Interview with Dr. Jeannie Lawrence – 467
In today's interview, Dr. Jeannie Lawrence describes why you should hire a coach if you're facing burnout and moral injury working in clinical medicine.
A psychiatrist who has navigated burnout herself, she shares the framework she built to help other physicians find clarity, rebuild balance, and chart a path that actually aligns with who they are, whether that means staying in medicine or moving on.
What Drives Physician Burnout and Why Hire a Coach
The systemic pressures driving physician burnout are well-documented: EMR burden, administrative overload, scope creep, insurance interference, and a growing distance between what physicians were trained to do and what the job actually allows. Dr. Lawrence adds a psychological layer to that picture: medicine tends to select for perfectionists, and the culture of training reinforces the idea that boundaries and self-care are incompatible with commitment to patients. The result is a profession full of people running on empty and interpreting that as a personal failing rather than a structural problem.
For women physicians, the compounding factors are significant. After absorbing the full weight of clinical practice, many go home to a second full-time job in household management and childcare. The burnout rates among women physicians reflect this reality, and the solutions that work for the general physician population do not always account for it. Jeannie's coaching practice exists specifically in that space, addressing not just career dissatisfaction but the broader question of what a sustainable and aligned life actually looks like for this group.
The BREATHE Framework and the Role of Coaching
The BREATHE framework Dr. Lawrence developed intentionally starts before career strategy. Burned-out physicians in survival mode cannot access the clarity needed to make good decisions about what comes next. The first step is nervous system regulation: reconnecting with the body and with breath, undoing the chronic disconnection that high-stakes clinical work requires. From there, clients gain access to the cognitive resources needed to see what is actually possible.
Coaching is underused among physicians despite being standard practice for executives, athletes, and business leaders at every level. A coach does not provide the answers. They help clients see options their stress-narrowed thinking has hidden from them.
Summary
About half of Dr. Lawrence's clients end up staying in medicine, often with clearer boundaries and a renewed sense of purpose. The other half transition into utilization management as a starting point, then into pharma, research, entrepreneurship, or emerging spaces like healthcare technology. The starting point for anyone considering working with her is a call available at her Website. Her weekly Substack newsletter, From High Functioning to Flourishing, is published under her name on Substack.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
- Dr. Jeannie Lawrence's Website
- Dr. Lawrence's LinkedIn Profile
- What Is The Latest Breakthrough In Effective Coaching?
- See Her Massive Professional Rebirth From Intensivist To Coach – A PNC Classic from 2020
- Why Coaching Should Be the New Normal for Healthcare Professionals
- Why Physicians Should Not Underestimate the Value of Coaching – 274
- How Do I Hire a Suitable Physician Career Coach or Consultant? – 215
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Physicians – Hire a Coach Now and Find Career Satisfaction
Interview with Dr. Jeannie Lawrence
John Jurica:
Welcome back, Non-Clinical Nation!
Today I’m presenting my interview with Dr. Jeannie Lawrence, a psychiatrist and seasoned life and career coach who specializes in helping high-achieving physicians overcome burnout and transition into more fulfilling and sustainable careers.
Dr. Lawrence completed her medical degree at the Medical University of South Carolina and her psychiatry training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With years of clinical experience and her personal journey through physician burnout, she now guides physicians through the mindset, emotional, and practical challenges of transitioning from a high-stress clinical role to non-clinical paths. She helps physicians reclaim their energy, clarity, and power so they can explore non-clinical opportunities with confidence.
Okay then, let’s meet today’s guest...
Today’s guest experienced a wake-up call a while back, which led to many changes in her life and her career—like many of you have done or are thinking of doing. So I thought you would like to see a glimpse into her life and some wisdom that she can share with us today because she’s a coach.
Dr. Jeannie Lawrence, welcome to the show.
Dr. Jeannie Lawrence:
Hi, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been following your show for a really long time and appreciate it being online. So thanks for having me.
John:
My pleasure. I do like to talk to coaches every once in a while, and actually it’s been a long time since I’ve talked to a coach, so there might be some new things out there in the coaching-for-physician business. I’ll be interested in hearing about that.
But tell us a little bit about your background. You’re clinical—you practiced up until recently, I think. Tell us about that beginning story, and then we’ll get into what you’re doing now.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah. So I am a psychiatrist by training. I’ve been in practice for many years and still love mental health and psychiatry to this day.
I think my path to charting my own path started probably a few years out of residency. I was enjoying working in a community mental health setting and enjoyed the patients, but I didn’t love all the politics of the place where I worked. Those were the first inklings of maybe I’d like to do things differently one day—something entrepreneurial—but I continued in regular employment.
A few more years later I found myself in a very busy community mental health center in an underserved area. They hadn’t had a psychiatrist there for probably six months, so there was a huge backlog of patients and a lot of pressure on me to get through those patients as quickly as possible.
I definitely operated at that time as the typical physician: come in, do your best, give it your all. I was very much in my own head that I had to save the day, and there was that pressure from the clinic as well. They were really good at double-booking all the slots and making sure there was almost zero no-show rate. It was a really busy clinic.
