Why you should consider working with a coach

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is a pleasure to be speaking with you today. I'm really excited about today's episode because I'm talking about why you should consider engaging a coach in your research career. Yes, why you should consider engaging a coach in your research career. And for many of us, we have mentors, and mentors are awesome people.

1:23 I want to just shout out all the mentors who are making sacrifices, moving the careers of so many mentees forward. You are awesome, and you deserve all the goodness in the world because of the goodness you create. Thank you. And I will tell you that even though mentors are absolutely amazing, they're kind of limited because their focus really is just on research and your research methodology. And really, you are really so much more than the research that you do, so much more than the grant writing that you do, so much more than the papers that you submit. And one of the great things is an opportunity to bring everything that you are to the table and have a coach help you shape your career.

2:12 And when I think about coaching, so I will tell you that I had no idea about coaching until, gosh, maybe eight years into my faculty career. And I was part of this career development program. And actually, up until I had had a couple of times where I had met with coaches, and I remember thinking, wow, this is so awesome. And I remember I finally got to a point in my life where I was like, I think I need a coach. And so I attended this career development workshop, and there was this amazing coach who was just talking about the importance of coaching in our research and mentoring life. And then she did a demonstration coaching session, and I was the person who stepped up to have the demonstration done.

2:54 And it was just so powerful. I was talking about something that actually was tangential to my research, wasn't directly related. It was really about me getting... It was kind of tangential to my research. It wasn't exactly like germane, but it was about me getting enough sleep, which is important because if you don't get enough sleep, then how can you kind of get the best use of your mind? And so this coach came and she worked with me through the process. And I had so many aha moments in that space. And I was like, oh, my goodness, I want to work with you. And so I will tell you that it's three years later, and I'm still working with the same executive coach. And it's been a phenomenal, phenomenal relationship.

3:37 And since then, because I've kind of recognized the power of coaching, I've done so much coaching in so many areas of my life. I have a peer group and we coach each other. I have a peer coach and we coach each other. I have a grant writing coach that I work with. I right now recently have actually gotten a health and wellness coach as well. I love coaching. I think it's awesome. So I want to talk to you about why you should consider it, especially from the perspective of your career as a research scientist. So why you should engage a coach alongside your research career. And today I have five reasons, five reasons to share with you. Okay, so coaching has changed my life. And one of the ways it's changed my life is because it really helps you develop clarity of purpose.

4:22 So maybe I'll speak in the first person. It's helped me develop clarity of purpose. And I will tell you that when I first started my faculty career, it felt nebulous to me what I was expected to do as a faculty member. And I don't know about you unless someone's really guided you and shown you the way it feels a little nebulous because it's like, okay, well, medical school is pretty straightforward because you have to finish the curriculum, pass exams, and you knew you were done when you got the certificate at the end. And the same for residency. Okay, these are the competencies that you're supposed to develop. And at the end of the residency program, here you are, you get to graduate. And the same if you went on to fellowship. These are the competencies that you need to develop. You go through people's clinics, you do rotations.

5:05 And at the end, having met all the requirements, you get a certificate. It's like, congratulations, you're done. And then you get into your faculty career, and it's not exactly clear what is a win. It's not clear. It's like, okay, so I need to see X number of patients in clinic, make sure I meet these RVU targets, and then I need to meet my scholarly writing metrics. Okay. And then I also need to teach and mentor. Okay. And it's just there's so much to do. And there's so many bosses, and there's so many people who seem to be yelling at you to produce things or to create things. And the things that people say are most important have no accountability and no structure.

5:47 So it can be overwhelming to be a new faculty person. And even after you've been in the process for a couple of years and you finally figured out what you're supposed to do, it still can be so hard. And depending on who you meet with and who you talk to, they have different ideas for what your career should look like. And so you are a trusting, wonderful person, and you're like, okay, mentor, mentor me. And they're like, this is what you should do. And if you talk to another mentor, they're like, well, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. This is what you should do. And then there are people who say, no, no, no, focus on only one mentor, only one mentor, ignore what everybody else says, just focus on this one mentor. And then there are other people who say, well, you should have multiple mentors because you have multiple aspects of your life.

