It's one thing to hear an idea and think, "Yes, that makes sense." It is another thing to bring it back to real life, to the meeting, to clinic, the conference room, the hard conversations, the moments when people are tired, stressed, and not at their best. Because the hard things are going to happen.

Stress is gonna happen. Uncertainty is going to happen. People are going to get depleted. The goal is not to pretend we can avoid any of that. The question is, what do we have in place when it does happen? Today, Dr. Kemia Sarraf and I are bringing this series together and talking about how trust, uncertainty, and the reservoir become parts of the way teams and leaders work. And why exposure may be inevitable, but harm does not have to be.

Well, hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Better Physician Life podcast. Thank you so much for being here today. So today is the final episode in this four-part series with Dr. Kemia Sarraf. Kemia is a board-certified internal medicine physician, the founder of Lodestar Consulting and Executive Coaching, and someone I love talking with about medicine, leadership, teams, trauma responsiveness, and what it takes for people to do hard work without losing themselves in the process.

I'm also senior faculty at Lodestar, so this series has been a really nice way to bring together some of the work I do through Better Physician Life with some of the work Kemia and the Lodestar team are doing with leaders, teams, and organizations. Over the past few episodes, we've talked about trust, safety, and connection.

We've talked about uncertainty. We've talked about the reservoir, the things that fill us, drain us, and why capable people often miss the warning signs until they're already running low. And today, we're bringing it all together, because it's one thing to talk about these ideas, and it is another thing to build them into a team before the hard moments happen. 

And that's why I'm excited for this conversation, because Lodestar has built real places for this work to happen through programs like All of Us, BRAVE, and the Trauma Mitigation Masterclass. And today, I wanna talk with Kemia about why those kinds of spaces matter, what teams are actually practicing, and how leaders can begin to bring this work into real life.

Kemia, welcome back, and thank you so much for being here. 

I am really happy to be back. And as I was listening to you talk through all of the things that we've talked about, my brain kinda narrowed in on a few things like real time, real life, 'cause it was real right before we came in the room, right?

And also the impact of uncertainty on us and how immediate that is because, that's kinda what I brought into the room with me this morning, is like the impact of some uncertainty. So it is both a stressful day in my world to be talking about this, but also it's a real-life example of what is it that we do?

How is it that we put these things in place? How do we notice what's going on? And the thing that really is occurring to me is something that we talk about a lot when we're doing leadership development, which is that story follows state. The stories that our brains predict follow the state of our nervous system.

So, because nobody was privy to the conversation before the conversation, before we hit the record button. I'll just say that, you know, there was a lot of laughter that we were having, right? But also this, you know, sort of rapid fire download from me of what is going on that has the state of my nervous system in overdrive.

The short story is that I've raised these, fairly independent, completely feral sons, right? Hey, we used to joke that I've got four semi-feral boys. We've abandoned all pretense of the semi. My oldest two are both adults. My second son is in his early 20s, 22, and has accepted a position in the Peace Corps and left on Sunday.

Right? I've lost track 'cause sleep deprivation. Left on Sunday, was in DC, flew out, and, you know, he'll be positioned- his Peace Corps position is in Benin. And I was expecting to hear from him that he had landed, that these things were fine, that all these things are moving on.

I'd expected to hear from him around midnight last night. It's now 8:00 AM, right? So what do you do when your 22-year-old goes dark, right? And is on the other side of the planet?

You panic. Now, the odds are absolutely everything is completely fine, and he's making his way through X and Y and Z. And, the state of my nervous system is one that has been in overdrive for a while, anticipating his departure, grieving his departure, recognizing, you know, all of those, and fearing his departure.

Doctors sometimes can worst-case scenario things a little bit. Some of that is training, we're trained to look for and listen for, not just the common things are common, but also the zebra event and, sort of safety plan around that. So some of this is our training. Some of it comes with being a parent.

Some of it comes with just being me and my infinite capacity to catastrophize things. I mean, like, I am world-class in that. And some of that state of the nervous system is also depleted reservoir, right? You heard me say, well, sleep deprivation. I literally had to stop and think to myself, "What day is it?"

Right? 'Cause the last several nights have been a little depleting on the sleep side, right? And when we talk about this idea that the stories our brain predicts, this isn't hyperbole, and it's not metaphor either, right? The brain is a prediction machine before anything else. We are predicting what's happening to us.

