Have you ever felt like you were on a moving sidewalk toward retirement, as if you had committed to a life path long ago and now you’re simply being carried along it? If so, you’re not alone, and you won’t want to miss this episode.

This week I speak with Mark Shrime, MD, PhD - Head and Neck surgeon, researcher, and former Chief of the Harvard Program in Global Surgery - about discernment, vocation, risk, and the search for meaning in medicine. Mark talks candidly about disliking medical school, nearly quitting, and ultimately choosing ENT after spending time with a surgeon who modeled what it means to balance work and play - a theme that never stopped mattering.

We explore how physicians make consequential decisions under uncertainty, how intuition can be trained, and why medicine treats vocation almost like the clergy: you choose young, never leave, and give your whole life to it. Along the way, we discuss administrative bloat, the profit motives of healthcare, the indoctrination of not listening to our inner voice, and the question of whether doctors are truly risk-averse or simply trained to be.

A turning point comes with Mark’s service work on Mercy Ships, where he performed head and neck surgery in a purely service mindset. An epiphany in Monrovia - punctuated by a near-fatal car accident - clarified his path in a way that finally felt aligned rather than obligatory. Conversations in Madagascar later informed his paper Trading Bankruptcy for Health (Value Health, 2018), a study I referenced in my TEDx talk Seeing Beyond the Red Swans.

We talk black swans, white swans, and red swans, and the privilege of being present with people in their deepest truths. Ultimately, we circle back to what humans crave most: to be seen, accepted, safe, and unjudged, even though safety is not incentivized in modern healthcare.

We close with positive psychology, the inner judge and its saboteurs, and the uncomfortable but necessary skill of falling in love with failure, especially in surgery, where complications become harder emotionally even as skill peaks.

Watch Mark's TEDx talk, Putting Purpose Over Path.

Work with him and buy his book here.

Follow him on instagram here.

After returning from our inaugural women surgeon's retreat in Cabo, Steph Sheldon and I debrief about the lessons we learned.

Please enjoy this special episode of Surgeons with Purpose.

The "Pain to Power Workshop" will launch on Jan 18th. Get on my email list here to get all the updates about the program.

And if you are ready to join us in Empowered Surgeons Group, click here.

Steph Sheldon is a creative entrepreneur, business coach, website designer, and brand strategist who works primarily with women founders and coaches to help them clarify their voice, build intentional digital spaces, and grow sustainable, aligned businesses. She blends her background in architecture with business strategy and creativity to support her clients in creating meaningful, effective online presences and offerings.

Steph frames business not just as technical work but as creative and personal expression, rooted in clarity, intention, and connection between the founder and their audience. Her content and coaching often explore how inner beliefs, creativity, and somatic experience inform business success.

Follow her on instagram here.

Are you a woman surgeon who wants to retreat with us in Norway in August? Get on my calendar for an interview here.

Join Empowered Surgeons Group here.

In this episode, Dr. Lauren Umstattd shares her journey through otolaryngology training, a painful facial plastics fellowship experience, and the difficult decision to leave a path that no longer aligned with her values. First drawn to ENT as a medical student by its breadth and clinical complexity, Lauren enjoyed the precision of endoscopic and microscopic surgery during residency but found herself emotionally weighed down by head and neck cancer care. A rotation in facial plastic surgery changed everything, offering her clarity, creativity, and a sense of elective choice that resonated deeply.

Fellowship, however, became one of the most difficult chapters of her training. Despite being a strong student, Lauren felt profoundly out of alignment with her fellowship director and increasingly isolated, questioning herself in ways she never had before. As the experience deteriorated, she began simultaneously building her future practice, ultimately making the terrifying decision to resign just ten months in, despite fears about certification and professional identity. Ultimately, she chose her hard.

Lauren goes on to describe building a facial plastic surgery practice rooted in trust, transparency, and psychological safety. She discusses leveraging social media, thinking like an entrepreneur, and learning to separate the certainty required in surgery from the experimentation required in business. Central to her work is reframing perfectionism and failure, setting honest expectations with patients, and acknowledging that neither surgeons nor outcomes are ever perfect.

This conversation explores what it means to design a life and practice on your own terms, build culture intentionally, and fall in love with the hard parts of the work. It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes the bravest move in surgery and life is choosing alignment over approval.

Dr. Lauren Umstattd is a facial plastic surgeon and entrepreneur known for her commitment to autonomy, ethical patient communication, and psychologically safe practice culture. She is passionate about building systems that support excellence without sacrificing humanity. Follow her on instagram here and TikTok here.

Dr. Kat Hudon shares her journey from enthusiastic learner to an employed physician slowly beaten down by a system designed to keep doctors exhausted, constrained, and disconnected from their creativity.

In this convo, we explore how medicine places an impossible mantle of perfection on physicians, why resilience is a finite resource, and how the system punishes anything that falls outside the narrow definition of “excellence.” Dr. Hudon reflects on moral injury, middle management challenges, the growing administrative bloat in healthcare, and how she realized she always had a choice.

This episode is about reclaiming agency through values, connection, collaboration, and the courage to design a life and practice that actually aligns with who you are.

