[00:00:00] Dr. Jessica Singh: Welcome to the Holistic Physician Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jessica Singh. This podcast explores physician health, wellbeing, and fulfillment, embracing all aspects of the human experience. Just as in medicine where a single interaction can transform a life, this podcast is grounded on the belief that each coaching conversation has the power to inspire, heal, and bring about meaningful change. 

[00:00:34] In this podcast episode, I'll be debriefing my fifth coaching session with Dr. Mary. What happens when life happens to you as a coach and you're coaching, and you have these coachees that you've built this relationship with, they're in their progress of coaching and something happens, a [00:01:00] life event, death, sickness, whatever it is.

[00:01:04] How do you navigate? So for me, with Dr. Mary, when we set the coaching agreement, and this happens with everyone, right. You set the frequency, the duration of the sessions, how long the coaching engagement will last, and it's really important as a coach to provide that structure. In that structure comes safety, that psychological safety.

[00:01:32] In that structure, you and the coachee know what to expect, what to work forward. You build a rhythm together, and they have their space to do work in between sessions. And so one of the things I've learned, especially with coaching physicians or anyone with a busy lifestyle and schedules that can change in the last minute, is that sometimes what the coaching agreement says at the [00:02:00] beginning doesn't necessarily hold.

[00:02:03] And so I have learned to honor that space because for me, especially with physicians, sometimes call happens, work schedules change. So yes, on paper, while it may be ideal to coach every one or two weeks. In reality, sometimes it's just not possible, and that's okay. But what's important is to still keep a regular rhythm, to still have that determination to have regularity because it is needed for the coaching process to be optimal, to have that transformation, to have the consistency and accountability.

[00:02:40] What was unexpected for me is just sometimes it's hard to plan. You can never plan life. And so with these coaching engagements, whether they're six months, twelve months, whatever it is, how do we plan our lives that far in advance? 'Cause that [00:03:00] consistency from our end is so important. And so I'm working on learning how to navigate this and also giving myself grace.

[00:03:08] So while I was coaching Dr. Mary, we had an unexpected death of a family member, and it was unexpectedly difficult to process for my husband especially. And so I realized we just needed time. He needed time off from work. He needed time to heal. And I knew that if the healing didn't happen, it just would have lingered like this dark, ominous cloud until it was processed, and I didn't wanna wait for days, months, years.

[00:03:44] It's so hard, um, it was the loss of a parent. And often it's so easy, right? It's so easy to work through it or to do everything else than really sit and go inside and process that [00:04:00] grief. And so I was really blessed. We found a spiritual program, and it was in a beautiful temple in LA. But it required thirty-one days consecutive participation, and the schedule was so intense.

[00:04:16] It was from four AM to seven PM every day that you could not be involved in outside work. That was actually one of the parameters of joining the program was to fully be present and not to miss even a single session. For me, it was like, okay, 30 days of intense healing spiritual process. It was like the highest priority. It was something I didn't even know that we needed, and that the opportunity came and existed, and it was so close to home. We're located in New York, didn't have to fly to another country. It was one of those opportunities that was so needed for healing that it was the most important [00:05:00] thing, and everything else had to work around it.

[00:05:03] And so I really was praying and hoping that the people I were coaching would accept, accept this break, accept this space. But it was something that I had to really figure out how to put in words because it's how do I just tell someone, "Hey, we're gonna schedule your next session five weeks out?" And what I realized is that everyone was so accepting, and it wasn't that big a deal at all.

[00:05:35] It's not like it happens all the time. I make a commitment to myself and to people that I coach to be there consistently, and if I have the wisdom to know when something is more important, especially to do this work, to heal, to be able to give from a place of nourishment, other people are gonna want the same. Otherwise, how can I support them and do this work?

[00:05:58] And so I was [00:06:00] really grateful to Dr. Mary. She was very accepting. And I realized that in coaching, there are certain timings where breaks are actually a wonderful thing. So for Dr. Mary, this happened right midway through our coaching engagement. And the reason why I realized this timing was so favorable was because she had already done a significant amount of work in our initial sessions together.

[00:06:25] Then she had time, time to fly on her own, to really apply what she learned and to see what's sticking, where she's still stuck. Because coaching engagements end inevitably, and the goal of coaching is not that someone stays dependent on a coach, but it's that they become even more independent, that they feel supported from within, that they trust their resources, their insight to be able to navigate any situation moving forward, even [00:07:00] though the door is always open for coaching, right?