We aren't actually experiencing. It's why a Major League baseball player can swing at and connect with a fast pitch. The nervous system doesn't function fast enough to interpret all of that incoming data. It's swinging at the 10,000 pitches before. It's predicting where that pitch is gonna go based on thousands of data points that it has stored, right?

So the challenge with this, though, is that the more revved up our nervous system is, the more activation energy there is in it, particularly when it is threat activation. And ain't no threat like the real or imagined threat to one's child, right? The more threat activation we have, the more energy we have behind that, the narrower the aperture for additional incoming data becomes, right?

We really begin to focus on the threat and only the threat. Now, evolutionarily, this has served us very well. We wouldn't be sitting here had it not, right? It's why our DNA has survived to this point. It also, in a time in history when there is so much information coming so fast from every direction, and so much of it is that threat uncertainty we were talking about before, it begins to function in ways that are not in service to us or to the people around us.

And I think this is absolutely essential because, I'll speak for myself in this, I know that I have in more times than I would care to admit in my life allowed the story, that story of threat, that story of negativity, to become so instantaneously dominant in my brain that I end up acting, behaving.

It manifests in ways that, looking back, I'm not proud of, right? I explode and yell, right? Or I shut down and don't respond in the way that I needed to respond in the moment. We can head that off. We can head that off when we understand how it works, when we train ourselves to recognize the state of our nervous system, and when we deliberately begin to deploy disruptors as early as possible.

Is it 100%? Absolutely not. It depends on how practiced we are for one thing, how resourced we are, how scaffolded we are by the people around us. But it is 100% surety that without that learning, without that understanding, without that practice, without that self-resourcing and co-resourcing that we do end up showing up as someone other than who we meant to be.

I want to be someone who is able to remain present and grounded and useful and thoughtful and resourcing to others even in the midst, maybe especially in the midst of a traumatic stress exposure or experience. That's who I want to be. That's who I mean to be in this world. And so to do that especially in times like these where it's not just this one thing that's going on with my kid taking off.

It's the 10 million other things that are going on: professionally, personally, in the world, in our community. All of these things are part of that exposure. And as we learn in medicine, right out of the gate, the dose makes the poison. And so while any one thing may not reach that threshold where we're like, "Wow, this is too much for me," or, "This is just too much happening," when you add it all up, the exposure can actually be fairly great.

So I give that sort of long preface. And you know, now the behind-the-scenes moment is we came into the room, we started talking about this. And you know, and I watched you even from that state of a lot of high energy on my part. I watched you lean in and listen and co-regulate, with me in the sense of I could see from your body language you were really listening, that you were really locked in, that you were expressing understanding and empathy.

You didn't bright side it. You didn't try to offer reassurances that, "Oh, I'm sure.” You simply listened, right? And were a steady presence. And that activation of our co-regulatory abilities, of that limbic system co-regulatory, even via Zoom. Now, it helps that we know each other, right?

It helps that there's trust that already exists between the two of us. But that was useful. You were deploying the very tools that we learn in coaching. We really, really spend a lot of time honing those skills in the work that we do within Lodestar and practicing those skills, right?

And then it gave just enough breathing room for us to shift into every physician's fallback, which is dark humor, "What's the worst that could happen? This whole thing is a charade and they're selling my kid for parts somewhere.” Right? I mean, we just go straight into the absurd.

Now, it's an interesting thing, dark humor, right? Because it exists for a reason. It's a great disruptor for one thing, right? Humor is a connector. All kinds of humor is a connector. Laughter connects us, as long as it's not mocking laughter, right? It is not the laughter that's at another person's expense but the laughter that connects us.

Shared experience, even the dark. But the dark humor, I think, is part of our nervous system's way of disrupting that extreme stress and helping us to return to prefrontal cortex. We cannot be in a state of full-blown, you know, they call it amygdala hijack, which I recognize is a misnomer, but we can't be in amygdala hijack.

We cannot be in fight-flight, fully in fight-flight, and in laughter and humor and connection at the same time. They neurobiologically contradict one another. So when we see or we hear our colleagues utilizing that kind of humor, sometimes it's sort of, "Oh, really? Too soon, man. Too soon."

And I think it does play a part of how we bring ourselves back into the present moment, widen that aperture enough for additional data to start to flow in, and that's absolutely essential. One of the things you also said in the introduction, which doesn't help.

