I Didn't Go Into Medicine To Become This | Ep6

Michael Hersh, MD

[00:00:00] Well, hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of Better Physician Life. I have been so excited to record this episode, and it's so fitting that she is the first guest for this podcast, and I'll explain more about that in a moment. But without further ado, let's get to the show. Dr. Kemia Sarraf is a board certified internal medicine physician and the founder of Lonestar Consulting and Executive Coaching.

With over two decades of experience spanning medicine, public health, nonprofit leadership, and trauma mitigation, she brings rare insight to the challenges faced by high performing professionals. Her trauma responsive coaching approach is deeply informed by both her clinical background and her lived commitment to healing in high stress environments.

Whether leading institutional equity work or supporting burned out [00:01:00] leaders, Dr. Sarraf’s work blends compassion, clarity, and purpose. She lives on a farm in central Illinois with her husband, four Sons, and a host of Beloved Animals. And I've been there and it's beautiful. And it turns out we both completed our internal medicine training at the same hospital.

Shout out to Washington University in St. Louis and Barnes-Jewish Hospital and in a true full circle moment. We actually met while recording a podcast episode back in 2022. So welcome to the show, Dr. Kemia Sarraf. It's so good to see you. It is so good to see you too, my friend. Thank you for the invitation. I really love podcasting with you.

It's a lot of fun. Yes. And, like I was mentioning, we had not met before. We essentially hit the record button on a podcast episode three years ago, essentially. And, I tell the story when people ask how I met you [00:02:00] about how just sitting there listening to you.

I never really considered the impact of trauma. Right. Trauma for me was this big t and we can get into it and I didn't really see how trauma was something that related to me. And hearing you speak, telling your story, telling my story through your stories, my mind just exploded quietly while we were recording it, and you can see it in real time.

Yeah. in the video. And it really was a pivotal moment for me because then I subsequently signed up for your trainings and, I'm so grateful to be a part of the Lone Star family now, and so I've just really been excited to talk with you.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I don't remember if it was due to the fact that I knew we were gonna be doing this, but something prompted me to go back and watch, a part of that very first interview.

And, actually I was [00:03:00] watching it from that perspective of. Watching you have this realization like connect all the dots. It wasn't even so much a realization, I don't think. I think it was that all of the little pieces clicked into place at the same time. And yes, you're right. You can see it happen.

You can see it happen. Which I think is the point of the work, because even as it's happening, people are realizing or seeing sort of the path forward begin to open up. I hadn't thought about this until we started just talking right now. It's almost like, you're in this deep dark forest with all sorts of, components of the path existing.

And then as you get the right name, right, and you grow a little bit of understanding about what's the neuroscience underneath all of this. Suddenly the footpath starts to appear. And when that happens, it's a hopeful moment, which [00:04:00] is a weird word to pair with trauma, isn't it?

What a, strange word to pair up. But I think the importance of that is so many of us stay away from the discussion, or we stay away from the word, or we stay away from the learning. Because what we think happens if we approach it is basically that we're gonna dissolve from structure to soup, or we think that it requires, months on a therapist's couch, somewhere sucking our thumb and, rocking in the fetal position.

And this is, trust me, not to diminish or dismiss in any way the power of the therapist's couch. It is just to say that when we give something the right name the way we did and we hear someone say, oh yeah, same, same, same. Right? There's so much power in that as well, in that recognition that our [00:05:00] experience is uniquely ours and not unique to us, is really powerful.

And I felt like I got to, when I went back and watched, I was like, oh, look it, look at all that happening at the same time. Brain explosion. Yeah. it's so important what you're mentioning too, because we think that. you talked about this kind of turning to soup or just kind of like falling apart.

If we just pull at a tiny seam, if we just start to, you know, consider, and the truth is, it really has been such an enlightening experience for me to go back and to think about things I don't know if activating is the right word for me, but in that conversation is that you and I walked the same halls of the same hospital and had very similar experiences probably with some of the same people, and a lot of those experiences for me got tucked down.