6:30 It's like, which one is it? There's so much. And for the average faculty member, there's so much chatter. It's hard to decipher which is the most important, what is the most important thing I'm supposed to be doing? Like, what about the rest of my life? And it just feels overwhelming. I can. One of the things coaching did for me was to just pause on all that noise and really put me at the center of my career. Oh my goodness. It was revolutionary. It was the first experience I had had in my life where I was the center. Oh, I was the center, not the curriculum, not the medical school, not the metrics, not the mentor, but me.

7:17 Oh my goodness. And it gave me such clarity of purpose because to be honest, let's just be honest, this career is about me and it's always been about me. But somehow it becomes confusing because it seems like it's about the mentor or it's about the division chief or it's about the needs of the department. It's not always clear that you are the center of this career, but you are. And what coaching did for me was to put me in the center of my career and say, let's lead with you as the center. And that put everything in perspective. It put everything in focus because now I could start to look at my career through the lens of me.

8:02 What do I want? What do I need? Where do I want to go? How do I want to get there? It was such a beautiful experience. It just made the, you know, it's like when you're like, when you're farsighted and you've never had a glasses prescription and you finally go to the eye doctor or the optometrist and they give you a prescription and you put it on for the first time and all of a sudden it's like, wow, the sharpness of the focus. It's like, oh, it's like seeing for the first time. It's like, wow, everything is so sharp. That was the kind of clarity that I had. Clarity of purpose. It was so, so awesome just to finally see my career through the lens of me.

8:45 I mean, who else, who else is so important to this career but me? And to be honest, one of the things that happens for better or for worse is that people make our mentors the centers of our careers and it's not healthy and it's not right because it's not their career, it's ours. And they came along maybe 20 years ago, 10 years ago and things are a little bit different now and they don't have the same kind of experience that you have because you're different from them. And so to be the center of your own career is the only way and being in an experience with a coach allowed me to do that in a way that none of my well-meaning mentors had been able to do for me because yes, they have more knowledge and more insight than I do but what they don't have is more knowledge and more insight about the life I'm living today.

9:37 And coaching allowed me to bring my life front and center as the most important piece of my career. That was number one. Number two is that it allowed me to bring my whole self to the table. You know, I want to appreciate my mentors. They are, they're good at what they do. They've succeeded and nobody succeeds in academic medicine as a clinician scientist without major effort and major self-sacrifice. And I think we're sacrificing in different ways today than perhaps our mentors did 10, 20, 15, you know, years ago but we're still making sacrifices because this journey is hard.

10:19 But even though our mentors are so awesome, one thing they don't get into and I don't blame them and to be honest I don't want them to get into it is our family stuff, is our family drama, is our family challenges. You know, some of us have children, some of us do not, some of us have aging parents that we're looking forward to, some of us have significant others that, you know, are a big component of our lives and some of us don't. But all of that stuff stays under the radar. But the thing is, even though they stay under the radar, they are driving a significant portion of our experience. Like if we have a bad relationship or we are struggling with maybe infertility or something, those are not issues we bring to the mentoring table.

11:08 I mean it's just rare that you would be so comfortable to do that. And but it's your life and those things are affecting you. And if you don't bring them forward, they can be in the shadow in the background, but they absolutely are driving your career. And so to have a coach where you can really bring everything in your life that is relevant to your career to the table is very freeing, very liberating, very illuminating and so critical. I mean because in reality it's like trying to pretend you don't have an arm and a leg because the only thing that's important in this particular research mentoring meeting is your head.

11:52 But your arm and your leg exist and if they hurt, they're going to affect your head's ability to focus. And so it's really important that you're able to bring all of yourself to your career experience. And coaching allows you to do that. Coaching allows you to do that because coaching doesn't tell you, well this is the only thing we can talk about. Coaching doesn't say, well I'm only here for your research side of things. Like what is going to help you be the best that you can be? What is going to help you achieve the goals that you set out for yourself? And if a family relationship is getting in the way of you being everything you can be, then the family relationship is on the table for discussion. And it's a beautiful thing that you can do that because there are not many spaces in our academic environment where we can bring up those things without fear of judgment or fear of censure in some way or the other.

12:43 And so I really have appreciated my coaching relationships because everything can come to the table. My whole self can come to the table because my whole self is important in moving my research career forward. Okay, so number two, that it allows you to bring your whole self to the table. Number three is it helps you learn to trust yourself. I really like this one. It helps you learn to trust yourself. Okay, so when I first started in my faculty career, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't. I mean, I didn't have research, much research background.