We were joking about that, too, dear listeners. Michael and I both took a deep breath coming in, and I looked at him, and I said, "I don't know why the hell we do that. Does that ever work?" The data says it does, what we know about parasympathetic activation says it does, and it doesn't ever seem like it helps enough in the moment.

But the other piece of what you were saying that I think is really, really important is that we cannot prevent the exposure. I've been on this planet a lot of decades, right? I haven't found a way to safeguard against the exposure. Traumatic events happen.

Traumatic stress exposure happens. Massive uncertainty that is completely outside of our control happens. The floor is not stable. It has never been. I think that's part of growing up that is really, really hard. Someone needs to, like, write an adulting manual that just opens with that. "Hey, newly minted 18-year-old, just know that nobody knows what they're doing and the floor is not stable." We'd all stay in high school forever. But that's the reality. 

We learn this as parents, we learn this as physicians, we learn this as human beings. We learn this over and over and over again. We cannot predict. One of the things that I learned, now we're gonna tell the story about Joseph real quickly.

When Joseph was 13, my eldest son, who is fine by the way, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Everything changes in a split second. And so we bear witness to that in others. We bear witness to that as physicians. We accompany that. We companion that in our patients.

We know this theoretically, and we also learn this. If you are fortunate enough to live long enough in this world, you do at some point learn that it changes instantly. And when that happens, when hell visits, you better have a deep bench of internal resources to draw from, and you want to have a deep bench of external resources to draw upon, right?

We talk about connection as one of the best disruptors of toxic and traumatic stress available to us, the right kinds of connections, right? The right kinds of connections. Learning how to do that well ensures that when, not if, someone else needs it from me, I can show up in that way. I can show up as the antidote to what's happening.

And on a morning like this, what I need are people who are also skilled to show up for me as the disruptor, as the connector. Not to say, "I'm sure everything's fine. Take a deep breath," But to say, "Oh my God, that's so hard, and I'm here." And when I say, "Don't teach your children to be independent, you will suffer as a result."

Dear listeners, please hear both the truth behind my words and also the humor in it all. 

And the reality of it all, right? These tools are so incredibly helpful, and tools don't fix the uncertainty. They don't fix the stress. They don't fix the worry. They help you to resource yourself in these moments.

And I think you mentioned briefly the dose makes the poison, right? So none of these things is happening in a silo. We have all of these different things happening in our lives simultaneously, and sometimes it just takes one more thing, just that one more thing that leads to one of my favorite personal phrases is like, "I don't have the bandwidth for one more thing."

And that is where connection comes in. The type of connection is so important. I know I've heard you tell stories before. I won't tell your story. But going to the wrong people when you are in need- when you have a need, and you go to somebody, and they minimize it, or they just tell you, "Everything's gonna be okay," or, "Don't worry," or, "This is all fine," and that's like the last thing that you need to hear.

And so knowing not only that connection plays such a large role, but knowing that you're connecting with people who are, as you sometimes put it, like casseroles in, right? So, like people who are going to show up for you and just know that what you need is support, not reassurance or answers, we become the resource for each other.

We're the casserole offering. That is such an important reminder, right? Dr. Susan Silk wrote about something called Ring Theory back in, I think it was in the late '90s, early aughts. But she was a clinical psychologist, I think, who developed breast cancer, and one of the things that she noticed as she was moving through this was that a lot of really, really well-intentioned, well-meaning, lovely people were showing up and wanting to talk to her about how they felt about her breast cancer, 

And especially, I think early on, this just rubbed wrong, right? Because, like, wait a minute, I don't care how you feel. I'm the one experiencing this right now. And so she and her husband developed this really elegant, in its simplicity, way of thinking about it. Which is, whoever's at the center, whoever's got the thing that's happening, that's the center circle, and then whoever's closest to them is the next circle, and then friends or other family, and then friends, right?

And these circles get bigger the further out from the person who's having the experience. And I had read it at some point, and when Joseph got sick, I revisited the idea because I was like, yeah, you see it, and it's the most well-intentioned. It's other people who also love and care about, and they're trying to process.

And I remember thinking, “Oh, we could really even further bring this down,” because in the Midwest, in particular, when something goes wrong when you lose someone, when somebody becomes critically ill, we have this lovely way that communities show up. I call it the casserole brigade, right?

At least you don't have to think about dinner every night. It just shows up on your front porch in the cooler. And so I said, "Well, this is grief out, casseroles in." If you're the center, you get to dump out as much as you need to or want to. The only thing anybody gets to dump in is support, and sometimes that support is just presence, right?

