“I guess the average person doesn't have a plan. So that's a good first start, like have a plan. Everybody should have a plan. That's good. But like a lot of people that do planning, they skip the most important part. What is your purpose in life? Why are you here? What's most important to you? What are your values like? Where do you want to go? What does your ideal future look like? I think it's hard to do that exercise in training because you're like, super, go, go, go.” - Daniel Wrenne   Daniel Wrenne loves helping people use their finances to live better lives. During the work day, he ..read more

“Maybe getting a little clear on what this idea is so you can be even 5% or 10% more intentional about keeping those two things separate.” - Jill Farmer Contaminated time is a topic that comes up a lot in our conversations. It’s a term that’s been recently introduced in the field of stress management. Here, we discuss what contaminated time actually is and what someone can do about it. We first learned about the term from New York Times best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner, Brigid Schulte. Essentially, contaminated time refers to the idea that, whether we’re at work or at home, our ti ..read more

“If you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of anyone else. And as caretakers, we are professional caretakers. It is completely true, although we like to think that it's not. We like to think that with our training and with our logic, that we can just overcome everything.” - Dr. Virgie Bright Ellington Physicians across the country are feeling burned out. We’re committed to finding ways to decrease stress in our lives and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Between December 2021 and January 2022, about 2,500 US physicians took a survey conducted by researchers at the AMA, Mayo C ..read more

“And so what I play with a lot with my physician clients is you're really good at being highly capable people who handle challenging and complicated things. But in this setting, can we shift, gear down to something that's more simple, that's more in line with your views, and then it gives you more time to be and to rest and to use this season, the cozier, darker season of this holiday, to slow down and to have a little more presence and comfort for yourself instead of frenzied running around.” - Jill Farmer Jen and I want to talk about something that's pretty timely, and that's holiday stress ..read more

“You know, to be a unicorn, I think you have to be willing to stand out from the pack and sometimes take a different pathway forward. You can also pay a price for this. The vast majority of people will take the high road. They'll be supportive, encouraging. But there are also others who may not be so kind and may want you to conform. They may also display petty jealousies. They may help to create obstacles in your pathway. But I think for me as a unicorn, I think you have to understand that standing apart from the crowd can attract negative attention. But thankfully, most of the time it is pos ..read more

“Physicians are the hardest working folks in terms of, on average, if you compare the average physician with any other line of work or profession. We're hardworking folks and there are private equity folks, corporations, non-physician folks in turtlenecks that know this and exploit this. And that is something that we have to be aware of when we are becoming employed physicians.” - Dr. Virgie Bright-Ellington A lot of us are interested in transitioning into nonclinical careers or picking up a side gig that we can do in addition to our clinical career. This is something we get a lot of questions ..read more

“If we want culture change, we need to bring a new top leader and they are going to kind of drive culture change from the top down. That's not really how it works. It has to be at least a top-down and a bottom-up effort combined.” - Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken We're excited to bring back international coach and consultant, Tosca Bruno-van Vijfeijken. She's a public thought leader and coauthor of the book, “Between Power and Irrelevance: The Future of Transnational NGOs”, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Tosca is an international expert on leadership and has many insights into physi ..read more

“One thing I do want to point out to investors is when we look at investments, the first thing we look at is the return. I’m guilty of it because that’s the whole point of the investment to see how much my money can grow. And then maybe the last thing we’ll look at is, oh, who is running it? But I think the more you invest, the more you really look into these, it should be the other way around. It should be who is running the property.” - Dr. Cherry Chen Although Dr. Cherry Chen specializes in internal medicine, she’s also an expert in real estate. Dr. Chen is also the founder of The Real Esta ..read more

“Learning how to position yourself to impress admissions committees and seeing that happen and then helping other people and then through word of mouth, someone telling someone else that they wanted to go into this field as well and really helping them, I think just further reinforced that my role was to help other people become wonderful physicians." - Dr. Shemmassian Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting. He's one of the world's foremost experts on medical school admissions, college admissions and graduate school admissions. For nearly 20 years, he and his ..read more

“If we are serious about this quintuple aim, this lofty goal of improved health outcomes at lower cost with better experiences for our patients, all of that in an environment of equity and physician wellbeing, then we really need a shift in health and healthcare. Because what I see is that patients are disenchanted with healthcare. They don't feel that their physicians have time for them. They don't feel heard. And I see physicians leaving healthcare because the system is really not conducive to either group.” - Dr. Iris Schrijver  Dr. Iris Schrijver is a certified lifestyle medicine phys ..read more