To Overcome Challenges and Promote Personal Growth Pursue Joy

Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 422

To Overcome Challenges and Promote Personal Growth Pursue Joy

- Interview with Dr. Chrissie Ott

John: Today's guest has a long clinical career applying her med-peds to different things like primary care, hospital medicine and complex pediatric care. But what got my attention was her experience and leadership as a physician coach. So Dr. Chrissie Ott, welcome to the PNC podcast.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Thank you so much for having me. It is a pleasure to be here.

John: Great, I think we can learn a lot from you and I've found, I've interviewed a few coaches before, of course, and everyone kind of has their own thing because there are at least probably 10 different types of coaches, different areas they can focus on. And so I always learn a lot when I interview a coach. So tell us a little bit about your background before you started the coaching in terms of your clinical background and training briefly.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Sure, yeah, coaches are kind of like physicians. There are subspecialists and they can be in completely different areas of practice. So my background, as you mentioned, is med-peds.

I trained at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and then I skedaddled to the Pacific Northwest as soon as I could after residency ended. So I've been located in Portland, Oregon for about 18 years. Maybe this year was 19.

Anyway, I started off in a large primary care practice that did not feel like a perfect fit. And then I did this unimaginable thing of opening a solo micro practice in 2008, which at the time was extremely unusual. It has become much more common in the years since.

But at the time I learned right away that I was doing something that I had been subliminally implicitly taught was not possible. We sort of came up through medicine thinking, oh, you will join a typical practice or you will work for a system or a hospital or an academic institution. So going out on my own that early was really different and really feeds my entrepreneurial spirit.

And it had its strengths and it had its drawbacks as well. And then from there, I transitioned into hospital medicine where I joked that I traded all of my long-term relationships for one night stands and enjoyed that for a while. And then have sort of hybridized and hybridized again to where now I care for medically complex kids and young adults in a residential skilled nursing facility.

And I love that challenge. I love the flexibility. And all along the way, these pivots have taught me such valuable lessons about our choices, that there are always choices and creative solutions when we feel the most stuck. And that is a topic for coaching.

John: Now, as I was looking through what I could find on you on LinkedIn and so forth, I kind of got the feeling that you spent, being a med-peds that kind of broadens your possibilities in terms of what you do. Were you more on the children's side or is it a 50-50 mix in general?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Because of my clinical assignments right now, I practice more pediatric medicine than internal medicine, but I've had different chapters in my clinical career where it was heavier adult and less heavy peds. I love them both so much equally. And as you know, from our conversation before, my latest pivot is actually becoming board certified in obesity medicine, largely so that I can support pediatric patients who are not necessarily getting easy access to the full range of evidence-based treatments. But I will also want to and enjoy caring for adults along the way as well.

John: Got it. I have like a warm spot in my heart for med-peds physicians because one of my good friends is a med-peds. And when I started my practice, that was almost non-existent. I think the whole idea of combining those had just kind of taken on. I have no idea whether it's grown more, if it's plateaued, if it's going down or whatever. But I remember as a family physician, I was taking care of newborns and so forth.

This was a long time ago, I had those privileges, but I really always was happy to see my friend, the med-peds when I had a sick newborn. It's like, I need help here. So you come and take over this case.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: At the hospital, I ended up learning that I was nominated to lead some wellness work. And that wellness work began to grow within the institution. It was a natural fit for me. I'd actually done wellness group formation as early as med school. So anyway, that is what dovetailed into learning that coaching existed. And we got 300 clinicians through a 12-week coaching program where they each got six individual coaching sessions, six small group sessions where they got to see, oh, I'm not the only one struggling with issue X, Y, or Z.

And then also 12 teaching sessions where there was this curriculum about mindset and cognitive behavioral tools and reframing and values and these things that really help ground somebody who is in need of a pivot or a transition and gives them like a conscious framework so that we can be super conscious about our decision and not just coming from a reactive space of like, oh, where will be the next safe place to land? And it was then that I was like, this is my work that I want to be doing. I want to liberate physicians from unnecessary suffering.

John: Okay, now bring us up to today in terms of how much of each you're doing, how much clinical, medical director, coaching and how that looks, because I know, I mean, that's tough to balance sometimes.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: It is, I'm not going to suggest that I figured out how to balance it. I have a tendency to put too much on my own plate. I know that I'm probably not the only one out there with that tendency, but that is definitely my tendency. It's a constant titration. And I believe that it's kind of like a cockpit. You know, we sometimes need to put our landing gear up, but we sometimes need to put our landing gear down.

And right now, well, I'm not at a cruising altitude, but I'm actively titrating some things right now. So bringing on this idea of joining an existing obesity medicine practice and offering a whole new service means like manic level learning and absorbing CME. And I love that.

