When she first came to me, she already knew what she thought.
She had opinions about her patients, her parenting, her life. She had instincts. She had, as I came to understand over time, genuine inner wisdom.
What she didn’t have was trust in it.
She second-guessed herself at work — not because she was incompetent, but because somewhere along the way she had learned that not knowing something immediately was a form of failure. She’d look up information on a condition she hadn’t encountered recently and feel shame about it. She’d lose her temper with her kids and spend hours afterward in a spiral of guilt that made it harder to reconnect with them.
She knew her truth. She just didn’t trust herself enough to stand in it.
We started, as I often do, with charting.
The charts were the visible problem — the thing that was spilling into her evenings and making her feel perpetually behind. And we solved that relatively quickly, because once you understand what’s actually creating the pattern, the pattern becomes workable.
But charting was never really the whole story.
What was underneath it was a physician mom who had spent years being very good at her job and very hard on herself — and who had quietly learned to outsource her sense of worthiness to external things. To finishing the charts. To what others thought. To whether she’d handled everything perfectly.
That’s an exhausting way to live.
The shift I’ve watched happen over our time working together is harder to measure than closed charts but far more significant.
She has her own back now.
When she encounters a patient situation that’s unfamiliar, she looks it up without the spiral of shame that used to follow. When she loses her temper with her kids — because she’s human, and she still does sometimes — she recovers faster. She doesn’t let the guilt compound into a story about what kind of mother she is.
She declines invitations to things she doesn’t want to attend. Not with elaborate explanations or preemptive apologies. Just — no, that doesn’t work for me.
She is more present with her family. Not because she has more time, but because she’s not spending her time at home worried about what everyone around her thinks of her.
She knows her core values now. And she’s making decisions from them rather than around them.
This is what I mean when I say coaching is about more than charting.
Charting is where many physician moms start because it’s the most visible symptom — the thing you can point to, the problem you can name. The laptop open at 10pm. The notes still unfinished. The evening that never quite belonged to you.
But underneath the charting is almost always something deeper.
A physician mom who doesn’t fully trust herself. Who holds herself to a standard she would never apply to her patients or her colleagues. Who has spent so long caring for everyone else that her relationship with herself has become an afterthought.
That’s the work.
Not time management. Not productivity systems. Not even thought work as an abstract concept.
The work is learning to have your own back — in the exam room, in the carpool line, in the quiet moments when nobody is watching and the only voice in the room is yours.
If you’re a physician mom who recognizes something in this — the inner wisdom you have but don’t quite trust, the standard you hold yourself to that you’d never hold anyone else to — I want you to know that this is exactly what we work on in coaching.
It starts with whatever is most pressing for you right now. For many physician moms that’s the charting. For others it’s the anger, the guilt, the relationships, the sense that you’ve lost yourself somewhere in the middle of being a very good doctor and a very good mother.
We start wherever you are.
If you’re ready to find out what that looks like, I’d love to talk.
