This week, on the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast, Jennifer sits down with Erinn Weisman, DO – a physician, life coach, podcaster, and burnout expert – to discuss how physicians can avoid the pitfalls of burnout and depression and shape their careers to align with their life goals and aspirations.

Tune in to discover: 

• Advice for physicians who might be considering a change in careers
• Actionable tips for physicians who want to become influencers in their space
• Marketing advice for physicians looking to grow their practice
• How physicians can create awareness of what they really want, assess the facts about themselves and their work situation, and act on them to make positive change

References:

Dr. Weisman on Instagram and LinkedIn

Dr. Weisman’s Dr. Me First podcast page

Transcript Notes

Speaker 1: Dr. Marketing Tips. Paging Dr. Marketing Tips. Dr. Marketing Tips, you’re needed in the marketing department.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. Your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators and medical marketing professionals with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Jennifer: Hey there. Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. This is Jennifer and today I am joined by Dr. Errin Weisman, who is a life coach, podcaster and fierce advocate for wellness in medicine. She faced professional burnout early in her career and speaks openly about her story so that she can help others, particularly female physicians and working moms. Dr. Weisman wholeheartedly believes to be a healer, you must first fill your own cup. You can find out more about Dr. Weisman on her podcast, Doctor Me First. Her website, Truth RXS or you can hang out with her on social media. Check out the show notes for all the details on Dr. Weisman. Well, let’s go ahead and get started.

Jennifer: Hey there Dr. Weisman, thank you for joining us today on the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. We’re thrilled to have you.

Dr Weisman: Yeah, Jennifer, it’s great to be here with you.

Jennifer: Awesome. So why don’t you just share a little bit with our listeners about how you got into what you’re doing now and talk to us a little bit about burnout, how you got into coaching and how in the world you’ve got into starting a podcast.

Dr Weisman: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a whole bunch. So, 2014, worst fricking a year of my life. I had got out of training. I’m a family medicine doc. Supposedly got into my big girl job, supposed to be at the top of the mountain and when I looked around I was like, “Oh my God, I climbed the wrong mountain.” I had had a couple of babies during residency. Like I said, finished my training, got out, signed my contract, and just within a matter of weeks I was like, “Oh my God, I can’t keep doing this for the next 30 years of my life.” I was also super scared to be like, “Who do I admit this to? Who do I talk to about not liking the job that I have pretty much spent my entire life training for?” So I reached out to med school friends, residency colleagues, and everybody was pretty much shaking their head at me and being like, “Yeah, me too. I don’t know what to do either.”

Dr Weisman: And me being a loud mouth, then I got into my administrator’s office, talked to my chief medical officer and was like, “I don’t know what to do.” And she rightfully admitted to me. She’s like, “Oh, that’s why I went to administration because I needed a change.” And so I was like, “Oh my God, what am I going to do?” And I remember sitting at my kitchen bar with my husband and being like, “I’m done. I’m done.” I’m the first doctor in my family, maybe I’m the last. I got to go and do something different because I can’t keep waking up every morning so miserable and every Sunday night having such high anxiety about what’s going to happen to me through the week that this is just unsustainable for me. And he said, “Hun, just give it six months. Give it six months. Let us figure it out and we’ll go from there.”

Dr Weisman: And in the meantime then, I was like, “How am I going to make it six months? How are we going to do this?” And so I did what I tell all my patients not to do and I got on the internet and I found hundreds of thousands of other physicians like me who were just like, “This sucks. This absolutely sucks. This does not match what we were going to do in medicine with our day to day.” And I was like, “I don’t think I’m depressed. I don’t think that there’s some pathology going on here. I just know that I really hate how the system is working around me.” And so again, like through my Google search, I found the happy MD. I found some other, Pamela Wible was talking about physician suicide and then I found this coach. She was a family medicine doc too, and she had a program called The Entrepreneurial MD.

Dr Weisman: Now I’m a DO, but I still hang with my MD colleagues and I was like, “You know what? I have a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe she’ll teach me how to change my CV to a resume. Maybe this is what I need.” So I started doing that program and little did I know at the time,” it was coaching and so I did the online program and then I was like, I got to talk to this woman.” Again, I’m a mover and shaker and so got on the phone with her and did what I now know is called a discovery call and was like, “Okay, this is it.” She started asking me questions like, “What is your ultimate dream in life? Where do you want to be in five years? What is the most significant thing right now that if it was lost or taken away, you would be devastated?”