And then also being an entrepreneur in charge of a coaching business requires a certain management bit of time, as well as hosting, as you know, this gathering of physician coaches called the Physician Coaching Summit in a couple of months, which demands quite a bit of bandwidth as well. So I am doing about 0.6 of employed FTE. And then I am adding, layering on these other things on top of that.

John: So let's focus in on the coaching side of it. So how are you structuring that? What kind of coaching are you doing? What kind of clients do you have and how's that going?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Yeah, the majority, but not all of my clients are healthcare professionals. I have coached nurses and frontline physicians, specialists, CMOs, kind of up and down. And the way that I began working with clients was very much aligned with the way I saw our clinicians get helped by this physician coaching intervention that we did at my institution.

I did a 12 week course and taught along the way and also gave one-on-ones along the way. And in 12 weeks, I would see people make the most amazing transitions. I would see people decide to launch new ventures or decide to stop certain jobs or ventures that really needed to be sunset rather than ramped up. I just saw neurons firing and going like, oh, I don't have to believe everything I think. And that creates freedom for more creative wisdom. It supports me in being a fuller version of myself.

One of the intakes that we do and a pre post kind of self-assessment is the question, on a scale of one to 10, how aligned are you with your current trajectory? So not just the results you're seeing in your life, but the where you're headed in terms of your physical health, your professional development, your creative life, your inner or spiritual life, your social landscape, how connected are you socially, and financial wellbeing and all of these things. So people actually had a moment to take inventory.

And when we do a pre and post with those questions, what I see after six or 12 weeks of intervention are dramatic shifts. Like their general emotional state is better or their relationships are better because they're more dropped into themselves and they're having a little bit deeper experience of their intended life crafting.

John: Now, in general, in that particular setting that you're describing, was it something that was offered to them that they could take advantage of because of an employer or something like that? Was it they were seeking it out? I'm just kind of trying to get a feel for the group that you were dealing with in that setting.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: When I was leading wellbeing work, I was not facilitating the coaching. I was more like I'm inside the institution. I arranged the grants and I recruited four clinicians that wanted to participate.

They had to volunteer. And as any of your listeners know, who are in medicine or in wellness in medicine, it is really hard to get doctors to raise their hand and volunteer, to participate even in things that are intended to be helpful to them. Because we're overwhelmed, because we're cynical, because we're tired, because we're burnt out, because a million different individual reasons, it's hard to get participation.

I knew that we had something different when we rolled out this application for 60 spots and we got 120 responses of people wanting a spot. And so that's how it actually grew from just the first 60 to becoming a cohort of actually 300 total over the course of 15 months. So it was offered in that first round as a benefit of their association with the institution. When I started my own practice, it was just like, this is what I'm offering. Here's a price tag. I'm going to give you CME associated with it. Let's see how this goes. It was a little bit of a wing and a prayer, but it turned out really well.

John: What kind of people will then, now that they know you're there and you're doing this coaching, what kind of issues do they have typically when they're coming to you? Or you could say maybe even what would you rather see or do you like seeing the type of clients that naturally are attracted to what you're doing?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: I love seeing people who are ready to do the work, people who are ready to really explore. So, just like starting out with a patient who needs a lifestyle change, if they are starting off at a very early stage of change, if they're pre-contemplative, it's not as gratifying, right? We need to wait.

If folks are not ready to take a look, then that resistance is kind of like a third party in the room when we're trying to do coaching. Anybody who is ready to actually take a deep dive is welcome, clinical, non-clinical, what have you. But a lot of people that I coach are sensing a transition needs to be made and they can't tell when to make it or if to make it or what the transition is going to be.

They have a sense that change is coming or change is needed. And a lot of times it's also relational. Many times it's relational with difficult personalities at work that is making their work untenable.

Unfortunately, that's really common. Or it's a difficulty with a relationship to the system, that they've been in the same system for a decade or more, perhaps, and they just have gotten to the point where they're like, this relationship is not working. And I feel trapped because I have a high earning salary and I have this much autonomy and flexibility.

And my fear brain tells me that I won't be able to recreate either this income or this autonomy and flexibility in another professional setup. And so I stay stuck and I stay suffering. And it does not do any good to my close relationships or really the quality of memories that I'm going to look back on from the end of my life.

Not to get all morbid about it, but I do think the end is important to keep in mind. And as part of my coaching is always that we have a limited amount of time and what we do matters because we are on the clock. Always we are on a clock and we don't know how long our particular clock is and that's okay, but it makes it imperative that we bring our fullest self to creating joyful lives, full of meaning, alignment, and delight.

