# DTD 161
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Hey guys. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda. I'm Laura. And I'm Kendra. And the absolutely delightful, Dr. Vanessa Calderon is joining us today. We first met her at a physician coaching conference and fell in love with her vibe, and you are going to as well.
She is a board certified emergency physician. She's the National Director for Wellness and Resilience at Vituity, which if you're not familiar with that, it's a national multi-specialty medical organization. And these days she's primarily focusing on conscious business and leadership development, where she works with both physicians and other entrepreneurs.
Today, she's gonna talk to us about self-compassion, which is so, so important. Thank you, Vanessa, for coming on the show. Well, thank you lovely ladies for having me. I'm so happy to be here. Yes, Vanessa, thank you so much. We are just gonna kick it off and let our listeners learn a little bit about you. Tell us whatever you want.
Yeah, sure thing. So, I guess just briefly what brings me here standing in [00:01:00] front of all of you today is well, let's see. I think my story starts a little bit before medical school. So I was a social justice activist for a very long time before I chose medicine. And actually, I think in the back of my mind I kind of always knew I wanted to be a doctor.
I was one of those little young kids at five when I was like, when I grow up I'm gonna be a doctor. But I did a lot of activism work before medicine, working on healthcare access and social justice work. Then I went to med school and spent a lot of time doing leadership development, leadership work.
I was, you know, from chief resident to national board experience. I was a department chair for close to a decade, a medical director for a very long time, and then dove into business development work. So working to start essentially practices in new departments and new hospitals throughout the country.
So, all of that brings me here as I continue to work in that space. I realized my work started to focus a lot on human development work, so wanting to mentor the people that [00:02:00] worked with me, mentoring them and continuing to grow and learn from myself. So, today I am primarily focusing on what I say, conscious business and leadership, which is helping physicians and other high powered entrepreneurs really make decisions that are aligned with their highest self and really great values that also really create profit well and results and impact, but keep them true to themselves so that at the end of their lives they're living lives where they are experiencing a ton of fulfillment.
Amazing. Yeah, that sounds amazing. And like you said, one of your favorite topics is self-compassion. So tell our listeners a little bit why you're so passionate about self-compassion.
Yeah, I think you know, the more and more I've grown, especially over these last 10 years, the more I realize that as nice as I thought I was to myself, I actually was not that nice to myself.
I had something called esteem, so I had a lot of self-esteem, which is very different than self-compassion. And self-compassion [00:03:00] is the kind of kindness and the kind of love we have for like the souls out there that we view as just super kind like our little kids maybe, or our grandparents that we have very good relationships with. That kind of love we have towards them and the kindness we have towards them. That's the kind of kindness and love we can have towards ourselves when we practice self-compassion. And what I've realized is the more and more compassion I have towards myself, the more successful I am, the happier I am, the more fulfilled I am, the deeper my relationships are. So for me, if you were to graph it, it's really directly related to my level of happiness, fulfillment, love, joy in the world, and success is directly related to my level of self-compassion.
Yeah, that's amazing insight. So many of us struggle with self-judgment and perfectionism, so how does self-compassion help counteract these tendencies without really sacrificing patient care or the confidence that we have in taking care of our patients every day?
Yeah, I think that that is one of the biggest [00:04:00] what I think in the world of coaching, we say limiting beliefs, which is a thought that we have that is not giving us the results that we want in the world. To assume that practicing self-compassion is going to counteract how great we are with patients is really a disservice to patient care because in my experience working with myself and also coaching hundreds and hundreds of really smart and successful, ambitious physicians and other leaders, the more self-compassion they have towards themselves, the better clinicians they are and the better leaders they are.
Because what happens when you think about judgment when you judge yourself? You know, there's an old school way of thinking that when we judge ourselves, it's gonna push us to be better. That the way for us to continue to excel in the world is to be hard on ourselves. They've done many, many, many studies to debunk that old belief that being hard on ourselves makes us better people, when in fact, the opposite is true.
Because when you have thoughts like, I'm not enough or I failed, you have [00:05:00] feelings of disappointment and sadness and those feelings of disappointment and sadness lead to these spiral actions of closing yourself off, of being hard on yourself, of ruminating, and those types of actions do not create intentional results in the world. Those types of actions do not create the results that you want.