Dr Weisman: And at that time my answer was my medical license, even though it was causing so much havoc in my life, it was what I was clinging to most. And so through that awareness of working through the coaching process, I realized, “God, my headspace is totally screwed up right now.” The things that I’m thinking do not align with who I really am. And the more I worked with her, the more I really loved it, the more I made a lot of internal shifts, which helped me in my job, which I actually stayed in past that six month mark that my husband had set for us. And the more I looked around and I was like, “Where’s all the young physician mom coaches at? We needed this shit in med school.”

Dr Weisman: So I went and got training and I started coaching physician colleagues in 2015 and from there it just was a slow kind of snowball up the hill, where I realized that I wasn’t the only one, that I was actually pretty good at helping other physicians as well, kind of figure out their path, sort through all of that mental clutter that we’ve had for years and years and really get clear on what we want moving forward and how the podcast came around, as I was listening, I was doing a lot of commuting and I was listening to a lot of other people’s podcasts and I was like, “I like talking with people. I don’t like doing this kind of stuff. I think I need a podcast.”

Dr Weisman: And it actually kind of came out of jealousy, but it was a good jealousy and into the fact that I saw something that I wanted and I went after it. So I launched my podcast in 2018 and lo and behold, we get like three to 4,000 downloads a month. I hear from other physicians around the world who are being helped and inspired by this little thing that I do in my basement and it’s been so good doing Doctor Me First and teaching physicians that, “Hey, you can have the life and the work that you love. It does not need to feel like slavery and you are not broken.” It just happens to be, the system around us is really broken but until we get ourselves healthier, we can’t fix said system.

Jennifer: So I think that’s a great, great story and it’s inspirational. And so let me ask you this, are you still practicing?

Dr Weisman: I am. I am still practicing. I quit for about three months. It was like the end of 2018 I thought, “You know what? Coaching is going really, really well.” I’ve been doing some consulting. The podcast is getting off and so I was like, “Okay, I think I’m kind of done. I’m just going to transition out and see how it goes.” And what I realized and I’m so glad I gave myself the opportunity to stop, that I was like, “Oh, actually I like that part.” I like medicine on my terms, but absolutely 100% has to be on my terms in order for it to say sustainable for me. So yeah, I do telemedicine. I will also work with two different residency programs and it’s a great balance. And I work as a medical consultant for a couple other healthcare companies.

Jennifer: So what do you say to physicians who might be looking to make a change in their careers and kind of dabble in some different things? What kind of words of encouragement would you offer them?

Dr Weisman: I would first ask them to sit back and say, “Okay, what is it? What is it that’s really going wrong right now?” Because too many times we just get in the emotions and we get in our heads and it all [inaudible] away from it all. So I always tell people to sit back and like, what’s your biggest struggle right now? Because the problem I’ve seen so many times with clinicians is they’re like, “This job sucks. I’m going to go to job B.” But they didn’t take enough time to see what was wrong with job A that they actually just went down the street to the same job in a different building.

Dr Weisman: And that is not the point of all that. The point is to radically shift from where you’re at to the place to where you want to be and I find too many people are just in escape mode. It’s so awful, they just want to get away. And so I say pump the brakes a little bit, sit back and figure out what’s your biggest struggle right now? What are the things that are going the most wrong and why is that? Really dig into it because honestly there is a lot of crap that’s circulating around us that’s wrong but a lot of times too, it’s just what’s in our brain and how we’re perceiving things that we need to clear it up too. At baseline we’re not good communicators. We are all could get much better at communication. So that’s one place that I like to encourage people.

Dr Weisman: And I ask them. I’m like, “Have you told anyone about how much this is bothering you?” “Oh, well I might’ve mentioned in a meeting,” or, “I sent an email that one time, three months ago,” and I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no. If this is a big enough problem that you are thinking about uprooting your career and going somewhere else, you need to be knocking on every door down that hallway before you say, ‘I’m done. I’m giving up.'” And so that would be the big thing is just having that awareness on what is it actually that is just grading you. My next A is having a really good assessment and saying, “What is it that you truly want? What life would you have that would make you jump out of bed in the mornings and be like, ‘Yes, absolutely. I am so excited to be doing this work today.’ What does that look like?” Eight out of 10 people who I asked that to, they either don’t know or that shift is only like 10% away from what they’re already doing.