John: One of the advantages of me interviewing someone like you who's a coach is I can kill two birds with one stone. One, I can find a coach who might be taking some clients and the other is some of my followers or listeners want to know what it's like to pursue that journey. So from the first one, so do you coach people across the country? Are you doing face-to-face? You're doing remote? And if what you're saying resonates, how would someone get ahold of you?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Absolutely. I do coach. I do have availability for folks right now. You can find all of my information at chrissieottmd.com. Can find me on Instagram at chrissieottmd and Facebook. I mean, all the things, pretty much chrissieottmd. The podcast is Solving for Joy. You can certainly listen and hear some thoughts and interviews there too. I work with people in the way that they need to be worked with.

I had a new client this past month who really was pretty fearful about starting a relationship with a coach and really needed to make a small commitment at first. So what I'm finding is that really holding people where they feel a little bit stretched, but mostly safe is the way forward. Like I don't need you to pay me in advance for a year's worth of coaching.

It is okay if we just do four sessions and just reassess from there. But I do coach on Zoom and I coach people across the country and I have a client who's in Australia. So we find ways to make it work no matter what time zone you're in.

John: Ah, very good. So now what would be your advice to someone who maybe has just an interest in becoming a coach in terms of whether to follow your journey or how would you advise they get started?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Usually there's a first question, do I get certified? And I have a bias, which is yes, you should get certified. Because I think that we all benefit when the profession is held to a higher standard. Meeting certain benchmarks of hours of practice, mentorship, and understanding the ethics of coaching, what it is and what it isn't, where it stops and where therapy begins and where you need to refer. So I definitely condone getting certified. There are some great schools out there. It's an investment. It's a professional development investment like anything else. I trained with the Martha Beck Institute Wayfinder Life Coaching.

Another, a physician-specific training course that I would consider would be Physician Coaching Institute and very, very much love Lodestar. They have an amazing certification for people too. Dr. Kenia Saraf, very trauma-informed approach. And there are others. There are other many good options as well, but those are two that come to mind and I would investigate those if I was looking to get certified for the first time. And then also connect with community.

Finding physician coaches online to connect with, that's what I did first. I was kind of like, where do I even start with physician coaching? I just had this calling that I needed to lean into. And it was great to find my people. And I now know hundreds, literally about four to 500 different physician coaches in a short span. And the Physician Coaching Summit was one of the things that really accelerated me finding that community.

If any of your listeners are curious about physician coaching, you do not have to be a certified coach to attend the summit, but you could come and become enriched and learn about coaching and connect with many other physician coaches at that event, which is coming up in early November in Arizona.

John: Okay, I definitely wanted to hear a little bit, even more than that, keep going a little bit about the Coaching Summit. How long has the Coaching Summit been going on? I know you actually took over this year in terms of leadership of the Coaching Summit and yeah, just tell us a little bit more about what that's like. And if someone were to come, what would it be like? How many people would there be there? What would the itinerary be? That kind of thing.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Yes, thank you for asking. Kathy Stepin, a wonderful pediatrician based in Alaska has a company called the Institute for Physician Wellness. And Kathy has been leading wellness work for physicians for years and years. And she founded the Physician Coaching Summit. So this is the sixth year of its existence. I began attending in its third year and I was just profoundly impacted.

It's just like, oh my gosh, these people are blowing my mind. It's a largely female group, not all female, but it's often heavy female predominance. So I will say these women were blowing my mind with their insight and their studies and the data that they were sharing about the impact of various coaching programs on, for example, time away from work in the EHR or scores of imposter syndrome or scores of professional fulfillment or scores around burnout.

And just seeing that there is this driving raft of data that is growing to demonstrate the efficacy of professional coaching in medicine. And then on top of that, they were just fun. They were just like super nice, welcoming women, no mean girl vibes, just a really nice place to be.

So it's usually around 35 to 45 attendees. So it's a very intimate, smaller conference. It's not like going to the American Academy of Pediatrics where you're one of thousands in the giant ballroom.

It's really quite intimate and it's usually at a very comfortable spot. Like in this year, we'll be at Savannah Resort and Spa, Wellness Resort and Spa, which is in Carefree, Arizona. And it's a little bit like a mirror of all light.

There's programming. Everything is very health focused and delicious and beautiful. And we'll be doing these extra things. Like there's a headshot photographer on site for the attendees. There will be a full moon yoga nidra on the first night because it happens to be a full moon. So we'll be lying under the desert sky doing this guided meditation.

We're having a sound bath. There's going to be a dance party and the speakers are just amazing. Including one of our keynotes is Cesar Cervantes, who's a TEDx speaker coach and has a whole TEDx speaker program. And he happens to have gotten a lot of physicians onto TEDx stages. He's a brilliant guy and a really fun speaker to listen to. And we just are so lucky to get to be together in this way annually. I feel like it could be a Eureka moment for anybody who attended.

John: Okay, I don't think I have too many people that have been coaching for more than a few months. They might just have picked it up or something. But from what you're saying, if that's something you're interested in, if you want to get immersed and you want to meet a ton of other coaches and people that support coaches, then it would be something worth checking out.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Absolutely. And please feel free to reach out to me personally. I'm glad to hop on a call and chat about it, see if it's right for you.