I could keep up with the pace, but I started to notice that the way I was working just didn’t align with me. That started me thinking harder about what I’d like to do differently in the future. It felt like moral injury because I’d gone into psychiatry because I really enjoyed taking care of patients, long-term relationships, and appointments where I could really connect. None of that was possible in a clinic doing basically fifteen-minute med checks.
Another nail in the coffin was when I brought up concerns about the way the clinic was run to leadership. They listened but did nothing about it—or feigned listening. This is something I hear from a lot of the folks I work with: we often try to make some kind of change within the system, and often it falls on deaf ears. That left me feeling a little powerless.
Then one day I was going through patients on a really busy day as usual, and I got a phone call. I would normally never answer a phone call, except it was a hospital out of state—in the same state where my husband happened to be out of town. So I answered. It turned out to be the clinic he was at, and they reported that a code blue had been called on him in an ambulatory care center and that I needed to come right away.
That was very scary and very shocking. Fortunately he’s okay today, but that was a big wake-up call for me. I learned a lot that day. The first thing is that life is very precious and not promised—and too short to spend it doing things that don’t really align with my values or the kind of life I wanted to live.
I also realized that almost by necessity I could, should, and needed to do something a little different. When I went to this clinic I was under the mirage as a young physician that if I didn’t show up or if I left in the middle of the day, the whole place would fall apart. So I regularly put myself and my family’s needs last.
But in that moment I realized I had to leave, and I also learned that the clinic was able to figure it out and move on without me. That started to loosen me a little bit mentally from the idea that I had to be there all the time. It gave me a little bandwidth to start thinking more deeply about what I really wanted to do with my career.
I’ll pause there—that’s kind of how I started moving in this direction.
John:
Oh yeah, I get to ask a lot of questions. You did your training after I did—I go way back. This is how medicine has been for the last twenty-plus years, but it seems to be getting worse.
Did you have an inkling when you were in training? Sometimes I’m curious whether any residents and fellows these days can tell how practice is really going to be while they’re in training. I get the sense that usually no. Did you think, “Okay, yeah, I’ll be doing every fifteen-minute visit all day long, bored out of my mind and overworked”?
Dr. Lawrence:
That’s such a good question. The answer is absolutely not. I had no sense that there was such a thing as fifteen-minute med checks. Even as a resident, in our half-day clinic we were staffing everything with the attending, so the appointments were at least half an hour. The way medicine is actually practiced in the real world was miles different from anything I expected as a resident.
John:
So what were your first steps? You had this hard stop. Did you go back to that job for a while right away, or did you just say, “Look, I’ve got to find something different”? What transpired after that?
Dr. Lawrence:
I went back and was there probably for a few months longer, but I was already working on my next steps. I decided a good next step would be to try locums, because I’d heard it might be a way for me to continue practicing clinical medicine. I didn’t dislike taking care of patients—I just knew I wasn’t doing it in a way that aligned with my values. I wanted a little more freedom and flexibility with my schedule.
I did locums for a few years and that was good. I was able to negotiate my salary a bit, have some input on my days off, and I wasn’t as immersed in the politics of the place. It was actually a pretty good fit for a while. But I still had ideas in the back of my head that medicine should be practiced more holistically—psychiatry shouldn’t be fifteen-minute med checks—and I still wanted one day to truly chart my own path and take care of people in the way I saw fit.
John:
So what kind of things did you end up considering as you were going along? As a family physician I can spew out a few things, but as a psychiatrist you probably have different interests and tendencies. What popped up besides the locums that looked interesting and maybe doable?
Dr. Lawrence:
Telehealth was something I considered and did. Outside of clinic I also did some consulting. By this point I had my own LLC and was already a little entrepreneurial. I started offering consulting services as a psychiatrist to primary care practices.
I connected with a DPC doc—a friend of mine who had a family medicine practice and needed the ear of a psychiatrist or someone she could refer patients to for consultation. That worked well. I wouldn’t take them on as full patients, but I’d do an evaluation, make recommendations, and be available to follow up with my colleague and the patient.
And then of course coaching.
John:
So where did the coaching come in?
Dr. Lawrence:
I started moving toward that around 2020. COVID was starting and we were all very confused about what was happening with the pandemic and not sure how long it would last. I felt a push—a desire to try to help.
We were all online a lot because everybody was isolated. People were spending more time in physician Facebook groups, sharing stories about what was stressful, asking questions, and talking about how difficult it was to be a frontline physician—going into hospitals, working in emergency rooms. At the beginning of the pandemic we didn’t even have proper PPE. It was very scary. Doctors were having to spend the night away from their families just to protect them, yet you couldn’t really just call off work. There was the duty to still show up.
As a psychiatrist and as someone who had done a lot of my own personal development work, I wanted to share what I knew from a clinical standpoint and from a personal growth standpoint about ways people could find some stability and peace even in the midst of chaos. So I started a blog.
Writing had been an interest of mine as a younger person that I’d put aside for school and medicine. I tapped back into it for the first time in 2020. I started sharing my blog and it ended up in some physician communities. People really resonated with it—especially when I talked about the unique space physicians find themselves in: appearing very dutiful and successful on the outside, but still struggling as human beings on the inside and not being able to show that because we’re the physician and we’re supposed to have the answers.
