Fear of Failure Holds Us All Back Naturally and Automatically

We are hardwired to be creatures of habit. Our reticular activating system is always scanning the horizon looking for danger. This creates the bubble of safety we call our comfort zone.

As doctors, we have a number of comfort zones. Your personal comfort zone when you're away from work is one. At work, you have a comfort zone inside the boundaries of your specialty - the things you're comfortable doing with patients and the things you aren't (many of which are due to previous bad outcomes).

In order to keep us safe, we have a cognitive bias against doing anything new. We stay inside the protective walls of our personal comfort zone at work and at home.

The boundary guard of our comfort zone is fear of failure.

If we do something new it might not work out the way we planned.

We've learned to understand that as FAILURE, and avoid it at all costs

At the same time, all of us are constantly reaching for new goals and learning new skills. Check that ... All of us aspire to reach new goals and learn new skills.

Fear of failure can bring any outside-the-comfort-zone excursion to a screeching halt.

Things might not work out the way we planned. It's risky. I haven't got time for that. So ... we default to just getting busy again.

And as a doctor, you can always find something to get busy with. The Whirlwind is complicit in reinforcing the walls of our comfort zone.

In this post, you'll discover a way to redefine failure, to eliminate it completely from your vocabulary and your life experience at work and at home. It's a very simple mental exercise for scientists like you and me.

You see ... anytime you do something new, it's just another experiment - like the ones we did as undergrads. Let me show you how this mind flip works so you can stretch your boundaries, learn new skills, reach new goals and enjoy the ride.

Check it out.

The Surprising Power of One Simple Weekly Practice

• It increases your power and influence and effectiveness as a leader.
• Increases your team's engagement and enthusiasm for your shared work
• It's just one thing that you do once a week, takes about 10 minutes
• And it's been research proven to make a massive difference in both your experience as a leader and your team's experience of your leadership.

The Multitasking Myth - And Why It’s Makes Everything Worse

Quick question: do you think you're pretty good at multitasking?

You can do two or three things at once? In this post, you'll discover why that's simply not true.

Multitasking is not possible at the level of neurophysiology. "I can do two things at once" is an illusion with massive downside.

Any extra task you add to the one you're doing right now makes you stupid - it cuts the quality of your performance in half.

Let me show you what to do instead.

Give up multitasking.

Use the Pearl Necklace Technique to maximize your productivity and actually improve the quality of your work.

Check it out.

How to Build a High-Performance Team: Stop Answering Every Question

The Counterintuitive Leadership Skill That Changes Everything

In this post, you will discover a little-known and slightly controversial leadership skill set that goes like this:

• Do not answer every single question your team members bring to you
  
  
• AND do not say yes to all of their requests for your help

Let me show you how to avoid the trap of making your team dependent upon you - by not answering all the questions they bring to you. It'll free up your day. It'll help you be more effective. It'll help increase the initiative and capabilities of your team overnight, all of you will get home sooner without working harder when you pick up this habit—and it's totally against typical doctor programming.

Check it out.

The Challenge of Giving Feedback to Leadership

In this post, you'll discover a crucial skill set for speaking up the chain of command when you're upset by a bad leadership decision.

Your organization has made a decision you don't understand, maybe implemented something that doesn't make sense, and you've had to step in and take actions to save the day. How do you talk to your boss in a way that lets you say what needs to be said and their knickers not get in a twist? Check it out.

Let me show you how to speak to your boss in a way that doesn't challenge their ego, that gets the two of you on the same page, and allows you to give them the feedback they need because they just made a decision or took an action that has harmed the front line. You're closer to the front line than they are. You know this didn't make sense and was implemented incorrectly, and you want to give that feedback in a way that actually changes things for the better.

Here's one way to do it that works almost every time.

Otherwise

- Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

The Four Ways to Say Thank You—and the One That Doubles Your Impact

As a physician leader, you already know that gratitude is critical to your team's culture, camaraderie, and performance. But did you know there are four different ways to say thank you, and if you choose the right one, your thank you can have double the impact on your team's engagement and productivity?

In this post, I’ll walk you through all four thank you methods—and reveal the one that is a true leadership superpower. Ready? Let’s get started.

Listen to this post as a Podcast

One of the curses of being a physician is that everybody wants you. Everyone, all the time.

You're a smart, high-energy person who asks good questions and figures out problems lickety split.

• So at work, everyone wants you to be on their committee or to come to their meeting.
  
  
• And in your home life, the PTA wants you, the board of the library wants you, everybody in the community wants you to ... and pretty soon you're overextended.

You've got roles and responsibilities piled chin high. You don't remember saying yes to them, but you also don't remember saying no.

Let's get you back in balance

Listen to the PODCAST

In the whirlwind of your normal week, just notice all the roles and responsibilities you don't remember taking on—you you don't remember saying YES, but you know for sure you didn't say NO either.

In this lesson, you'll discover the superpower of DECOMMITMENT

How to recognize and release these roles quickly and respectfully and get on to focusing your life and your practice on the things you really want.

Let me show you a simple way to decommit from places where you've been overextended mindlessly and get back to what's really important in your life.

In this blog post, I’ll share the secret to job, career, and life satisfaction for physicians, all distilled into one simple question and a two-circle Venn diagram.

Listen to this Podcast Here:

What is your Ideal Job Description?

By answering this one question and understanding your personal Venn of Happiness, you’ll have a clear Satisfaction Target for your practice, career, and life.

This is the core concept I teach all my physician coaching clients, and I’m excited to share it with you here as we kick off 2025.