Can doctors risk authentic connection?
Nicola Harker
Leadership Coach | Doctor, Speaker, Author, Compassionate Leadership Expert | Empowering Female Leaders for Impactful and Balanced Success | Burnout Coach improving staff retention and wellbeing.
People who go into medicine, do so because we want to make a difference. We care enough to work hard for others' benefit.
The trouble is, these professions are TOUGH and we are not taught how to deal with the personal impact of everything we see. So we start to "armour up" in order to cope with all the suffering, struggle and death.
At first we don't notice the impact this has on our ability to do our job. But after a while we become tired, burned out, or just "remote" because we are walled in behind our defences.
I'm a GP and I started to notice these changes in myself, and I got curious about whether there is an alternative.
I’ve been a patient, and I've been a close relative of someone who was seriously ill on several occasions. And the worst part was that it felt like many of the professionals just didn't understand how awful it was. Occasionally someone would look me in the eye, and reassure me that they saw my struggle, and it would almost reduce me to tears with relief.
Being able to connect with the human inside us, and with our patients is hugely valuable. It's what our patients want. But many of us are scared that we will be consumed by emotion if we let ourselves feel anything. Through my own research and training, I've learned that this is not true. It is possible to lean-in to difficult emotions in a way that offers up support, but doesn't get consumed by them. I've discovered that instead of feeling drained, using these techniques allows me to be energised by these interactions. And research confirms my experience - when we use a different part of our brain during therapeutic interactions, we avoid empathy-burnout.
This is why I am so passionate about teaching the skills of authentic connection and courageous compassion. Because I know that these skills allow us to show up differently in our work, as clinicians or leaders.
If you know someone who is tired, stressed, burned out, or wondering why we need to learn the skills of compassion, please PM me, or share my post.
Together we can make the world more compassionate.