And the same thing with perfectionism. You know, I read this quote that perfectionism is just shame that is cloaked in gold. And I think that is so true. The reason why so many of us drive towards perfectionism, we think it's because we are trying to reach this level of excellence, but there's a slight difference between excellence and perfectionism and, and that's all just words.
A step down from that perfectionism really is just us being so afraid of being seen for who we are. We are so afraid of our true, our authentic selves being shown out to the world that we strive for this level of perfection because we think that that's who we're supposed to be. And man, I can just see like the number of people that I've worked with.
When we first dive deep into this topic, so many people are resistant. They're like, no, wait. That is who I'm supposed to be. I am supposed to be perfect, but you are just supposed to be who you are. And I a hundred percent guarantee that who you are right now is enough and you don't need to pretend to be someone that you're not because truthfully [00:06:00] that just creates this huge like barrier inside yourself where you're always fighting to be someone that you're not. And that's pretty exhausting. That's where burnout comes from. That's where stress comes from. I love that.
So not just perfectionism, but now let's talk about pathologic altruism. Because we are trained to prioritize others most often at the expense of our own wellbeing. No one tells us to go on home. You've already done enough. Go ahead and pick up more patients. Can you pick up that extra shift? Can you do more, more, more, more, more for everyone else? So some of us will start getting nervous if we start having self-compassion, that we're gonna lose our sense of duty and professionalism.
How does a shift with self-compassion, shifting that mindset, how does that work? And also maintaining that strong sense of duty and professionalism.
Yeah. Oh, I love the way you called it pathologic altruism. I've never heard it called that before. That is Oh, it's good. Yeah. You know, in my world, I kind of call it being a martyr [00:07:00] instead of being a servant leader. Yeah. You know, I think we make those things up in our heads a little bit. So I'm gonna just talk on sort of high level, and then I'll bring it down to like actual day to day. My husband loves like actual direct, like what does this actually look like? And so we'll talk about it on that level too.
But I'll say, you know, the concept of pathologic altruism is I kind of call it this concept of martyrdom where we always assume that we always have to be doing more, or that there's something wrong that we're, you know, we tell ourselves that we're selfish if we don't pick up that extra shift.
Especially, you know, when Covid came and we were working really hard and then we were really short staffed, and then for a lot of hospitals, the opposite happened in the emergency department where people became overstaffed. And now we're at a place again where we're short staffed again. And so, and by the way, these cycles will continue to happen.
We'll be overstaffed, short staffed, overstaffed, short staffed. That will always happen. And so I think what I find the most interesting is whenever we are in these hard places, we tell ourselves stories. I'm not good enough, I'm selfish. All these types of things that show up. But the thing is, in my experience [00:08:00] everyone is not telling themselves the same story. You over here with this pathological altruism telling yourself that you're not good enough if you don't pick up the shifts or that you're being selfish or that you need to be a better team player. There's somebody else having a totally different experience than you, and so whose experience is right or wrong?
If this person is saying, you know what? I picked up an extra shift last week and this week I need to really spend time with my 3-year-old at home. Who's wrong? You know, the truth is like, and, and I just wanna be honest here, probably nobody is wrong. Both just need to examine where they're coming from and why.
If you really believe that you're not doing enough, that's deeper. There's something deeper there that's really leading you to tell yourself those stories. And in my experience, it comes from a lot of, as we know, conditioning and examples that we've seen. And so let's talk about this on sort of the shift level, like the actual day to day.
Let's say we're short staffed at a site and you know, I wanna go home because I've been working since, you know, I picked up the morning shift. I've been working since 5:00 AM. My shift is over. I even stayed an extra hour or an extra hour and a half sometimes because I picked up patients all the way till the end.
And now I wanna finish all my charting. So now I wanna go home. I'm exhausted. But you have this nagging thought, oh my gosh, I should pick up a shift later. Or, what about tomorrow? Or, can I really leave this doctor like that? Listen. You are not serving anybody when you stay. When you stay and you push yourself a little bit harder, what ends up happening? [00:09:00]
It's this cycle that is not a virtuous cycle. It's actually a pretty vicious cycle. You become exhausted and then what happens? You go home and how are you to the people that you love? You're probably not your best. You're not kind, you're not patient, you're not showing up for them. And then what happens?