We try to like bury them because we don't wanna go back and explore them or think about them because they happened in the past and what will happen if I take it [00:06:00] out and look at it now. Right. And what I gained was an incredible amount of clarity. And what I was able to find was some self-compassion for what I had gone through during those years.

Those are some of the toughest years for me. And when I can look at them with a little bit of compassion, when I can take 'em out, take out those memories, look at them and be, and have some self-compassion for what I was going through at that time. I don't have to be proud of the things or how they went, but I can give myself a little bit of grace for who I was at that time in my life, and also for who I've allowed myself to become since that time.

But it all starts by being able to look at those challenging moments. Yeah. I love that. And the thing that came up for me the most as I was. Listening to you say, all of that is as physicians, but I think in most professions, and maybe just in adulting in general, we don't spend enough time talking about the normal stages of adult development.[00:07:00]

Think about how old we were, but think about how young we were. Let's reframe that, right? Think about how young we were going through this particular training. Now there are certain things that developmentally you're ready for at that age and stage of adulthood. And it's really, really interesting because I was probably my mid thirties, but really beginning to dig deeper and deeper and deeper into this work, into trauma-informed trauma responses, starting to build programming around this, starting to deliver programming around this differently.

That I really began to understand that this was not just a missing part of my education, but this was a missing part of my compassion. That in my twenties I had context and experience and brain development adequate for X and Y and not yet for Z. And I know you've heard me [00:08:00] say this in some of our leadership trainings before, right?

How long does it take a 2-year-old to become a 10-year-old? It sounds like a really stupid question until we put the next part in there and we say, well, what happens to that 2-year-old if we expect them to read like a 10-year-old or do computations like a 10-year-old, right? And then we punish them because they can't behave and read and compute like a 10-year-old.

We harm them. Even if our intentions over here are really, really good, we want them to read and relate and do the things we're not appreciating the age and stage they are in and we harm them. So we understand this both intuitively. I think as parents and as educators and as all the things, and we talk about child development in that way.

What we don't understand and appreciate and really lean into, and I don't think that our systems of higher education in particular [00:09:00] are set up to understand, appreciate, and develop pedagogy that's appropriate, is that there are normal, healthy stages of adult development. Right. And taking a 20 something year old and expecting that they know how to process, understand, move through, move beyond that level of stress, at that rate and pace without the things that they need to do, it is harmful.

So no one in medical education, not you and me as medical educators, not the, residents we had as interns, not the chief residents. We had not the chief residents. you became not the, attendings that we worked with, not the professors we had. No one was in there trying to do harm. No one, and I really mean this.

I [00:10:00] have yet. To meet the educator, the physician who's back in the back room, just like rubbing their hands together and twisting their snidely whiplash mustache and thinking like, how can I really screw my students? How can I really harm people? None of that exists. It is simply that we are part of a system that hasn't taken the time to recognize and appreciate the ways in which the system isn't set.

Now in particular to move that education at the right pace. And while we're not gonna slow it down, there's, this idea that we're gonna radically slow it down, we're gonna do that. That's not gonna happen. That's not the world in which we live. And so what we have to do is we have to increase the resourcing, right?

None of us went into medicine thinking it was gonna be easy. I didn't, you didn't. It was hard to get there in the first place. Right. And, we go into it in part [00:11:00] because it is hard and it is something that not many people can do. So, when I talk to my students today, and they talk about the stress and how hard it is, I remind them, I'm like, honey, I hear you and you signed up for this.

This is the job. This is what we signed up for, right? We signed up for hard, we signed up for long hours.

We signed up to be proximate to harm, right? We signed up to feel with other people. You're supposed to feel pain when someone dies. You are supposed to feel pain when things don't turn out the way you want to. You're supposed to feel pain when you deliver a cancer diagnosis. If that stops for you, it's probably time to think about whether you are going to be able to be the physician, the healer you intend it to be.

It's supposed to feel like that. the challenge [00:12:00] for us is how do we show up for the patients and the staff and the students in the way that we meant to, intended to going in and Have places where we have someone who is showing up for us. And how do we learn how to show up for ourselves?

