Interview with Dr. Debra Blaine – 411
In this week's episode, Dr. Debra Blaine introduces Positive Intelligence, a breakthrough in effective coaching. This method tackles the root causes of stress and internal blocks to career change and creative work.
After stepping away from medicine following 33 years in practice and burnout from corporate healthcare, Dr. Blaine built new careers as both a prolific author and coach, giving her firsthand insight into the mindset challenges that hold people back.
She explains how short, daily mental fitness exercises can help reduce stress, support better decision-making, and lead to real, lasting change. And it does so without hours of therapy or overwhelming time commitments.
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A Breakthrough in Effective Coaching
Dr. Debra Blaine has noticed that the same struggles that keep physicians from making career changes, like self-doubt, perfectionism, and fear of judgment, often show up for writers too. Through Positive Intelligence, she found a way to name and shift those patterns.
The framework calls them “saboteurs,” thought habits developed early in life that once helped us cope, but now get in the way. It teaches people how to move from those reflexes toward “sage powers” like empathy, curiosity, and creativity, which are grounded in clarity instead of fear. That can lead to real breakthroughs for coaching clients.
Building Mental Fitness One Step at a Time
The mental fitness side of Positive Intelligence focuses on short, focused exercises that help you stay present and move through challenges more effectively. Debra used the approach to complete her latest book, Whiskers in the Wild, in just three months of research, writing, and design, including staying focused when self-doubt crept in.
The program uses an app with daily tools, weekly learning modules, and works especially well when paired with coaching to apply the mindset shifts to real-world decisions and obstacles.
Summary
Dr. Debra Blaine offers free saboteur assessments and discovery calls through her website, DebraBlaine.com, for those curious about coaching or stress management tools. You can also connect with her through her newsletter, Ink and Scalpel, where she shares updates and helpful resources, and her email, DebraBlaine@DebraBlaine.com.
Her coaching focuses on physicians facing career stress and writers working toward publication, blending Positive Intelligence with traditional coaching to help clients move past internal blocks and create meaningful, lasting change.
Links for today's episode:
- Dr. Debra Blaine's Website
- Connect with Dr. Debra Blaine through her Website
- Access to Dr. Blaine's FREE Coaching Discovery Call
- Positive Intelligence Website and FREE “Saboteur Assessment”
- Sign Up for Dr. Debra Blaine's Newsletter: Deadly Algorithm
- How to Publish a Book and Promote Your Business
- More on How to Publish a Book
- Achieving Personal Success by Writing and Self-Publishing a Novel – 268
- How to Become a Marvelous Medical Mystery Author – 231
- How to Influence the World by Writing a Medical Thriller – 116
- The Nonclinical Career Academy
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 411
What Is The Latest Breakthrough In Effective Coaching?
- Interview with Dr. Debra Blaine
John: Today's guest has effectively combined her love of writing and her expertise in self-publishing with her desire to help others through coaching. We're going to hear a little bit about all of those things today, I think. I thought it was time to learn more about her latest projects, including a breakthrough she's identified in achieving sustained positive changes for her coaching clients. I'm really interested in hearing about that. Dr. Debra Blaine, welcome back to the podcast.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Thank you so much, John. Thank you for inviting me back. Glad you're not sick of me yet.
John: No, I always learn something and you really have done a lot of things. And every time you come back, there's more books and more aspects to your coaching. I think the listeners really learn from that. So let's just talk a little bit about your background and then kind of what you've done since we last spoke with you last year.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. I'm a physician. I guess I'm an officially retired physician at this point, practiced 33 years. I became very disenchanted with medicine. I became certified as a coach in 2019. And then right about the time I became an author, I started publishing books. And so I've been doing those two things too. Initially, they were sort of side gigs to keep me from noticing how miserable I was in medicine.
I finally left. Sometimes when we don't do things on our own, the universe kicks us in the butt. So I caught COVID two years ago and found that I couldn't handle those 12 hour shifts, 60 patients a day with somebody whipping me like a horse. So now I'm full-time writing and coaching. I coach writers and I coach physicians who are experiencing, I don't really want to use the word burnout because I feel like that has such a pejorative meaning to it at this point. And it's like your HR department, they'll pay lip service and they'll say, oh yeah, burnout is a thing. And we want you to have a good work-life balance and we want to support you.
But it's kind of like once you're labeled like that, I think whether it's real or not, I think that we feel as physicians that, they don't think I can handle it because doctors are supposed to be tough as nails. We're not supposed to get sick. We're not supposed to have needs. We're not supposed to be emotionally stressed. We're supposed to be able to handle everything. And so what I've done now is I'm reframing it into stress management.
Because what is burnout? Burnout is I'm stressed to the max. I'm not enjoying my life anymore and I don't see any way to get out of this. Everybody has stress. I feel like it's more industry acceptable to say, okay, I'm going to get some coaching to handle my stress better because that's really what it is. It's not a lie.
John: Right. And I've heard some people use the term moral injury, but that's not going to make the employers happy. And I have to talk to coaches who have had some success in really taking some pretty burned out physicians and actually having them stay in their careers and be successful. I suspect part of that is putting boundaries and getting their employer to follow those boundaries or adhere to those, or they just leave and find another place that's better. So I get your point for sure.
So, before we get into though, we're going to get in more detail on the tools you're using in that for the coaching of those stressed out physicians, but tell us then about the writing and you really, to me I consider you to be sort of a fiction or novel writer, because those are the books that I was reading as they were coming out. I think one year you published three books. I don't know if you've done that again or in one year you've put that much out there, but I know you're doing some nonfiction too. So tell us a little bit about the writing and then we'll get into what you've done most recently.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. I've got 10 books that are published and another one that's on my laptop that still needs some editing. And of the 10 that are published, six of them are fiction. One of them, and they're all available on Barnes&Noble and Amazon. One of those is not, except for one, which is only available through my newsletter, Ink and Scalpel. And that one's called Deadly Algorithm and it's free. If you want that one, you would download it, but you would give me your email address and then you'd be on my newsletter. Of course, you can always unsubscribe anytime that you want.
Then I did my first two non-fictions, one, which was the step-by-step guide to self-publishing so that people, authors could do it themselves because it sounds very intimidating, but once you get it, it's not hard going through, people went through medical school, they can absolutely self-publish a book.
And then I wrote another one on the, the secret sauce of writing fiction, like the structure of story arcs and character arcs and how to create suspense. And then I was trying to help a friend who wanted to self-publish, but she had everything in PDFs and most of the self-publishing software uses a Doc X file. But I remembered that Canva had sent out something about how you can publish books on, with Canva. And I had originally thought it was just covers, but I looked into it and yes, indeed, you can use PDFs. So I created a coloring book, a stress relief coloring book with Mandela animals, and that's on Amazon. It's not up on Barnes&Noble yet, because I had to, I'd probably have to resize it and I hadn't gotten around to that.
But that was fun, creating these pictures and putting different things in them. And it was all to accentuate an inner strength that you could meditate on while you're coloring. Apparently coloring is a big thing for adults. It's just kind of a way to block out the world.
John: Yeah. I used to love color. It kind of reminds me, I watched my wife do puzzles. To me would be the same thing. The coloring is intensity. You're focused, you're distracted with what you're doing. I can see that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah. I think I published that one under DE Blaine, because it's completely different, but it's supposed to come up if you put it in under all my books. But that one is obviously not a Kindle. The others are coming both ways. And then the last one that, so from Deadly Algorithm, I wrote this sequel, which is book one of a dystopian, a young adult dystopian trilogy about how AI fails and it wants to take over the world. That one is not out yet. So I'm not really going to promote it. Although I guess I could. I felt like I had shortchanged one of the characters in Deadly Algorithm and I owed it to her. So it takes place, it picks up 12 years later and she's in search of her mother. And she's battling the world that who wants to wants to control her and destroy her. But then I got a little distracted because... I'm a cat lover. You know, I'm a cat lover.
John: Yeah.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Here's a cat.
John: I have a cat for you if you want it.
Dr. Debra Blaine: If I want it? Get this book and then you'll want it.
