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."
If you follow me for any time, you know that I’m about physicians owning their value, recognizing their strengths, and balancing their lives. I was doing that before it became popular to talk about.
While it has a catchy ring to it, what you don’t know is that it was not always that way for me. And no one knew. It was one of the ways that I struggled in medicine.
There …
Maybe you think it’s too early to consider the next stage in your career.
Medical school graduation is just months away. Newly graduated doctors will be making their way to their first rotations in July. Senior residents and senior fellows are thinking and dreaming about their next position as new attendings.
This got me thinking.
Are you truly considering and factoring in your well-being as you look for the next position where you …
In the neonatal ICU, a baby dies from necrotizing enterocolitis or NEC. It’s not the first nor the last time I’ll experience death during my medical career. Doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, surgeons, and the rest of the team spent the days prior to his death implementing medical interventions and procedures, hoping to arrest the process. Two surgeries, multiple blood transfusions, antibiotics, drips to support the blood pressure, intubation, and ventilator …
The journey in medicine is a journey of goal setting. Doctors set goals all the time. We set the goal to become a doctor and then strive to achieve it. Once we decide on the chosen specialty, we set the goal for the residency training program we hope to match into, and we strive to achieve that. Match Day can be a day of great celebration for some, while it’s …
A successful career in medicine means learning how to forge ahead with feedback and not allow it to stop you in your tracks. For some doctors, this is a challenge. The feedback feels bad. It’s perceived as negative, not being good enough. We’re exposed to it and its negative impact quite early on the journey as medical students. Medical school rankings are feedback that begs the question, “Am I doing …
Medical school prepares doctors for patient care: perform a history and physical, and based on the findings, consider the next diagnostic tests to order, review all data, and develop a treatment plan. By graduating from medical school, you are skilled to perform those duties with a certain level of competency and confidence.
Success in the next phase of this journey and the rest of your life depends on honing those skills …
Many doctors decide to pursue a career in medicine in their youth. They have experience that points them in this direction. Once the decision is followed by a firm commitment, we seldom change the course. Medicine, here I come! At that age and with such limited life experience, it’s impossible to truly grasp the depth of the commitment to this career.
Becoming a doctor is not a career decision; it’s a …
This time last year, I took the podium at conferences as far away as Dubai to deliver my keynote speech entitled, “On The Cusp Of Life And Death, Choose Life.” My talk highlighted the professional and personal development opportunities that show up as doctors, nurses, and parents navigate the challenges in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) caring for preterm and term newborns on the cusp of viability due to …
There are times in our journey as doctors when life gets in the way. Well, life got in the way, and I had to go back to the basics and deepen my understanding and connection to myself and my source to easily navigate the curves and the bumps in the road.
I had to figure out a way to move through the tears that came with the diagnosis and poor prognosis …
Physician wellness and work-life balance are hot topics in today’s medical arena. It is on the minds of medical students, residents, and physicians in practice. While the concepts and methods to achieve it are enticing, the question remains: how does the individual physician achieve it? Some believe that system-wide changes in medicine will get doctors closer to these goals. Then there are the supporters of strategies that physicians can implement …
Over the past few summers, I’ve noticed that I’m fearful of swimming in the deep end of the pool. Gone is the fearlessness of my youth, when I’d venture out, take risks, and somehow just know I’d make it back to the shallow end, where I could firmly stand on a solid foundation.
Somewhere along the way, I had replaced my fearlessness with what-ifs.
What if I get a cramp in my …
I meet doctors in different arenas: clinical settings, conferences, and referrals. I am noticing a trend. We are keenly aware of what we do not want in medicine. We talk about physician burnout and its impact on doctors’ lives. We know firsthand the effect the EMR has on the doctor-patient relationship as doctors spend less and less time in direct patient care activities. And we are learning how to navigate …
We often associate our calling with our career. That’s what I did from the very moment I decided to become a doctor. That’s all I focused on. I studied for it. I invested time and money into it. Like many doctors, my identity was intimately woven into what it means to be a doctor. It’s who I became to the exclusion of everything else.
From the outside looking in, I was …
Hitting a roadblock in your life and career? Don’t get frustrated. Use the resources that are readily available to you.
Not sure what they are? Think about it. You have had access to them all the time.
The moment you decided to become a doctor, you became unstoppable. You may have followed the traditional path and went from college into medical school and then residency. Maybe your path took a few turns before medical …
This time of year, I like to walk down memory lane. I remember my first rotation in the neonatal ICU. I was up all night doing heel sticks on preterm neonates, only to have to repeat them when the results came back because the K’s (potassium levels) were elevated from squeezing the heel. The life of an intern and resident on a NICU rotation has changed since I trained. We …
After years of being busy taking care of critically ill and recovering neonates in the neonatal ICU, then coming home to take care of my children, I’m making new decisions. One of them is to learn how to relax and be still. It’s a new experience for me. It’s taken years and many shifts to get to this place. And it’s becoming a self-care practice that I really enjoy.
For the …
As July draws near, it is a moving day in medicine. For physicians, it signifies entering the next level of professional growth.
Let’s think about what moving entails. When we move from one physical location to the next, like into a new apartment or from one city, state, or country to another one, there is the process of sorting through our belongings. We make two lists: what stays and moves with …
Doctors are lifelong learners. Medical students and residents often hear the feedback to read more in their quest to acquire the knowledge to understand health and disease processes and direct patient care.
With so many demands on a resident and early career physician’s time, how do you make the most of the directive to read more? During residency training and throughout your medical career, the patient case mix guides your reading …
A doctor’s life is a life of service to others. In today’s medical arena, that service goes beyond patient care. As early as residency training, doctors have to learn how to navigate their workflow and the energy of nurses and other team members involved in the delivery of patient care. Doctors assume administrative roles and have to effectively manage their time between meetings and patient care. It’s easy to understand …
The seeds of emotional turmoil inherent in medical education are planted early in the pursuit of becoming a doctor. It is the unspoken fear that medical students and residents experience each day on attending rounds. It is the worry of missing a vital piece of information from the history and physical exam of a patient. It’s the concern that despite reading and preparing for the cases, emerging physicians may find …
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