And sometimes that support is a casserole, right? But I think it's a really important theory to rumble with a little bit because so often we don't or can't show up. Or maybe a better way of saying it is we don't show up because we're afraid we can't show up as what the person needs. Nobody trains us in that.

Nobody trains us. We're not great at grief in this country, for example. In fact, we tend to pathologize grief pretty quickly. It isn't the type of thing that we see modeled, it isn't the type of thing that we really talk about, and we become so afraid we're gonna do it wrong that we don't do it at all. Or we do it in a very narrow way that can actually end up leaving the grief-stricken more alone on the backside than they were when it begins. We've sort of transitioned into a, different type of trauma here. But I think the reality is all of this sort of exists on a spectrum, and so our default when we're afraid we'll do it wrong is to not do it.

And I think that the hope in all of this, the good stuff that exists, there's a better word for it, and it's not coming to my prefrontal right now, but the place that exists at the same time that all of the exposure exists, right? I can't do anything about exposure.

That's gonna happen. But here's the hope that counterbalances that, is that this actually is not complex. If we parboil this down to its simplest form, connection mitigates trauma. And we can learn how to show up as a mitigator, as a disruptor. When we commit ourselves honestly to recognizing, understanding, and practicing.

These are a set of practice skills just as much as a suture is a practice skill. It's just that nobody told us that.

I'll offer that, in fact, not only did nobody tell us that, but medical training in particular teaches us to function independently and alone. And so we move from very community-based training where we're medical students and residents and fellows and surrounded by community, and then we are transitioned to basically independent practice, lone wolf style of showing up and doing things on our own.

And so, it's almost that asking for that community, asking for help, reaching out, trying to find somebody to talk about these things with feels like a failure. 

Yeah. 

Except it's 100% human nature. We need connection. This is how we move through things. 

And then I just wanna tie one thing back. When you were talking about grief, I hear like big G grief in terms of loss and illness, and I talk with physicians all the time about grieving the loss of the career that they thought they were going to have, what they thought life was gonna look like as a mid-career doctor.

And so grief doesn't necessarily look like the things that you expect, like it's going to look like. And that was a really roundabout way of saying it. And it's still grief. 

Absolutely. And interestingly, 'cause the very first thing that just sort of smacked me as I was listening to you say that that's where moral distress gets really sticky in all of this as well.

Because the moral injury, the moral distress of exactly that thing you're talking about, which is this is not who I thought I would be. This is not what I thought this career would be. This is not who I'm meant to be. This is not the world I thought it was going to be. That is really, really, really sticky.

And it's a different type of traumatic event or traumatic exposure, right? So, you know, we tend to think in the same way we think about grief as the loss of a person generally. That's where our brains go when we talk about grief. Our brains when we think about trauma, when the word trauma is invoked, is, especially, four or five years ago, our brains would just go to big T events. 

Trauma as an event. A moment in time, we put our finger down and point to and say, “That's trauma." We can all see it. We can all agree to it. The idea that there's this continuum of exposure, the dose makes the poison, right? Is a really important framing in all of this. We start talking about the additive or the compounding influence of the traumas of moral injury.

That arises from a different place, traumatic stress exposure is the stuff that's coming at us from the outside, whether it's primary, secondary, or vicarious. It's coming in from external to us. The traumas of moral injury arise inside of us. It's a different source point, and that's a really important thing for all of us to understand because that distress doesn't require a different intervention, but it requires a different type of recognition.

And it becomes very woven into the fabric of our grief, particularly when that distress is tied to, "I didn't go into this to become this version of me. I didn't go into this thinking I would become this person, this physician."

But we hear it across professions, though, right? "I didn't go into this thinking I'd become this type of..." whatever it is. And it's that really insidious slow by degree divergence from what we thought true north was or what we know true north is for us, right? It happens so slowly most of the time.

And we wake up one morning, we're like, "This is not who I planned to be." And I'll never forget it was probably late 2021. And I don't even remember which wave of the pandemic we were in at that point. But I was working with a younger ER physician. They were leading a multi-hospital system on the East Coast.

They'd really been in it and at it for a long time, and had done such a remarkable job all the way through. And the thing that they said to me that it was like a gong over my head. They said, and this was someone in their late 30s, "the thing that is hardest for me right now is I never in my wildest imaginings thought that people would behave towards me the way they are behaving towards me when they come into the ER. It never occurred to me that the world would be like this." 