John: Maybe I can learn how to be more friendly to my cat. No, I treat my cat well, but she's just sometimes annoying, but go ahead.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, you know what? Actually you might find it really helpful because what I did was I helped somebody, one of the cat rescuers transport a cat he had trapped from one township to another, where there was a vet that was willing to treat the cat for less money. And we got to talking and I've been wanting to write a book about cats anyway. I find that nonfiction often sells better than fiction. If you have a niche, that's what people want.
John: How-to books.
Dr. Debra Blaine: How-to book, exactly. This is my how-to book on cats. I'm trying to get the light on it the right way. And it's got some stories by that rescuer in it, but basically, it's about how to determine whether the cat that's wandering through your backyard is a feral or a stray, what do they need? How can you help that cat? How do you trap a cat? How do you do TNR, which is trap, neuter, release where you trap the cat and the cat is neutered or spayed and then released back into their community so that they don't have, cats have litters, can have litters every two or three months and they can have five kittens in a litter. Do the math. That's a lot of cats, a lot of cute little kittens, but there's not enough resources.
I did a lot of research for this book. The ASPCA cites 75% of kittens born outdoors die in the first few weeks of their life. And so, the TNR thing is a good thing, but then I didn't want to just talk about trapping outside. And I had a trapper, I have a friend who's a trapper for seven years, a volunteer, she's retired. And she gave me a lot of information about the different kinds of traps and how you handle them. She gave me literature. She also helped me get my little Midnight, Midnight is elsewhere for right now, into the house.
I had input from her. I had input from an animal behaviorist who wrote the foreword. And then I did a lot of research and my vet actually, my vet usually reads my fiction and I gave it to him. I was so nervous. I was like, okay, this is your purview, but I need you to tell me if I'm completely out to lunch. And he read it and he loved it. He got a copy to put in his office. He wants his patience. So you put an endorsement on the back.
John: Did you let him read it before you published it or after?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, before, no, before. I wanted him to tell me. I didn't want to publish something that was stupid. Actually, it's my best seller. It's been out for three weeks and it's sold, I want to say like 240 books, copies so far. And it's paid for the editing and the cover design and the US copyright already in three weeks. So, I'm very excited about that.
John: I'm going to have to promote that because basically that would have a big demand. I mean, you're talking about a third of the price to a half of people are cat people the dog people versus the cat people and some are both, but I've got picture books on cats the things that we have gotten as gifts or I give to my wife or something, but this sounds really practical and very useful and yet with some stories.
Dr. Debra Blaine: That was the hope. And it also helps you decode their messages. Cats talk to us. We just don't understand their language. They don't use words like we do. But since writing the book when I look at my cats now, I look at what are their whiskers saying? What are their ears saying? What are their tails saying? What's the posture? The posture is sort of intuitive, I think for me anyway, but all these things, I didn't really know how they get along with each other. And then I put a bunch of like fun facts about cats that make you the star of your cocktail party that things that like, oh, really cats run 30 to 40 miles per hour.
I'm kind of proud of this book. I think I haven't been as proud of a book since I published Code Blue in 2019. And most writers, I think, have a cat. I feel like a lot of writers have.
John: Kind of a natural attraction. Yeah, it sounds really good. I'm going to have to actually get several copies because I know people that love cats.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And please write reviews.
John: Okay. Yes, yes. I've tried to write reviews. I have written many reviews for you, but not a hundred percent. I will do it and I'll tell my friends to do it as well. And I think it'd be very useful because I don't really understand my cat. Just at a basic level. I've always had cats my whole life, but that part would be good. But what I want to know is how to be able to communicate back to them to get them to do what I want them to do.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, yeah, but I talk about that a little bit too.
John: Okay.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Cats are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. And I think just like talking to a child, when we talk to a child or we talk to a cat and we expect them to understand, like, usually if you tell your cat, don't do something, all your, all you expect them to understand is no. When you're, when your grandson, when your granddaughter or my grandson, when we tell them don't do that.
But if we explain, this is why I don't want you to do that. Now at that age, they don't really understand your reason, but they can understand that you have a reason. There is a reason and that can get across, that can be transmitted and communicated. And then if there's a relationship of mutual respect, they're more likely to say, okay, I don't understand it, but my human doesn't like it. And then he thinks it's important.
John: And you might be out to something in terms of two trying to maybe something in the nonfiction area tends to the sell more. So, if you have other things you want to teach us about, that sounds like a good idea. I do want to say that I have read several of your books. I've definitely not kept up. You're writing too fast for me to keep up, but I do read the occasional old Grisham or some other author in between when I'm talking about fiction. I definitely advise people. Would it be true that if I were to read Deadly Algorithm, which is available for free, and since that is going to have a spinoff or a sequel, that's pretty representative of your writing style and that kind of thing.
Dr. Debra Blaine: The truth about Deadly Algorithm, I wanted a reader magnet and I wrote that book in two weeks. It took me another four or five weeks to make it sound like it wasn't written by a second grader because I wrote it a whole thing in two weeks. It turned out to be a novella size. It was supposed to be a short story of 5,000 words. It turned out to be 23,500 words.
So, yes and no. That is my writing, but it's not as polished and refined as some of my other books are. I never actually sent it to a professional editor because it was just a free reader magnet, but I did have a friend of mine who's an author go through and kind of tell me where I screwed up. I did have, I did have a beta reader for it.
Yes, but that's free. I would love it if you if people would get it and then they can always contact me through my newsletter. They just answer it because it comes from Debra Blain at DebraBlain.com. I'm thinking about starting another newsletter for the cats, but I can't call it Ink and Scalpel. I can't put them in the same newsletter. I'd have to have something separate.
John: Okay. Well, I think it's good to know about that writing background and to be able to check out your books just because I think physicians like to support other physicians. Although of course non-physicians are going to read your books, obviously, and probably maybe the majority are non-physicians, but I just think the way they're written because of the way you think as a physician, it kind of comes through the writing. But let's switch gears here then to your coaching. A little background as far as how did you get into coaching? You mentioned it at the beginning, but exactly who are most of the clients that you have at this point in your coaching career?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I started 2019, I got certified as a coach when I was, after I wrote the first book, Code Blue, about a doctorate in urgent care, but I put it in a thriller setting that I realized when I was finished with it, it was very upsetting. I realized I hated my job.
John: You didn't realize before that?
Dr. Debra Blaine: It was something I kept pushing aside. I hid it from myself. Like, yes, at some level I knew I hated it, but it wasn't out front right there, staring me in the face. And after I wrote that book, I was like, I really hate what I'm doing. And this is my life. And at that point, I don't know, I was 50 something years old. And I was like this is not a good way to be.
John: Let me interrupt you there one, one minute. And then to tell you what I was thinking when I got to that point, maybe it's a little bit worse. I hate my patients. I hate my job. It was like, there's certain patients I couldn't stand. And so I would do the stupid thing of looking at my schedule ahead of the time the day before or the same day and I'd go, okay, before I even started, I'm like, I'm going to dread this day.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Those are saboteurs that we could work on. We'll talk about that. But yes, in that book, I had a lot of patient scenarios and I put in a lot of the patients who were really demanding, entitled, obnoxious, and so difficult. And I wanted to, in a story so that people who read it would be able to say, oh, is that what I sound like? Or is this what doctors have to deal with? And that was the whole point of writing the book. So yes, I totally understand.
I became certified as a coach and I wanted to work with physicians initially. That was my initial reason. I wanted to work with physicians who were experiencing burnout, which is really stress. But what I discovered was that a lot of doctors, many, many doctors don't ask for help, myself included, until they're at rock bottom. It's kind of like being an alcoholic. Not that doctors are alcoholics, but that idea that until my whole world falls apart, I'm going to be, I'm tough. I can handle it. Can't let anybody know that I'm struggling. I certainly can't let these big corporate leaders know. I can't let the human relations department know. I have to hold it together.
And as a coach, I do have several clients, several physician clients still that I've been, a couple that I've been seeing for five years. It's been a long time. Which was never the intention. They just didn't want to leave. It was, my intention was we're going to finish three months, six months. And then it was like, oh, we don't want to go. That was a whole other thing which was beautiful for me because things always come up.
That was my initial interest in coaching. I was able to connect with people the way I used to connect with patients when I had time. I used to be able to get to know my patients and what are what's getting in the way of your implementing this treatment and what's holding you back from do making these changes. Which is really, we doctors are coaches. We coach our patients. We used to coach our patients. Now I feel like so many of us don't have the time. We don't have the time to coach our patients. We don't even have the time to worry about. It's all about how many patients you can see and what period of time and what is the satisfaction rating.
