Today’s post is different: it’s a celebration of my first blogiversary!
Within you’ll find a reflection of my past year staking a claim to a little corner of the internet and doing things I had never done up until this point.
If you’re a regular reader (please note that this does not even include my mother 
), then you know I use this venue to help physicians live their most prosperous lives.
I do so by shining spotlights on both the outward and inward issues that entrap us (hint, there’s always an inward component!) and offer practical as well as mindset tools for overcoming these issues.
We put so much into medicine often at great costs to ourselves and those around us. If I can help physicians prioritize themselves and live intentionally, then I believe they will be able to help change the healthcare landscape for the better for us and our patients.
Dude, What Happened!?
Whoa, it’s been a year! In some ways, this has been the shortest year ever. And in some ways, it’s been the longest.
Obviously, the elephant in the room is the complete disruption of life as we know it courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. Never in our lifetimes have we faced a deadly pathogen on such a scale. (H1N1 comes to mind but had nowhere near this impact; ebola was very limited [thankfully] in large part due to its lethality).
I wish I could say that this is the stuff of movies, but it’s been my and your existence for over 18 months now.
(And don’t worry, Michael Bay has a moving coming out already released a movie about the pandemic…)
Despite all the negatives associated with COVID-19, it’s also shown us that we can adapt (well, at least some of us). We can push forward, innovate, iterate.
Hell, we got vaccines developed in under a year—a monumental achievement by any measure! Who would have guessed the hardest part would be getting people to take them!?
I’m not sure I would have embarked on this journey if not for the pandemic. It led to me (further) questioning the status quo state of healthcare and what it means to be a physician practicing in the US.
And that led me down a rabbit hole of coaching and entrepreneurship that brings my words before your eyes today.
What Have I Done?!
Several things, and I’d like to take you through them. We’ll start with this here blog first.
Ze Blog
My first post was published exactly a year ago on 9/9/20 entitled The Space Between: Part 1 — The Unconscious Brain.
That post started off with a quote that describes the concept that underpins all of coaching for me:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor Frankl
This quote is so pivotal to my understanding of mindset work and origins as a coach that I wrote three posts about it—Part 1 above, Part 2, and Part 3.
And from there, I haven’t looked back or stopped. Well, except those times I did.
I’ve written 48 posts over the past 52 weeks, four shy of a perfect record.
Why did I miss four? Three due to launching coaching programs and one due to illness—that time I was convinced I had PCR-negative COVID and sat on lobar pneumonia for weeks!
Those 48 posts (today’s post is #49, but counts as the first of my second year) span topics from coaching to mindset to productivity to burnout and wellness to…Star Wars!
My favorite post to write to date was My Most Original Limiting Belief. Why? Because it was fun reflecting and sharing how a limiting belief had shown up in various phases of my life.
One of my goals with blog posts this next year is to feature more guest posts. I did one this past year, called 10 Myths about Burnout, and had a lot of fun adding commentary to it.
I’d enjoy doing similar in the future as well as full, standalone guest posts. (But let’s be honest, can I stop myself from adding commentary? Probably not….)
Blog Stats
In the past year, I’ve had 11,896 page visits. Visitors are mostly based out of the US followed by Canada.
The largest number of readers hail from the following ten locations:
- Minnesota (home court advantage)
- California
- Texas
- Illinois
- New York
- Georgia (but they probably use Dominion machines for Google Analytics, so a recount is in order )
- Ontario
- Florida
- Oregon
- Washington
Within the US, I have the fewest readers in South Dakota. Go figure.
After North America, I had the most readers from the UAE, South Korea, China (I’m not censored…yet!), Singapore, India, Ireland, Sweden, and the UK.
I’m quite surprised that the UAE is in third place (or on the list at all) and that South through East Asia beat out Europe, but I’ll take it.
