Why Your To-Do List Never Gets to-Do(ne)

Send us Fan MailYou can be earning a good salary and still feel broke. And if that’s you, there’s a good chance you’ve also wondered what’s wrong with you that you haven’t figured this out yet.Dr. Caroline Clerisme sat in a financial counselor’s office after dental school and saw the number: about $250,000 in loans, which would cost her roughly $520,000 if she paid it off the traditional way over 25 years. Her first job paid less than $100,000, nowhere near what her professors had promised. She paid every bit of it off in four years, while still investing.Caroline is our first dentist on the show, and she’s a money coach for doctors. In this conversation we get honest about the money drama so many of us carry quietly: why we avoid looking at our numbers, where the leaks hide (subscriptions and takeout, every time), and how to tell whether a purchase is adding value to your life or just making you look successful. She also tells the story of the woman at church who called her an embarrassment for driving a Honda Civic with dents and scratches, and what it taught her about the expectations people put on what a doctor should look like.If the shame around your debt has been keeping you from even opening the statement, this one’s for you.Dr. Caroline Clerisme is a general dentist, wife, mom, investor, entrepreneur, money coach and author. She is the founder of Doctors Out of Debt, a company that helps doctors get out of debt, build multiple streams of income and create generational wealth. She received her doctorate from Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, speaks regularly at professional schools and business clubs about debt repayment and generational wealth, and writes children’s books.Ready to know your numbers and stop carrying this alone? Caroline works with medical and dental professionals through one-on-one and group coaching, covering budgeting, debt repayment and investing, with access to her team. In January she’s opening her coaching to doctors and their spouses, so you can get on the same page together. Learn more at https://doctorsoutofdebt.comConnect with Caroline: Website: https://doctorsoutofdebt.com and https://drclerisme.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/doctorsoutofdebt Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100022395751764And if money fear is part of what’s keeping you stuck in a job you’ve outgrown, let’s talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailYou got more done today than you’ll ever give yourself credit for. And the list is still longer than it was this morning.If you’ve got scraps of paper in every bag and a notes app full of lists that never end, nothing is wrong with your work ethic. We were trained, for very good reasons, to drop everything the moment something is labeled urgent. That training saves lives. It also means anyone who hands us something with urgency attached gets our full attention, whether or not it’s actually an emergency, and whether or not it’s actually ours.In this episode we look at two maps for everything that lands on your plate. The first is the Eisenhower matrix: urgent or not urgent, important or not important. It shows why the things that matter most for your own health and your own life sit quietly in the important but not urgent box until they turn into emergencies of their own. The second is one I built for us: urgent or not urgent, yours or not yours. A lot of what’s on your list came from a hierarchy where you started at the bottom, and nobody ever told you it was okay to stop.Then I’ll give you three questions to start running everything through:Is this urgent? Actually urgent, or just labeled that way by someone else?Is this important? Or could good enough be good enough?Is this mine? It may be my work. That doesn’t make it my emergency.And if the name in your feed looks new, you’re in the right place. We were Ending Physician Overwhelm, and now we’re The Physician Whisperer.Listen in, then go look at your list with fresh eyes.If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let’s talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-callConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailWhat if the thing standing between you and an easier work life isn’t time, or staffing, or the right moment? What if it’s permission, and the person you’ve been waiting on to give it is you?We are rule followers. We got here by passing every test, clearing every hurdle, and doing what the hierarchy asked of us for years. So of course giving ourselves permission feels foreign. Sometimes even the word lands heavy, a little authoritarian, with a quiet longing underneath.In this episode, we sit with that word together. I share why permission always means some rule is being set aside, and how many of the rules we still obey aren’t written down anywhere anymore. We look at the difference between choosing an hour of doing nothing and losing an hour to distraction, and why your body can tell the difference even when the activity looks exactly the same. We also talk about why giving yourself permission is not the same as being permissive.Then I walk you through the questions I’d ask you if we were sitting down for coffee. What would you do if you had permission to make things easier at work? What’s stopping you right now? Is that roadblock real? And what would get you just 1% closer? If you’ve been quietly wondering whether you’re even allowed to want something different from your career, this conversation is very much for you.Grab a pen if you can. This one is meant to be talked back to.If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let’s talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-callConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailYou cut back your FTE, or you finally walked out the door, and somehow you still aren't resting. If that sounds familiar, nothing is wrong with you. Your brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do.When I sit down with a physician who's weighing a big change (cutting back, leaving employed practice, going out on her own) and we dig into why, it nearly always comes back to the same thing. She wants more time to rest. More time with the people she loves. More time that's