These are all business points. These are how businesses rate their success and it made healthcare into a business. But in my opinion, humanity shouldn't be used for those purposes. Maybe I'm in the minority. I don't really think so, but I think people don't understand. And there's just such a conglomeration of the way things are run now.
I kind of shifted. I was already writing books. I started writing more books and then I started coaching authors and I found that immensely satisfying because as wonderful as it is to get one of my books in the mail that it's published like, wow, this is mine. It's almost equally as satisfying for, to see my client's books up there on Amazon or when they send me a signed copy and they say, thank you. And they're so proud of it. I feel proud, I can share their happiness and celebration. And since the last time we talked, I've had two more clients who just put up their books. One wrote from scratch, she wrote it, edited it, we published it together. And another one, she's a veterinarian. Most of my writing clients are doctors, not all, but most. She edited it and then we self-published, she self-published it.
That's just really gratifying to me. But I started into this program, Positive Intelligence, I don't really know why I was like, I stumbled onto it. But the thing is that the same elements that interfere or make it difficult to get your book written, feelings of insecurity, is my writing good enough? And people are going to care about this or procrastination, writer's block. All those things that can potentially get in the way of getting your book out there. The same kinds of stresses get in the way when we want to make a change in our life.
I hate what I'm doing, but what else could I possibly do? Will I be good enough? Will I be accepted? Can I make enough money doing something else? How can I make something else work? What will people think? Will people think of me if I decide to leave medicine altogether? What if this administration says, no, we don't want you here. Will I find something different?
All the same kinds of resistance that we get in writing a book comes up in planning our lives. And actually our lives are kind of the book we're writing. The thing with this positive intelligence is all stress comes from the same root causes. And all of our challenges are symptoms of our stress.
The way it's broken down, it's this guy, Shirzad Sharmin, I've come to actually kind of love his voice. And first of all, I just want to tell you something. I am not like, I don't jump on bandwagons. I'm not one of those people. It's like, yeah, yeah, this is the greatest thing on Earth and all that. I don't do that. But my life has changed so much since I started doing this. Things that used to really bother me, or I used to have a hard time getting past projects, it's getting done. Everything's just going more smoothly for me. I'm happier. I'm just a happier person. And when I think about it, that's so much more valuable than how much money I'm making.
This book, Whiskers in the Wild, it took three months and three days from the first sentence to on the Amazon bookshelf. And that includes two and a half weeks at an editor, 10 days at different beta readers. Getting the cover done was done some event at the same while those other things were being done.
But it basically took me two months to write, research, organize. And because I'm a fiction writer, primarily, I have a lot of anecdotes in there. I didn't, it's not a book where this is what happens when and it's like, it's not a textbook. There's all these stories that are interwoven to demonstrate what I'm talking about. And I basically did it in two months, if you subtract that time.
I attribute a lot of that to using this program, because when these things come up that would normally smack me in the face and say I'm out of commission for three days and on that project, I was able to deal with them better.
John: I'm going to have to hear more about that in a second, but I did want to mention something here. I have spoken with a lot of coaches and I don't really understand or I don't get to know how a coach works and how they interact with their clients generally. But because you and I were in a mastermind group together, I had actually an get the experience how you engage.
A mastermind, of course, everyone is volunteering and helping each other and asked to challenge and discuss whatever. So, but my point is that I always found your observations and your encouragement of the other members of the mastermind, the way you did it was very good. You would ask questions, which is perfect. And so, I already kind of know that as a coach, you're very effective and that I would enjoy being coached by you, but now we're going to go into this and say, okay, now you have those skills already. It's sort of a promotion of you on the podcast here to say, look, physicians, if you need a coach and depending on what you need that coach for, I would definitely have you to consider Debra Blaine.
But let's go ahead and hear now beyond what you've done in the past. Tell us again, how this has worked for you and what does it really entail this positive intelligence? I did go through and I kind of looked at a very high level what it is, but I do not understand it in depth at all.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, thank you for that, John. It means a lot to me. And the thing about coaching is that it is about asking questions. It's not about telling somebody what to do. It's about helping you figure it out for yourself. Because when you to a conclusion, it's going to make a whole lot more sense to you. And you're going to be a lot more motivated to follow through on it than if I were to say to you, well, John, why don't you do this. Then that's just like, okay, your teacher, your parents, your spouse, whatever, or whoever leaders, whoever your medical director or whoever's above the medical director says, it's not the same. And the whole idea is delving into yourself to find out.
The positive intelligence method, he's done this guy, Shirzad Sharmin, he's done like a lot of research. He was a speaker at Stanford for a while. He used to be a CEO of a company. I don't remember exactly but he talks about neuroscience and psychology, and he cites all this stuff. And it's on the website. I'm not going to go into all that stuff. Because I don't want it to make it like just a listing of qualifications.
But what it is, basically, there's three parts to it. One is to help you develop, help you master your mind. He calls it mental fitness, how to be able to focus more, keep the thoughts in front of you that you want in front of you and chase the others away.
And so, yeah, we talk about that and all kinds of woo woo seminars, there's meditation, I'm all for the meditation. I'm just saying, if people think that's all one of those things. But it's and he does it this in 10 second intervals. For example, for my clients, I usually send them one of these things in different colors. It's a widget. It's just to play with, but by taking something or anything, and he talks about just breathing, I'm not going to go through an exercise here, because I don't want to bore people who are not into that.
But by focusing on one of your senses, whether it's noticing your breathing, whether it's listening, just listening. What do you hear that's the furthest away? What do you hear? What else do you hear? What do you hear that's the closest to you? Every morning, I open the window, and I listen to the birds for 10 seconds. And I'm with the birds. Not just yay, I listened to the birds. But I close my eyes, and I'm just with those birds, I'm flying with the birds for 10 seconds. And in those 10 seconds, it shifts, it shifts your brain from the more negative rational side, or the rational side, which can give rise to a lot of negativity to this more positive experiential side.
And in that side, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, which he calls the sage, that's where all the creativity comes from, the productivity, the love, all the all the sage aspects come from love. On the other side, there's the saboteurs, those voices that chatter in your head and tell you, you're not good enough, you're never going to make it, you're supposed to have finished this already. Those patients are horrible. The judge judges others, it judges circumstance, and probably most importantly, it judges ourselves and finds us lacking. And that's not to say that we shouldn't judge things, we have to judge things, but the difference between judging and discerning or evaluating, evaluating doesn't have a positive negative attached to it, it's simply information, as opposed to that's bad.
And making a point of your saboteurs are not you, they're just these voices. And they come from a place of survival, they were developed in our childhoods to help us survive. And their strengths, their real strengths, but when we get older, we overuse the strengths.
And so, how to get back to making them what they were designed to be, and noticing them. So there's an app, which I've worked with people using the app and work with people not necessarily using the app. But the app is really nice, because I'll talk about the app in a minute. But it's a way of every day, you just sort of focus on what's the next thing, it gets you in the habit, how do you how do you make something stick, you have to have a habit. And how do you create new habits? By tying it to something that you do every day. I was always in the habit of opening my window to see what the weather was. And I would stick my head right up against the screen, practically. So now, I still do the same thing. I haven't taken a second longer than I would normally have. But I'm in a different state of mind when I do it.
The first thing is to get mastery over what we're thinking. And in 10 second intervals, you can do anything for 10 seconds. I shouldn't say that. Some people if they have some neurodivergent issues may not be able to, but the vast majority of people for 10 seconds can hold their attention somewhere. The more that you do that, the more that you strengthen those mental muscles.
That's just the foundation. Then he talks about nine saboteurs in addition to the judge, everybody's got the judge. He used like a factor analysis to get to these, every color that you can possibly create comes from either yellow, red, or blue. Every single color from those three. And so, I haven't really tested his hypothesis here, but all of the stresses that we have come from one of these nine or 10 saboteurs.