[00:07:02] That, that's always there. But the goal is ideally to have that independence and nurture that independence. And so I like this opportunity in the middle of a coaching engagement because it also gives the coachee a chance to reassess what do they still need to work on and to recontract for the remainder of the coaching engagement to see where they may want more support or if they even want to extend the duration of the engagements and what they want to work on.

[00:07:32] And so I am grateful that it worked out in this circumstance, but it's challenging because if you work for an organization, a coaching company, you're contracted, often you can't just pick up and leave, even if it's for something that's truly important to you, leaving may cause you to get fired. It may cause you to lose a contract.[00:08:00] 

[00:08:00] But sometimes that break is the most necessary thing for us to not just survive, but to thrive and heal. And so it really brought up some important questions for me to consider thinking that I wanted to share about in this podcast, which is as you think about coaching and sustainability in a profession, if you have your own coaching practice, are you the solo coach in your practice?

[00:08:28] What happens if you need to do something? Life happens. How do you create that space for yourself? If you have people who you're fortunate that are employed by you, other coaches or coaches in your network that you feel comfortable referring to, these are both great resources to help create a safety plan or a backup net when things do happen.

[00:08:52] I highly suggest having it prepared at least somewhere so that if in the event something came [00:09:00] up, you have a plan of what to do, of how to continue to support your coachees while you take the time you need to support yourself. Another agreement that came to me was even at the beginning in signing the coaching agreement, talking about expectations. We have cancellation policies and rescheduling policies for coachees. I am thinking about adding a clause in my own contract about expectations and if something happened in life, what my policy would be.

[00:09:32] Would I refund completely? Would I allow rescheduling or an extension of the engagement, and up to how much time? What happens or how do you continue to support the coachee when things come up? And so another idea may be offering a free session or two just as a token of gratitude for them understanding that you just need some time.

[00:09:56] So there are definitely ways to work about it, and the [00:10:00] biggest message that I have to say is in this work especially, we carry so much. We carry so much for our coachees. We carry so much for ourselves. Most people who go into coaching have transitioned from another career or have been healing themselves so intensely, and life continues to happen.

[00:10:21] And so to be able to walk that talk, give ourself that self-awareness, that space to emotionally process whatever it is life is giving to us, we have to be able to take that space and advocate for ourselves. We have to create those circumstances inside and reflect them outside in order to really process what we're going through.

[00:10:46] Because in the field of coaching, that emotional processing and awareness and that self-care, it's not optional. It's not a luxury. It's necessary to do coaching the way that it should be done [00:11:00] and to actually be present for our coachees. And so I'm grateful for this experience because it really helps in moving forward when challenges come up in coaching. I feel like how we work through them is always a lesson that we can carry forward. What would we do differently? What would we do well? And how can we continue to prepare ourselves for the unexpected moving forward?

[00:11:26] And so speaking of that space of emotional awareness, another point that has come over and over again, and it came also with Dr. Mary, is welcoming emotions into the coaching space. I've found often that even when I coach people and either through me or through whether it's a platform or another company, they find out what coaching is. And even if we've had quite a few sessions together, there's still a question of, can I bring this into coaching? It [00:12:00] often arises as if certain topics are off limits. And I like to say everything is welcome within coaching because if something's so present, it's affecting who we are in this present moment, it's welcome for exploration, but it's welcome for exploration from a coaching scope of practice, which is not diagnosis, advising or problem-solving, interpreting, healing past trauma, but it's using our past and our present to inform the present and the future.

[00:12:31] So there's this forward motion and this shift in thinking from known to new thinking. And what I realize that I need to continue to do as a coach is to make it known that emotions are very welcome in this space, and they in themselves are huge topics for coaching conversations. And a goal or an outcome of a coaching conversation may be to feel, for instance, a feeling [00:13:00] from frustrated to less frustrated, or working through something difficult, an emotion.

[00:13:06] Because often, especially in medicine, how are emotions ever perceived as a goal or something to work through? There's something we come, we observe, but then we have to work at the work we're doing, especially in medicine. Where's the space for them to process? At the end of the day, you have to function a certain way. It doesn't matter how you're feeling.

[00:13:26] And so coaching really is so key and so invaluable for that because it allows a whole person to show up with all of their emotions, their thoughts, their feelings, and to explore them in this safe place where they can be processed, released, and even transformed.

[00:13:47] And so what I realized is that how do I make my conversation more educational? How do I let prospective coachees know or my current coachees know [00:14:00] what exactly is welcome in the coaching space? And that even having a goal doesn't necessarily have to be like an action goal or a, "Okay, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z between now and next time."

[00:14:13] Having a cognitive shift, being more aware of something is huge, and that is also a very powerful outcome of a coaching session that we don't often see as goals but should be celebrating that they are, especially in coaching. And so raising awareness to that.