13:24 I hadn't really submitted grants very much. I mean, I'd submitted one or two. I hadn't written many manuscripts. I'd done a couple, but there was so much I didn't know. And so I was always looking around for who knows, who's the expert, who's the brilliant person, who's the person who's done this? And of course, invariably, there are all these amazing mentors who've done so much. It's like you're in awe of them. And everything they say is like gold. Oh my goodness, they recommended I do this. I must do it now. You know, there's just the sense of like the mentor is the expert. They're the leader. They know everything. They're so awesome.

14:04 Until you find out that, well, you know, they're kind of human. Like, oh, maybe they're not thinking as critically about my career as I'm thinking as critically about my career. And it's not that we find out that there are flaws in our mentors. It's just that we find out that, you know, there's only so much someone external to you can do to move you forward. And it's not a judgment on the mentor. It's just a judgment of the process. Maybe not even so much a judgment. It's just the reality of the process that nobody is thinking about your career more than you are. Even if you have the most amazing mentor in the world, they can't be thinking about you more than you. Because yeah, they may be thinking about you and thinking, OK, what opportunities can I give to this person?

14:49 But they don't know anything about what's going on in your house with a newborn baby who doesn't go to sleep. They have no idea of how much you struggle just to get into work in the morning because maybe of all the arguments that you're experiencing at home. They just don't have any idea about how you're needing to care for your aging parents is impacting your work. And you don't necessarily want them to know because you don't want them to stop giving you this great stellar advice. But what happens is that you have to bring all these things to bear in making your own decisions. When do you slow down? When do you speed up? And maybe the mentor is telling you, like, look, you have one more year until tenure, drop everything you're doing and focus.

15:32 And you're like, oh, I can't do that because right now we have a sick child at home that's taking a lot of time and energy and attention. And I recognize that the tenure clock is one year to go. This is not the right time in my life to accelerate. And in reality, what it helps you to do is it helps you learn to trust yourself. It helps you learn to trust your instincts. It helps you learn to stop outsourcing the direction for your career. It really helps you look inward and to trust that the way you feel, your gut reaction is real. It helps you to trust your inner witness, your inner voice, your inner sage.

16:15 It really helps you do that. And the reality is we're needing to learn to do that again because much of our experience kind of, I think maybe the word I want to use is denigrates our experience or it denigrates our, yeah, our experience because it's like you haven't had much experience. I'm the one who's been here for the last 30 years and I'm successful and they are. But there is a thing that works for you that may not be conventional, but you know, you know it will work for you. You know this is the way to go and you can't explain it fully to a mentor who's done it differently, but you know it's the right way to go.

17:02 And so learning to trust yourself is important and a coach allows you to do that. Number four is it helps you shape a career that's actually fully yours. In general in life, we're autobiographical people. What's worked for us is what's worked for us. And so when we give advice to people, we're going to give advice about what's worked for us. We're rarely going to give advice about things that haven't worked for us or that we have no clue about. And so many times when our mentors and they're so, they're great people, they're helping us shape our careers, they're helping us shape our careers according to their experiences.

17:44 And most of the time if you follow your mentors, you may not go wrong, you probably won't go wrong, but you won't be shaping your career, you'll be shaping their careers, or you'll be developing a mini me career, or you know, you'll be like going off of a template that's not you. And the reality is that your career is yours. But in order to make it fully yours, what you need to do is take all the ideas that you're given and then shape it into a career you actually want. And so working with a coach allows you to stop looking to other people as the trusted source for how your career should be, and just collect ideas from all of them, and then synthesize it into one direction that really moves you forward in the way you want to move.

18:35 And so that ultimately at the end of your story, at the end of your journey, you're shaping a career that's fully, wholly, 100% yours, not somebody else's, that's not a clone of another person's career, it really is your career. And you are learning and using so much from other people, from your mentors, from your sponsors, that you're not recreating their careers, you're making your own. And so it's been really awesome for me because I'm shaping a career that's mine, that's not somebody else's, it's actually fully mine. And yes, it's got components of other people's careers because I appreciate all the people who are around me making waves and doing amazing things.

