Stephanie Wellington is a physician, certified professional coach, and founder of Nurturing MDs, dedicated to guiding physicians from stress and overwhelm to ease and flow in the demanding medical field. She empowers clinicians to infuse new energy into their careers and reconnect with their identities beyond the stethoscope. She can also be reached on Facebook and LinkedIn.
When Dr. Wellington integrated life coaching principles into her medical practice, her clinical experiences transformed. While she still faces long shifts, critical patients, and systemic challenges, she chooses to be solution-focused, prioritizing the best outcomes for her patients, her team, and herself. For over a decade, she has been teaching physicians the life strategies needed to transform their medical careers and optimize their well-being.
She is a speaker, author, and recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award. If stress and overwhelm are part of your practice, get started with the free guide: “15 Ways to Infuse New Energy.”
Stephanie Wellington is a physician, certified professional coach, and founder of Nurturing MDs, dedicated to guiding physicians from stress and overwhelm to ease and flow in the demanding medical field. She empowers clinicians to infuse new energy into their careers and reconnect with their identities beyond the stethoscope. She can also be reached on Facebook and LinkedIn.
When Dr. Wellington integrated life coaching principles into her medical practice, her clinical experiences transformed. While she still faces long shifts, critical patients, and systemic challenges, she chooses to be solution-focused, prioritizing the best outcomes for her patients, her team, and herself. For over a decade, she has been teaching physicians the life strategies needed to transform their medical careers and optimize their well-being.
She is a speaker, author, and recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award. If stress and overwhelm are part of your practice, get started with the free guide: "15 Ways to Infuse New Energy."
It became my go-to daily practice and changed everything.
Mondays and me: a rocky start
For years, I dreaded Mondays. They felt like a tidal wave of catch-up work after the weekend.
During fellowship, the schedule was structured so that one fellow covered the entire weekend. This setup gave the others a real break—time to rest, recover, and reconnect with family and friends. But then …
Moving into the new year, I’m carrying forward the lessons that help me stay aligned with my goals and take meaningful action. But this time, I’m doing it differently. I’m moving with ease and flow. The years of stress and striving? That phase of my life is over, and I am fully embracing a new way of being.
How do I know?
Because stress does not serve me. …
What sets great physician leaders apart? How do they ensure their leadership remains sharp, effective, and impactful?
Physicians often recognize the need to refine their leadership skills when they notice breakdowns in communication, delays in response times, or a lack of team cohesion. If you’re experiencing these challenges, it may be time to evaluate how you’re engaging with your team.
A common leadership misstep
Imagine …
While a new year offers new beginnings, it’s not about scrapping everything and starting fresh. Instead, it means sitting still and quiet long enough to truly appreciate life lessons and use them as fuel for growth.
So, here’s what I’m taking from one year to the next.
Peace
In 2024 I learned that life’s events can shake you to your very core, and there’s little you can do to stop it. But when …
The vacation had been planned for months. With laptop in hand, I headed to my happy place… my favorite place in the sun. I was excited to check some things off my to-do list while enjoying the sun, the beach, and the breeze.
But things didn’t go as planned. For the next ten days, the internet service was out. Despite my daily calls to the service provider, hoping for a fix, …
Do you begin each day with a clean slate? What if you could?
How different would the new day be if you weren’t picking up where you left off—with the stuck energy, the stale energy, the energy of being drained at the end of the shift, at the end of the day?
What if, as we walked out of the hospital, office, or clinic, that energy was left behind, and instead, we …
Can you remain steady in the midst of chaos—whether in the emergency room, on the unit, or in the clinic? There are times in medicine when chaos ensues. Maybe it’s a trauma rushing into the ER. Or a refractory asthmatic coming into the office who rapidly deteriorates, requiring immediate intervention. Maybe it’s a newborn who is floppy and cyanotic after birth.
Regardless of the clinical setting, there are times when the …
This season, I’m living even more fully into who I am behind the scrubs and stethoscope. I’m deepening my understanding of whether I’m operating in my highest energy versus operating from stress and fear.