Corey: Hey guys, Corey here, co host of the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast and I wanted to interrupt this episode just for a minute to tell you about Insight Training Solutions. So Insight Training Solutions is an ongoing employee engagement and training platform for your medical practice, meaning employees can log on and take these medical practice specific trainings whenever and wherever they are. And each training is meant to increase employee engagement, improve practice reputation, and develop some patient service mindsets.

Corey: If we’re being honest, something that we all know some of the employees may lack, not calling anybody out by name, but one of the cool things about Inside Training Solutions is they’re always developing new content and they just released 10 steps to a phenomenal patient experience where you’ll learn how to create a phenomenal patient experience, strengthen job security, and discover customer service secrets for your entire team. So this course is in addition to the other ones they already have, which include communication across generations and how to understand today’s multi generational workforce and how to develop overall patient experience. This is another course, the new approach to customer service. We’ve also got eight ways to wow patients and you can sign up for a free trial to see what everything is about at insighttrainingsolutions.io. That’s insighttrainingsolutions.io or just google Insight Training Solutions. You’ll be glad you did.

Dr Weisman: So really getting assessment, really looking into what is it that you’re moving to and if you don’t know what that is, it’s totally okay. Then we need to use some other tools to figure out what is it? Is it a certain schedule? Is it a certain type of practice? Is it a certain location? Is it all of the above? So I love that assessment piece because that really helps us dig in and as clinicians we are really good at assessing other people. Again, horrible at ourselves. We keep putting ourselves on the back burner. We keep ignoring our thoughts and feelings. No more of that. That’s when we open the floodgate. And then the last A that I like to use is action. Where are the things that you’ve been stalling out in and that you’ve been putting off because you’ve either been afraid or you think that’s dumb or it’s going to expose you as you’re an imposter and you don’t know what you’re doing.

Dr Weisman: We really need to dig into that because those are the areas of your life that you need to have some action in. Even if it’s a small conversation, even if it’s a subject or something dropped with your nursing or administrator, those are some areas that you need to check out. Maybe it’s just setting up a LinkedIn profile and seeing what opportunities are out there, but that’s where I try to get people out of their heads and actually in to some forward movement. So those are my three A’s. Awareness, assessment and action are kind of my go to tips when we first start working this out.

Jennifer: Yeah, so that’s great advice and I find a lot of the doctors that we work with, I don’t know if they’re on the verge of burnout or if they’re on the verge of becoming entrepreneurs and it’s just a stroke of genius, but it’s always like they’re looking for the next thing. So we’ve got one doctor that we’ve worked with for years who wants to be basically Dr. Oz and he’s getting ready to do a national book tour. And then we have other physicians that will call us because they’ve started a new business or something like that, they’re always grasping for that next thing.

Jennifer: And one kind of underlying theme that we see with a lot of these physicians is they go from just practicing to wanting to become kind of influencers or influencers in their space. So yeah, it seems as if Dr. Weisman, you’ve had some great success becoming an influencer within your space. What would you suggest to those other physicians out there that are looking to really kind of up their game, in the influencing space and particularly on social media or starting a podcast? What would you say to them?

Dr Weisman: I think first and foremost, you have to find what brings you joy. Because if you just want your name out there, you just want a book, you just want to be the next celeb doctor. If it doesn’t bring you joy, it’s not going to be sustainable and that’s going to translate through to your audience that you’re just grab an after fame, fortune and money. So I really push people to say, “What do you really have fun with? You lose track of time with? That you get super with and you just can’t believe you’re getting paid to do it?” Those are the things people can step into because your super power is going to be different then my super power. There are some phenomenal writers out there that if they would only put their words down in a book, they would be a multimillion dollar writer.

Dr Weisman: And so I just really would say understanding your why. Why do you want this? And making sure that that’s aligned with your values. For me, why I became a coach is because of that woman who I was in 2014, who was sitting on the edge of her bed sobbing, trying to figure out how she was going to make this life work while she was secretly hoping that she’d get hit by a semi on the way to work. That is why I do this work today because I know there are more women out there who are silently suffering and that’s what gets me up every single morning because I know there’s someone else out there who I can help and so really tapping into that why. Why do you want a podcast? Why do you want to be an influencer and making sure that your reason really resonates with you? Because I’m going to tell you it is not sunshine and rainbows. You’ve got to do hard things, but let me tell you, you can do hard things if you know why you’re doing it.

Jennifer: All right, so last couple of questions. What social media channels are you on?