By looking into and understanding what each saboteur does, why it's there, it was originally helpful and how to arrest it in the process, how to recognize it, and then how to switch that saboteur responds best to this sage power. And what are the sage powers? There's five sage powers. There's empathy, which is I think the most important. And all the sage powers come from love. Empathy is for you, most importantly, empathy for yourself. John, do you love yourself? You should love yourself. If you're having trouble loving yourself at any given moment, find a picture of yourself when you were three years old. And look at that face. And if you have a smiling face of this little kid, like, oh, wow, yeah, who couldn't love that child? But me, not now. No, but that's still you. That person's still in there. That little John knows how wonderful he is. And he forgot along the way. Life battered him down and he forgot along the way.
It's about learning to love yourself again, to celebrate your accomplishments. And then once you do that, then you can have compassion for other people. And then you can have compassion, or at least tolerance for the world around you.
Then there's explore, which is really my favorite of the sage powers. Explore is about curiosity and wonder. Especially when we come up against a brick wall and something feels hard, instead of trying to push through it, to find a way to be drawn to it. Because it's effortless. When we're curious about something, it's not an effort to, there are certain parts of this cat book that I was just, I really wanted to know, how does that happen? How does that work? And so, it was no big deal to do that research because I was really interested in it, as opposed to, this is my assignment. My teacher told me I have to write the research cats and man, I'd rather be out playing basketball or something. It's a whole different concept, a whole different way of looking at the world.
And then there's others. I want to go through the whole thing because I know we're limited on time, but innovating is to use that information to create new ways of using it, to think outside the box. Instead of, if you're trying to figure out how to do something and you have five different things, usually, for me anyway, my first impulse is, well, that won't work because of this. That won't work because of that. And that won't work because of that. But the suggestion here is, what do I like about that? It might be just 2% of it. But I like this part of it. I like this part of it. I like this part of it. And so, again, the judgment, that negative connotation drops off.
And then you have the qualities that you want to put together and see, how can I put those together and make them work for me? And this is why he does this whole thing with mental mastery first, because you have to be in the right frame of mind to be able to do that, to be able to say, well, I'm not going to look at what I don't like. I'm going to look at what I do like. All right, but when you've been practicing it, it does work.
You're probably thinking, okay, well, I don't have time for something like that. That sounds like a really long drawn out thing. I'm a doctor. I'm seeing 60 patients an hour or a day. The app, if you do the app, literally, it's three five-minute sessions a day, but only one of them is really super important, which is that daily focus in the morning. And I've just gotten in the habit of when I'm putting on my makeup in the morning, I'm listening to the daily focus. Guyes you could be putting your shoes on getting dressed or whatever, listen to daily focus. If you set it that way, it'll remind you a couple more times for like a recharge.
On the weekends, for the first six weeks, there's a module. It's about 60 to 70 minutes, but it's broken up into different videos. So you can say, I don't have time. I don't have an hour right now, but you got to go in order. The first one's only 11 minutes. I'll listen to that. And then maybe you listen to three on Saturday morning and one on Saturday night and the rest of them on Sunday afternoon.
You can do that, or you can sit and just go through it for an hour. And then during the week that follows, it gets emphasized and you practice. I got to say, I finished that a long time ago. I've been doing this for months. I don't know, since January. Every day I learned something because even though I heard it before, it doesn't all go in right away, but it's like, oh, there's a way to apply this. And he'll say think of the last time that something like this happened. It's not going to be for everybody, I'm sure, but because you have to be willing to put yourself into it, be open to it. And it's just it's been amazing for me.
John: Question, because it sounds like this is something that, okay, we can access online, go to the site download the thing, do it, learn about it, read through it. But from what I was understanding and going through his website, and as he actually, created this and made it, I think, available to coaches specifically. So it makes me think then, okay, so not only does he want people just to go on and learn about it, but they actually have the help of a coach to help somehow implement this.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Exactly. The app is one price online, if that's all you want. I can put people in the app. If there's, I can't offer it for less than that. But if there's extenuating circumstances some financial hardship that I could work with them and make some exceptions. But combined with coaching, then it becomes something where it I would be coaching them through each week, not just on positive intelligence, it would be on, on how it's going to relate to their, to their life, to the issues that are coming up for them, how can that help them, and really giving it a hands-on application.
I've got several people who are doing it. One person, she's going through a really horrible time. She had a pelvic exenteration, a total pelvic exenteration. I don't know if you know what that is. I did not know what that was. She had vulvar cancer. She's had four surgeries. I can't tell you how many rounds of XRT. She's been on chemo three rounds. Now, then she had the pelvic, on top of that, she had the pelvic exenteration, which is they remove her entire perineum. And that was four or five months ago. But she was telling me when she was going for these scans recently, that she was doing her PQ reps while she was there. And it really helped her shift her mind from the negative, that hyper-vigilant, this is going to be horrible. It's going to be terrible.
When we're in the moment, we're not fearful. We're, when we think about the past, we regret. When we think about the future, we're afraid. And we can be, not necessarily, hopefully not, but, but when you're in the moment, none of those things exist. And so, it's a way to kind of just recharge our brains, recharge our essence, our central energy, and be able to respond better.
We have a tendency, I certainly have a tendency, and I still do many times, I'm not cured, I don't think I'll ever be cured, but to react to whatever's thrown at me, but to be able to have a tool that helps me respond. I can respond appropriately without reacting out of fear or out of anxiety or out of anger. And that's not new. That idea is not new. It's not new to coaching. It's not new to psychology. But the way that this program is put together is unique. And I've found it really helpful.
John: No, I think it does sound to be quite useful and makes it another tool that you can use. And once you understand kind of what's going into what makes you tick, and it sounds, but it's not something you can just learn in 15 minutes, obviously. So it would seem to be quite useful to have a coach who is able to use different tools to help that whatever you might feel is appropriate for the issue with your clients. We'll put the information on that in the show notes. And then, of course, then also the information on how to get a hold of you.
Dr. Debra Blaine: For anybody who wants to take the saboteur assessment, and then wants to schedule a free discovery, it's a free saboteur assessment, and a free discovery call with me to just go over it, and talk to them about it. And then they can they can decide if they're interested. And then the price of the app gets incorporated into the coaching that I would do. So it's not going to be this huge. I think I can make it much more manageable.
John: That sounds great. Particularly if you're facing something you're trying to deal with again, on here, a lot of times, it's like, okay, I'm miserable. Do I change jobs? Do I find something else to do? Do I leave medicine? Do I not leave? There's a lot of challenges. And then people get frozen, they can't even make a move because they're just afraid of going in any direction. If you're one of those people right now that are really suffering, or feel like you need some help to work through some of these things.
My only encouragement would be that coaches are always very helpful. You need to have the right coach. Sometimes you need to try different coaches to find the best one for you. But I would also say that nothing is as bad as you think it is. I was thinking earlier, when you were talking about this, a challenge that I might have, it could be anything, just something broke down, and I'm to fix it. And I'm just frustrated. And I'm like, what the hell? The thing that helps me the most is just put it aside and come back the next day. And I come back the next day, and 90% of the time, I have some insight. I don't know where it came from. Oh, that's how it works. And that's how I can fix it. I'm not saying this is like applies to all these problems. But it's just, there are ways to deal with these challenges and not be so frustrated.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And if you don't have time to come back the next day, if it breaks down, and it's frustrating, and then you can sort of master your mind for the moment, and now look at it in a different way and explore, what is it about it that's working? What is it about it that's not working? It makes you more clear headed. And many times when you're when all that sort of red I think of cartoons, when somebody's angry, and that the red cloud comes up. When that haze goes away, and say, Okay, let me just see, what was this about? Like, what is it? What is the next step now? What do I need to find out to make in order to fix this? Oh, I need I need more information about this. Or I look at that I was supposed to put this thing on it. It makes its flow more smoothly. And then maybe you don't have to wait till the next morning.
John: Anything else you want to tell us that before I let you go as far as just advice for potential clients or for physicians who are frustrated and unhappy in their careers or anything?
Dr. Debra Blaine: We actually talked about this, I think, before we started the recording. The idea that we don't have to get everything perfect right away like, when I discovered, when I went into medicine for a lot of reasons, I was I was expected to do that and to know what I wanted to do. And if you're not happy in what you're doing, you don't necessarily right away have to know what it is you want to switch to you is enough to know that this isn't like it's a really important step to know, this isn't really where I want to be. and then to look at how you can rearrange your life.