Folks really resonated with that and started saying, “Yeah, that’s my experience. It looks great on the outside, but I’m struggling on the inside, and as a physician I’m not really sure what to do about that.” There are lots of conversations about the barriers physicians face to seeking help—concerns about licenses and jobs, stigma around mental health—and not a lot of safe spaces.
People started asking, “What’s the solution for someone like me?” I didn’t at the beginning necessarily put the label “coaching” on it, but my goal was to try to help my colleagues in a way that wasn’t stigmatizing, that was accessible, and that we could do amongst ourselves. I do feel like physicians can be our best community and allies because we have that shared experience that others often can’t understand. That’s what put me in the coaching space on purpose. I really wanted to do something outside of the clinic and the exam room so there were fewer barriers to access.
John:
So how did you do that logistically? How did you make it known that you were open to do some coaching? I suppose you had a website and the blog? Tell me more about that transition.
Dr. Lawrence:
The “open for business” part happened organically. The thing that moved me from thinking a lot about being an entrepreneur to actually becoming one was getting into communities with other physicians who were also trying to be entrepreneurs. That really got me out of my head and into motion.
In those circles I started talking about what I was doing, and people would come to me and ask if I could help them. That’s where I worked with my first client. From there, I still have a blog—it’s now on Substack. I have a YouTube channel, I do podcast guesting, and a lot of it is word of mouth. When my clients work with me and their lives are transformed—they’re no longer burned out, they’re changing their careers or their lives in ways they didn’t think possible—they refer. That has been the backbone of my business.
John:
So now pretty much that’s what you’re doing full time—coaching. I believe you tend to focus more on women. I don’t know if that’s just the way it is or if that’s on purpose. Maybe you can explain that.
I want to pick your brain. Tell us what you’re seeing with other trends in physicians today—what’s causing the burnout and what’s making them leave practice.
Dr. Lawrence:
I do work with women physicians specifically. It’s complicated—there are many layers.
First of all we know how difficult medicine is. The systemic machine isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse. There are so many layers between the doctor and the patient, and so many layers between what we went into medicine to do and what we actually get to do—EMRs, administrators, profits before people, scope creep, insurance companies… all of that.
When I was a resident I really thought as a physician you would be in a position of some autonomy and power to do the work you’d been trained to do. To come out of residency and realize you don’t have much power at all over the way you spend your time or the people you see or how you practice medicine is disheartening, to say the least. So there’s that big systemic layer.
There’s also some of the wiring and conditioning we have as physicians. Medicine tends to cherry-pick folks who are perfectionistic, hard on ourselves, and very altruistic—and who can unfortunately sometimes be taken advantage of by these big corporate machines that ask you to work and be a martyr rather than work in a balanced, human way.
There’s also the training. It always amazes me the kind of war-related terms we use in medicine—“the front lines,” “being in the trenches.” That attitude that we’ve signed up for this huge cause that we can’t draw any boundaries around or say no to is a big part of it.
And then for women physicians in particular, there’s that extra layer. After all of that work in medicine, they’re often going home to a whole second job. Not to say that spouses and partners aren’t taking a role, but we do know statistically that women tend to take on more of the childcare and the mental and emotional load of the household. It’s at least a triple whammy that can make burnout a really big problem in the physician community, especially among women.
John:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. We can try and say there’s no difference between women and men, but that’s just not true. If you want to have a family, the dad’s not going to have the baby. And most of my listeners are women. If they’ve got one or two or three or five kids—or a couple of twins—it’s always the bulk of that responsibility that seems to fall on the women. I get that a hundred percent. I have seven sisters, so I get a lot of examples.
I want to pick your brain further. I saw some things either on LinkedIn or on your website—certain models you follow. You use the Breathe framework for something. Is that worth talking about for a minute? It sounded like a good tool.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah, it’s a framework I’ve created that helps my clients go from often really smoldering burnout—people can wait years before they actually see someone—to recovering from that burnout and also really thriving: charting their own paths in their careers, finding balance in their lives.
Breathe refers to a couple of things, but first of all it’s an inside-out approach. A lot of times when a physician is burned out and thinking of transition, the first thought is to transition out of their career into something non-clinical or something that suits them better. We’re fixers, we’re doers—we’re always looking for that external solution.
Breathe really is starting with your breath, starting with your body, starting with yourself. Before you can access the parts of your brain that can create solutions, be creative, and be resourceful, you have to reconnect with your biology.
I call it: a lot of times physicians are running through life and through our careers holding our breath. We’re disconnected very much from our own bodies. I have a physician client now who’s an emergency medicine physician. In her words, to do the work she’s done for many years she’s had to purposely disconnect from her body—go without sleep, forgo meal breaks, forgo vacations, forget all the things your body as a human being needs.
Physicians can do this for a while and it becomes a way of life until it’s no longer sustainable. The Breathe framework is about nervous system regulation and reconnection to yourself and to your body. The simplest way to do that is with intentional breath and some other tools that we use. From there, then we have access to what’s next.
