With Chrissie Ott
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the podcast. This is actually only my second episode of my new name. So I was the Medical Mentor Coaching podcast. You are the very first guest who is not part of my team from the in the Academic Medicine Strategy group. So thank you so much for joining us. Amazing. We have changed from like a coaching business to what we realize we are now, which is a faculty development group whose goal is to really help faculty in academic medicine.
Love their jobs. And what I hope is we help capture people from the moment they walk into them and they get to love them from the start. But I think what I really know is that a lot of the people I'm talking to have had a rockier beginning and have ended up here looking for some solutions and.
A way to make sure that they have a nice balance between what they're doing in their day and what they thought their life was going to be. And so thank you for joining us. This is the fabulous Dr. Chrissy Ott. And if you don't mind, I'm gonna call you Chrissy, and I would love if you call [00:01:00] me Stacy.
I always feel a little weird when I get called doctor something. It's like you get called to the principal's office, so no principal's office today, but if you don't mind telling us all who you are and, maybe how you and I got to know each other. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
And what an honor to be your first guest since the name change. Really exciting times. I absolutely endorse being called by my first name especially in the space. Thank you, Stacy. I'm Chrissy. I am a Med Peds trained physician. I live in Portland, Oregon. I have had a rather interesting portfolio career and circuitous career path from traditional outpatient primary care to solo micro practice, primary care to hospitalist medicine in a very niche med peds.
Space to what I do now, which is long-term care for medically complex children. I knew after my eight years at Baylor College of Medicine that an academic [00:02:00] life was not for me. So I differ and honor our different paths and and I know that's important for your faculty to know. I love when I do get to teach residents and students, I just, I absolutely eat it up.
And also. I knew that I needed to be out in the world. Outside of the, would be ivory tower. I became a physician coach through leading wellbeing work. So in my organization, which is Providence Health Services in Oregon, I I began leading a hospital wellness committee, which became leading a regional wellness committee, which eventually became leading.
Regional wellness with a 0.4 FTE, and the thing that I am the most proud of in all of that time was introducing 300 clinical med staff to coaching through a 12 week. Course that we had four renditions of this course, and it moved wellbeing index scores and burnout [00:03:00] scores in really profound, inspiring ways.
And I knew even before I received coaching that I would be doing coaching because it felt like such a lever and such a game changer. For physicians, whether early or mid or late career to actually change the way their brains interact with their role in medicine in a more capacitated way, in a way that is at the same time driven, but.
Gentler with themselves at the same time. That is a roundabout way of telling you some of what I do. I became, happy happily the director of the Physician Coaching Summit. So now I also gather physician coaches and have fallen in love with my peers in physician coaching. And so we became acquainted through that community and found each other online and found out we have a ton of things in common.
And yeah. Fast friends who haven, we keep finding each other. That's right. Yeah. We just keep finding each other in new [00:04:00] places. We're like, oh, you're here too. This is so great. That's right. That's right. So I would love if we could delve just for one second, and I'm gonna tell everybody out there, I gave Chrissy no advanced notice on what we're gonna talk about.
So this is totally freeform and I appreciate her ability to roll with it. But can you talk about why a physician should consider. Coaching if through an academic medicine. And what's a little different, what I do is it's more career coaching, but there's no career that doesn't involve wellness because that's the thing that makes us not enjoy what we're doing.
And I had a great conversation with the chair yesterday who said, I, I presented to my faculty and I told 'em this was an option and there was like a limited number of people who raised their hand and said, yeah, I would love to have coaching. And I think part of it is most of us only know coaching as maybe something that you get.
On a sports team. Hopefully you've thought of it that way. 'cause I think that's the closest analogy. But most, like the people think about it as remediation. Like the person who got coaching was the one who was not acting well in the OR, or was burnt out from something or another. And so what do you do if you are like, Hey, I got this.
How can coaching help you? [00:05:00] Oh, I love this question. So many of us are really lousy at spotting when we are actually the ones suffering. We are really good at addressing other people's suffering, but we have formed a little bit of a rigid concrete identity around not being the one suffering. At the same time, we might experience ourselves as cynical, irritable, frustrated, impatient, we sometimes call those things burnout with good reason, but sometimes we don't even identify as burned out. We are just like, this is a system that's stupid. And I have to swim through it because I've got medical school debt and a family and a mortgage and then drop coaching in, and you're like, wait a second.