Because that's the skill. None of us. We're taught, at least not explicitly. So here's a story, and I think I shared this story once before with you, but I'm gonna share it again because I think it's a really important one. And I wonder if it's not a differentiator in some ways in the experience that you and I had.

Because there are a lot of things that go into what lands in us and with us as a place of harm, we can even take the T word out. I know a lot of our colleagues are intensely uncomfortable with it, and that's okay. And I know that also, even though in the [00:13:00] last five years we've seen an increase in comfort with the word overall in our society now we're also seeing some overuse and even some weaponization of that word.

Right. And I. believe that very, very rarely does any absolute truth exist on the two ends of the binary, right? Most of the time what we're trying to do is navigate the messy middle.

When I was an intern, and I don't remember how far into internship I was, but far enough into it that I was pretty tired, pretty ragged, had gotten pretty accustomed to the space and the pace there. and you know, remember I was there in, the late nineties, right?

So this is prior to resident work hours and all of that kind of stuff, and. I remember, sitting on the 11th floor, which is where our sort of home as residents and students was. And I had a patient that I had been taking care of for a couple of [00:14:00] weeks and they were fairly young and they had died and their death wasn't entirely unexpected.

It was also a death that really, really hurt. It really hurt because it was someone I had really, come to care about deeply just as a human being and also someone I had hoped we would get through to the other side of everything. And so I was sitting at the nurse's station, and this is back in the day of handwritten notes, right.

And I was writing the death note and I was crying. Very silently. it wasn't big he being sobs, but I, all of that emotion was just sort of running down my face as I wrote this. And one of the chief residents walked by and he was, 'cause we had four or five, I think at the time.

He was quite well known as a hard ass, right? Big guy. pretty intimidating. And I didn't know him as well as I knew some of the others, but I knew his [00:15:00] reputation and he stopped. And, my memory of this was, are you crying? Are you crying? the famous line from, that movie with Tom Hanks, there's no crying in baseball.

He stopped and he said, are you crying? Why are you crying? And I looked up and I said, my patient died and I'm sad. Right. I kind of moment and I braced myself just a little bit for what I thought was gonna be the inevitable, there's no crying and, take this elsewhere and suck it up and snuck it off.

And instead he looked at me and he said, I'm glad you feel that you are the physician I will want someday. And he walked away. Right? I would imagine if I could track him down and ask him, he would've no recollection of this, right? But a very important moment for me as a young physician to have someone in a position of power and authority.

[00:16:00] Right. say, oh yeah, that's what you are supposed to feel. It's okay. It was intensely important as a moment of resourcing, frankly, because being allowed to, be present to my own emotions. Nothing was on fire. There was no emergency. I wasn't falling apart, running a code.

I was feeling my emotions after the emergency was done. And he, now with the benefit of being at this age and this stage and of development, right? I can see back on that and say that acknowledgement was absolutely essential in letting that path open up for me. And that's what I mean when I talk about the messy middle, right?

Because we label it unprofessional. It's such a crappy way of framing it up. But, it wasn't permission to fall apart running the code. It wasn't permission to, not [00:17:00] do the job. It was permission to feel the weight of the job and remain human in the job.

And it's what we want, right? We want our students, our residents, and each other to feel resourced enough, permitted also enough to when the day is done, when the code is done, when we are feeling the impact of the harm that we had just born witness to catches up to know what to do with it, because the job is supposed to be hard.

It's supposed to be hard. That's the damn job that stays in the pg. I think that's the job. The job doesn't have to become harmful and too often it has. Too often it does, and it's not just that we're not taught the other set of skills. Right. It's not just that we're not permitted the other set [00:18:00] of skills.

It's that I think in medical education and training in particular, we don't even realize that the other set of skills exist and are necessary and so That's why I think we run into so many of our colleagues. I mean, look, med students come into medicine, starry-eyed.

Just freaking story eyed. We go into this to be healers and somewhere along the line we become a version of ourselves that we didn't mean to be. And we hear that all the time. We hear that in our conversations with our clients, and we hear that in these, big leadership trainings. And we hear that in organizations that span sectors.

