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You don't actually want to leave medicine. You want to leave whatever is happening to you right now. Those are two completely different problems, and only one of them has a fantasy attached to it.

When work gets bad enough, our brains tend to offer us exactly one exit: quit. Become a barista. Move to an island. And I get it, that fantasy is doing a job for us. But it is not a plan, and it does not tell us anything useful about what we actually want. So this week I'm asking you a much smaller and much more boring question instead: what do you want your Tuesday to look like?

Not your dream life. Not your five year plan. An ordinary midweek workday, from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep. Who do you see before you leave the house. What are you doing at eleven in the morning. When does the day end, and what happens after. I walk you through building that day out in real detail, then through the harder part, which is holding it up next to the Tuesday you are actually living and looking honestly at the space in between.

That gap is uncomfortable. It is also the most useful information you have, because every element in your ideal Tuesday is a value in disguise, and some of what you want is closer than you think. If you're a physician in the middle of deciding whether to stay, go, cut back, or build something of your own, this is the exercise I would have you do before you decide anything, because it is very hard to choose your next thing when you have only ever defined what you're running from.

Grab a piece of paper. This one is worth actually doing, not just listening 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-call

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

Back to school season hits different when you're the physician, not the kid with the new backpack. But that Target aisle full of fresh pens and Trapper Keepers is tapping into something real: the pull toward a reset.

This week I'm borrowing that energy, minus the pressure to build some perfect new system from scratch. We're talking about the low hanging fruit. The dot phrases you wrote two years ago that you now have to fix every single time. The lunch routine that fell apart over the summer. The chores your kids could absolutely be doing that you're still doing yourself because some part of you feels guilty enough already.

I also walk you through how I sat down with Claude and actually fixed a documentation problem I'd been limping along with for months, and the fix wasn't even the one I expected.

This isn't about becoming more organized as a personality trait. It's about asking one question, over and over: how can I make this easier? Hit play and let's refresh something together.

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

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

"I'm just a family doc."
"Oh, you can call me Megan, that's fine."
"Ugh, I'm so lazy."

We say these all day long and almost none of us hear ourselves say them.

I was at a coaching retreat recently, standing with a brilliant physician friend who had just pitched herself to speak at her state medical group's women physicians' conference. She was lit up about it. Genuinely excited. And in the middle of telling me all of it, she said, "and I'm so cheap." She didn't hear it. I did.

What she meant was that she's local, so there's no flight and no hotel, and she hadn't set a speaking fee yet. What she said was that her value is low. So I offered her a different sentence, and I watched it move through her body in real time. What happened next included her going back to her hotel room that night and sending a proposal she had not planned to send, and a text the following day that started with "you are the answer to my prayers."

This is not an episode about standing in front of a mirror repeating affirmations at yourself. I don't do that, and I'm not going to ask you to. This is about the handful of sentences you say about yourself over and over without ever once examining them, what they're quietly costing you, and choosing something that is just as true and doesn't put you in the wrong.

Here's some of what we get into together:

• Why "I'm fine" said through gritted teeth eventually stops being a word that means fine, and what that leaves you with when someone who loves you asks
• What happened to the word "wellness" over the last ten years, and why so many of us can't hear it now without flinching
• The one sentence I offered my friend, and what it actually did (it did not write her talk)
• The swap I'd start with this week, and why "sorry" is more expensive than it looks

Pick one phrase. That's the whole assignment.

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

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

There is a decision you are not making. It finds you in the car on the way to work. It finds you after a hard clinic day. It finds you at 11pm when you are trying to fall asleep. And every day you tell yourself you will just wait and see.

Here is what I want you to know: waiting is not free. Every day you spend not deciding is a day you hand over mental bandwidth and emotional energy to a question that never gets answered. I did this for years, and then I did it some more. What I did not understand at the time is that not deciding is still deciding. If you are wondering whether to stay or go and you never say it out loud, you have voted to stay. You just have not declared it, which means you cannot do the one thing that would actually help: make staying better.

In this episode we talk about the real cost of the open tab in your brain, the one quietly eating your RAM. We talk about what happens when you wait long enough that someone else makes the decision for you, which is happening to more physicians than any of us expected. And we talk about a third option almost nobody considers, which is deciding, out loud and on purpose, that you are not deciding yet, with a date on the calendar and a plan for what you will explore in the meantime.

You are going to feel some discomfort either way. Staying somewhere hard and choosing to make it better asks you to stop running on autopilot. Leaving something familiar is uncomfortable even when it is right. But discomfort while you are moving forward is a completely different animal from the low grade drain of being stuck. One of them costs you years.

Say it out loud. Stay or go. Then let's get to work on making it right.