John:
That’s a good point to stop for a minute and give us your website address, because I’m sure we can find more about this just by going to your website. Would that also have the blog attached to it?
Dr. Lawrence:
The website is jeanielawrencemd.com/sanctuary. That will take you to the coaching page. And “From High Functioning to Flourishing” is the name of my Substack—it’s under my name as well, Jeannie
Lawrence, MD.
John:
Yeah. As a coach I think you do the same thing—you do an initial call just to get to know each other and see if you’re a good fit. I’ll probably check in on that again before we leave today.
But tell me more about how you approach somebody who comes in saying, “I’m miserable, I just gotta get out of this, and I just don’t know what to do.”
I’ll start by saying: you should get a coach. Physicians are the least likely to. When I was working in leadership at a hospital, we always had coaches. The CEO had a coach, every VP had a coach. Business people have coaches. It’s a normal thing, but physicians don’t think about that. What do you think about that theory, and about what they should do if they’re ready to fall apart?
Dr. Lawrence:
I agree with you. In every other industry it’s kind of standard. I like to use athletes as an example, but I love what you said about hospital settings and CEOs—it’s very standard. Yet understandably there’s some skepticism among physicians, because that’s just how we are sometimes. Just normalizing it is really important.
When you are burned out, understanding that this is a chronic stress state—that literally your brain and body are flooded with stress hormones—makes it almost impossible to really see the possibilities and to think as clearly as you might. Having the outside perspective of a coach to start to help you untangle what’s happening in your own brain so you can see what is really possible for you is invaluable.
The starting point for any physician I see who’s struggling with burnout and wants to do something different but finds themselves stuck in the same place year after year is that they literally can’t see that they have choice—that there are possibilities and options. Even when they’re presented really beautifully on a podcast like yours with all these examples of what’s out there, their brain is in survival mode. All they can think about is the reasons they can’t do those things. A coach can be really helpful to start helping you pull through some of that with a different lens.
John:
Do many of your clients end up staying in practice? Do most of them leave? What’s that kind of mix look like?
Dr. Lawrence:
It’s about fifty-fifty. Some reclaim their love of medicine, find joy in medicine again, rediscover their love of medicine and stay in it. Many of my physicians stay in clinical practice. Their burnout isn’t necessarily because of the patients or the medicine or the patient care—it’s often because they’re working in places and institutions that have so many barriers between them and what they came to do.
A lot of times my clients are struggling with creating boundaries around their own time, creating balance so that the work feels sustainable, and believing that they’re worth those things. That’s the work that we do. It’s really incredible: when a physician is restored with their own autonomy and some level of balance in the way they’re practicing, they fall back in love with it and can stay for years to come. I’m selfishly glad—some physicians at least should stay in medicine. I want them to be able to take care of me when I’m sick.
And then the other half want to, for whatever reason, move on to something different—something non-clinical. I have clients who have gone into many amazing careers in pharma, research, creating their own businesses… all of these kinds of things. That’s amazing too. The work is unlocking those passions that they probably put aside and helping them bring their unique gifts out into the world. Physicians are so altruistic—it’s always something that benefits mankind or their community. So it’s a win-win either way, whether they stay or go into something non-clinical. In my practice it’s probably about fifty-fifty.
John:
And you’re not seeing that everyone’s going toward one thing they’ve heard about. It’s pretty eclectic—they sort through their strengths, weaknesses, interests, and then come up with something. Many of those jobs have been there for years and years; we just haven’t even known about them.
Is that pretty much the spread, or are there any trends in what they pursue?
Dr. Lawrence:
Utilization management is like the first thing that comes to most people’s mind. For my clients it’s been a good stepping stone for some folks who are completely burned out of clinical medicine and their commutes and all of those things. It can feel like a nice breather—even if it’s not their forever career—to do something from home that still keeps them clinical but out of the hospital.
After that I do see a mix. I have clients who have gone into pharma and research, or moved from utilization management into pharma and research, or into entrepreneurship. That’s just the trend that I see in my practice.
John:
Any surprises? Anything that someone has chosen to do that just stands out as being unusual or interesting?
Dr. Lawrence:
I have someone—she’s not fully there yet—but her plans right now are to go into the tech space and create some kind of app that is going to benefit locum physicians. I think that’s very cool because there are some problems to be solved in that space. She’s perfectly positioned to do it, and I can’t wait to see what she creates. I love that that’s an option these days—how more accessible tech has become in some ways, so a physician can move into that space.
John:
Time’s right for it. Okay, another question from left field. With your background in mental health, have you ever seen a client—or just someone referred to you—that you had to say, “You need to take care of the mental health issues first; this has gotten out of control”?
Dr. Lawrence:
I have. Most people, because we’re physicians, understand mental health most of the time—the difference between when they should see a psychiatrist or therapist and when coaching might be appropriate. But I have had people on calls and have had to offer mental health resources as a first step or the best step. The short answer is yes, it does happen.
John:
It’d be an advantage having a background in psychiatry as a physician coach.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah, it is an advantage that way—it can help tease that out and also offer the right connections.
John:
All right, I think we are getting ready to go. Go ahead and tell us again: if we’re interested in learning more about you and your coaching, where should the first place we go be?