Now, that doesn't mean doesn't necessarily even mean leaving your present job, or your present position, you might be able to, by changing the way you change your perspective about it, you might be able to find that, oh I really do like this job, but I wasn't tapping into the things about it that I like, I was being run around. Or if that's not working, I want to try something else. I've been through a few different attempts to find myself, probably since I was 10. But that's okay. It's only it's society that says we're supposed to know and we're supposed to stay in the same thing for the whole for our entire life. And it's not true. We have to we have to give ourselves permission to be human beings to care about things to care about more about some things at certain stages in our life than others. And to explore, we have to give ourselves permission to explore.
John: It's great advice. I'm always reminded that some of us who made the decision to go into medicine made that decision like we were children. And there's no reason why that should necessarily stick. But there's so many good things about being a physician, though, and going through all that, that whatever you end up shifting to is going to be probably fantastic. And there are ways to get there. I appreciate your comments.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And you always use your knowledge. My grandfather used to say, no knowledge is ever wasted and everything that you are up until this point, you will continue to tap into and it'll still be a resource for you and whatever you choose to do next.
John: All right, with that, then I am going to say goodbye. I'm sure we'll get back again sometime down the road and catch up again.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay, great. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you and I appreciate you having me back on the podcast.
John: You're welcome. All right. Bye-bye.
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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 411
What Is The Latest Breakthrough In Effective Coaching?
- Interview with Dr. Debra Blaine
John: Today's guest has effectively combined her love of writing and her expertise in self-publishing with her desire to help others through coaching. We're going to hear a little bit about all of those things today, I think. I thought it was time to learn more about her latest projects, including a breakthrough she's identified in achieving sustained positive changes for her coaching clients. I'm really interested in hearing about that. Dr. Debra Blaine, welcome back to the podcast.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Thank you so much, John. Thank you for inviting me back. Glad you're not sick of me yet.
John: No, I always learn something and you really have done a lot of things. And every time you come back, there's more books and more aspects to your coaching. I think the listeners really learn from that. So let's just talk a little bit about your background and then kind of what you've done since we last spoke with you last year.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. I'm a physician. I guess I'm an officially retired physician at this point, practiced 33 years. I became very disenchanted with medicine. I became certified as a coach in 2019. And then right about the time I became an author, I started publishing books. And so I've been doing those two things too. Initially, they were sort of side gigs to keep me from noticing how miserable I was in medicine.
I finally left. Sometimes when we don't do things on our own, the universe kicks us in the butt. So I caught COVID two years ago and found that I couldn't handle those 12 hour shifts, 60 patients a day with somebody whipping me like a horse. So now I'm full-time writing and coaching. I coach writers and I coach physicians who are experiencing, I don't really want to use the word burnout because I feel like that has such a pejorative meaning to it at this point. And it's like your HR department, they'll pay lip service and they'll say, oh yeah, burnout is a thing. And we want you to have a good work-life balance and we want to support you.
But it's kind of like once you're labeled like that, I think whether it's real or not, I think that we feel as physicians that, they don't think I can handle it because doctors are supposed to be tough as nails. We're not supposed to get sick. We're not supposed to have needs. We're not supposed to be emotionally stressed. We're supposed to be able to handle everything. And so what I've done now is I'm reframing it into stress management.
Because what is burnout? Burnout is I'm stressed to the max. I'm not enjoying my life anymore and I don't see any way to get out of this. Everybody has stress. I feel like it's more industry acceptable to say, okay, I'm going to get some coaching to handle my stress better because that's really what it is. It's not a lie.
John: Right. And I've heard some people use the term moral injury, but that's not going to make the employers happy. And I have to talk to coaches who have had some success in really taking some pretty burned out physicians and actually having them stay in their careers and be successful. I suspect part of that is putting boundaries and getting their employer to follow those boundaries or adhere to those, or they just leave and find another place that's better. So I get your point for sure.
So, before we get into though, we're going to get in more detail on the tools you're using in that for the coaching of those stressed out physicians, but tell us then about the writing and you really, to me I consider you to be sort of a fiction or novel writer, because those are the books that I was reading as they were coming out. I think one year you published three books. I don't know if you've done that again or in one year you've put that much out there, but I know you're doing some nonfiction too. So tell us a little bit about the writing and then we'll get into what you've done most recently.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay. I've got 10 books that are published and another one that's on my laptop that still needs some editing. And of the 10 that are published, six of them are fiction. One of them, and they're all available on Barnes&Noble and Amazon. One of those is not, except for one, which is only available through my newsletter, Ink and Scalpel. And that one's called Deadly Algorithm and it's free. If you want that one, you would download it, but you would give me your email address and then you'd be on my newsletter. Of course, you can always unsubscribe anytime that you want.
Then I did my first two non-fictions, one, which was the step-by-step guide to self-publishing so that people, authors could do it themselves because it sounds very intimidating, but once you get it, it's not hard going through, people went through medical school, they can absolutely self-publish a book.
And then I wrote another one on the, the secret sauce of writing fiction, like the structure of story arcs and character arcs and how to create suspense. And then I was trying to help a friend who wanted to self-publish, but she had everything in PDFs and most of the self-publishing software uses a Doc X file. But I remembered that Canva had sent out something about how you can publish books on, with Canva. And I had originally thought it was just covers, but I looked into it and yes, indeed, you can use PDFs. So I created a coloring book, a stress relief coloring book with Mandela animals, and that's on Amazon. It's not up on Barnes&Noble yet, because I had to, I'd probably have to resize it and I hadn't gotten around to that.
But that was fun, creating these pictures and putting different things in them. And it was all to accentuate an inner strength that you could meditate on while you're coloring. Apparently coloring is a big thing for adults. It's just kind of a way to block out the world.
John: Yeah. I used to love color. It kind of reminds me, I watched my wife do puzzles. To me would be the same thing. The coloring is intensity. You're focused, you're distracted with what you're doing. I can see that.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah. I think I published that one under DE Blaine, because it's completely different, but it's supposed to come up if you put it in under all my books. But that one is obviously not a Kindle. The others are coming both ways. And then the last one that, so from Deadly Algorithm, I wrote this sequel, which is book one of a dystopian, a young adult dystopian trilogy about how AI fails and it wants to take over the world. That one is not out yet. So I'm not really going to promote it. Although I guess I could. I felt like I had shortchanged one of the characters in Deadly Algorithm and I owed it to her. So it takes place, it picks up 12 years later and she's in search of her mother. And she's battling the world that who wants to wants to control her and destroy her. But then I got a little distracted because... I'm a cat lover. You know, I'm a cat lover.
John: Yeah.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Here's a cat.
John: I have a cat for you if you want it.
Dr. Debra Blaine: If I want it? Get this book and then you'll want it.
John: Maybe I can learn how to be more friendly to my cat. No, I treat my cat well, but she's just sometimes annoying, but go ahead.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, you know what? Actually you might find it really helpful because what I did was I helped somebody, one of the cat rescuers transport a cat he had trapped from one township to another, where there was a vet that was willing to treat the cat for less money. And we got to talking and I've been wanting to write a book about cats anyway. I find that nonfiction often sells better than fiction. If you have a niche, that's what people want.
John: How-to books.
Dr. Debra Blaine: How-to book, exactly. This is my how-to book on cats. I'm trying to get the light on it the right way. And it's got some stories by that rescuer in it, but basically, it's about how to determine whether the cat that's wandering through your backyard is a feral or a stray, what do they need? How can you help that cat? How do you trap a cat? How do you do TNR, which is trap, neuter, release where you trap the cat and the cat is neutered or spayed and then released back into their community so that they don't have, cats have litters, can have litters every two or three months and they can have five kittens in a litter. Do the math. That's a lot of cats, a lot of cute little kittens, but there's not enough resources.
I did a lot of research for this book. The ASPCA cites 75% of kittens born outdoors die in the first few weeks of their life. And so, the TNR thing is a good thing, but then I didn't want to just talk about trapping outside. And I had a trapper, I have a friend who's a trapper for seven years, a volunteer, she's retired. And she gave me a lot of information about the different kinds of traps and how you handle them. She gave me literature. She also helped me get my little Midnight, Midnight is elsewhere for right now, into the house.