19:15 So I can take what they've learned and I can apply it to my career in a way that's fully authentic and fully reasonable, like it's real for me. So that's number four, it helps you shape a career that's fully yours. Number five is that working with a coach helps you identify resources that help you move forward. And so you would say, well, this is the function of your mentor, and to some extent it is. But again, I think your research mentor is really focused on you succeeding in the research sphere and your whole life really is still in your hands, right? Because research is one component of your multifaceted life, but it's all got to come together to create the life you want.

20:02 And having a coach allows you, because your focus is not just on one aspect, like it's not my research or nothing else, it's your whole life. And because of that, you start to identify resources that are helpful to you. For example, I once attended a coaching program where we had a say in who would be members of our group coach. And I looked at who would be members of our group coaching experience, and I looked at my life and I thought, you know what one thing that's really, really big in my life right now is the fact that I have young children, and young children kind of drive my experience. I mean, it really does. It changes how much work you can do when you're not at work, it changes how long you can be at work, it changes how you can attend meetings early in the day, later in the day.

20:47 And so it felt like at the stage at which I was in my career, having other people, having other faculty members, other faculty peer mentors who are at the same stage is going to be so important to me. And so that's the request I made. I said, I want to be in a coaching group with women who have young children. And that's the coaching group that I was in. And it was so awesome and so powerful because I didn't have to explain, I didn't have to explain why the fact that the baby wasn't sleeping at night was a big problem for my research productivity. I just didn't have to. It was just a given. It was just known. And there's something about that experience where there's just a baseline level of what's known and you can just build on that.

21:33 You don't have to spend time just creating context and helping people understand why things are the way they are. It's just lovely for everybody to just have the same frame of reference. And it's been a real privilege. At that time in my career, that was the biggest, biggest issue. And allowing that to be front and center as part of my coaching experience helped me because then I could be real about the real barriers to productivity. And then when people gave me advice, when people coached me through these scenarios, they could do it from the perspective of someone who's actually walked through this before is currently walking through it at the same time.

22:16 And so that was really awesome because I could identify resources that maybe I wouldn't have ordinarily been able to identify. I don't know about you, but many of my mentors are men who have a different experience when it comes to childcare and when it comes to the bulk of the work in the house. I think in general, people who identify as men tend to have a different experience from people who identify as women or are the primary caregivers. And so it is helpful to have coaching experiences in which I can really seek the resources that I want and identify resources that help me move forward.

22:59 So those are five reasons why you should consider engaging a coach alongside you as you are building a research career. And I'll just summarize those five things. Number one, it helps you develop clarity of purpose. Number two, it really helps you bring your whole self to the table. Number three, it allows you to learn to trust yourself. And before, it helps you shape a career that is fully yours. And number five, it helps you identify resources that moves you forward. And this is a great point for me to say, if you are considering working with a coach, especially as you move forward your career as a research scientist, as a clinical scientist, consider working with me. I invite you to work with me.

23:41 Now you can go to our website, coicoach.com and get on the wait list or you can direct message me and we can work out a one-on-one coaching experience or you can be part of our group coaching as well. I'm open to doing both at this time. I have some slots for individual coaching, but I want to just invite you to really consider building your career alongside working with a coach and think about the fact that when we think about coaching, coaching kind of comes from the business world, but before the business world, it came really from the sporting world. And coaches really don't work for their clients, right?

24:21 They don't do the work for their clients. Their clients do the work for themselves, but the coach helps them really identify strategies to help them be the best that they can be. And when you think about it, in sports, the best players have coaches. All the best players have coaches. And I think in our work as clinicians, as clinician scientists, as scientists, wow, if we're really going to be at the top of our game and really have an optimal experience, I think that we would be best served as other professionals are by working with coaches. So I invite you to think about who are coaches that you can identify in your life that you can work with right now, even if you're not necessarily available or open to working with me, who can you work with that helps make you the center of your career, not somebody else's expertise, but makes you the center of your career and allows you to lead from the center and discover what resources you need or want to access and allows you to help and helps you do that, helps you really build the career that's totally 100% completely and fully yours.

25:30 All right. Somebody else needs to hear this podcast. Please share it with them. And if you have insights that you want to share, please leave us a voicemail on our podcast website, clinicianresearcherpodcast.com. Again, that's clinicianresearcherpodcast.com and share with us how we can create an episode that's especially tailored to a question that you have. I look forward to playing your voicemail on a future podcast episode. All right. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you for listening. Take care and goodbye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

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