We hear it in medicine, we hear it in public health, we hear it in government, right? In any kind of service related job. We hear it from first responders, [00:19:00] police, fire, EMS. We hear it in the legal profession. Boy do we hear it in the legal profession. And it's always that same version of, I didn't go into this.

I didn't go into public health. I didn't go into education. I didn't go into law enforcement. I didn't go into the legal profession. I didn't go into medicine. I didn't go into this to become this. I don't recognize this version of me, this version that is

A crispy critter, right? That's snapping at people or this version that's completely shut down, or this version that is throwing things across the boardroom or this version that is slamming doors or this version that manages to keep it together at work and loses it at home on the people or with the people I love most, or this version that isn't really keeping it together anywhere except for this very thin veneer that I'm then drinking or [00:20:00] in some other way

Harming myself. And so what I think this work that you and I engage in as coaches, as professional development experts, in all the things we do, there's so much overlap. It's hard to tease them apart. I think the beauty of this work is that it allows people to see that path and that path returns them to who they meant to be.

That path returns us to who we meant to be and how we meant to be in this world. And that path home is not, as long and as fraught as I think we're afraid it's gonna be. And I think that fear keeps us from getting started.

A hundred percent. The Lodestar trainings frequently begin with calling to mind this. I didn't go into this to become this. And I think for so many physicians, it is an unfortunate reality that so many of us are [00:21:00] feeling that way.

And, I think you, spoke to, the harm, right? The years and years of, going into room one, experiencing a tragedy, something horrendous, a death, a bad diagnosis, a challenging family, some other horror that we have normalized and see every single day. And then. You move on to room two and put a smile on your face and try to show up as the doctor that we are all trained to be.

And you're a hundred percent right as well. That's the job. The job is to walk out of room one, put a smile on your face, or walk into room two and do it. And at some point, if we do not go back and unpack the experience with a friend, a colleague, a coach, somebody, it sits. And over time, those.

I'll call them small experiences, but of course they're not [00:22:00] small. Build up and build up and the harm compounds and then we become the people that we never thought we were going to be the person that we didn't think we were going into medicine to become. And, you're right there is a path back, right?

As we were talking, right? Just being able to look back at those experiences, process those experiences, find the self-compassion for where we were in that moment, and remembering what the people in the room might have been experiencing and how we were able to show up in the room.

It gives us an opportunity to rediscover the person we wanted to be in medicine, in healthcare, in life, at home, all the things. And you're right, the path forward is not as, challenging and cumbersome, but it does take work. We do need to be present for it and we do need to invite it in. how do you go about encouraging physicians or attorneys or first [00:23:00] responders to allow that in for them?

What a great question. I think it's multifold.

I think it is first and foremost the acknowledgement that this is all of us, right? I think that allows people, a moment to realize this is an invitation and not the pathologizing of. Them of their experience of all the things, right? our training is very, pathology focused, right? It's all about that sort of, what gives rise to disease?

How do we disrupt disease once the process has started, right? How do we cure, all of those kinds of things. and all of that's good, right? And we're what we want and, we sometimes forget to acknowledge and look at and begin taking care [00:24:00] to view okay, that's the pathogenic model.

Then. What's the salutogenic model? What are the conditions that are necessary for people to do well? What are the ingredients that give rise to wellness and wellbeing and joy and health and all of those sorts of things. And I think our tendency to pathologize, and that's probably where and why maybe the word trauma trips people up, right?

Because it is just the nature of the word is pathologizing. If I carry trauma, then I am a trauma victim. That's a scary one. and I think that's a really important one to tease apart, right? Victim. And having experienced traumatic stress, or having experienced a trauma that becomes embodied and us, those are very different things, right?

We have choice about what we do with the [00:25:00] experiences that we have. that's the beauty of being human. It's always time to rewrite, and we don't know how the story ends. So back to your question, how do we invite people? actually I think you phrased it. How do we encourage people?

And I think that the answer to that is we invite them in, we invite them into what is very much a human and a shared process. And we ground it in some really basic neuroscientific principles around how we are hardwired to scan for right. And interpret things. and in this reality too, which is that our brains are set up in such a way that the negative

Or the harmful experiences that we have. Stay with us for much longer and in a much more permanent way than the positive and the safe experiences that we had. Right. I wonder in saying that out loud, [00:26:00] had that moment in time with that chief resident not been coupled to a really hard, painful experience, if I would've remembered it all these decades later, right, because we're talking three, almost three decades now.