I had input from her. I had input from an animal behaviorist who wrote the foreword. And then I did a lot of research and my vet actually, my vet usually reads my fiction and I gave it to him. I was so nervous. I was like, okay, this is your purview, but I need you to tell me if I'm completely out to lunch. And he read it and he loved it. He got a copy to put in his office. He wants his patience. So you put an endorsement on the back.
John: Did you let him read it before you published it or after?
Dr. Debra Blaine: Yeah, before, no, before. I wanted him to tell me. I didn't want to publish something that was stupid. Actually, it's my best seller. It's been out for three weeks and it's sold, I want to say like 240 books, copies so far. And it's paid for the editing and the cover design and the US copyright already in three weeks. So, I'm very excited about that.
John: I'm going to have to promote that because basically that would have a big demand. I mean, you're talking about a third of the price to a half of people are cat people the dog people versus the cat people and some are both, but I've got picture books on cats the things that we have gotten as gifts or I give to my wife or something, but this sounds really practical and very useful and yet with some stories.
Dr. Debra Blaine: That was the hope. And it also helps you decode their messages. Cats talk to us. We just don't understand their language. They don't use words like we do. But since writing the book when I look at my cats now, I look at what are their whiskers saying? What are their ears saying? What are their tails saying? What's the posture? The posture is sort of intuitive, I think for me anyway, but all these things, I didn't really know how they get along with each other. And then I put a bunch of like fun facts about cats that make you the star of your cocktail party that things that like, oh, really cats run 30 to 40 miles per hour.
I'm kind of proud of this book. I think I haven't been as proud of a book since I published Code Blue in 2019. And most writers, I think, have a cat. I feel like a lot of writers have.
John: Kind of a natural attraction. Yeah, it sounds really good. I'm going to have to actually get several copies because I know people that love cats.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And please write reviews.
John: Okay. Yes, yes. I've tried to write reviews. I have written many reviews for you, but not a hundred percent. I will do it and I'll tell my friends to do it as well. And I think it'd be very useful because I don't really understand my cat. Just at a basic level. I've always had cats my whole life, but that part would be good. But what I want to know is how to be able to communicate back to them to get them to do what I want them to do.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, yeah, but I talk about that a little bit too.
John: Okay.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Cats are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for. And I think just like talking to a child, when we talk to a child or we talk to a cat and we expect them to understand, like, usually if you tell your cat, don't do something, all your, all you expect them to understand is no. When you're, when your grandson, when your granddaughter or my grandson, when we tell them don't do that.
But if we explain, this is why I don't want you to do that. Now at that age, they don't really understand your reason, but they can understand that you have a reason. There is a reason and that can get across, that can be transmitted and communicated. And then if there's a relationship of mutual respect, they're more likely to say, okay, I don't understand it, but my human doesn't like it. And then he thinks it's important.
John: And you might be out to something in terms of two trying to maybe something in the nonfiction area tends to the sell more. So, if you have other things you want to teach us about, that sounds like a good idea. I do want to say that I have read several of your books. I've definitely not kept up. You're writing too fast for me to keep up, but I do read the occasional old Grisham or some other author in between when I'm talking about fiction. I definitely advise people. Would it be true that if I were to read Deadly Algorithm, which is available for free, and since that is going to have a spinoff or a sequel, that's pretty representative of your writing style and that kind of thing.
Dr. Debra Blaine: The truth about Deadly Algorithm, I wanted a reader magnet and I wrote that book in two weeks. It took me another four or five weeks to make it sound like it wasn't written by a second grader because I wrote it a whole thing in two weeks. It turned out to be a novella size. It was supposed to be a short story of 5,000 words. It turned out to be 23,500 words.
So, yes and no. That is my writing, but it's not as polished and refined as some of my other books are. I never actually sent it to a professional editor because it was just a free reader magnet, but I did have a friend of mine who's an author go through and kind of tell me where I screwed up. I did have, I did have a beta reader for it.
Yes, but that's free. I would love it if you if people would get it and then they can always contact me through my newsletter. They just answer it because it comes from Debra Blain at DebraBlain.com. I'm thinking about starting another newsletter for the cats, but I can't call it Ink and Scalpel. I can't put them in the same newsletter. I'd have to have something separate.
John: Okay. Well, I think it's good to know about that writing background and to be able to check out your books just because I think physicians like to support other physicians. Although of course non-physicians are going to read your books, obviously, and probably maybe the majority are non-physicians, but I just think the way they're written because of the way you think as a physician, it kind of comes through the writing. But let's switch gears here then to your coaching. A little background as far as how did you get into coaching? You mentioned it at the beginning, but exactly who are most of the clients that you have at this point in your coaching career?
Dr. Debra Blaine: I started 2019, I got certified as a coach when I was, after I wrote the first book, Code Blue, about a doctorate in urgent care, but I put it in a thriller setting that I realized when I was finished with it, it was very upsetting. I realized I hated my job.
John: You didn't realize before that?
Dr. Debra Blaine: It was something I kept pushing aside. I hid it from myself. Like, yes, at some level I knew I hated it, but it wasn't out front right there, staring me in the face. And after I wrote that book, I was like, I really hate what I'm doing. And this is my life. And at that point, I don't know, I was 50 something years old. And I was like this is not a good way to be.
John: Let me interrupt you there one, one minute. And then to tell you what I was thinking when I got to that point, maybe it's a little bit worse. I hate my patients. I hate my job. It was like, there's certain patients I couldn't stand. And so I would do the stupid thing of looking at my schedule ahead of the time the day before or the same day and I'd go, okay, before I even started, I'm like, I'm going to dread this day.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Those are saboteurs that we could work on. We'll talk about that. But yes, in that book, I had a lot of patient scenarios and I put in a lot of the patients who were really demanding, entitled, obnoxious, and so difficult. And I wanted to, in a story so that people who read it would be able to say, oh, is that what I sound like? Or is this what doctors have to deal with? And that was the whole point of writing the book. So yes, I totally understand.
I became certified as a coach and I wanted to work with physicians initially. That was my initial reason. I wanted to work with physicians who were experiencing burnout, which is really stress. But what I discovered was that a lot of doctors, many, many doctors don't ask for help, myself included, until they're at rock bottom. It's kind of like being an alcoholic. Not that doctors are alcoholics, but that idea that until my whole world falls apart, I'm going to be, I'm tough. I can handle it. Can't let anybody know that I'm struggling. I certainly can't let these big corporate leaders know. I can't let the human relations department know. I have to hold it together.
And as a coach, I do have several clients, several physician clients still that I've been, a couple that I've been seeing for five years. It's been a long time. Which was never the intention. They just didn't want to leave. It was, my intention was we're going to finish three months, six months. And then it was like, oh, we don't want to go. That was a whole other thing which was beautiful for me because things always come up.
That was my initial interest in coaching. I was able to connect with people the way I used to connect with patients when I had time. I used to be able to get to know my patients and what are what's getting in the way of your implementing this treatment and what's holding you back from do making these changes. Which is really, we doctors are coaches. We coach our patients. We used to coach our patients. Now I feel like so many of us don't have the time. We don't have the time to coach our patients. We don't even have the time to worry about. It's all about how many patients you can see and what period of time and what is the satisfaction rating.
These are all business points. These are how businesses rate their success and it made healthcare into a business. But in my opinion, humanity shouldn't be used for those purposes. Maybe I'm in the minority. I don't really think so, but I think people don't understand. And there's just such a conglomeration of the way things are run now.
I kind of shifted. I was already writing books. I started writing more books and then I started coaching authors and I found that immensely satisfying because as wonderful as it is to get one of my books in the mail that it's published like, wow, this is mine. It's almost equally as satisfying for, to see my client's books up there on Amazon or when they send me a signed copy and they say, thank you. And they're so proud of it. I feel proud, I can share their happiness and celebration. And since the last time we talked, I've had two more clients who just put up their books. One wrote from scratch, she wrote it, edited it, we published it together. And another one, she's a veterinarian. Most of my writing clients are doctors, not all, but most. She edited it and then we self-published, she self-published it.
That's just really gratifying to me. But I started into this program, Positive Intelligence, I don't really know why I was like, I stumbled onto it. But the thing is that the same elements that interfere or make it difficult to get your book written, feelings of insecurity, is my writing good enough? And people are going to care about this or procrastination, writer's block. All those things that can potentially get in the way of getting your book out there. The same kinds of stresses get in the way when we want to make a change in our life.