And that reckoning with this disruption between what we thought it was gonna be, who we thought it was gonna be, and the reality of what is. And, Viktor Frankl talks about tragic optimism, 

A physician and a Holocaust survivor, who, on the back end of that experience, talks about holding both the worst of humanity and the best at the same time. Admiral James Stockdale talked about this when he talked about what became named as the Stockdale Paradox.

He was a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton, during Vietnam for, I believe, seven years, and was tortured daily. And he said he survived when so many others didn't, in his mind, at least in part, because he never lost sight of the absolute reality of where he was and what was happening, and he never lost hope that someday he would be returned home, right?

So holding the tension between these two extremes seems a really important thing for us to be able to do. And we don't do that unless we know to practice it. I think, as a general rule, right? And I think that in medicine, coming full circle to what you said, you were talking about, you know, we're in community in med school, we're in community in college, we're in community in residency and fellowship, right?

There's this sort of thing we move through together. We transition, we compete, you know, all of those things. But we move through it together, and you said, and then suddenly it's dropping off a cliff in many ways. And I really have so much empathy right now, especially for our residents who graduate and move into private practice, 'cause it's so much worse, right?

It's so much worse. That cliff is a much bigger cliff than it was when you and I finished, and this is part of the erosion of our profession, right? We can talk all day long about power dynamics and power structures and the physician lounge and what it meant and the power differentials.

All of that can be true. And what was also true, what is also true, is these are places where physicians connected with one another, where they talked about things, where dark humor could disrupt the really hard case, where we saw each other and said, "Hey, I gotta curbside you 'cause I have no idea what's going on right now, and I need help, brother."

Right? That was a place where that was safe to do it, and it happened organically. And friendships grew organically because we were proximate to each other. Proximity is protective. I'm gonna say that second time, right? Proximity is protective. It's protective of our patients because I see you, and it sparks something, I think, “I gotta ask him about this." 

And suddenly we're having a conversation. You're telling me that there's a treatment I didn't know existed, or you're saying, "Hey, I can get this patient..." You're seeing the worry, and you're like, "I got you. I'll get them in." And you're making space in your calendar, right?

You're making space in your clinic. Proximity is protective. It's protective of us as well because relationships aren't built in those big, huge moments. 

Relationships are built through the small things done consistently over time, the small moments. And when you strip humans of those moments, when you strip us of our proximity with each other, it doesn't collapse all at once. It's not how it works. And if it did, we'd probably do something about it. 

Again, it's that small movement by degree off course, and you keep going. What happens if I set my trajectory true north, I plot the course, and then I ignore it, and I get off by a half degree in the first mile, and I keep going?

50 miles, 500 miles down the road, I'm a thousand miles off track. It happens slowly by degree. I know I'm mixing metaphors. It collapses. It unravels. I think one of the greatest laments that I hear in working with physicians in systems, going into hospital systems and working within systems, and it doesn't happen on day one, it usually happens end of day two.

The lament is, "We used to be friends." We collectively in this hospital, in this system, in this practice, we used to be friends. I don't even know my colleagues anymore. That's the follow-up. This matters. It matters because we are the antidote to what is happening to our nervous systems. We are the very best disruptor of toxic and traumatic stress that exists.

The app ain't gonna cut it. We did not evolve to do this solo. Our nervous systems evolved to do this in community. Healing happens in community. Disruption happens in community. If you can do this in community early enough, you can prevent the need for the extreme intervention down the road. This is protective.

It's preventive. And the answer is you and me. It's us. It's almost irritating in its simplicity.

And this truly is the work that Lodestar does. Going into systems and organizations and in some ways mending the bridges that have been left untended to for too long. Talk to us a little bit about the programs that Lodestar provides and how you do this work

Well, because we're doctors, we call them service lines, right? We have three main service lines and a number of programs that exist under each of them. 

The first is the coaching service line, right? Which includes one-on-one coaching, team coaching, restorative coaching, which is something that we do that is very, very unique, recognizing that sometimes teams, just like individuals, can experience traumatic stress or trauma and need skilled intervention to help that team get back on track.

Group coaching. And then we do coach development, coach training under that service line. We have, anything that we offer to the public is accredited by the ACCME, or dually accredited if appropriate. So our coach training program is ICF, International Coaching Federation accredited and ACCME accredited.