[00:14:32] The ways I think that I'm going to work more on this moving forward are having more written materials available, more educational materials, videos available on what coaching is, what's welcome into the coaching space, and continuing to recontract, continuing not to make assumptions. And when having that conversation with the coachee and inviting them what they'd like to explore today, inviting them to explore their emotions [00:15:00] and their thoughts and if they want any shift in them, without leading of course, but just letting them know it's a possibility. And so it's interesting how what we think is obvious as coaching is not obvious at all 'cause if it were obvious, then this wouldn't be coming up over and over and over again. So what I realized what's obvious to us as coaches may not be obvious at all to the person being coached, and it's important to just keep the awareness of that.

[00:15:32] There are three other points in this coaching call that I'm just going to call out loud and acknowledge and also have self-compassion I realized that I question stacked in a couple of places, and I am still working on this. Obviously, I feel like as a coach, we strive towards continuous improvement, strive towards more effective and powerful questions. And so much of it still depends on what's going on inside 'cause when I [00:16:00] re-listened to this recording and realized that I question stacked a couple times, it still happens, these habits, and so even though we know what the right thing to do is or what the better way to coach is, sometimes these things happen, and the goal is to have awareness, self-compassion, and to continue to work on ourselves.

[00:16:21] And so again, I am really grateful for this opportunity to record, listen, and debrief these episodes for continued learning because I also realized that there's a phrase, "So I just wanted to..." that comes up when I coach, especially in this episode, and one of the things I always try to work on as a coach is removing the I from the conversation.

[00:16:45] The agenda should never be about what a coach wants. It's what a coachee wants. And so rather than saying, "I'd like to invite you for X, Y, and Z," get rid of those words. At least that's what I tell myself, is just get rid of the I's and [00:17:00] see what happens. Really, really have faith in the process and let the coachee drive.

[00:17:04] And so again, I'm saying these things and I know these things, but they still happen. So what is the answer? To be hard on myself? It's to be real, real with myself, like, "Hey, guess what? It's still happening," and that I need to work on it still, but to also have self-compassion and to do this work, the self-awareness work, so that way one day it happens much, much less, if not at all.

[00:17:29] It's the same. So removing myself from the equation, and then there was one point in the coaching conversation, it was about at seventeen minutes and thirty seconds, where I started asking "may I offer?" to Dr. Mary, and I realized this is a big no-no, And this is a big point I wanna make. What type of coach do you wanna be, and how do you stay true to those values when you're expected to do otherwise? It's [00:18:00] difficult. Sometimes we get into these prestigious coaching jobs, and they say they're coaching, but they're really providing advice. The expectation is that sometimes the people you're coaching don't know what they're doing, and so they're looking to you as a coach. And that's not a coaching expectation. That's not a coaching approach, not truly. Because in coaching, we approach those being coached as being wise, resourceful, and whole, and viewing them with unconditional positive regard.

[00:18:29] I actually was in an environment where I was encouraged to do certain things that did not align with what coaching is, but I did them anyway because I felt like I had to perform. And I learned my lesson the hard way. I had to actually get mentoring to undo the learning that I was told to do. And I was really grateful to find Clare, a mentor coach, who's so aligned with the ICF values. And it's the same for NBHWC, where [00:19:00] it's a thought partnership. It's not advice giving. And so I realized that I will never compromise myself again.

[00:19:08] I'm not going to be in a coaching position where I'm not coaching. And so it's easier said than done sometimes, especially when prestigious opportunities come up. You just got to do it to advocate for yourself and to think about what type of coach are you. And there's nothing wrong with the-- That opens up a can of worms, right?

[00:19:28] If I say there's nothing wrong with having to give advice or guide or provide solutions, I will caveat that where there's nothing wrong with it as long as you're not calling it coaching. Call it for what it is, because the heart of coaching in align with ICF and NBHWC is a thought partnership where the coachee drives.

[00:19:50] And so really having that clarity from within helps and is absolutely necessary in order to find the right alignment in our work, [00:20:00] whether we work for ourselves, for someone else, for a platform or an organization moving forward. And so big points from this debrief and my takeaway is just to trust yourself. In the way we trust our coachees, it's so important to have that faith in us, to trust that we are wise, resourceful, and whole, and let that guide us on this journey.

[00:20:27] Thank you for listening to the Holistic Physician Coaching Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to making coaching more accessible and to support both physicians and those who coach them. Subscribe to access exclusive subscriber-only episodes, including physician coaching sessions, coaching debriefs, and coach mentoring sessions that offer valuable insights for professional development for coaches.

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