When my mother passed away months ago, I was thrust into unbelievable grief. I looked to family and friends who had lost a parent and wondered how they got through it. I wanted the pain to stop. …
More than a decade ago I hired my first coach, and life was never the same. During my time with the life coach, I experienced first-hand the value of an end-of-year process that goes deeper than setting a New Year’s resolution.
Years have passed. As a busy physician, I’ve told myself that I don’t have the time for a deep dive reflection of my life and career. I have patients to …
We all do it at one time or another.
Maybe the office or clinic is closed, but you’re on call, waiting for the phone to ring and take your attention away from family, friends, and festivities.
Is it a source of stress, or have you learned to go with the flow?
There are many things that trigger us in medicine and in life.
In the first few years as an attending physician, holidays were …
The conversation of physician wellness includes self-care and self-care practices.
As a practicing physician, I adopted many self-care practices as the vehicle to restore peace and connect to the flow of life.
One practice has taken center stage for me, creating the pattern interrupt needed to get back in the flow of life when faced with stress and overwhelm.
My morning routine, whether I am waking up at home or in the hospital …
Get off the field.
Go back to the dugout and rally your team.
Create your rules of engagement.
The structure and hierarchy of medicine teach doctors to compete with one another. From the beginning, we’re told there are a finite number of acceptance letters sent to aspiring physicians. In medical school, we compete for one of a limited number of slots in highly selective and competitive training programs. And as attendings, we have …
There are times in medicine when the focus is on how hard it is to be a doctor in these uncertain times. We focus on patient care demands, reimbursement challenges and financial instability, and the general lack of feeling rewarded. And that can keep physicians stuck in a cycle of comparing what’s possible with the present circumstances.
Hey, I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve looked at senior attending physicians and …
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When was the last time you paused for a moment to feel your energy? I mean, really get in touch with the energy you hold inside your being?
Could it be that, as physicians, we have gotten so used to feeling stressed or drained at the end of the day that we’ve forgotten how to feel at ease and be in a state of joy as we take care of our …
Like anyone else, the holiday season can be the source of great joy. And it can add to the stress and overwhelm that physicians already experience. The practicing physician may find herself torn between responsibilities in the clinical setting and the preparations needed to make a memorable holiday experience for family and friends.
It starts with rushing from work to make it to the store before closing. It’s planning, decorating, baking, …
Lately, I ask myself, “Where is my focus?”
Is it on what’s in my inbox, where I receive daily emails about COVID-19, the vaccine, what’s working, and what’s not?
Is it on the news, the trial, the verdict, police shootings, and the state of unrest in our country?
And if my focus is on what’s outside of me, then who is focused on me?
Focusing on me is my job. It’s the most important …
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Physicians know what success looks like on paper. We spend a large part of our journey in medicine taking action to be competitive for medical school, the top-ranking residency training program, and the prestigious attending position.
Then the reality of a medical career sets in.
The focus on patient volume to generate revenue, the precise documentation needed to justify coding, and the micromanagement of the team to ensure patient satisfaction is a …
It’s easy to get distracted by the demands of the journey in medicine. Today physicians now see patients in person and virtually. Technology allows docs to bring work home and complete documentation remotely, which can blur the lines between work and home life.
It’s completely natural that physicians experience more stress and less success, as the demands seem never-ending.
Success is right where you are in this very moment. But success becomes …
Abundance is defined as “the state or condition of having a copious quantity of something” or “plentifulness of the good things of life: prosperity.”
The massive havoc of the pandemic causes us to shrink in the face of human frailty, morbidity, and mortality rather than feel expansive and abundant. Even the vaccine efforts are enveloped in distrust and scarcity.
As I sit to write this article, I dance between medicine’s possibilities and …
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When my medical career was in its infancy, providing for my family after divorce meant moonlighting in addition to working full-time hours. Although it was my decision, I was torn between my children and my work. Time in the hospital meant missing out on watching them grow, change, and develop their own little personalities.
Although it was 21 years ago, I still remember it like it was yesterday, where I was …
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