That's not the only truth that's available to me. Yeah, wait a second. I could do anything I want to with my medical degree. Wait a second. I might be happier if I have other thought patterns. I like the way this is going. One of the reasons that I [00:06:00] think an academic faculty member might be really thrilled about coaching is demonstrated in this story.
So when we got those 300 med staff through. And we would have weekly meetings on Zoom. It was like late pandemic times when this started. We'd have weekly meetings and people would reflect on how it had influenced their week. And one of my favorite stories was a family practice residency faculty member who.
Said I took this tool that we learned this week. It was, maybe it was like this sphere of control, the sphere of influence and the sphere of concern. So when you realize like you have a hundred percent control in that small sphere, in the middle you have. Some influence on the middle sphere, and you have basically no influence on the big stuff so that if you're just throwing yourself against the wall of the big stuff and using all your energy out there, very low returns.
But if you take that and okay, I cannot change the world, but I can change [00:07:00] my experience of it, so let me do the thing that helps me move forward. And they showed that to their residents. And the resident was actually, can I save that piece of paper? Because it felt like such an important lesson. So all of the lessons that I watched academic faculty absorb from mindset or implementation, or time management or just, actually belief spotting.
Yeah, spotting when we have a painful and limiting belief, they are passing that on immediately to their trainees, to their learners. Just as a chair who undergoes life changing coaching is evangelized to share it with their faculty. As soon as it feels like it has taken root in an embodied way, there's really a choice about wanting to share it with the people that you have beneficial influence.
With and I love the point that, the fact that you just pointed out, a lot of chairs do have coaching [00:08:00] so they recognize the value. And yet somehow we don't think that as people who are maybe not the head of the program, that we should have the same benefit. So I love that. Tell me a little bit, so what's, what are you doing these days that makes you most excited?
I know you had briefly mentioned to me as a teaser almost about what you're doing with AI right now, and I would love to hear what you're doing and that, what, what should I be doing? What should everybody be doing? I just got back from a day long AI summit at Microsoft Headquarters, which was not on my dance card at all, I've.
Built this, presence on LinkedIn and presence online, which again, that alone was not really on my dance card. So if you have a closed mindset about that, just know that you can shift that any day and make new friends on LinkedIn and have conversations with them and become actual friends in real life.
It's fascinating world that we live in. So I got invited through LinkedIn to attend at no cost to me, and they flew me to Seattle, put me up [00:09:00] in a hotel. Fed me all day long. I got to sit on the warm seated toto toilets at Microsoft headquarters. So much hilarity. It was amazing experience. We've, we learned about, of course, I mean it was a little bit denominational and they talked a lot about Microsoft dragon copilot.
That I got that and we also talked about, agentic AI that agents are here. If you haven't already implemented AI in your life, like it's time to catch up. Because the next step is not just people who are using ai, but people who are generating specific tools for themselves, then for others in ai.
So a lot of the work that I do right now as a physician coach in the program that I coach for as well as my own personal coaching at Joy Point Solutions, is about helping physicians who are. Having a hard time closing notes. We have all either been them or known them and it's about getting out of the exam room.
It's about examining our beliefs about social contract. Like how do we actually say, I love [00:10:00] being here with you and I have to go, I love you. And there's a boundary let me drop this knowledge real quick. Boundaries are not a problem, but they are sometimes uncomfortable and the cost of freedom is a little bit of uncomfortable.
Some, sometimes there's a little discomfort between us and Freedom, right? Yeah. So I'm coaching people about getting out of the room, but I'm also coaching them about getting their notes done in real time by using tools like Freed or a bridge or Dax whatever the tool in your system might be, and optimizing it and not just accepting defeat if it's uncomfortable the first 10 times you use it and just normalizing.
This is part of the learning curve. And yes, there will be imperfections. Yes, you are still the clinician of record and you need to read it for accuracy, but you're starting from 80% done instead of zero. There's nothing like staring at a nearly blank note two weeks later, and you're supposed to like somehow scrape out of your memory the salient details of this encounter.