Dr. Lawrence:
My website: jeanielawrencemd.com/sanctuary.
John:
Okay. I will put that in the show notes and a couple of other interesting things that we’ve talked about, links to those as well.
Any last words of advice to listeners who are oftentimes in the position kind of pre-coaching—but they’re miserable? Give them a little hope.
Dr. Lawrence:
My word of support is that it’s okay. Physicians are very hard on ourselves. We have these extremely high standards that we should be able to work a million hours a week and go home and work a million more hours and juggle it all perfectly in this beautiful balanced way without ever dropping a ball.
If you are struggling, it can feel like a personal failing. What I’d want to say is that that’s not the case. You’re a human being. We forget that sometimes—even though you’re a physician and even though you’re helping people and saving lives. Remembering that you’re a person, and that any person under that amount of work and load and stress is going to experience something, whether it’s burnout or something along those lines.
It’s not a personal failing. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It just means this is an opportunity to pivot and to change directions—to take assessment about what might be going on and make the change that is necessary for you to enjoy your life. Because we only get this one.
John:
So true, so true. Thanks again for being here today, Jeannie. I really appreciate it, and maybe we’ll catch up again down the road sometime and see how things are going.
Dr. Lawrence:
I’d like that. Thanks for having me on, John.
John:
Bye-bye.
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Physicians – Hire a Coach Now and Find Career Satisfaction
Interview with Dr. Jeannie Lawrence
John Jurica:
Welcome back, Non-Clinical Nation!
Today I’m presenting my interview with Dr. Jeannie Lawrence, a psychiatrist and seasoned life and career coach who specializes in helping high-achieving physicians overcome burnout and transition into more fulfilling and sustainable careers.
Dr. Lawrence completed her medical degree at the Medical University of South Carolina and her psychiatry training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With years of clinical experience and her personal journey through physician burnout, she now guides physicians through the mindset, emotional, and practical challenges of transitioning from a high-stress clinical role to non-clinical paths. She helps physicians reclaim their energy, clarity, and power so they can explore non-clinical opportunities with confidence.
Okay then, let’s meet today’s guest...
Today’s guest experienced a wake-up call a while back, which led to many changes in her life and her career—like many of you have done or are thinking of doing. So I thought you would like to see a glimpse into her life and some wisdom that she can share with us today because she’s a coach.
Dr. Jeannie Lawrence, welcome to the show.
Dr. Jeannie Lawrence:
Hi, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been following your show for a really long time and appreciate it being online. So thanks for having me.
John:
My pleasure. I do like to talk to coaches every once in a while, and actually it’s been a long time since I’ve talked to a coach, so there might be some new things out there in the coaching-for-physician business. I’ll be interested in hearing about that.
But tell us a little bit about your background. You’re clinical—you practiced up until recently, I think. Tell us about that beginning story, and then we’ll get into what you’re doing now.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah. So I am a psychiatrist by training. I’ve been in practice for many years and still love mental health and psychiatry to this day.
I think my path to charting my own path started probably a few years out of residency. I was enjoying working in a community mental health setting and enjoyed the patients, but I didn’t love all the politics of the place where I worked. Those were the first inklings of maybe I’d like to do things differently one day—something entrepreneurial—but I continued in regular employment.
A few more years later I found myself in a very busy community mental health center in an underserved area. They hadn’t had a psychiatrist there for probably six months, so there was a huge backlog of patients and a lot of pressure on me to get through those patients as quickly as possible.
I definitely operated at that time as the typical physician: come in, do your best, give it your all. I was very much in my own head that I had to save the day, and there was that pressure from the clinic as well. They were really good at double-booking all the slots and making sure there was almost zero no-show rate. It was a really busy clinic.
I could keep up with the pace, but I started to notice that the way I was working just didn’t align with me. That started me thinking harder about what I’d like to do differently in the future. It felt like moral injury because I’d gone into psychiatry because I really enjoyed taking care of patients, long-term relationships, and appointments where I could really connect. None of that was possible in a clinic doing basically fifteen-minute med checks.
Another nail in the coffin was when I brought up concerns about the way the clinic was run to leadership. They listened but did nothing about it—or feigned listening. This is something I hear from a lot of the folks I work with: we often try to make some kind of change within the system, and often it falls on deaf ears. That left me feeling a little powerless.
Then one day I was going through patients on a really busy day as usual, and I got a phone call. I would normally never answer a phone call, except it was a hospital out of state—in the same state where my husband happened to be out of town. So I answered. It turned out to be the clinic he was at, and they reported that a code blue had been called on him in an ambulatory care center and that I needed to come right away.
That was very scary and very shocking. Fortunately he’s okay today, but that was a big wake-up call for me. I learned a lot that day. The first thing is that life is very precious and not promised—and too short to spend it doing things that don’t really align with my values or the kind of life I wanted to live.
I also realized that almost by necessity I could, should, and needed to do something a little different. When I went to this clinic I was under the mirage as a young physician that if I didn’t show up or if I left in the middle of the day, the whole place would fall apart. So I regularly put myself and my family’s needs last.