You probably don't sleep well. You probably don't eat well because your cortisol levels are all messed up and now you're craving tons of carbs and sugar. And then what happens? You probably don't exercise the next day and the cycle goes on and on and on. And those little micro choices that we make every day.
Those micro choices cause these levels of micro stress where our amygdala turns on, our stress levels are all messed up in our bodies. All of our stress hormones are going crazy. And when we do that, little by little, by little over and over and over again, those little acute stressors, that's what brings on chronic stress and what brings on burnout.
Because burnout is not like a light switch that turns on. All of a sudden we wake up and we're like, holy smokes. What happened? No burnout happens after chronic exposure to these tiny little baby decisions, and so all we need to know is to check with ourselves and say, hold on a second. Am I really in integrity right here?
If I go home, am I a [00:10:00] bad person? Probably not. Because what ends up happening when we choose ourselves is the G word, right? Like we feel incredibly guilty and guilt is like this moral stamp we put on things like you are immoral. If you don't pick up that extra shift, you are immoral. If you go home, you are immoral if you take care of yourself.
And I just want us to like be thoughtful. Is that even rational? It's not. It's a completely irrational thought that we are being a bad person if we don't always sacrifice ourselves. We are not less professional, we are not less caring. And just one more thing I want you all to think when these thoughts come up is, who does this thought benefit?
The benefit that if you don't work harder, you're lazy, or that if you don't work harder, you're doing something wrong. Who does it benefit? It does not benefit you and it does not benefit the people that you love at home. It does not benefit your family. So who does that benefit? Yeah, I preach. Yeah, that's, we have some suspicion.
Yeah. Preach. Preach it. And I think a lot of that too, I, it was coming up while you were speaking Vanessa, about just performance [00:11:00] space worth. I know I have a personal testimony about that big time. And just like when you were talking, that plays a big role and I think from what I've read, it tends to lean on the women more than men.
We have men clients that do definitely identify with performance based worth, but I do think that women fall susceptible to it just because we think to stand on two feet in our time, in our place, we have to perform. We have to like prove something. We've gotta do stuff. We're doers.
We're not just like beers. Like we just can't be. And so what you were saying was just really speaking so immediate to that, that's really what was coming up.
Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you. I think it's so interesting. Women have definitely, especially our generation of women, well, not just our generation, the generation after us, the generation before us, right? Like our mothers, our grandmothers, we have been socialized and they're trying to continue to do [00:12:00] it now, and they, you know, sort of royal, they, yeah. They're trying to continue to make women believe that their worth comes from service. Their worth comes from being mothers, in fact. Do you know, there's this concept of the selfish feminist, the concept of the selfish feminist, where there was very thoughtful and very intentional branding to brand any woman in the sixties and seventies who was choosing to work outside of the home as selfish because it was disrupting the entire status quo.
It was who's gonna do childcare if the woman works? What happens to the men when they're at work? They have to come home early. That's bananas. You know, like now they have to also do childcare. So they did very intentional branding to coin this term of the selfish feminist.
Any woman that chose to think about herself or to think about her desires or her wants or careers were just flagged as being selfish. And selfish is one of the worst things you can ever call a woman being selfish. And so a hundred percent I agree with you. And you know, there was a TED event in Atlanta, [00:13:00] TEDx Atlanta, and I was there and I was surrounded by so many young, bright minds, and I was so moved by the fact that these young women, there was a high school that sponsored some of the seats there. So there was a lot of young teens, but also young, 20-year-old and 30 year olds who were no longer believing, like just putting their middle finger up to this concept of like being selfish because they're choosing themselves.
And my heart was so warmed. I was like, wow, I wish that I had that socialization that they had. But you know what? We had what we had. Our experience was our experience for whatever it was, and now we get to come back and say, Hey, hold on a second. Look, let's learn from these young people that are no longer believing these lies. This isn't something we need to believe anymore. It's just not true.
I think an extra helping in medicine is think about who goes into medicine in the first place, who sacrifices the best years of their lives in order to serve others. So not only is it like a societal thing with women, but a lot of our men too are [00:14:00] particularly altruistic.