Dr Weisman: I love hanging out on Instagram. To me, it’s so fun to see everybody’s pictures again, to hear stories. So come find me on Instagram. That’s where I post about all my podcast guests, which child has done what sport recently. And I really try to put myself out there and be really real and I love interacting with other people who are doing the same thing. And then my other social media that I really love is actually Linked. In. It is a really, really cool space and I think that’s kind of how we hooked up, to find people who are out in the world who are actively engaged in business and who want to cooperate and collaborate with other people. So those are my two main areas that I hang out in.

Jennifer: Okay. So a big topic in our office these last couple of weeks is TikTok. Are you on TikTok and do you have any thoughts on it?

Dr Weisman: I’m not on TikTok. It makes me a little nervous that it’s owned by the Chinese government. That’s my one big thing that I just, I’m not quite sure about that. There are a lot more physicians that I’ve seen that have been doing the little videos and shaking their booty and stuff and I’m all for it, if that’s your expression. I just haven’t gotten into it, to be perfectly honest. I know a lot of my residents are doing Reddit and so that’s actually a space I’m thinking about more moving into rather than TikTok.

Jennifer: All right. And then last thing, what is the one piece of marketing advice that you have for physicians out there looking to grow their practice?

Dr Weisman: I have two actually. So the first one is, not all of your stories are meant to be read by everyone. So when I was first coming out I was really raw and I wrote a lot of stuff and half of that stuff I’ve never even published and I’m really glad that I didn’t because it just needed to come out. It was really cathartic. But now I go back and read the stuff that I did and that is the stuff that most resonates with people. So I just want to put out there, you can go into vulnerability overload and so your marketing doesn’t have to be that cathartic rush. So just remember, there’s times if you’re not comfortable putting something out online, just let it sit. Maybe it’s not the time for that to be published yet. You can be authentic and other ways without going into that vulnerability overload.

Dr Weisman: And then my second thing with marketing is that authenticity. Let people know who you are. If you follow me for half a second, you know that I love Fridays and F bombs. Those are my two favorite F words. And some people that’s not their jam, that’s not who they are and that’s okay, but that’s authentically who I am. I will be totally up front, brutally honest when it comes to moming and physicianing and everything that I’m going through with and the people I most resonate with are those who I feel like are being authentic and I know them too.

Dr Weisman: So I think it’s important, like I said, to have those kind of those buffer lines, not to overexpose but then in your marketing, be who you are. I mean, if you’re a hardcore Christian, put it out there. If you’re not, put it out there. If you like F bombs, say them. If you don’t, don’t. But just know that you don’t have to apologize for who you are on the internet and you don’t have to be like anyone else. I think that’s where I’ve had my best success is no one can carbon copy me because of my authenticity.

Jennifer: Great advice. Super authentic. How can folks find you if they want to find out more about your coaching programs or just be able to follow you online?

Dr Weisman: I would love for them to come over to the Doctor Me First podcast. I mean, it’s my voice. You’ll get to know me super well. So just on any podcasting app. Type in Doctor Me First and you’ll see a super sassy Dr. Weisman on there. If you want to come hang out with me and find out more about me, I have a Bitly link. So it’s just Bitly/Talk with Errin. And that’ll actually get you directly onto my schedule and we’ll have a conversation. So I’ll get those for you for the show notes, but I love talking. I love just hearing people’s other experiences and more so, I love how a conversation can change the trajectory of someone’s life. So I’m all about that.

Jennifer: Great stuff. Thanks for joining us today, Errin on the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast and best of luck to you.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Dr. Marketing Tips.com podcast. If there’s anything from today’s show you want to learn more about, check out Dr. Marketing tips.com for our podcast resource center with all the notes, links, and goodies we mentioned during the show. If you’re not already a subscriber to our show, please consider pressing the subscribe button on your podcast player so you never miss one of our future episodes. And if you haven’t given us a rating or review yet on iTunes, please find a spare minute and help us reach and educate even more of our medical practice peers. Thanks again for listening and we’ll catch you next time, doctor’s orders.

Subscribing and Rating Our Podcast

If you like what you heard, please take a few seconds and subscribe, rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts. Here’s how:

Subscribe

To subscribe, click this link to open Apple Podcasts on your computer and then click “Listen on Apple Podcasts ” button next to the artwork. This will redirect to the Apple Podcasts app where you click the “+Subcribe” button on the righthand side.

Ratings and Reviews

To leave us a rating and review, scroll down to the “Ratings and Reviews” section below the episode listings. Then, you can click the button that says “Write a Review” and proceed to give us 5 stars *wink*.

Thank You for Your Support.