I hate what I'm doing, but what else could I possibly do? Will I be good enough? Will I be accepted? Can I make enough money doing something else? How can I make something else work? What will people think? Will people think of me if I decide to leave medicine altogether? What if this administration says, no, we don't want you here. Will I find something different?
All the same kinds of resistance that we get in writing a book comes up in planning our lives. And actually our lives are kind of the book we're writing. The thing with this positive intelligence is all stress comes from the same root causes. And all of our challenges are symptoms of our stress.
The way it's broken down, it's this guy, Shirzad Sharmin, I've come to actually kind of love his voice. And first of all, I just want to tell you something. I am not like, I don't jump on bandwagons. I'm not one of those people. It's like, yeah, yeah, this is the greatest thing on Earth and all that. I don't do that. But my life has changed so much since I started doing this. Things that used to really bother me, or I used to have a hard time getting past projects, it's getting done. Everything's just going more smoothly for me. I'm happier. I'm just a happier person. And when I think about it, that's so much more valuable than how much money I'm making.
This book, Whiskers in the Wild, it took three months and three days from the first sentence to on the Amazon bookshelf. And that includes two and a half weeks at an editor, 10 days at different beta readers. Getting the cover done was done some event at the same while those other things were being done.
But it basically took me two months to write, research, organize. And because I'm a fiction writer, primarily, I have a lot of anecdotes in there. I didn't, it's not a book where this is what happens when and it's like, it's not a textbook. There's all these stories that are interwoven to demonstrate what I'm talking about. And I basically did it in two months, if you subtract that time.
I attribute a lot of that to using this program, because when these things come up that would normally smack me in the face and say I'm out of commission for three days and on that project, I was able to deal with them better.
John: I'm going to have to hear more about that in a second, but I did want to mention something here. I have spoken with a lot of coaches and I don't really understand or I don't get to know how a coach works and how they interact with their clients generally. But because you and I were in a mastermind group together, I had actually an get the experience how you engage.
A mastermind, of course, everyone is volunteering and helping each other and asked to challenge and discuss whatever. So, but my point is that I always found your observations and your encouragement of the other members of the mastermind, the way you did it was very good. You would ask questions, which is perfect. And so, I already kind of know that as a coach, you're very effective and that I would enjoy being coached by you, but now we're going to go into this and say, okay, now you have those skills already. It's sort of a promotion of you on the podcast here to say, look, physicians, if you need a coach and depending on what you need that coach for, I would definitely have you to consider Debra Blaine.
But let's go ahead and hear now beyond what you've done in the past. Tell us again, how this has worked for you and what does it really entail this positive intelligence? I did go through and I kind of looked at a very high level what it is, but I do not understand it in depth at all.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Well, thank you for that, John. It means a lot to me. And the thing about coaching is that it is about asking questions. It's not about telling somebody what to do. It's about helping you figure it out for yourself. Because when you to a conclusion, it's going to make a whole lot more sense to you. And you're going to be a lot more motivated to follow through on it than if I were to say to you, well, John, why don't you do this. Then that's just like, okay, your teacher, your parents, your spouse, whatever, or whoever leaders, whoever your medical director or whoever's above the medical director says, it's not the same. And the whole idea is delving into yourself to find out.
The positive intelligence method, he's done this guy, Shirzad Sharmin, he's done like a lot of research. He was a speaker at Stanford for a while. He used to be a CEO of a company. I don't remember exactly but he talks about neuroscience and psychology, and he cites all this stuff. And it's on the website. I'm not going to go into all that stuff. Because I don't want it to make it like just a listing of qualifications.
But what it is, basically, there's three parts to it. One is to help you develop, help you master your mind. He calls it mental fitness, how to be able to focus more, keep the thoughts in front of you that you want in front of you and chase the others away.
And so, yeah, we talk about that and all kinds of woo woo seminars, there's meditation, I'm all for the meditation. I'm just saying, if people think that's all one of those things. But it's and he does it this in 10 second intervals. For example, for my clients, I usually send them one of these things in different colors. It's a widget. It's just to play with, but by taking something or anything, and he talks about just breathing, I'm not going to go through an exercise here, because I don't want to bore people who are not into that.
But by focusing on one of your senses, whether it's noticing your breathing, whether it's listening, just listening. What do you hear that's the furthest away? What do you hear? What else do you hear? What do you hear that's the closest to you? Every morning, I open the window, and I listen to the birds for 10 seconds. And I'm with the birds. Not just yay, I listened to the birds. But I close my eyes, and I'm just with those birds, I'm flying with the birds for 10 seconds. And in those 10 seconds, it shifts, it shifts your brain from the more negative rational side, or the rational side, which can give rise to a lot of negativity to this more positive experiential side.
And in that side, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, which he calls the sage, that's where all the creativity comes from, the productivity, the love, all the all the sage aspects come from love. On the other side, there's the saboteurs, those voices that chatter in your head and tell you, you're not good enough, you're never going to make it, you're supposed to have finished this already. Those patients are horrible. The judge judges others, it judges circumstance, and probably most importantly, it judges ourselves and finds us lacking. And that's not to say that we shouldn't judge things, we have to judge things, but the difference between judging and discerning or evaluating, evaluating doesn't have a positive negative attached to it, it's simply information, as opposed to that's bad.
And making a point of your saboteurs are not you, they're just these voices. And they come from a place of survival, they were developed in our childhoods to help us survive. And their strengths, their real strengths, but when we get older, we overuse the strengths.
And so, how to get back to making them what they were designed to be, and noticing them. So there's an app, which I've worked with people using the app and work with people not necessarily using the app. But the app is really nice, because I'll talk about the app in a minute. But it's a way of every day, you just sort of focus on what's the next thing, it gets you in the habit, how do you how do you make something stick, you have to have a habit. And how do you create new habits? By tying it to something that you do every day. I was always in the habit of opening my window to see what the weather was. And I would stick my head right up against the screen, practically. So now, I still do the same thing. I haven't taken a second longer than I would normally have. But I'm in a different state of mind when I do it.
The first thing is to get mastery over what we're thinking. And in 10 second intervals, you can do anything for 10 seconds. I shouldn't say that. Some people if they have some neurodivergent issues may not be able to, but the vast majority of people for 10 seconds can hold their attention somewhere. The more that you do that, the more that you strengthen those mental muscles.
That's just the foundation. Then he talks about nine saboteurs in addition to the judge, everybody's got the judge. He used like a factor analysis to get to these, every color that you can possibly create comes from either yellow, red, or blue. Every single color from those three. And so, I haven't really tested his hypothesis here, but all of the stresses that we have come from one of these nine or 10 saboteurs.
By looking into and understanding what each saboteur does, why it's there, it was originally helpful and how to arrest it in the process, how to recognize it, and then how to switch that saboteur responds best to this sage power. And what are the sage powers? There's five sage powers. There's empathy, which is I think the most important. And all the sage powers come from love. Empathy is for you, most importantly, empathy for yourself. John, do you love yourself? You should love yourself. If you're having trouble loving yourself at any given moment, find a picture of yourself when you were three years old. And look at that face. And if you have a smiling face of this little kid, like, oh, wow, yeah, who couldn't love that child? But me, not now. No, but that's still you. That person's still in there. That little John knows how wonderful he is. And he forgot along the way. Life battered him down and he forgot along the way.
It's about learning to love yourself again, to celebrate your accomplishments. And then once you do that, then you can have compassion for other people. And then you can have compassion, or at least tolerance for the world around you.
Then there's explore, which is really my favorite of the sage powers. Explore is about curiosity and wonder. Especially when we come up against a brick wall and something feels hard, instead of trying to push through it, to find a way to be drawn to it. Because it's effortless. When we're curious about something, it's not an effort to, there are certain parts of this cat book that I was just, I really wanted to know, how does that happen? How does that work? And so, it was no big deal to do that research because I was really interested in it, as opposed to, this is my assignment. My teacher told me I have to write the research cats and man, I'd rather be out playing basketball or something. It's a whole different concept, a whole different way of looking at the world.