Would I remember it, would it be as crystal clear it, that was not a painful memory or experience I had with him. It was actually very positive. But we don't tend to, retain those positive experiences the way we do the hard and the harmful ones. That's human. That's not Kemia, that's not Michael. That's not unique to any one person.

That is a human thing. That is the brain's way of remembering this was dangerous before this was harmful to us before, avoid it in the future. So there's a very good reason from an evolutionary perspective that we do this, that negativity bias, that's what that is, that negativity bias exists for a reason.

But I think the way that we [00:27:00] become invitational into this work is to be really invitational. there have been innumerable now, clinical trials and studies that just looking at coaching, right? Just looking at coaching and showing incredibly good outcomes for physicians.

Let's just talk about our own profession for physicians who engage in coaching relationships. Reduction in burnout, reduction in, their sense of abandonment and disillusionment and all of these kinds of things based on those clinical trials. There should be no coach who has a minutes availability for the next 10 years.

So why isn't that the case? Why do we still see resistance? Why is it that oftentimes when a hospital organization offers coaching, and this is my lived experience, is the first call with that physician one in which, not only is there a lot of resistance, but often there's a lot [00:28:00] of, fear and sometimes even resentment about what it means that the organization is offering them the.

Okay. One of the things that I noticed I have to say over and over and over again is there is not a, fortune 500 CEO on this planet. There is not a Fortune 500 company on this planet where their C-Suite executives don't all have written into their contract weekly coaching with a professional coach.

Right? Contractually, that is an expectation in every sense of the word. Somehow in medicine, it has become equated with failure, or performance improvement or all of these kinds of things. Nothing could be further from the truth of what a good coaching relationship should look and feel and sound like.

And this is meant to be that resourcing that is focused [00:29:00] on the salutogenic model. So showing up in a way that says, these are the realities of our profession. These are the realities of our lived experience. Yours is different than mine, and there are similarities to it. Right. And that exposure to traumatic stress doesn't equate trauma.

This has been very important to differentiate with when we're doing second responder work, right? So when we as a company are called in to do work with folks, in communities, first responders and communities who have responded to big events, fires, mass casualty events, whatever they happen to be, right.

Helping on that level set you were talking about, that level set of exposure to traumatic stress does not mean embodied trauma. And the entirety of the job right now is to prevent that exposure from becoming embodied, right? That's the purpose of the work. You and [00:30:00] I, any physician, probably anyone alive, frankly,

The job is not to avoid traumatic stress exposure. If you're a trauma surgeon, actually the job is to be exposed to traumatic stress exposure. Right, as a physician who is doing, regular screenings for people, you are acknowledging that you are going to be exposed to traumatic stress exposure because you are going to find cancer and you are going to have to talk to families about that.

Right. So the avoidance of traumatic stress exposure is not the goal. The goal is to recognize when those exposures happen and mitigate, disrupt it when we know how to do that real time in particular. We can prevent that embodiment. And so you were talking about how we go from room A to room B to room c.

It's almost like very thin veneers of varnish over and over and over [00:31:00] again. You do that long enough, 10,000, 50,000, a hundred thousand times, and it is like a rock. I don't wanna be a rock. That's not what I went into this profession to become. I don't want students and residents breaking themselves against the rock.

That is me. I don't want patients breaking themselves against the rock. That is me. I want my family breaking themselves against the rock that is me. And so I have to develop the skills that, there's that layer. Okay, now I go here and I do this to disrupt it because without it, without that skill, I end up far from where I meant to go.

And the visual that came up as you were talking, about going room to room is that we get off by degree, right? And this was actually where the term Lodestar for our company came from in the first place, right? If the north pole is the goal, right?

And I [00:32:00] set my walking path from my farm to the North Pole today and I start walking and I've got that exact heading set when I leave. But then I never look at my compass again. You watched me catch myself there. If I never look at my compass again, I will start to drift, right just a degree at a time or a quarter of a click at a time.