[00:11:00] No. Yeah, I have, so I'm super excited about that. I will tell you it's interesting. It doesn't matter what a physician is going to coaching for, I think how to get my notes done on time comes up, whether it's career coaching, wellness, coaching, joy, dopamine and there's a million ways to do it, right?
But some of it starts with the mindset that I'm gonna be done with this when I walk out of the room, or I'm gonna do the things that I need to do in order. To not keep doing this at night and do it on the weekends and doing it in two weeks, because I think just that decision yes. Changes what you're willing to do for your notes.
And I was just at a study recently where they talked about how women spend so much more time on our notes than men do. Some of it is the help we have in the room. So that was interesting. But some of it I think, is this. Feeling that we need to be more perfect than some of the men that we work with.
And so I also think getting rid of imperfection I usually challenge the people I work with to leave a typo in their note. That is still understandable. Yes. And I get these triumphant text messages that take them a week or two to leave one typo in their note. And [00:12:00] so I'm sure you're having these same conversations.
I have had that exact conversation. Ugh. I love when a rigid perfectionist finally leaves some typos or some poor formatting in their note. And they're cringing, but they're like, I know this is part of my growth curve, but I hate every second of it. I know. But it is actually healthy. It's healthy for you to mess things up a little bit.
And it's healthy for you to realize that the alternative, like what you're trading for, that perfection is not worth it a hundred percent. I've been sharing this analogy, which I'm sure you'll echo. When you get that note done in the room or immediately after the encounter. Or procedure.
It's 50 cents worth of energy. If you're doing it the end of that very long day, it's $5 worth of energy. And if you're doing it a week or more later, it's $50 worth of energy. I love this analogy. I'm going to be scribing it to you, but stealing it completely, totally borrow [00:13:00] away. Utilize, spread the ripple of good will.
I think it helps people get their mind around it. And I also tell folks, you know what? Doing it in real time is telling the truth about the time work mismatch. It is really past time for us to share the burden of the time work mismatch. Yeah, I love that. It is not a phrase that I've ever used before.
So how do you usually describe that to people? If you're seeing 25 people, but you have three hours of charting at the end of the day, that's more than a day can actually hold. Yeah, there was a study out last year about the number of out of work hours required for different specialties. And, no surprise geriatrics and infectious disease were really up there at the top, which are not the most highly rewarded financially in terms of subspecialties, but they have a lot of history to cover.
And if they miss something, it's important. It really challenges things. So there's a lot of [00:14:00] it's a high sense of responsibility, perhaps even exaggerated sense of responsibility there. But when we are the only elasticity in the system, we are just hiding the truth from that system.
We are absorbing the hit, and we have proven by our burnout numbers and by the numbers with which we are leaving medicine and seeking nonclinical careers or less than full-time medicine, that is not sustainable. So I would rather see doctors stay in medicine longer and see an honest number of patients per day in a way that they actually get home to enjoy their lives.
Because that's just, it's fair. Yeah. It's simple. There is, it should not be long hour punishment and we should not be the only elasticity in the system. So sometimes I get pushed back because people are really invested in their, productivity and their RVs. I'm like, great, get outta there even faster then, and finish those notes then, because again, [00:15:00] you are giving away your actual life.
We don't get more time on this planet. Any time that you are giving outside of work is your life. It's your life energy. Yeah. It's the experiences that you could be having outside the flowers and the birds, or your dog, or your children or your spouse or your friends. And in academics, you add the teaching, you add the research.
There's administrative time for many people and yeah, there's no reason that you went into academics if you didn't value some of that, which means that gets added to the plate in addition to the clinical work, which is already very full. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tell us a little bit, you've obviously made the pivot.
You talked about people who are maybe consider things outside of traditional medicine, so tell us a little bit more, I know you've got the coaching practice, but tell us, you mentioned it briefly about the physician coaching Summit. Yes, I am. I'm in a overly full plate stage of life with an aging parent [00:16:00] and a tween daughter and a spouse and three dogs, and I keep piling on.
So I have a 0.7 FTE clinically. On top of that, I also do a couple days of telehealth and an independent metabolic health practice, which I adore. And in coaching I was so honored to be asked to take over the Physician Coaching Summit a couple years ago by Kathy Steppen, it's founder, and we are.