My top five most popular posts in order are:
- Charting as You Go
- The Opportunity Costs of Practicing Medicine (thanks to securing a nod from Physician on Fire’s “Sunday Best” a few weeks back)
- Top 17 Reasons Docs Get Behind on Charting
- Charting: The Leading Cause of Physician Burnout
- Your Charting Mindset
Weekly Updates
Most of you reading this are subscribed to Prosperous Life MD and know I send out a weekly update every Monday.
They’re like a variety show of content and contain quite a bit of information. Most notable are the Thoughts of the Week, which often turn into mini blog-posts in their own right!
I hit 100% on this one—52 weekly updates in the past year!
I don’t expect much to change with the weekly updates moving forward except maybe some more rotating categories of content.
Life Coaching Training
This past year I completed my life coaching training through the Life Coach School (LCS).
Now you don’t need any formal certifications to call yourself a coach. In fact, even at the LCS, they’ll tell you that you’re a coach the day you decide to become a coach.
However, I wanted to become proficient at coaching, and so I had to make a choice:
- Put in the hours myself to find the material and read and read and read as well as then seek out potential clients to practice on and fumble through trial and error.
- Or, pay for a program that could accelerate my learning and training to save time and frustration, help me practice the application of mindset work, and provide a supportive community in which I could explore and grow.
I chose the latter and have no regrets whatsoever!
(This reminds me that I need to put up my LCS certified seal on the website…five months late!)
Coaching
All that training was for a purpose, and I certainly have strived to put it to good use!
I’ve coached 56 physicians for over 200+ hours in a variety of formats–my own 1:1 clients, my own group clients (in Charting Conquered), as a contracted coach doing 1:1s in other groups, and as a contracted coach doing group coaching.
I have 29 more clients that I’ll be coaching later today on our first live group coaching call in Charting Conquered!
Group and 1:1 coaching are different and I enjoy both for the variety they offer. I intend to keep doing both moving forward.
The aspect of coaching that is most appealing and meaningful to me is the potential impact, both immediate and downstream.
If physicians reclaim their time at home or make medicine sustainable for themselves, then perhaps they get to nurture their relationships or decide to stay in medicine instead of leaving. In that way, every time I help a physician, I’m potentially helping their families and/or their patients. The primary and downstream transformations are truly motivating!
The butterfly effect from a coaching gut check.
We all go into medicine to serve others. I see coaching as a natural extension of this, and I just happen to focus on the healers.
What Does the Future Hold in Store?
I’m always daydreaming and have several ideas for other coaching programs I’d like to offer at some point.
I’m intentionally constraining myself to one for now so I can devote my time and attention on establishing myself as the expert and maximizing the value I can provide other physicians.
I do intend on running Charting Conquered quarterly in 2022 (still odd to think or write about 2022—seems so far off even if it’s not) starting in January.
I’ve had a few departments and institutions inquire into Charting Conquered and I’m excited to brainstorm what such relationships could look like. For example, it could serve as a proof of concept or stepping stone for broader implementation of coaching at an institutional level, which would be phenomenal!
Last Remarks
I need to thank my wife, family, and friends for encouraging me, in one form or another, to pursue this enterprise.
I also want to thank each and everyone of you for supporting the mission of Prosperous Life MD.
Some of you engage in the comments section, some of you email me words of encouragement or that something resonated with you, and some of you lurk behind your screens. Whatever your level of engagement, you’re critical to the mission.
After all, if I can plant the seed in you to start believing that better is possible and that medicine can be different, then change will be inevitable.
I often say that we are intelligent, hard-working, and creative. We use those traits every day in service of others.
We can put those same traits to use to better our lives and the state of medicine.
Thank you all again, and here’s to more blogiversaries in the years to come!
What’s been your favorite post or topic I’ve covered this year? What would you like to see covered moving forward? Let me know in the comments section below.
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I’d also be most appreciative if you shared this post with anyone whom you think would benefit from the content or message of the blog. They may similarly be most appreciative ☺.