And then when whoever says this to people, hopefully you all have never heard this, but when someone says to you, but what about the patients? Well, I don't know. If you really cared, maybe we would have appropriate staffing. It turns it into my problem when like, I literally had no control over this situation.
You know, it's not my problem that the waiting room is full because a hundred people just checked in. But yet I'm led to go ahead and feel that way, that it's somehow my fault. Yeah. So anyway, we're spiraling, but...
Well, I wanna add though, too, like, you know, for those of us who are the pathologically altruistic, like, we may still make it our problem that the waiting room is full and people are suffering and we can't help them all.
This is what we say to those of you who experienced this is that you can't continue to be their doctor if you keep on this burnout track that you're going on. There are gonna be even more people [00:15:00] suffering. So you can't save the whole world. You can't save the whole waiting room.
You can't answer every last message in your inbox from, you know, those demanding patients who send you like eight a day. For those of you who are in family medicine or internal medicine.
Yeah. And you know, I just think that there's a time and a place for doing the work. I come from a world of leadership, you know, I was the administrator, I was the operations person trying to solve issues so that we can see the patients in the waiting room and they don't have to be waiting and we can move them through.
I was in conversations with administration when we were struggling with nurse staffing, when we didn't have beds, all of those types of things. And I'll tell you that there's a time and a place for everything because, you know, just like Kendra said, coming from like a personal place of like always believing it was my fault if those patients had to wait. I'll just share that if you are called to make a change and really want to take on, you know, these issues that are administrative issues, you have to come from a place [00:16:00] of intention. You can't solve it from being burnt out or being exhausted. And also when you're on shift, your job is to do the best that you can to save people's lives and take care of patients.
And afterwards, if you're like, okay, I'm well rested, I feel good. Now today I wanna tackle the waiting room. Okay, so what does that look like today and just really be intentional about the choices that you wanna make, because I remember, oh my gosh, I've worked, you guys have all experienced this.
I worked at one site where there was no nurses until a specific time. And then when that time came, all of a sudden all the patients flooded the ER. And it would just so happened to be right when I had to leave. And I would feel a tremendous amount of guilt leaving my partners with all of those patients that were just vetted.
And it took me a few shifts to realize that I was feeling guilt and that the guilt was driving me to take unintentional actions, which is stay late or pick up more patients. And then I was like, hold on a second. I don't make the nurse's schedule. I'm not the, you know, like we all know what time patients show up and we all know that the nurse staffing doesn't always align with the time that patients show up.
And that is [00:17:00] not something that I can control. And every time I stay, I'm not necessarily making it better for the patients or for the nurses. The nurses need to have their own decision and decide when they're gonna staff. But me staying and being exhausted and not being home for my kids' game or not sleeping well tonight, that's not gonna make a difference in the long run.
Yeah. Nope I did the same because I was part-time. I would sit there and be like, well, all full-timers shouldn't pick up an extra shift. It should probably be me. But I was part-time for a reason and I was paid less. I mean, I'm hourly, so I was paid far less than the other people. And most of them had a spouse at home who wasn't working outside the home.
Whereas I was that support person. Anyway, again, we could go on and on about all the things.
Well, hopefully people have not had this experience, but I personally have. And when you make a mistake or mistakes happen in medicine, the emotional weight that you carry can be immense. And so how can self-compassion help [00:18:00] physicians process errors or omissions or just not a big enough differential or whatever happened in a way that promotes growth rather than guilt or shame.
Yeah. Whoof, this is a real one. I've worked a lot with physicians that are experiencing malpractice or going through malpractice or even before they're at this stage of malpractice, they've had a bad outcome.
We should just name how horrible that feels, because we really care about the people that we take care of. We don't want them to have bad outcomes outside of us, outside of malpractice. We care about the person on the other side, and we want them to have a good outcome. And so when something like that happens, it hits us so hard and it hits us hard on so many levels.
Number one, we were trained to be perfect. To never be vulnerable, to never make any mistakes. And so if something like that happens, you know, all of these years of indoctrination in medical school telling us that we've been perfect, especially, I don't know if you guys remember ground rounds. I remember sitting through ground rounds and it was so [00:19:00] punitive. Okay. And like, so shameful, you know? And so that's what people can feel.