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

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

There is no algorithm for being everything to everyone. There is no version of you that can close every note, remember every modifier, sort every piece of garbage correctly, and never make anyone unhappy. And yet somehow we keep walking around asking ourselves how we're supposed to do it all, like the failure is ours instead of the expectation being the problem.

This week I want to talk about a question I hear constantly, from my clients, in physician Facebook groups, in my own head some days: how am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to remember that, attend to this, keep everyone happy, and still function as a human being?

We dig into a real story from a session with a client, one that involves a shame-based email about note closure rates, a naughty list of underperforming physicians, and, somehow, a fight over which garbage can is allowed to hold what. It sounds almost funny until you realize how much mental bandwidth these invisible, ridiculous burdens actually take from us. We walk through why we keep landing in this stuck loop of self-blame, and I give you eight questions you can come back to again and again to figure out what's actually yours to carry and what isn't.

This is not a one-time fix. This is a practice. And once you have it, you will never look at your own overwhelm the same way again.

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

The eight questions, so you have them ready:

1. What is my load like right now?
2. What feels truly important to me right now?
3. What are the external goals, tasks, or priorities that others are putting on me right now?
4. Which of these, if any, feel important to me?
5. Which of these feels unimportant to me?
6. What feels like it's not mine to carry?
7. How do I want to show up if others don't agree with my priorities?
8. How am I going to have my own back? (Don’t skip this one!!!)

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

Tell me a place in your life that is not home and not work where you feel fully like yourself. And no, sitting in your car in the driveway does not count.

This week we are talking about the idea of a third place, a concept that is part physical space and part something you do, a hobby or an activity that lets you show up as a full human being instead of Dr. So and So. Think the coffee shop from Friends. Not home, not work, just a place where you get to exist without your degree attached to you.

We walk through what makes a third place actually count (there are five characteristics, and yes, they matter), and I run through a long list of ideas to help you figure out what yours might be, whether that is running, gardening, artisanal cooking, a book club, or getting out on a paddleboard. I also get real about three things that feel like hobbies but usually are not doing what we actually need: credit card points, online shopping, and scrolling.

If you have let this part of your life shrink down to nothing, this episode is your permission slip to bring a piece of it back, even in a season where it can only be small.

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

Resources mentioned in this episode:

The concept of the "third place" comes from sociologist Ray Oldenburg, from his 1989 book The Great Good Place.

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

I spent 48 hours trying to get home from a trip to see my mother in law. A canceled flight, a rerouted city that turned out to be smack in the middle of World Cup weekend, a storm system, and a whole lot of nothing I could control. And somehow, it turned into one of the clearest lessons on values I have had in a long time.

Here is the thing. Most of us do not think about our values until something falls apart. We spend our energy on the to do list, the aggressive game plan, the five AM wake up call we are never actually going to sustain. But when chaos hits, and in medicine and in life it always does, it is not the plan that saves you. It is knowing what actually matters to you.

In this episode I walk you through what happened when my well organized travel plans blew up in real time, and how a values clarification exercise I had done just hours earlier completely changed how I moved through it. No spinning. No fighting with gate agents who could not do anything anyway. Just clarity on what I actually wanted in that moment, and the ability to act on it.

We talk about what this looks like when you bring it into your clinical world too. The quiet days that suddenly explode. The trauma bay. The board that is empty until it is not. You already know how to triage a crisis at work. This episode is about learning to do that for your life.

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

Resources mentioned in this episode:
Parents Who Lead by Stew Friedman and Alyssa Westring

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD

Send us Fan Mail

Quick: without overthinking it, what area of your life could use some more attention right now? If your answer was "all of it," or if you just went completely blank, this episode is exactly for you.

In this episode, we work through the five areas where I see physicians struggling most. Not in some abstract, general-public kind of way, but in the specific, trained-out-of-us, system-conditioned ways that make these particular struggles feel so hard to name and even harder to address. We talk about your health, your boundaries, your emotional well-being, your time, and your career arc. And we get honest about how they all bleed into each other while also being distinct enough that trying to fix all five at once is a recipe for fixing none of them.

The point of this episode is not to give you a five-point plan. It's to help you identify the one thing that is actually calling your attention right now, in this season of your life, in these specific circumstances. Not the thing you should be working on. Not the thing you worked on six months ago. The thing that, if you're being honest with yourself, is where the energy needs to go.

We also talk about why that single focus matters more than you might think, and how making real progress in one area tends to create ripple effects into the others in ways you don't always see coming.

Grab a piece of paper. This one's worth sitting with.

Want more of this in your inbox? Join the email list at healthierforgood.com and get weekly messages made for physicians like you.

Connect with Megan:

Instagram: @MeganMeloMD
Website: healthierforgood.com
Email: megan@healthierforgood.com

Support the show

To 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: megan@healthierforgood.com

Follow me on Instagram!
@MeganMeloMD