So you come out of that course trained as a coach, ready to sit for your exam with the International Coaching Federation. Which is really globally recognized as, I think, the standard for coach certification. And then we have an advanced course called our Trauma Mitigation Masterclass, which offers ICF core coaching hours, so those who are maintaining their certification, and also ACCME accreditation, so learning and adding skills there.

Then we have our professional development and consultative service line. Although the favorite thing that I ever hear when working with an organization, I hear this more often than you might think, "You don't act like any consultant I've ever met." And then I do my little internal dance and I say, "Well, that's 'cause I didn't go to consulting school."

It really is about, though, professional development and getting in there with organizations and really listening, really, and solutioning with. Because the needs of every organization are similar and different at the same time, right? So we don't come in assuming that we have a solution for you.

How do we implement with you within the bounds of what you're trying to do and work with, right? And so it's been, a lot of fun to do this work and again, this holds across industry. So professional development includes BRAVE leadership which is, our flagship leadership development program, which is not just another leadership training.

And I say that, really, actually, not at all tongue in cheek. Most leadership development has grown out of the field of psychology, and before anybody comes at me, this is not a diss on psychology. The field is massive and rich and critically important, and has limits from a leadership development perspective because it is so infinite. And so infinite in variability and so infinite in applicability, and doesn't always hold across culture, across lived experience, across age, across gender, across professions.

What does hold is a neurophysiological approach, right? So this is additive. It's not a replacement for any leadership development or any leadership success you've had. But I think what we hear, Michael, most often is, " I don't know what to do now." We're not working with emerging leaders most of the time.

We are working with CEOs, C-suite executives, government leaders who are at the top of their organization, at the top of their game after decades of having, and they're sort of tipping their head to the side, mostly metaphorically until we're one-on-one with them, saying, "The stuff that got me here ain't working anymore."

And that we get, and that has a solution, and it's not just another transfer of knowledge to do X. It is an embodied set of skills and recognitions and understanding that fills in the other half of the leadership equation, and that is neurophysiological. That is not psychological. You've got the psychology.

I know you do. If you didn't, you wouldn't be where you are. Let us bring this other part to you, right? So that you recognize that story follows state, yours and every single person you encounter every day. This isn't just a Kemia's having a minute here kind of story follows state. This is true. What is true for me is true for you, is true for every single person we encounter every single day.

So we need to skill ourselves additionally to show up as a cue of safety to recognize when, not if, these things are happening. To skill our teams for when, not if, the next traumatic stress exposure comes. I'm a bit of a river rat, I like to use those metaphors about running a river as a team.

You don't run a river in a raft solo. You run it as a team. I cannot promise smooth waters all the way down the river. What we can do is skill ourselves for when, not if, we hit the rapids. They are coming.

How are we going to prepare for that? So that's what BRAVE Leadership is about. And because what the leader allows is what's allowed, we begin with leaders, and we also recognize that to shift organizations, to create organizations where everyone thrives, requires that everyone begin to develop these same set of skills, right?

And so we have a companion program to this called All of Us, which is for all of us, right? And that's sort of the professional development. There's a lot of other things that go in there. We do workshops and other things that are tailored for very specific groups within organizations, whether that's HR, whatever that happens to be, that sort of professional development as well. 

And I think if there is a through line for all of the Lodestar programs, it is that connection piece.

It is reconnecting to each other. It is reconnecting to ourselves. And I think this work is so incredibly important. I think this is also a great place for us to pause because I think I could talk to you for hours. I know I have talked to you for hours. And, while this may be the final episode in this four-part series with Dr. Kemia Sarraf, I have a feeling it is not the last time we are gonna hear from you on this podcast, because I enjoy talking to you. I enjoy these conversations way too much for this to be the last one.

So if this episode or this series made you think about your team, your leadership group, your organization, or the way people are trying to do hard work together, I would really encourage you to learn more about Lodestar. Kemia and the Lodestar team are doing such powerful work with leaders, with teams and organizations, talking about trust and psychological safety and trauma responsiveness, and what it takes for people to stay connected under pressure.

And you can find out more information about Kemia and Lodestar in the show notes, including links to Lodestar's website and Kemia's social media. And I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to hear more conversations with Kemia on the podcast, send me a note, let me know.

These are the kinds of conversations I think we need more of, and I'd be happy to keep them going. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you, Dr. Kemia Sarraf, and I will see you on the next episode of Better Physician Life.