1. Kat describes the arc many physicians experience: entering medicine as a high-achieving, enthusiastic learner and slowly realizing, “I thought this was going to be better.”
2. Residency forges some of her most meaningful, lifelong relationships—even as the system itself begins to erode joy and creativity.
3. As leadership changes in employed medicine, conditions often worsen rather than improve.

1. Medicine demands perfection while punishing anything less.
2. Resilience is not endless—it’s a bucket that must be actively filled and resourced.
3. The dream of post-training life rarely matches reality; the clinical work is often the easiest part of the job.

1. Five years ago, Kat witnessed a dramatic rise in loneliness and anxiety among children without adequate training, resources, or systems to support them.
2. The moral injury of feeling like she was causing harm simply by working within a broken system shook her willingness to participate in it.
3. Healthcare has become an industry of industries, bloated by layers of administration and confusion designed to perpetuate itself.

1. Insurance companies dictate care decisions, limiting physician autonomy and patient-centered care.
2. If given a magic wand, Kat would eliminate the outsized power insurance holds over medical decision-making
3. The growing number—and salaries—of administrators contrasts sharply with the lived experience of clinicians.

1. Disillusionment with healthcare helped catalyze Kat’s move toward building a direct care clinic focused on longevity and age management.
2. Starting a business required clarity around core values and identity.
3. Physicians have highly transferable skills and more freedom than they are often led to believe.

See you all in 2026!

Click here to join us in Empowered Surgeons group.

Check out my latest TEDx talk, "Seeing Beyond the Red Swans", here.

In this conversation, I’m joined by author and human performance expert Brad Stulberg to explore identity diversity, mastery, and what it really means to build a sustainable, meaningful career. We discuss the concept of the identity house, what it means to feel one's way to skill attunement, core values, process vs product, and how presence and flow are at the heart of mastery.

This episode is especially relevant for surgeons and high-achievers who have poured everything into one role and are wondering how to prevent burnout without giving up ambition.

The Identity House

1. The idea that we all live in an identity house with multiple rooms (e.g., surgeon, parent, artist, athlete, writer)
2. Why having multiple rooms matters: if one room floods or burns down, the entire house doesn’t collapse
3. Not all identity rooms are the same size, and we don’t need to spend equal time in each
4. You can spend most of your day in one “room”—the key is not letting the others get moldy
5. The concept of minimum effective dosing for neglected parts of identity
6. Why it’s never too late to renovate your identity home, even if you’ve lived only in the “surgeon room” for years

Core Values as Burnout Prevention

1. Why defining core values is the first step in preventing burnout and moral injury
2. Research-backed values associated with long-term well-being: Autonomy, mastery, belonging
3. Two distinct types of burnout:

Career vs. Week Thinking

1. The danger of optimizing for a “successful week” instead of a successful career
2. How ego convinces us we’re more indispensable than we are
3. The liberating truth: the world keeps turning without us

Mastery, Presence, and the Craft of Surgery

1. “Feeling our way to excellence” and how it intersects with see one, do one, teach one
2. The universal mastery trajectory:
3. Simple → Complex → Simple
4. Why what looks “simple” is actually hundreds of unconscious micro-steps
5. The four stages of competence:: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence (the apex of excellence)
6. Why many high-achievers get stuck in conscious competence (or try to skip steps)
7. Presence, intimacy with craft, and why the best moments (like a first kiss) are...

Trauma is more common than we think, especially in high-stakes professions like surgery. In this episode, I define trauma, PTSD, and post-traumatic growth and explore how these experiences can show up in the body, the nervous system, and everyday life.

Drawing from my own experience with complex PTSD and panic attacks, I walk you through a practical, humane process for moving through trauma rather than around it. This isn’t about fixing yourself or returning to who you were before. It’s about learning how to metabolize difficult experiences and create something meaningful from them.

If you need support, you can get on my calendar for a free consult here.

Join us in Empowered Surgeons Group here.

Join Empowered Surgeons here.

Book a free consult with me here.

And if you're here for the free content, amazing! My next masterclass + open coaching is on December 14th at 10 am EST. Sign up for "5 Ways Surgeons Fail" here.

In this episode, I break down what coaching is. Not the corporate wellness version, but the real, practical, life-changing version that surgeons and high-stakes professionals actually need.

Coaching, as I define it, is choosing thoughts that generate feelings that empower you to create results you truly desire. It's the antidote to the soul-crushing grind of modern healthcare, moral injury, the day-to-day depletion, and the feeling that you’re running out of capacity while the system demands more.

It’s also the only part of this profession that you can truly control.

We start by identifying what you yearn for (your will), then reconnecting with your power, the internal clarity, agency, and authority that have been buried under years of training, cultural conditioning, and systemic pressure. Then we learn how to wield that power with intention and compassion. In this way, one moment at a time - little by little - your impact and your world expands. Instead of stagnating and staying small, you show up big. You create big things.

I know it works because I've done it.

If you’ve ever wondered what coaching actually is (and isn’t), why it works, or whether it’s worth your time, this episode is your starting point.