And if I keep going without. Reorienting myself, and I go a month, I may be 150 miles off course, I go a year, I may end up at the South Pole. Right? So this work that we do is really about, are we checking? Are we checking our compass? Are we reorienting ourselves over and over and over again? Because for me, the North Pole is who I wanna be in this world.[00:33:00]

What does it look like when the best version of that person of me shows up day after day after day? That's my true north, and I cannot possibly hope to stay on track for that if I'm not checking regularly. And that's a skill to learn and to practice just as much as every clinical skill we've ever picked up along the way.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think you hit the nail on the head that so many physicians can view coaching as punitive or as a failure or as I've done something wrong or, why can everybody else do this? And I'm struggling. And, we covered it at the beginning of this episode that none of this has been normalized for us.

None of this has been demonstrated for us in a way that shows us that this is the weight that we're all practicing under, and we do need to go back and think about these things, process these things, reorient [00:34:00] ourselves. Otherwise, you do end up becoming the person that you never wanted to be. And so how do you check in with yourself?

Start reorienting yourself, start resetting your path and your track. For me, physician coaching was a tremendous part of that. I. Felt completely lost in my career. I was running away from it. I thought that the only escape was just getting out and not doing it anymore. And here we are five years later, recommitted to practicing clinical medicine, still practicing full-time without an end date in sight.

And all of that was possible because I was able to start reorienting myself to start evaluating, figuring out where am I, how did I get here, and how do I find myself back to the fulfillment and joy that I found when I first started practicing. And, it was work. And it does take effort. And yes, of course it does, right?

But [00:35:00] everything in life that is worth doing and worth enjoying. It takes work and effort, right? Raising children is hard. It takes work and it takes effort and. Most days, it's completely worth it. Right? And so how can we bring that back to our careers? Yeah. I think that is such an essential component of this, because I think the thing that pains me most is to watch our colleagues, leave,

And the ones who haven't left yet, are looking for the exit, right? They're checking their retirement account, they're checking their student loan balance, many of 'em. And they are looking for any exit. And there are a lot of reasons for it. Look, we didn't, we didn't come to this podcast today necessarily to begin pulling or teasing apart all of the challenges that exist in the way.

Medicine is practiced today, the way that the system is set up. And I do think it's [00:36:00] important, you and I have talked about this many times to acknowledge that it's not meant to be a solo sport, right? Change your mindset, change your life. It is an unrealistic expectation. It is. So this is in no way to suggest that a physician who feels they are drowning, that they're bottoming out.

They're disillusioned. They don't care anymore. They've got this, it's not compassion fatigue. It's compassion death. Right? Their compassion for the people they're taking care of has just died. This is not to say that. The system hasn't been a complicit compounding all of those things, and that if you come into coaching, you yourself will be able to fix all of those things.

We need to be working to fix the system, too. is what I'm saying. And I know you believe that, and I know you and I and many, many, many others of us in this work are working [00:37:00] every single day to try and improve those systems. That's why we do leadership development, right? What the leader allows is what's allowed in an organization.

And oftentimes our healthcare organizations now are run by people who do not understand. Again, I think rarely is that the CEO is back there twisting their mustache and trying to actively harm. The people who work for them. I think it is that lack of understanding the vocabulary and the broader paradigm around the culture that has drifted into this place, that is causing harm.

So we have to approach from both, right? We have to approach both from the individual, the physicians, the nurses, the, all of that, right? That's all part of that team. And we also have to, have the time and the space [00:38:00] and, the leaders need to understand and prioritize the time in the space to gain additional insight and skill and begin thinking about implementation of strategy.

That really works.

I can't even imagine.

So we sometimes hear people joke about, or sort of comment in an offhanded way about the death of the physician lounge.

But here's what the death of the physician lounge, just as an example, has done. Most of the hospital systems we work with, the doctors do not know their colleagues anymore.