And then there's others. I want to go through the whole thing because I know we're limited on time, but innovating is to use that information to create new ways of using it, to think outside the box. Instead of, if you're trying to figure out how to do something and you have five different things, usually, for me anyway, my first impulse is, well, that won't work because of this. That won't work because of that. And that won't work because of that. But the suggestion here is, what do I like about that? It might be just 2% of it. But I like this part of it. I like this part of it. I like this part of it. And so, again, the judgment, that negative connotation drops off.
And then you have the qualities that you want to put together and see, how can I put those together and make them work for me? And this is why he does this whole thing with mental mastery first, because you have to be in the right frame of mind to be able to do that, to be able to say, well, I'm not going to look at what I don't like. I'm going to look at what I do like. All right, but when you've been practicing it, it does work.
You're probably thinking, okay, well, I don't have time for something like that. That sounds like a really long drawn out thing. I'm a doctor. I'm seeing 60 patients an hour or a day. The app, if you do the app, literally, it's three five-minute sessions a day, but only one of them is really super important, which is that daily focus in the morning. And I've just gotten in the habit of when I'm putting on my makeup in the morning, I'm listening to the daily focus. Guyes you could be putting your shoes on getting dressed or whatever, listen to daily focus. If you set it that way, it'll remind you a couple more times for like a recharge.
On the weekends, for the first six weeks, there's a module. It's about 60 to 70 minutes, but it's broken up into different videos. So you can say, I don't have time. I don't have an hour right now, but you got to go in order. The first one's only 11 minutes. I'll listen to that. And then maybe you listen to three on Saturday morning and one on Saturday night and the rest of them on Sunday afternoon.
You can do that, or you can sit and just go through it for an hour. And then during the week that follows, it gets emphasized and you practice. I got to say, I finished that a long time ago. I've been doing this for months. I don't know, since January. Every day I learned something because even though I heard it before, it doesn't all go in right away, but it's like, oh, there's a way to apply this. And he'll say think of the last time that something like this happened. It's not going to be for everybody, I'm sure, but because you have to be willing to put yourself into it, be open to it. And it's just it's been amazing for me.
John: Question, because it sounds like this is something that, okay, we can access online, go to the site download the thing, do it, learn about it, read through it. But from what I was understanding and going through his website, and as he actually, created this and made it, I think, available to coaches specifically. So it makes me think then, okay, so not only does he want people just to go on and learn about it, but they actually have the help of a coach to help somehow implement this.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Exactly. The app is one price online, if that's all you want. I can put people in the app. If there's, I can't offer it for less than that. But if there's extenuating circumstances some financial hardship that I could work with them and make some exceptions. But combined with coaching, then it becomes something where it I would be coaching them through each week, not just on positive intelligence, it would be on, on how it's going to relate to their, to their life, to the issues that are coming up for them, how can that help them, and really giving it a hands-on application.
I've got several people who are doing it. One person, she's going through a really horrible time. She had a pelvic exenteration, a total pelvic exenteration. I don't know if you know what that is. I did not know what that was. She had vulvar cancer. She's had four surgeries. I can't tell you how many rounds of XRT. She's been on chemo three rounds. Now, then she had the pelvic, on top of that, she had the pelvic exenteration, which is they remove her entire perineum. And that was four or five months ago. But she was telling me when she was going for these scans recently, that she was doing her PQ reps while she was there. And it really helped her shift her mind from the negative, that hyper-vigilant, this is going to be horrible. It's going to be terrible.
When we're in the moment, we're not fearful. We're, when we think about the past, we regret. When we think about the future, we're afraid. And we can be, not necessarily, hopefully not, but, but when you're in the moment, none of those things exist. And so, it's a way to kind of just recharge our brains, recharge our essence, our central energy, and be able to respond better.
We have a tendency, I certainly have a tendency, and I still do many times, I'm not cured, I don't think I'll ever be cured, but to react to whatever's thrown at me, but to be able to have a tool that helps me respond. I can respond appropriately without reacting out of fear or out of anxiety or out of anger. And that's not new. That idea is not new. It's not new to coaching. It's not new to psychology. But the way that this program is put together is unique. And I've found it really helpful.
John: No, I think it does sound to be quite useful and makes it another tool that you can use. And once you understand kind of what's going into what makes you tick, and it sounds, but it's not something you can just learn in 15 minutes, obviously. So it would seem to be quite useful to have a coach who is able to use different tools to help that whatever you might feel is appropriate for the issue with your clients. We'll put the information on that in the show notes. And then, of course, then also the information on how to get a hold of you.
Dr. Debra Blaine: For anybody who wants to take the saboteur assessment, and then wants to schedule a free discovery, it's a free saboteur assessment, and a free discovery call with me to just go over it, and talk to them about it. And then they can they can decide if they're interested. And then the price of the app gets incorporated into the coaching that I would do. So it's not going to be this huge. I think I can make it much more manageable.
John: That sounds great. Particularly if you're facing something you're trying to deal with again, on here, a lot of times, it's like, okay, I'm miserable. Do I change jobs? Do I find something else to do? Do I leave medicine? Do I not leave? There's a lot of challenges. And then people get frozen, they can't even make a move because they're just afraid of going in any direction. If you're one of those people right now that are really suffering, or feel like you need some help to work through some of these things.
My only encouragement would be that coaches are always very helpful. You need to have the right coach. Sometimes you need to try different coaches to find the best one for you. But I would also say that nothing is as bad as you think it is. I was thinking earlier, when you were talking about this, a challenge that I might have, it could be anything, just something broke down, and I'm to fix it. And I'm just frustrated. And I'm like, what the hell? The thing that helps me the most is just put it aside and come back the next day. And I come back the next day, and 90% of the time, I have some insight. I don't know where it came from. Oh, that's how it works. And that's how I can fix it. I'm not saying this is like applies to all these problems. But it's just, there are ways to deal with these challenges and not be so frustrated.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And if you don't have time to come back the next day, if it breaks down, and it's frustrating, and then you can sort of master your mind for the moment, and now look at it in a different way and explore, what is it about it that's working? What is it about it that's not working? It makes you more clear headed. And many times when you're when all that sort of red I think of cartoons, when somebody's angry, and that the red cloud comes up. When that haze goes away, and say, Okay, let me just see, what was this about? Like, what is it? What is the next step now? What do I need to find out to make in order to fix this? Oh, I need I need more information about this. Or I look at that I was supposed to put this thing on it. It makes its flow more smoothly. And then maybe you don't have to wait till the next morning.
John: Anything else you want to tell us that before I let you go as far as just advice for potential clients or for physicians who are frustrated and unhappy in their careers or anything?
Dr. Debra Blaine: We actually talked about this, I think, before we started the recording. The idea that we don't have to get everything perfect right away like, when I discovered, when I went into medicine for a lot of reasons, I was I was expected to do that and to know what I wanted to do. And if you're not happy in what you're doing, you don't necessarily right away have to know what it is you want to switch to you is enough to know that this isn't like it's a really important step to know, this isn't really where I want to be. and then to look at how you can rearrange your life.
Now, that doesn't mean doesn't necessarily even mean leaving your present job, or your present position, you might be able to, by changing the way you change your perspective about it, you might be able to find that, oh I really do like this job, but I wasn't tapping into the things about it that I like, I was being run around. Or if that's not working, I want to try something else. I've been through a few different attempts to find myself, probably since I was 10. But that's okay. It's only it's society that says we're supposed to know and we're supposed to stay in the same thing for the whole for our entire life. And it's not true. We have to we have to give ourselves permission to be human beings to care about things to care about more about some things at certain stages in our life than others. And to explore, we have to give ourselves permission to explore.
John: It's great advice. I'm always reminded that some of us who made the decision to go into medicine made that decision like we were children. And there's no reason why that should necessarily stick. But there's so many good things about being a physician, though, and going through all that, that whatever you end up shifting to is going to be probably fantastic. And there are ways to get there. I appreciate your comments.
Dr. Debra Blaine: And you always use your knowledge. My grandfather used to say, no knowledge is ever wasted and everything that you are up until this point, you will continue to tap into and it'll still be a resource for you and whatever you choose to do next.
John: All right, with that, then I am going to say goodbye. I'm sure we'll get back again sometime down the road and catch up again.
Dr. Debra Blaine: Okay, great. Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate it. I always enjoy talking to you and I appreciate you having me back on the podcast.
John: You're welcome. All right. Bye-bye.
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