And let's just name things for what they are, man. They're human experiences. They are human experiences, and the truth is there's this concept in quality that's called like the cottage cheese model. I dunno if you guys are familiar with the cottage cheese model.
The best healthcare systems that exist right now out there have created stop gaps to make sure that we are catching errors before they happen because we are all human. So, like the healthcare system in Pennsylvania, like all these healthcare systems like Geyer for example, they create these stop gaps to make sure that these mistakes are caught before they happen. So if an error actually happens, what we need to think about is it's not just one person's fault.
Usually the cottage cheese model is like everything had to have lined up or the Swiss cheese model. Everything had to have lined up perfectly for that mistake to have happened. The timeout didn't happen appropriately. Maybe the nurse didn't do the job, maybe this person didn't do this, maybe this.
All of these things have had to have happened for that [00:20:00] mistake to have happened, and that's not excusing, you know, someone for making an error. It's just to name, we are human and mistakes are gonna happen, which is why we have done so much.
I was, by the way, I was an anesthesiologist before I went into, before I became an ER doc. And anesthesia used to have really horrible outcomes, horrible outcomes. Nobody wanted to be an anesthesiologist for a very long time. And then guess what happened? They started learning from a bunch of the aerospace and just flights from pilots, and they started learning because what happens in anesthesia, the most dangerous times is the takeoff and the landing when you're putting the patient down and when you're waking them up.
So they started learning all of these safety procedures that were happening outside of medicine and learning from those and bringing them over. And what they realized is we have to get everybody involved. We have to make sure people are arrested. We have to make sure that the nurse is there. We have to do these timeouts, we have to make sure the medicine, all of these types of things.
It was everybody's job to keep the patient safe, not just one person's job. So when an error happens, the most important thing to remember is that, [00:21:00] hey, hold on a second. You're a human being. Humans make mistakes and man, I am so sorry that happened. But that same mistake could have happened to somebody else and they may have not had a bad outcome at all.
Maybe you double dose somebody with, I don't know. I did this one time, oh God, I'm so happy that the patient was okay, but I gave the patient an extra dose of contrast and luckily they did not go into renal failure, but I felt terrible. I felt terrible and it was just an extra dose of contrast and I just, I felt terrible because of all of the things that could have happened to the patient.
And then I like went back and I was like, hold on a second. I second dose that patient. Why didn't the radiology tech call me? Why didn't the nurse call me? Why didn't this happen? Why didn't this happen? You know, right now how many techs call you when you order something, the creatinine isn't back yet. How you get like a million calls?
Why didn't that happen for this patient? And so then I went all the way back and I looked and I was like, oh my God. Look at all of the different errors that happened for that patient to get a second dose. Yes, I ordered it, but there was all of these things that were supposed to happen to protect the patient that were not [00:22:00] working that same day.
And so I just wanna remind people that we are humans and when mistakes happen, we have to remember that we're humans and we get to learn, give ourselves so much love in that space. And one small little technique that I love to teach is, you know, be with your pain. Be with your disappointment, be with your sadness, but you don't have to wallow in it.
And you don't have to stay in there forever. Just the way, like if your little like 7-year-old came home and was so sad that they had made a mistake at school, what would you do? You would be with them and you would hold them, and then what would you do? You would allow that other voice, your voice of kindness of compassion, of caring to show up for them and tell them it's okay. Let's learn. Let's move on. Let's figure this out together. What can we learn from this? That's what you would tell them. So do that for yourself. Give yourself that love, that kindness. Be with that. Be with those feelings.
But then allow that third voice to show up. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to somebody that you love. That's also having all those feelings of sadness and disappointment.
I love that. That is such a good technique. [00:23:00] Thank you for sharing that. It's also helpful to realize when a mistake happens, if you're learning from it already, you're already gonna be better the next time. I think it's really easy to go down this path of like, well, if I did that, I must be horrible and I suck. And like maybe I shouldn't even be in this job. Like, whoa, okay, that escalated quickly, right? You've already learned you're already gonna be better.
And I like some of the coaches too, that like actually thank the previous version of themselves that they're doing better today because of that mistake, because they learned and they do things differently now, so it's totally possible to turn it around and own the ending.