I find this mindboggling. I find this absolutely mindboggling. And when you begin to talk to physicians, oftentimes those of us of a certain age will talk about, we used to be friends. Pretty hard to scream at your friend when you get a 2:00 AM phone call. Pretty easy to yell at the doctor who's calling you at 2:00 AM when you have no idea who they are.

You've never heard their name before and your sleep is being disrupted for the 47th time, that day, that night, that whatever, right? We become less collegial. It is hard to diminish demean, dismiss the colleague when you not only know them, but you know their families, right?

Doctors, this is not about work hours. It's not about the work hours. We've always worked long hours. It's not about the work hours within reason, okay? I always have to caveat that 'cause somebody will come screaming at you and then you'll be in trouble. It's not about the work hours within reason. It is about the degradation of the things that allowed us naturally, very naturally to remain in the profession and remain whole.

So that has accelerated this layering of, right. The Physician Lounge was a place where you could curbside about something that was really complex. The Physician Lounge was a place where you could connect and laugh even if the humor was dark, right? And dark humor has its place. It has its role because laughter is disruptive of traumatic stress.

We cannot be in humor, even dark humor, and be in a traumatic stress state at the same time. It's why dark humor exists. Also, we're just dark and twisty, but these were the places these things happened and they're gone. Offering a yoga class, I sound like I'm being dismissive of the small wellness initiatives that be, are, have been undertaken.

And I promise that is not the intent. I'm just saying we've misdiagnosed and so any treatment is going to fail if you don't have the right there. I paused diagnosis. We have to diagnose what's happening.

I love that you're pointing that out and I think it all really does come back to Lodestar's kind of tagline here, which is that connection mitigates trauma.

We know that we experience harm in so many different aspects of our daily lives in our career. And as you were just alluding to it, is the connections. It's the connections with the patients. It's the connection with our colleagues. It's the connection with our families that is what is healing, right?

Like that is the thing that restores us. It's the thing that points us back in the right direction, and that helps us become more of the people that we want to be. And I also want to highlight your one word, which is. Us, right? Like we get to be that for each other and allowing ourselves to be present to our colleagues, to their experience.

Finding ways where we can be in community with one another. That is the answer. And so this is not to, as you were saying, diminish, how the role that hospital systems and medical systems play in the harm, but it does highlight the importance of remembering that all of this work starts with us individually, us as a medical community, us as hospital systems.

What can we do to support ourselves, support each other. And as you have highlighted in this episode, this work is so incredibly important. We have to invite ourselves to do this work so that we can continue showing up in the ways that are so important.

I could sit and listen to you all day. I have loved this opportunity to chat with you, to hear from you. There's always so much I have to learn from you and so I thank you so much.

I have no doubt that people are going to want to learn more about you and your work. Can you tell people where they can find you and learn more about Lodestar and those courses that you mentioned earlier, how they can sign up for them. Yeah, so you can find us at loadstar pc, that's L-O-D-E-S-T-A-R-P-C.com, loadstarpc.com.

And I think if I was gonna say that there's something about Lodestar that, puts us as a standout, it would be our coaches, right? The faculty that we have, our senior faculty to a person have advanced and terminal degrees.

They are all coaching certified accredited coaches. and. To a person. they are very, very highly experienced in their profession, whether that profession is medicine, nursing, the legal profession, government, they are very highly experienced. and then have come in, trained in this, done our advanced training and are available for that one-on-one coaching.

One of the most positive work experiences I've ever had in my entire life. Working alongside the Lodestar faculty. They are genuinely who they appear to be. And just the kindest, most generous of their time, their energy, their spirit, which sounds very woo.

I hear it. And, I mean it wholeheartedly, I've loved having an opportunity to work alongside some of these just incredible people. So thank you. I'll take this opportunity to thank you for that opportunity. Yeah. Well, we've built it together, right? Every single one of us contribute to the culture, and I think it, it is a testament to the fact that we live where we lead others, right?

We are not doing one thing here, and teaching something else and. Probably we're our own best teachers in the things that we teach, so I appreciate that, Michael. Well, Dr. Kemia Sarraf, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for again sharing all of your wisdom. Thank you to the listeners and we'll see you next time on the Better Physician Life Podcast.