But in that moment I realized I had to leave, and I also learned that the clinic was able to figure it out and move on without me. That started to loosen me a little bit mentally from the idea that I had to be there all the time. It gave me a little bandwidth to start thinking more deeply about what I really wanted to do with my career.
I’ll pause there—that’s kind of how I started moving in this direction.
John:
Oh yeah, I get to ask a lot of questions. You did your training after I did—I go way back. This is how medicine has been for the last twenty-plus years, but it seems to be getting worse.
Did you have an inkling when you were in training? Sometimes I’m curious whether any residents and fellows these days can tell how practice is really going to be while they’re in training. I get the sense that usually no. Did you think, “Okay, yeah, I’ll be doing every fifteen-minute visit all day long, bored out of my mind and overworked”?
Dr. Lawrence:
That’s such a good question. The answer is absolutely not. I had no sense that there was such a thing as fifteen-minute med checks. Even as a resident, in our half-day clinic we were staffing everything with the attending, so the appointments were at least half an hour. The way medicine is actually practiced in the real world was miles different from anything I expected as a resident.
John:
So what were your first steps? You had this hard stop. Did you go back to that job for a while right away, or did you just say, “Look, I’ve got to find something different”? What transpired after that?
Dr. Lawrence:
I went back and was there probably for a few months longer, but I was already working on my next steps. I decided a good next step would be to try locums, because I’d heard it might be a way for me to continue practicing clinical medicine. I didn’t dislike taking care of patients—I just knew I wasn’t doing it in a way that aligned with my values. I wanted a little more freedom and flexibility with my schedule.
I did locums for a few years and that was good. I was able to negotiate my salary a bit, have some input on my days off, and I wasn’t as immersed in the politics of the place. It was actually a pretty good fit for a while. But I still had ideas in the back of my head that medicine should be practiced more holistically—psychiatry shouldn’t be fifteen-minute med checks—and I still wanted one day to truly chart my own path and take care of people in the way I saw fit.
John:
So what kind of things did you end up considering as you were going along? As a family physician I can spew out a few things, but as a psychiatrist you probably have different interests and tendencies. What popped up besides the locums that looked interesting and maybe doable?
Dr. Lawrence:
Telehealth was something I considered and did. Outside of clinic I also did some consulting. By this point I had my own LLC and was already a little entrepreneurial. I started offering consulting services as a psychiatrist to primary care practices.
I connected with a DPC doc—a friend of mine who had a family medicine practice and needed the ear of a psychiatrist or someone she could refer patients to for consultation. That worked well. I wouldn’t take them on as full patients, but I’d do an evaluation, make recommendations, and be available to follow up with my colleague and the patient.
And then of course coaching.
John:
So where did the coaching come in?
Dr. Lawrence:
I started moving toward that around 2020. COVID was starting and we were all very confused about what was happening with the pandemic and not sure how long it would last. I felt a push—a desire to try to help.
We were all online a lot because everybody was isolated. People were spending more time in physician Facebook groups, sharing stories about what was stressful, asking questions, and talking about how difficult it was to be a frontline physician—going into hospitals, working in emergency rooms. At the beginning of the pandemic we didn’t even have proper PPE. It was very scary. Doctors were having to spend the night away from their families just to protect them, yet you couldn’t really just call off work. There was the duty to still show up.
As a psychiatrist and as someone who had done a lot of my own personal development work, I wanted to share what I knew from a clinical standpoint and from a personal growth standpoint about ways people could find some stability and peace even in the midst of chaos. So I started a blog.
Writing had been an interest of mine as a younger person that I’d put aside for school and medicine. I tapped back into it for the first time in 2020. I started sharing my blog and it ended up in some physician communities. People really resonated with it—especially when I talked about the unique space physicians find themselves in: appearing very dutiful and successful on the outside, but still struggling as human beings on the inside and not being able to show that because we’re the physician and we’re supposed to have the answers.
Folks really resonated with that and started saying, “Yeah, that’s my experience. It looks great on the outside, but I’m struggling on the inside, and as a physician I’m not really sure what to do about that.” There are lots of conversations about the barriers physicians face to seeking help—concerns about licenses and jobs, stigma around mental health—and not a lot of safe spaces.
People started asking, “What’s the solution for someone like me?” I didn’t at the beginning necessarily put the label “coaching” on it, but my goal was to try to help my colleagues in a way that wasn’t stigmatizing, that was accessible, and that we could do amongst ourselves. I do feel like physicians can be our best community and allies because we have that shared experience that others often can’t understand. That’s what put me in the coaching space on purpose. I really wanted to do something outside of the clinic and the exam room so there were fewer barriers to access.
John:
So how did you do that logistically? How did you make it known that you were open to do some coaching? I suppose you had a website and the blog? Tell me more about that transition.
Dr. Lawrence:
The “open for business” part happened organically. The thing that moved me from thinking a lot about being an entrepreneur to actually becoming one was getting into communities with other physicians who were also trying to be entrepreneurs. That really got me out of my head and into motion.