So burnout is a major issue in healthcare. What are some practical self-compassion strategies that busy physicians can implement in the middle of a crazy, wild, chaotic shift?
Yeah, so this is such a good question. So I'm gonna give maybe three because this is like my jam. I love to teach this to doctors. So the first is before you get into the middle of the crazy [00:24:00] hectic shift, remind yourself that you're gonna have a busy, crazy, hectic shift.
Because usually that's how they are, right? Especially if you're in the ER. And so what you need to do is plan for that ahead of time. So how can you plan for that ahead of time? What do you need to do to show up as your best self? Maybe you need to sleep. So I think about this as kind of like the foundations of wellness or the foundations of resilience.
Even maybe even the foundation of self-compassion, if we wanna call it at the very baseline of all of this is sleep. If you are not well-rested, you are not gonna show up as your best self the next day. So think and ask yourself, what am I giving my sleep away to that beautiful gift I give myself a night?
Who am I giving it away to? Is it emails? Is it Netflix? Is it charting? Like, what are you giving it away to? And then really ask yourself, is that more important than me being at my best tomorrow than me showing up? And so just that's the first thing I will say. So plan for that crazy, hectic, busy shift.
The other thing is we know it's gonna be crazy, busy and hectic and you know, there were times where there were some departments where I used to work especially the ones that were in, you [00:25:00] know, urban or inner cities, and they were crazy and they were hectic and it felt like you were going into battle every time you showed up to work.
And I loved it. That was my jam. And I knew that, listen, if I'm going into battle, if I'm doing that, I need to be rested, I need to be hydrated, and my body needs to be at its best, which means I need to make sure I'm hydrated and I need to make sure that I'm well fed. So practice staying hydrated, healthy whole food, meals, and make it easy for you.
So if you are just listening, I'm showing on the screen right now this humongous bottle. It is about 800 milliliters, I think 800 mls. And this is what I roll with. When I'm at home, this is what I roll with 'cause it's glass. But when I go into the ER, I roll with something just as big because when that's full, I don't have to get up as many times to go fill my water bottle.
And so yes it does mean that I have to pee. And a lot of us wanna sacrifice our bodily function for another charge or another procedure. Don't. Yes, do not do that. In fact, what I do, because I know that I'm gonna have to go to the bathroom when I'm in the bathroom, I take that as a moment, and this is your third one.
This is the third hint one. [00:26:00] Prepare ahead of time by sleeping. Two, make sure that your body's ready to go well hydrated and well fed. Whole food meals. You guys all know what that means. Limit the sugar limit, all those types of things. And if your hospital doesn't have options, or if you're a night shift person and you know what's on night shift, like a bunch of chips and cookies and donuts, bring something for yourself so that you can continue to have whole foods in your body.
And the third is self-regulation. So I'm gonna offer two self-regulation exercises. So self-regulation, also known as self command. These are small, tiny little exercises. They take like 20 seconds, so not very long. And what they do is they allow us to ground ourselves back into our body when things are going hectic and crazy.
So let's say you're six hours into an eight-hour shift, you still have charting to do, you have procedures to do, and you're already thinking of like, how in the world am I gonna sign out a clean sign out and get out of the hospital on time? So what do you do? So here's where I offer in some self-regulation exercises.
So again, what this does is it allows you to turn off the parts of your brain that are on [00:27:00] overdrive right now, like hyperstimulated, hypervigilant, all those parts of your brain that are like, I got all this stuff to do. And what it allows you to do is come from the part of your brain that's focused more productive, your prefrontal cortex.
This is the part of your brain that's gonna allow you to sit and chart. If you need to chart, it's gonna allow you to go and do that procedure. Talk to that family member if you need to. Give them some good news or bad news or whatever you need to do, and then just stay on top. So one of them is a breathing exercise and the other one's a tactile exercise.
Some people really can zone into their breath and some people are like, I hate it. Every time I try to breathe, all I can do is think, and I hate breathing. So I'll give you two. For the breathing one, all you gotta do feet flat on the ground and you just have to do a four by four breath. A lot of us are familiar with four by four breathing.
It's pretty simple. If you're not envision four sides of a box. Each box, you do one thing for four seconds. Inhale for four seconds. Hold your breath for four seconds. Exhale for four seconds. Hold your breath for four seconds. The [00:28:00] exhalation turns on our parasympathetic nervous system. So our relaxation response turns on when we breathe out nice and slow.