John: All right, well, I'll have the links to that in the show notes for sure. I want to go back to the podcast because I'm sure there's a lot in there that might be of interest to my listeners. I kind of glanced through some of the things, but I would say just what's your summary of the typical content? And I think you typically often have guests, if not all the time. Tell me more about the podcast details and what we need to know about that.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Yeah, the podcast also grew straight out of the Physician Coaching Summit. It had its roots and its seed planted there. Because we are in a podcast moment in history, anybody can have their own little broadcast channel, which is pretty cool.

And it was one of the years at the summit that one of the speakers broke it down and did a workshop on like, this is how to create your own podcast. And suddenly it became a doable thing that was broken down into a few different tasks or like software helping programs. Not that much. It can be done. So it just went from a theoretical idea to it can be done and I think I want to do it. And it was less than a year later that Solving for Joy was officially on the air.

My coaching often revolves around this theory, this theme of joy, which I understand is a combination of meaning, alignment and delight. And it just really sparks my juices to get to talk about how different people have successfully or unsuccessfully attempted to solve this lifelong equation. Like, how do I get more joy?

And it's not the same as happiness. It's not the same as gratification, but how do I keep course correcting my life or my career or my relationships to maximize meaning, alignment and delight? So I'm doing what I mean to be doing in a way that I want to do it and it's making me feel happy, amused, stimulated, drawn in.

I interview people most of the time. Yeah, we often explore their story. And so like, if it's a story of suffering, then they might explain how that was related to their errant attempts to Solve for Joy.

Sometimes it's bringing things that are surprising into the field of joy. Like, I think last week's episode was Dr. Bob McCauley and he's a pediatric palliative care physician. And he shared a lot of hard things in a book that he recently released and it was a beautiful book and we got to explore the book, but through the lens of also Solving for Joy on like a meta and micro level. So sometimes it's authors, sometimes it's physicians, sometimes it's other coaches, sometimes it's artists. I just really love talking to all kinds of people through this lens of joy.

John: Excellent, excellent. I think listeners, if you want to definitely take a listen to that, particularly if you want to see how that meshes together with coaching and maybe if you want to look at another person that's doing a podcast, what that's like. It's not necessarily an easy thing to do weekly, is it?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: It's a practice, it's a decision, it's a commitment for sure.

John: All right. Well, let's see. Well, we're kind of getting close to time now. I guess I would just open it to any last advice or thoughts you have for the listeners. Most of my listeners are, they're not necessarily in a good place all the time. They're seeking something, whether it's a new career or how to figure out how to deal with their current career or something like that. So I'm sure you run across that quite a bit. Any last before we go advice on how to maybe find that joy?

Dr. Chrissie Ott: I have a prompt. That's what I'm prompted to share with your listeners in closing. It's a writing prompt. It's a self-inquiry and it's a way to take inventory of what you're practicing believing. So we have to be wary of our conclusions and our conclusions are built from our most frequently practiced thoughts. So if you have an issue that's under your skin, something that you're ruminating about that's really causing trouble, I'd like for you to consider setting yourself a five to 10 minute timer.

And the first question to write down and then to answer is, what are my most frequent thoughts about this? And then just list them out and let them come. And when you feel like you're empty from listing those thoughts, the next question would be, what are my sneaky or hidden less obvious thoughts about this topic? And see if there's more that comes out. And then the third one is, if I have access to them, what are my most aspirational thoughts about this topic?

John: Okay. That is definitely something to work through and that would take a little bit of time. And maybe if you're having difficulty, it's time to find a coach. That would be my problem. Thinking back at the times when I was challenged in my life and just having questions like that and just being just like unable to grapple with them without getting a little bit of help. So, but those are good questions.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Yeah. Seeing them outside of your brain is sometimes enough of a relief to start sorting through them and being like, oh, I could keep this one or oh, that's obviously one that I don't need to keep practicing. And it's a great starting point if you do ever want to work with a coach and there are many wonderful coaches out there.

John: Words of wisdom. All right. I appreciate that, Chrissie. This has been fun. I appreciate the time you've taken to share this with us. And maybe if listeners, if any of you go to the summit, definitely say hello to Chrissie and tell her that you heard from her on the podcast.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Definitely. This has been fun and catch up again sometime down the road. I don't think I mentioned this, but the information for the coaching summit is at thephysiciancoachingsummit.com.

John: I've got that and I'll put that in the show notes along with everything else. And they should be able to find you one way or the other and the summit. All right, Chrissie, thanks a lot.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Thank you so much for having me, John. It was a pleasure.

John: All right, bye-bye.

Dr. Chrissie Ott: Bye.