In those circles I started talking about what I was doing, and people would come to me and ask if I could help them. That’s where I worked with my first client. From there, I still have a blog—it’s now on Substack. I have a YouTube channel, I do podcast guesting, and a lot of it is word of mouth. When my clients work with me and their lives are transformed—they’re no longer burned out, they’re changing their careers or their lives in ways they didn’t think possible—they refer. That has been the backbone of my business.
John:
So now pretty much that’s what you’re doing full time—coaching. I believe you tend to focus more on women. I don’t know if that’s just the way it is or if that’s on purpose. Maybe you can explain that.
I want to pick your brain. Tell us what you’re seeing with other trends in physicians today—what’s causing the burnout and what’s making them leave practice.
Dr. Lawrence:
I do work with women physicians specifically. It’s complicated—there are many layers.
First of all we know how difficult medicine is. The systemic machine isn’t getting better; it’s getting worse. There are so many layers between the doctor and the patient, and so many layers between what we went into medicine to do and what we actually get to do—EMRs, administrators, profits before people, scope creep, insurance companies… all of that.
When I was a resident I really thought as a physician you would be in a position of some autonomy and power to do the work you’d been trained to do. To come out of residency and realize you don’t have much power at all over the way you spend your time or the people you see or how you practice medicine is disheartening, to say the least. So there’s that big systemic layer.
There’s also some of the wiring and conditioning we have as physicians. Medicine tends to cherry-pick folks who are perfectionistic, hard on ourselves, and very altruistic—and who can unfortunately sometimes be taken advantage of by these big corporate machines that ask you to work and be a martyr rather than work in a balanced, human way.
There’s also the training. It always amazes me the kind of war-related terms we use in medicine—“the front lines,” “being in the trenches.” That attitude that we’ve signed up for this huge cause that we can’t draw any boundaries around or say no to is a big part of it.
And then for women physicians in particular, there’s that extra layer. After all of that work in medicine, they’re often going home to a whole second job. Not to say that spouses and partners aren’t taking a role, but we do know statistically that women tend to take on more of the childcare and the mental and emotional load of the household. It’s at least a triple whammy that can make burnout a really big problem in the physician community, especially among women.
John:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. We can try and say there’s no difference between women and men, but that’s just not true. If you want to have a family, the dad’s not going to have the baby. And most of my listeners are women. If they’ve got one or two or three or five kids—or a couple of twins—it’s always the bulk of that responsibility that seems to fall on the women. I get that a hundred percent. I have seven sisters, so I get a lot of examples.
I want to pick your brain further. I saw some things either on LinkedIn or on your website—certain models you follow. You use the Breathe framework for something. Is that worth talking about for a minute? It sounded like a good tool.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah, it’s a framework I’ve created that helps my clients go from often really smoldering burnout—people can wait years before they actually see someone—to recovering from that burnout and also really thriving: charting their own paths in their careers, finding balance in their lives.
Breathe refers to a couple of things, but first of all it’s an inside-out approach. A lot of times when a physician is burned out and thinking of transition, the first thought is to transition out of their career into something non-clinical or something that suits them better. We’re fixers, we’re doers—we’re always looking for that external solution.
Breathe really is starting with your breath, starting with your body, starting with yourself. Before you can access the parts of your brain that can create solutions, be creative, and be resourceful, you have to reconnect with your biology.
I call it: a lot of times physicians are running through life and through our careers holding our breath. We’re disconnected very much from our own bodies. I have a physician client now who’s an emergency medicine physician. In her words, to do the work she’s done for many years she’s had to purposely disconnect from her body—go without sleep, forgo meal breaks, forgo vacations, forget all the things your body as a human being needs.
Physicians can do this for a while and it becomes a way of life until it’s no longer sustainable. The Breathe framework is about nervous system regulation and reconnection to yourself and to your body. The simplest way to do that is with intentional breath and some other tools that we use. From there, then we have access to what’s next.
John:
That’s a good point to stop for a minute and give us your website address, because I’m sure we can find more about this just by going to your website. Would that also have the blog attached to it?
Dr. Lawrence:
The website is jeanielawrencemd.com/sanctuary. That will take you to the coaching page. And “From High Functioning to Flourishing” is the name of my Substack—it’s under my name as well, Jeannie
Lawrence, MD.
John:
Yeah. As a coach I think you do the same thing—you do an initial call just to get to know each other and see if you’re a good fit. I’ll probably check in on that again before we leave today.
But tell me more about how you approach somebody who comes in saying, “I’m miserable, I just gotta get out of this, and I just don’t know what to do.”
I’ll start by saying: you should get a coach. Physicians are the least likely to. When I was working in leadership at a hospital, we always had coaches. The CEO had a coach, every VP had a coach. Business people have coaches. It’s a normal thing, but physicians don’t think about that. What do you think about that theory, and about what they should do if they’re ready to fall apart?
Dr. Lawrence:
I agree with you. In every other industry it’s kind of standard. I like to use athletes as an example, but I love what you said about hospital settings and CEOs—it’s very standard. Yet understandably there’s some skepticism among physicians, because that’s just how we are sometimes. Just normalizing it is really important.
When you are burned out, understanding that this is a chronic stress state—that literally your brain and body are flooded with stress hormones—makes it almost impossible to really see the possibilities and to think as clearly as you might. Having the outside perspective of a coach to start to help you untangle what’s happening in your own brain so you can see what is really possible for you is invaluable.