So if you are in the middle of a crazy, busy, hectic shift, you still have a million things to do. I literally just pause in the middle of a hallway, not in front of any patients, and I'll just stand and I'll do a quick four by four breath. Maybe I do like, I don't know, 15 seconds, 20 seconds. My body's regulated again. I'm calm, I'm ready to go. So that's one exercise you can do.
The second is what I call two finger touch. So all you need to do again is you're grounded. You put your index finger and your thumb together, and you rub them slow enough. So if you're driving right now, use one of your hands. If you feel safe and you can practice with us and you just wanna move them slow enough so that you feel the ridges of your fingers, that's all you need to regulate your body, because what that does is put you back in your body, outside of your crazy, busy, hectic thoughts in your brain. So either of those two exercises work, and the reason [00:29:00] why I call them self-compassion exercises is 'cause guess what? They're grounded. They're both, by the way, grounded in science and proven to work.
But they're also a way for you to be kind to yourself, come back into your body, pause for a second, notice what needs to get done, because this is the third. Oh, here's one more. I'll set one more for you all. I
But they're also a way for you to be kind to yourself, come back into your body, pause for a second, and notice what needs to get done. This is the third. Oh, here's one more. I'll set one more for you all. I set an intention, so intentionality. What that does, I set an intention on my way to work.
When you set an intention, it primes your premotor cortex to do what you're telling it to do. So on my way into the hospital, I'll do a four by four breath. I'll do a few gratitude statements. Like, "I'm so grateful I get to help people today in the hospital. I'm so grateful that my job is, you know, to be with these vulnerable patients."
Whatever it is, I get myself into this pretty good vibe, and then I set my intention. My intention on my shift today is to have a productive, effective shift where I get to go home on time. I'll leave the department 20 minutes after my shift. So what that lets me do is get super clear as to what I'm going in to do.
I'm gonna have a productive shift. I'm gonna have an effective shift. If a code comes in, I'm gonna be grounded. I'm gonna make sure that I'm giving clear direction so it doesn't feel really crazy and hectic in there where there's a million people. All of those things, again, prime your premotor cortex so that when things are actually happening, you'll notice, "Huh? Look, it worked. My intention mattered." This is why mantras are powerful and why mantras work. It's the same thing. You're creating a belief for yourself, and you're telling your brain, this is what we're gonna do today. I love it. So powerful. It's awesome. Little toolbox to take to work.
So some doctors worry that self-compassion might lead them to complacency or a loss of motivation. You know, a lot of us, I feel like our inner critic helped us get to where we are and we worry. Maybe if we let it, you know, retire some, then somehow we're not gonna be the high achievers that we want to be. So how do you address this concern and clarify the difference between self-compassion and self-indulgence?
Ooh. I love that. Okay. Let's just thank every version of ourselves that existed before today, like the me of 10 years ago. Holy smokes. I was not a very kind person to myself. Not at all. Woo. The things I used to think about myself, not very nice. And I will also say like I got here, despite me being that mean person to myself.
Mm-hmm. And for all of you that think that your self critic got you here. Nope. You got here despite your self critic being so mean, so judgmental to you, you know, like I'm so happy that you're here. I'm so glad that you're here. And so I want you to think about, like, again, imagine like a little three-year-old or a 7-year-old, if you are always criticizing them, "You're not doing that, you're not doing good enough. Get up. Do it harder. I can't believe that you're so lazy. Oh, you should feel guilty for that." Then they end up to be really successful. Are you gonna think that your criticism got them there, or are you gonna be like, "Whoa, I'm so great. I can't even believe that person got there despite somebody yelling and screaming and judging them all the way there."
Because the truth is that we are here despite our inner critic, not because of our inner critic. We are here because we continue to push. There was something pulling us here at our core. Most of us here, most of us listening, we're healers at our core, we're physicians and we're healers at our core, which is why we're here and we got here because of that.
So I just wanna remind you of that because there have been so many studies to debunk the fact that being kind to yourself is going to lead to some sort of like sloth-like behavior. That's just fear. That is just fear. That is, we're so afraid of slowing down because what might be underneath, what haven't we been paying attention to?
