Not only does medical practice coaching teach you how to open your mind to who you really are, but it also allows you to bypass the dreaded $20,000 to $50,000 MBA business education that your medical school refused to teach you about.

When you recognize that many highly educated professional athletes hire personal coaches throughout their careers, you must wonder what value they find in being coached. You would think that they already know everything about their sport. It’s a means to discover unconscious secrets about yourself that you never realized or recognized, allowing you to reach your ultimate objectives consciously.

The variable perceptions of and misinformation about what personal coaching is all about tends to leave very highly educated medical doctors pondering how their knowledge and education could ever be surpassed or even helped by someone else advising them and who knows nothing about medical practice problems. And that was something that blew my mind when I first confronted personal coaching.

Physicians, especially, seem not to believe that all people unconsciously begin to develop and expand numerous self-limiting rules for their lives, thinking and activities that they unconsciously and diligently follow throughout their medical careers automatically.

Psychiatrists are aware of what happens when these rules go rogue. Psychologists approach these entanglements of neural communications through behavioral patterns. Hypnotists are often surprised when patients begin revealing actual events, happenings, and beliefs that they later never remember experiencing. Our memory banks pack those issues away that our conscious mind can’t have access to.

Physicians get a twist in their underwear whenever someone tries to help them manage the silent areas of their brains and memory banks that they keep unconsciously hidden. Those areas are the feeding ground for coaches.

A description of coaching and its value to physicians

Coaching has now become a rapidly increasing means of enabling anyone in any business, occupation, or professional environment to intellectually manage a world of rapidly increasing knowledge that no one can ever learn all about or keep up with.

Coaching is a process of transforming one’s intellectual capacity to recognize who one truly is by excavating the hidden gifts, insights, actions, and scaffolding that we use daily to make us better people or physicians and uncovers those self-created limiting rules we have made for our lives that we don’t yet recognize.

Therefore, through the repeated questioning by coaches of our motives, activities, beliefs, goals, and dreams for our futures, one by one, anyone can mentally open the areas of their own minds to alternatives and actions that they would otherwise never be able to. Even our children learn by repeating their questions.

You will soon be aware that coaching is not telling you how to practice medicine nor what you need to do to make you a better physician. A coach uses examples, the latest information, incentivizing comments, suggestions, curiosity questions, and ideas to consider helping you clearly see the answers you already have in your brain and don’t see yet.

A good coach will not push you but will encourage you every step of the way. To benefit the most, you will recognize that your coach is not only extremely interested in your success and finding answers and is a friend who cares about what you are doing and points out your improvements or shifts in your progress. The coaches are proactive.

You hire a coach to reach higher levels of position, credibility, and focus, which results in more confidence, trust in yourself, more productive thinking, and a professional medical practice that you would never sell for 5 million dollars.

You should also be aware that at the beginning of your coaching progress, you want everything to improve immediately. If your brain has been keeping all those secrets away from you, opening the doors to them will be slower than you think.

In effect, you have been coaching your medical patients in one way or another since you started your private practice. You have been doing the same thing that coaching does for you. You see the results in how your patients respond to your coaching and advice. It has been a fantastic adventure to witness how powerful coaching is. My virtual coaching courses have enlightened me about how far we can advance in life and our professional satisfaction — let alone making more income in practice.

I love coaching and teaching physicians interested in building their medical practice, managing their practices, using marketing to expand their practices, and becoming far better physicians in their practices. Patients quickly recognize the differences in the quality of their doctors.

A physician’s income in medical practice can often be a primary cause of physicians never maintaining their cutting-edge practice. And not end up with a sustainable retirement fund, can’t afford to improve their skills and medical knowledge, lose their medical practices for financial reasons, use suicide as an escape from the stresses such as burnout, disappointment with expectations of their practices, and being forced by government fee restrictions and practice mandates to leave private medical practice for employment in government-controlled or managed medical facilities.

Business education for all medical students would resolve most of these issues, but the availability of coaching can unquestionably be valuable. My medical school rejected my offer to mentor medical students or residency physicians because they want to keep their students away from those who agree with the need for business education for students that I advocate so much. It may be that I am the only physician advocating for such a solution to the lack of business education for physicians who struggle with finances throughout their medical practice careers.

Curtis G. Graham is a physician.