The starting point for any physician I see who’s struggling with burnout and wants to do something different but finds themselves stuck in the same place year after year is that they literally can’t see that they have choice—that there are possibilities and options. Even when they’re presented really beautifully on a podcast like yours with all these examples of what’s out there, their brain is in survival mode. All they can think about is the reasons they can’t do those things. A coach can be really helpful to start helping you pull through some of that with a different lens.
John:
Do many of your clients end up staying in practice? Do most of them leave? What’s that kind of mix look like?
Dr. Lawrence:
It’s about fifty-fifty. Some reclaim their love of medicine, find joy in medicine again, rediscover their love of medicine and stay in it. Many of my physicians stay in clinical practice. Their burnout isn’t necessarily because of the patients or the medicine or the patient care—it’s often because they’re working in places and institutions that have so many barriers between them and what they came to do.
A lot of times my clients are struggling with creating boundaries around their own time, creating balance so that the work feels sustainable, and believing that they’re worth those things. That’s the work that we do. It’s really incredible: when a physician is restored with their own autonomy and some level of balance in the way they’re practicing, they fall back in love with it and can stay for years to come. I’m selfishly glad—some physicians at least should stay in medicine. I want them to be able to take care of me when I’m sick.
And then the other half want to, for whatever reason, move on to something different—something non-clinical. I have clients who have gone into many amazing careers in pharma, research, creating their own businesses… all of these kinds of things. That’s amazing too. The work is unlocking those passions that they probably put aside and helping them bring their unique gifts out into the world. Physicians are so altruistic—it’s always something that benefits mankind or their community. So it’s a win-win either way, whether they stay or go into something non-clinical. In my practice it’s probably about fifty-fifty.
John:
And you’re not seeing that everyone’s going toward one thing they’ve heard about. It’s pretty eclectic—they sort through their strengths, weaknesses, interests, and then come up with something. Many of those jobs have been there for years and years; we just haven’t even known about them.
Is that pretty much the spread, or are there any trends in what they pursue?
Dr. Lawrence:
Utilization management is like the first thing that comes to most people’s mind. For my clients it’s been a good stepping stone for some folks who are completely burned out of clinical medicine and their commutes and all of those things. It can feel like a nice breather—even if it’s not their forever career—to do something from home that still keeps them clinical but out of the hospital.
After that I do see a mix. I have clients who have gone into pharma and research, or moved from utilization management into pharma and research, or into entrepreneurship. That’s just the trend that I see in my practice.
John:
Any surprises? Anything that someone has chosen to do that just stands out as being unusual or interesting?
Dr. Lawrence:
I have someone—she’s not fully there yet—but her plans right now are to go into the tech space and create some kind of app that is going to benefit locum physicians. I think that’s very cool because there are some problems to be solved in that space. She’s perfectly positioned to do it, and I can’t wait to see what she creates. I love that that’s an option these days—how more accessible tech has become in some ways, so a physician can move into that space.
John:
Time’s right for it. Okay, another question from left field. With your background in mental health, have you ever seen a client—or just someone referred to you—that you had to say, “You need to take care of the mental health issues first; this has gotten out of control”?
Dr. Lawrence:
I have. Most people, because we’re physicians, understand mental health most of the time—the difference between when they should see a psychiatrist or therapist and when coaching might be appropriate. But I have had people on calls and have had to offer mental health resources as a first step or the best step. The short answer is yes, it does happen.
John:
It’d be an advantage having a background in psychiatry as a physician coach.
Dr. Lawrence:
Yeah, it is an advantage that way—it can help tease that out and also offer the right connections.
John:
All right, I think we are getting ready to go. Go ahead and tell us again: if we’re interested in learning more about you and your coaching, where should the first place we go be?
Dr. Lawrence:
My website: jeanielawrencemd.com/sanctuary.
John:
Okay. I will put that in the show notes and a couple of other interesting things that we’ve talked about, links to those as well.
Any last words of advice to listeners who are oftentimes in the position kind of pre-coaching—but they’re miserable? Give them a little hope.
Dr. Lawrence:
My word of support is that it’s okay. Physicians are very hard on ourselves. We have these extremely high standards that we should be able to work a million hours a week and go home and work a million more hours and juggle it all perfectly in this beautiful balanced way without ever dropping a ball.
If you are struggling, it can feel like a personal failing. What I’d want to say is that that’s not the case. You’re a human being. We forget that sometimes—even though you’re a physician and even though you’re helping people and saving lives. Remembering that you’re a person, and that any person under that amount of work and load and stress is going to experience something, whether it’s burnout or something along those lines.
It’s not a personal failing. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It just means this is an opportunity to pivot and to change directions—to take assessment about what might be going on and make the change that is necessary for you to enjoy your life. Because we only get this one.
John:
So true, so true. Thanks again for being here today, Jeannie. I really appreciate it, and maybe we’ll catch up again down the road sometime and see how things are going.
Dr. Lawrence:
I’d like that. Thanks for having me on, John.
John:
Bye-bye.
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