Probably our feelings. What might we be feeling and maybe there's some emptiness there. Maybe we've been pushing ourselves and hold on. I haven't paid attention to relationships or haven't paid attention to this deep passion or something that's really been calling me. I've just been working so hard and so I'll just share right now that.
For those of you that think that if you slow down or if you're kind to yourself, that you're gonna just become a sloth. I'll tell you right now, that's almost impossible. Almost every physician I coach, they don't even know how to be lazy. They don't even know how to be a sloth. It's almost impossible for that to happen.
So that's just fear. That's just fear pushing you because it's scary to slow down. It's scary to slow down and just be with who you are because we haven't been taught that. Very few of us have seen models of success like that. We are now starting to see models of success like that emerge more and more.
And I just want all of you to look and think about what do I wanna be an example of? What do you wanna be an example of to your children? I'll leave you with that.
That's super powerful. I think sometimes when we don't wanna necessarily take care of ourselves, if we think about the model that we're creating for our kids that can help inspire us to take a little better care of ourselves.
So tell us what you're up to in the coaching world. Am I correct that you have new business and leadership coaching and a new podcast?
Yeah. So, if you are interested in following me on my podcast, I have a podcast. It's called The Empowered Brain. I've been running that podcast for three years. There's close to 200 episodes on there and it is the bomb. It is such a good podcast. It's called The Empowered Brain, anywhere you listen to podcasts. And yes, I am currently developing a new podcast that really speaks to a lot of the stuff we spoke on today, conscious leadership and business development.
That really helps you think through, how can I bring my whole self? How can I make decisions that are with intention, but still drive profit, you know? And still create an impact in the world because just the way you mentioned, a lot of us are so afraid that if we slow down or if we think about our feelings or if we're compassionate, we're not gonna be profitable and we may not be successful.
And those two things are just not true. There's a different way that's possible. So that is happening. So if you listen to my podcast, the Empowered Brain, you will get all of that information when that's out there. And for now, there's fantastic episodes on the Empowered Brain. And yes, I am coaching now successful a lot of physician leaders and also other entrepreneurs physician entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs to do the same thing, to really grow with intention, grow thoughtfully and continue to be present in their lives and not trade one career burnout for another career burnout, which is what I have seen happen a lot with physician entrepreneurs.
So you can find me at vanessacalderonmd.com. And same thing on Instagram at Vanessa_Calderon_MD.
Awesome. So the best way to reach you through your website, through Instagram.
You can message me on direct DM me on Instagram at Vanessa_Calderon_MD. For those of you who are the R is two, when I say it in Spanish, Vanessa Calderon MD or Vanessa Calderon MD or you can find me on my website, www.VanessaCalderonMD.com.
Awesome. So this has been so delightful. Thank you so much for being here. Do you have any closing thoughts for our audience?
Yeah, I'll just say if you're listening to this podcast, you are clearly driven to, you know, stay in medicine and make a big impact. And I'm so happy that the world brought you to this podcast because these women are incredible. They're powerhouses. They have found a way to continue to practice medicine in a way that really promotes patient safety and really promotes their own wellbeing. And I think that's what we want for everybody.
All of us went into medicine to take care of patients, to really honor that sacred bond between a physician and a patient. And that is still possible despite, you know, the craziness happening in the world outside of us and how business or healthcare has become so corporate, there is still a way for us to honor that relationship and continue to be, you know, what we all train so hard to be, which is just physicians. And I would just invite all of you to continue to follow these powerful women and to hire them if you were looking for someone to help, you know, direct you home, what I like to call home, which is how can I come home to myself and be more true to myself while also being in a really strong and solid position.
Thank you Vanessa, so much for your time today. We honor what you're doing in the leadership space with fellow colleagues and also just pioneering and braving the way for many women in healthcare that will follow your example. So thank you so much and we honor you today. And if this has helped you leave a review because it helps other doctors find us and move us up on the list.
If you have any experience with this or any questions whatsoever anything that really struck a chord with you in the episode today, email us at [email protected] and we wanna tell you about our new free video, how to Crush Physician Burnout for Good without cutting back hours, quitting medicine, or sucking it up in silence.
So until next time, you are whole. You are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
