Coaching is a synonym for mentoring, counseling, guidance, preceptor, teacher, tutor, and professor. Regardless of how you choose to perceive the word “coaching,” the significant action implied by the word is to provide the client with appropriate verbal, video, written, and audio communication or information necessary to enable you to reach a higher level of success or accomplishment in your medical career.

Ads to physicians, like those below, occasionally have a humorous effect but can attract medical patients for you. In this example, it’s about coaching.

1. You are likely to become far smarter than most physicians about how to make money using business tools. As a result, you will be expected to give up your die-hard secret to your unbelievable increase in medical practice income, which is not obvious to your peers.

Peer’s interest in you is to harass you to the point of giving in to their revealment demands. Peers that never intended to refer a medical patient to you in the past. Peers who never intended to research how they could earn far more income themselves — peer predators.

2. You will have to struggle with the Internal Revenue Service when they discover your rapid increase in income from
unknown sources while continuing to practice in your usual way. The IRS will tell you that your annual tax filings will now be audited annually instead of every five years. What’s even worse is the new tax law that is prepared to check every $600 of income in your bank account, which is required to be reported to the IRS. Even your neighbors will know something is strange as they become aware of that new covered 60-foot pool you are adding to your backyard.

3. There’s the continuous issue of your medical patients chiding you for charging them too much when they believe you are already filthy rich. Remember, you will have to hide your new top-of-the-line Porsche in your neighbor’s garage and only take it out for a spin on holidays, weekends, and evenings to avoid being noticed by those peers who envy you so much.

Who wants their 1957 Chevrolet to show up in the doctor’s parking lot behind the hospital daily?

It would, however, be a suitable time to secure an offshore bank account somewhere. One that the armed IRS tax officers cannot get to.

Another problem you will also have to tolerate is your constant escalation of practice income which will become much harder to hide over time. Perhaps dealing only with small cash segments in your financial transactions would avoid attention.

4. It would be of value to have your upcoming spouse sign a prenuptial agreement regarding secrecy — just in case divorce happens or your wealth is so extreme that your office staff will go on strike for higher wages and other favors. Everyone knows that physicians try to get divorced early in their medical practices before they become wealthy for good reasons.

My favorite aunt Helen instructed me not to marry my high school girlfriend. She barely made it through high school and advised me to marry someone in my medical school class if I would make it that far. She was right, and I ignored her advice.

5. Wise physicians discover too late that coaching often helps to fill in the unconscious gaps in our thinking that also exist in our memory banks, our maturity level, and our unique intention to avoid another level of financial and business education. What is so hard to digest is that we physicians have been intellectually corrupted by the idea that coaching is just telling me what I already know. The thought that we do not know everything by the time we graduate from medical school is a terrible mind-busting event that persists. “Good enough” gives perfectionists a migraine.

When we are most vulnerable (have had no business education), we suddenly realize that we have, unfortunately, also taken on a professional job that requires us to handcuff ourselves to the education requirements necessary to keep ourselves at the forefront of our specialty, rather than the business side of private medical practice that enables all physicians to remain in practice. But there is another side of coaching for physicians that are deadly serious.

Results from medical practice coaching that you should seriously consider

1. Physician coaching is not to tell you how to practice. It’s a means to open the subconscious self-restrictions that you have accumulated over many years, which restrict you from recognizing what you are truly capable of doing — and you don’t know that until you are coached.

Have you ever faced a situation in practice where you confidently made a crucial decision about managing your office staff, only to discover that it raised chaos instead of efficiency? You made that decision without understanding that implanted in your subconscious mind is a large entanglement of self-created restrictions that compromised your decision. Coaching is a way of discovering those you never knew about and enables your conscious mind to self-destruct those that are disruptive.

2. Virtually every physician who has engaged in clinical medical practice over the last century has relied on their conscious mental guidance to make all the decisions necessary for reaching their optimal level of medical practice success. However, within our unconscious minds, there are areas of unrecognized factors that unconsciously may guide our decisions in the opposite direction than intended.

These secretive underground factors include numerous biases for and against people, ideas, decision-making, and tolerance. You may have chosen a surgical specialty for your career only to discover later that the talents you thought you had been far off the mark.

Either you hate what you are doing, you jump to another specialty, or you find yourself continuously being criticized about your treatment/surgical efforts by peers or hospital committees. Coaching opens those items to a conscious level.

3. Nothing is more important than knowing yourself. The problem with that is that most of us never find out about the incredible value coaching has for physicians — no articles about it — no media coverage about coaching for medical doctors — no medical school teaching about it — and nothing about it in medical journals.

Over the last three years, coaching has escalated to a point now that it is worldwide and available for almost any professional in any field. The process of opening the closets of the subconscious brain for anyone creates a new world for the conscious mind to follow. It’s a dominant factor necessary for functioning entrepreneurial beliefs and actions.

By definition, all physicians are entrepreneurs, but most don’t know it. For most, it is an exciting feeling to know who you are inside and what you can do.

Most physicians sell themselves short, unfortunately. It’s the reason that physicians, especially in the U.S., refuse to obtain business education — something that will multiply your medical practice career incomes.

Curtis G. Graham is a physician.