. This episode is an invitation to listen to yourself more closely, trust that change can be nonlinear, and consider that there may be more than one way to practice authentically.

A family medicine physician shares how coaching with Jessie helped her find a sustainable way to stay in medicine. She had thought she was in her forever job: full-scope family medicine, OB care, community health, and clinical leadership in an FQHC she loved. Then the job changed. Leaders left, colleagues were fired, staffing became unsustainable. The work that had once felt like a dream no longer did.

If you still love medicine and want a way of practicing that allows you to be fully human, this episode is full of pearls to help you get there.

Jessie Mahoney and Ni-Cheng Liang explore why friendship is hard to find and sustain after medical training. The people, structure, and shared experience that made connection simply happen in training disappear. At the same time, clinical practice, family life, caregiving, leadership, and life pull our energy and attention in other directions.

This episode explores “intentional friendship”: how to make new connections, sustain old ones, and navigate the vulnerability of reaching out.

Friendship is neither optional nor indulgent. It is medicine. Listen to learn about scheduling connection, allowing friendships to have seasons, making room for imperfect attendance, moving beyond comparison, and practicing the often-unfamiliar skill of receiving support.

What is uncompromising intimacy? Why is curiosity oxygen for long-term relationships?

Listen to this week’s podcast with special guest Dr. Alexandra Stockwell to explore intimacy, libido mismatch, and practical ways to reconnect in long-term relationships.

Learn why practicing pleasure in your daily life can grow your libido and why small transitions can be an opportunity for connection.

In this episode, Dr. Jessie Mahoney offers a different frame: high-level work and high-level lives require high-level maintenance. Sleep is maintenance. Boundaries are maintenance. Friendship, nourishment, time outside, rest, reflection, asking for help, and coaching are all maintenance.

Sometimes we do not need a better plan. We need enough space to hear ourselves.

In this week’s conversation, family physician Dr. Kelly Derbin shares how coaching, mindfulness, yoga, two Connect in Nature retreats, and time in nature helped her navigate burnout and the tender decision to retire from clinical practice.  Her story is a beautiful reminder that a pause is not the same as stepping away from your life. It is often how you find your way back into it.

When life feels chaotic, hope can keep us going. But hope alone cannot make the decisions, protect our energy, or help us meet reality with wisdom. In this personal episode, Jessie shares an endurance-race approach to caregiving, overwhelm, agency, and grace.

In this episode, we explore mindful communication: listening with presence rather than listening to fix, advise, correct, or rescue. The desire to help can sometimes be experienced as judgment. Simply being present can be one of the most generous things we can offer another person.

This week I’m joined by breast radiologist, Dr. Jenny Kohr. We talk about pacing, perfectionism, intuition, singing lessons, and the quiet practice of trusting yourself through change. If you are craving more alignment, ease, or room to hear yourself think, this conversation is for you.

 In this episode, Dr. Jessie Mahoney talks with psychiatrist and author Dr. Jennifer Reid about her book Guilt Free. They talk about where guilt actually comes from, why it lands especially hard on women physicians. Listen to learn what you can do to move toward decisions grounded in trust, alignment, authenticity, and sustainability.

Born on the same day, about a decade apart, Dr. Jessie Mahoney and Dr. Erica Bove reflect on what they are proud of, what they know now that they did not know a year ago, and what they want for the year ahead. Listen to explore what it looks like when self-kindness moves from a mantra into an actual decision, how surrender shows up differently in career, family, health, and relationships, and why rest and non-productivity are essential to a physician's whole health, not extras.

Pearls of Wisdom

• Coaching, career pivots, fertility, parenting, relationships: the access point differs, but the deeper work overlaps.

• Sometimes speaking up means standing tall, and sometimes it means letting other people be them.

• Patience and trust often deliver what pushing and forcing cannot.

• Female friendship is not optional. It is part of your whole health system.

Caregiving for aging parents often triggers physician overfunctioning and worry. Jessie and Ni-Cheng explore boundaries and staying buoyant instead.

Shame around failure and rejection isolates physicians and fuels burnout. This episode explores why, through the story of Dr. René Roberts, who was rejected by every medical school she applied to for three years and later failed her Step 1 board exam twice before becoming an exceptional physician.

Our conversation explores what it took to voice her dream, trust it, and finally move toward it and the role retreats and coaching played at each step along the way.

What this conversation makes clear is that the path forward does not require leaving. It does not require arriving somewhere new. It requires something more honest: the willingness to hold up a mirror, to find thought partners who will tell you the truth, to cultivate sponsors rather than wait to be discovered, and to build pausing and reflecting into the ordinary rhythm of your career.

Dr. Ni-Cheng Liang shares what a hit-and-run accident taught her about acceptance, receiving support, resilience, and choosing how to meet the unexpected with mindfulness and self-compassion.

This episode asks whether what we often dismiss as “woo” may actually be unfamiliar, embodied, evidence-informed, and deeply effective. Dr. Jessie Mahoney pulls back the curtain on the intentional methodology behind Pause & Presence retreats, where coaching, mindfulness, breathwork, yoga, nature, reflection, beauty, rest, and community are deliberately woven together.

Communication takes energy. In this episode, we explore how clarity, transparency, and mindful communication can conserve energy in medicine, and at home –  especially when projects, relationships, and systems feel clogged or inefficient.

Almost every woman in medicine has, at some point, decided she doesn't belong. In this episode, we explore why.