A group of around 30 to 50 physician coaches that gather every year in person to delve into this space. Like it's just like we are a bunch of unicorns who love rigor. We're science nerds, but we are also have incredibly developed emotional intelligence and have done the work capital key. T, capital W in terms of digging into our own material and examining our own ways of being.
So the level of communication and connection available [00:17:00] in that room is not like anything I have ever experienced. It's just like coming home to these people that you may not know, but you suddenly know deeply and profoundly. I am still reeling in shock and having a hard time processing that you're still 0.7 plus telehealth, plus at least three other careers that I, you just told us about.
It's a little too much. I know. I was like, like we should start coaching in this call. That's right. And it's an intervention. I didn't wanna tell you this, but your mom and your sister and your brother all, no, I'm just kidding. I don't even know she has a brother, but I have listing though, and I can tell you, I think everybody listening probably feels like they have three full-time jobs, whether that is family and aging, parents and work and all the different aspects.
And everybody I think in academic medicine already feels like they started with three jobs that they signed up for, but then they forgot that all the other stuff in life takes more time. Always takes more time. And you think it will, but also deserves the presence. And that's the thing I'm [00:18:00] working on this year is my wife is very smart and was talking to me one day about the fact that I like all these things, but they start to take my mental space and that I wasn't doing the job, being present that I wanted to be in my real life. So I'm gonna ask you, how do you make that happen in yours? I will not pretend to have mastered that, especially in this.
Rather frenetic chapter. But when I do have time with my family, I just try to make it deep and short, like very present, small doses of extreme presence. I think that they trump. Larger doses of crappy presence over time. Yeah, absolutely. Are you good at turning it all off? Do you literally turn off notifications and leave your phone in the other room, or are you more of a.
I'm just so good at being present 'cause I just love this moment. I try to [00:19:00] turn things off when I'm focused on being present. It's tricky. I had a recent experience where my wife was outta town at a meditation retreat and so it was, solo parenting week on top of other things. So I needed to turn the dial down on like evening activities for both of us and I.
Because I was the only adult around, I knew that I was fully on, and so it was much easier to separate from my electronic wallet chain, right? I just knew that I had to stop. It's easier when I have another adult in the household, my spouse to be distractible. So I'm holding that information with interest and waiting for the conclusions that arise, but maybe tricking myself into thinking that I'm the only parent.
A few nights a week might be what I need to do to to temper that. Yeah, I actually love that idea. I don't, I, I don't know that I've done it before, but it makes total sense to think about the importance of it in those, in that timeframe. I don't, our [00:20:00] podcast is usually fairly short. We are also, we are already slightly longer than we normally are.
'cause I recognize that people have about on, on double speed. We're at about 10 and 10 minutes because we know you and you're listening to double speed's. Totally. Exactly. So I I'm from, originally from New Jersey. Sometimes I talk fast enough. You might have to go down to 1.5, but I recognize that this is how life is moving, but if you were gonna give us some advice on how to slow it down, what would you give us?
Tune into your breath. That's what I would give you is actually drop everything for a second and notice your breath, and if you have access to your own inner dial, slow that breath down. Especially the exhale. We know that two to one exhale to inhale actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system and you can shift your interstate in about 30 to 60 seconds.
And you don't need to be in your car to do it. You could do that at a meeting where you're frustrated or in the OR when they don't have your stuff. Or in the clinic where somebody's [00:21:00] just pushed every button. It is an imperceptible intervention. Yeah. I love that. Yes. Anything else that you wanted to make sure that everybody knows out there about what you're doing or how to find you?
I would love to, if you could just let us know how to find you. Yes, absolutely. You can find me on Instagram at Crisi md. Same for Facebook and LinkedIn. And we are gearing up to offer a four week charting with EASE applied coaching lab starting April 11th. If you need to be bridged to the world of ai, this is a space for you.
It's gonna be hands-on and teaching both mindset and legitimate. Actions starting in April. I'd love to welcome people there. Awesome. I will get your information, make sure it's in the show notes. And thank you so much for being here. We will, this one will actually come out soon. It'll come out before your April 11th date.
So it'll come out next week and people will have about a week to sign [00:22:00] up. Fantastic. Thank you Stacy. Thank you for sharing with me. My pleasure.