actually hers. That makes complete sense, and the change might be exactly right.But in this episode, I want to tell you the part nobody mentions before you make the leap. Training taught us to put almost everything above rest, and that pull toward the work doesn't stay at the office. It moves in with you. It's why vacations don't refresh us and why time off fills right up with tasks. A new schedule can open the door. It can't walk you through it.We talk about why rest starts with a decision rather than a strategy (the same way a marathon does), what really happens in your brain when someone hands you a free afternoon, and why the phone you reach for to relax is so rarely the thing that helps.You learned the Krebs cycle. You can learn this too.If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let's talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-callConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailIf I asked you right now to name your superpower, could you? I don’t mean the thing you’re working on or the thing you apologize for. I mean the thing you are genuinely, unmistakably good at.Most of us would hesitate. We spent years training to become experts, and the whole time we were also being trained to be deeply humble about it. So we got very fluent at apologizing, even for things that aren’t our fault, and very rusty at saying what we do well.In this episode, we look at three super skills I see over and over in physicians. We talk about what makes each one so valuable, where it tends to get squeezed, and what you might need in order to protect it. You might have one of them, or more than one. The number isn’t the point. Knowing yours is.The connector. You build real trust fast, patients ask for you by name, and time and volume are exactly where it starts to hurt.The complexity lover. You live for the puzzle nobody else could solve, and short visits and a packed schedule work against everything you’re good at.The technical or intellectual expert. You have deep surgical skill or a fund of knowledge your colleagues lean on, and you need the kind of support that lets you spend your time on exactly that.We also talk about why physicians are not interchangeable, and about the difference between owning your genius and using it as a defense. And if you’re thinking about stepping out of employed medicine to build something of your own, we talk about why knowing your strength changes the setting you build, from panel size to how you price your care.Pull up a chair and give yourself permission to stop apologizing for being excellent.If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let’s talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-callConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailRaise your hand if you've asked your employer for something you needed and gotten a whole lot of no. Maybe with a little gaslighting on the side.A few weeks ago I talked about thinking of your career as a business. One of you wrote in with a great question: how does that work when I'm sitting across from my employer, trying to get what I need? So this week, that's exactly where we're going.Most of us walk into those conversations the way training taught us to. Grateful to have the job, used to going along, asking permission. But imagine walking in as a business sitting down with another business that contracts for your services. Highly skilled, highly trained services the whole operation depends on. That one shift changes the conversation, and it starts with a boundary you set around how you see yourself.Together we walk through:Why the staff meeting is almost never the place to ask, and what to do insteadHow to stay grounded when you're exhausted and the news coming at you is badFinding where your needs and your employer's needs actually overlap, including how Dr. Weili Gray made the case for her scribeKnowing your deal breakers before you walk in, so you can have your own back without making threatsWhy Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference is where so many physicians start, and how you already use these skills with patients every dayAnd if your workplace is truly unsafe, I talk about who to bring in instead.You're not the one asking for a favor. Come hear what changes when you know it.Have a specific conversation coming up? Book The One, a single deep dive session where we prepare for it together so you walk in clear and grounded: https://www.healthierforgood.com/offers/2Lo6ZeJL/checkoutConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailWhat would you say if I told you that you're just a couple of "No's" away from getting the "Yes" that you want? With this in mind, most of us would likely persist when it comes to asking for what we want/need, right?It's all a part of the art of negotiation, and my guest today, Dr. Weili Gray, is an expert in finding the path to the "Yes!" She joins us in this episode to talk about how advocating for herself, learning to negotiate, and sticking to her asks, helped her overcome physician burnout on several occasions throughout her career.Dr. Gray is board-certified in anesthesia, sleep medicine, lifestyle medicine, and integrative medicine, and she is the founder/host of the Dare to Dream Physician Travel Podcast. She is also a certified life planner, and her driving goal is to help physicians live the life that they dream of as a way of honoring the beautiful gift of life that they've been given.At a certain point in her own career, she realized that she had become "numb" to the life that was happening around her, and was simply drifting through the years. A few life changing events made her think to herself that this isn't how she wanted to live, so she really intentionally decided to get in touch with what she wanted from her life. For her, this meant travel, spending time with family, and striking a balance with work that allowed her to appreciate how special the physician-patient relationship is.This episode is the story of her initial struggles in medicine, followed by how she learned to negotiate for the life that she now lives with enthusiasm and gratitude. I hope you enjoy, and if you're interested in learning more about Dr. Weili Gray's work, be sure to check her out on:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dreamphysician/Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/878895016552178/Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/6RPDrcyzz8T0naZvMSMFYv?si=a55d11f2efaf4604Connect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailWhat if the reminder to renew your license isn't an insult, just a line item in a business you didn't know you were running?Most of us never took a business class, and we can still tell you exactly how it feels when the CME reminder arrives and no one offers time to do it. This week I want you to try on a different frame: your career is a business, and you are the one thing that makes it run.We walk through the three core pieces of any business (a value proposition, a target market, and a revenue model) and what each one looks like whether you're employed or you own the practice. Then we get to the part I think changes the most: what it means to treat yourself as the talent, and who is actually on your team. It gets much easier to drop the resentment about the tasks nobody does for us once we decide when and how they happen.Here's a taste of what's inside:Why your employer, not your patient, may be your real target market, and how that changes the way you walk into your next evaluation.Why "we are not a charity" isn't a cold thing to say, even to the kindest doctor in the building.Who counts as your team, from the nanny to the meal service, and what to do when your circle is thin.How to stop being furious about license renewals, the DEA and CME hours, and simply decide when they get done.Press play, and let's take some of the drama out of it.If this resonates and you want support actually living it, let's talk. Schedule a free discovery call here: https://calendly.com/healthierforgood/coaching-discovery-call. You can also find me at www.healthierforgood.com or email me at [email protected]. And if you haven't seen the refreshed website yet, I'd love to hear what you think.Episode 106: Be Your Own Boss from March 5, 2024: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1957629/episodes/14630537This episode grew out of my time with EntreMD Business School, the business coaching community for physicians led by Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, MD. Learn more at https://entremd.com/.Connect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailThis was not the break I needed.That was the thought running on a loop years ago, when I finally took time off because I wasn't sleeping and couldn't keep going. A few days in, my three-year-old's preschool had a fire in the kitchen. Nobody was hurt. Preschool closed for ten business days, which was most of the rest I had taken that time to get.And then came the part that cost me more than the fire ever did. The guilt about being disappointed at all. I should want more time with my kid. Other people don't get any time off. What is wrong with me.That double hit is what we're taking apart today. A client described almost exactly the same thing to me recently, her own hard-won time off swallowed by a childcare gap, and all of it came flooding back. This happens to us constantly, and most of us have no process for it, so we white-knuckle through and then wonder why the feeling won't move.So today you get the process. Four steps, in this order:Name what you actually feel, badly if badly is all you've got, and then notice the second feeling sitting on top of the first one.Bring in common humanity, which is the thing you already do effortlessly for everyone else in your life and almost never for yourself.Allow it, which takes far less time than you'd think once you stop arguing with whether you're allowed.And then, only then, the question my own coach taught me: how could it be possible?Your time, your rest, and your fun are precious resources. It makes sense that you have feelings when they get taken. You are not a bad mother, a bad partner, or an ungrateful person for noticing the difference between what you needed and what you got.Come listen, and then put this one in your back pocket for the next time.My website has been completely redone and I'm proud of it. Come see it at www.healthierforgood.com. And I always love hearing from you, so write to me at [email protected] and tell me if this one landed.Mentioned in this episode: the work of Kristin Neff, PhD, on self-compassion, and Brené Brown, PhD, on shame and shame resilience.Connect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan MailRaise your hand if you have ever made a big decision based purely on how you thought it would make you feel afterward. If your hand is not up right now, I am calling you a liar, because we all do this constantly. Maybe if I get that board certification, I will stop feeling like an imposter. Maybe if I drop my FTE, I will finally feel calm.Nothing is wrong with thinking this way, it is deeply human, but this week I want to slow it down with you. We are digging into the decisions sitting in front of a lot of you right now, the FTE change, the leadership role, the board certification, and asking the question underneath the question, what am I actually hoping this will make me feel.I will walk you through an exercise I use with clients to get to that why, and then we get into the part that changes everything once you see it, the decision itself does not create the feeling, your thoughts do. I will show you what that means in practice, with a real client story and a few of my own late night Google search confessions.If you have got a decision you have been circling for weeks or months, this episode is going to hand you a much steadier place to stand while you make it.Ready to decide? Sign up here for The One, and let’s get goingConnect with Megan:Instagram: @MeganMeloMDWebsite: healthierforgood.comEmail: [email protected] Support the showTo learn more about my coaching practice and group offerings, head over to www.healthierforgood.com. I help Physicians and Allied Health Professional women to let go of toxic perfectionist and people-pleasing habits that leave them frustrated and exhausted. If you are ready to learn skills that help you set boundaries and prioritize yourself, without becoming a cynical a-hole, come work with me.Want to contact me directly?Email: [email protected] me on Instagram!@MeganMeloMD