Safe Haven - Life improvement strategies for the surgeon who wants more ... in 10 minutes - Episode 29

Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…

On this episode of the podcast, Jeff welcomes back spine surgeon and chronic pain researcher Dr. David Hanscom to discuss how our home should be a safe haven away from negativity and judgment. This seems like a no-brainer, yet David and Jeff indicate that it might not be as simple as it sounds. Whether we realize it or not, we often bring emotional baggage home from work, which can directly impact our relationships with loved ones.

David explains that our families and loved ones are our greatest source of support and ALSO our biggest triggers that feed pain, anxiety and stress. When we create a safe haven in the home, we can foster more of the love and support versus those triggers that promote negative feelings.

A safe haven in the home leads to healthier lives and more enjoyable medical practices. 

To do this, David suggests several steps to start creating a safe haven: 

• Step 1: Leave negativity and anger outside of the house. Step outside if you need to argue.

• Step 2: Involve your family in the process and never discuss pain (work stress and anxiety). 

• Step 3: Listen and do not give advice.

Creating a safe haven in our homes provides a barrier or respite from the stress and anxiety that comes with the practice of medicine in our current environment. 

If you aren't familiar with Dr. David Hanscom, he is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon specializing in complex spine problems. He's co-founder of “Awake at the Wound,” a process which brings athletic performance principles into the operating room. He's also the founder of the Direct your Own Care project (DOC), a structured rehabilitation protocol for chronic pain, and author of Back in Control: A Spine Surgeon’s Roadmap Out of Chronic Pain.

Making your home a Safe Haven is a perfect example of how surgeons can improve their effectiveness inside and outside of the OR.

Learn more from Dr. Hanscom on his website at www.BackinControl.com or on his program pages:

Create a Safe Haven – Family 
Healing Begins at Home – DOC Starting Point 

Batching - Life improvement strategies for the surgeon who wants more ... in 10 minutes - Episode 28

Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…

On this episode, Jeff welcomes back Jonathan Cabin to the mini-podcast. Jonathan and Jeff share with us a social media strategy we can use as a performance improvement tool in our personal and professional lives - Batching!  Jon describes batching for Jeff as a system for completing all of your social media tasks at once to avoid disruption and improve productivity. He explains that batching similar tasks can help improve our time management by minimizing instances of switching costs.
 

To do this, Jonathan suggests several steps to start: 

• Step 1: Choose a recurring task you complete on a regular basis, like posting on social media or checking email. 

• Step 2: Set an intention around batching the task you choose. 

• Step 3: Implement your batching system and monitor it for continual improvement! 

Most importantly, by implementing a system to complete all similar tasks at once you avoid disruption and improve productivity.

If you're not familiar with Dr. Jonathan Cabin, he is a board-certified facial plastic & reconstructive surgeon with a private practice in Beverly Hills, California. His areas of expertise include surgical and non-surgical facial rejuvenation, primary and revision rhinoplasty, facial reconstruction, and migraine surgery. In addition to caring for his patients, Dr. Cabin writes on the topics of performance-enhancement for physicians, surgical coaching, and bringing joy and meaning back into the practice of medicine. 

Batching is a perfect example of how surgeons can improve their effectiveness inside and outside of the OR.

What other ways can a batching strategy improve performance? Email Team@surgeonmasters.com your system of batching! 

System Change! - Life improvement strategies for the surgeon who wants more ... in 10 minutes - Episode 27

Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…

On this episode of the podcast, Jeff welcomes back Karla McLaren to talk about System Change!

While we can all benefit from the many strategies that we teach on these mini-podcasts, Karla shares with us a concern that we are focusing too much on self-care for surgeons, instead of looking at the systems in which we work. She illustrates her point with a key example - the undervalued emotional work that we do.

Karla offers three steps to help the system become more emotionally intelligent:

• Step 1 - Awareness: Become aware of the emotionally laborious work surgeons endure every day with patients, colleagues, and management.

• Step 2 -  Take Inventory of the emotional work you're doing daily, and the emotional work that people are doing for you.

• Step 3 - Acknowledgement: Look at emotional work as work and treat it seriously.

Most importantly,  just become aware of the emotional work you're doing and acknowledge the emotional work others are doing for you.

If you’re not familiar with Karla McLaren, M.Ed, she is an award-winning author and social science researcher. Her lifelong work focuses on her grand unified theory of emotions, which revalues even the most “negative” emotions and opens startling new pathways into self-awareness, effective communication, and healthy empathy. She is the founder and CEO of Emotion Dynamics, LLC. Karla is also the author of The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill (2013), The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You (2010), and the multimedia online course Emotional Flow: Becoming Fluent in the Language of Emotions (2012).

Awareness of emotional labor is a perfect example of how surgeons can improve their effectiveness inside and outside of the OR.

Help Us Help You - Life improvement strategies for the surgeon who wants more ... in 10 minutes - Episode 26

Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…

This week on the Mini-Podcast Jeff talks about the goals of the SurgeonMasters Podcast, and encourages listeners to “Help Us Help You!” SurgeonMasters is passionate about making a positive impact on the lives of surgeons and we believe that the life improvement strategies the podcasts provide help surgeons build a foundation for further skill development and well-being. 

We know how busy surgeons are and we aim to provide convenient and easy learning opportunities with minimal time investment.  Repetition is key, and dedicating small amounts of time, like 10 minutes to listen in to the SurgeonMasters podcasts, help surgeons take control of their growth and development to customize strategies to suit their own lives and maximize the benefits. 

SurgeonMasters applies the 8 PRACTICEs methodology to drive performance improvement and surgeon wellness through our podcasts:

1. Passion for performance improvement
2. Reciprocity of roles and relationship
3. Attitude resilience
4. Communication with mutual understanding
5. Time management
6. Inspire others to share their goals
7. Complex problem solving through simplicity
8. Energy for personal practice and wellness

Most importantly, help us help you!

Let us know how we can help! We welcome our surgeon listeners to do 1 of 3 things this week:

• Provide feedback to drive performance improvement
• Send us any ideas or topics you’d like to learn about
• Give us the names of educators that want to teach or have expertise on life improvement strategies

Send us an email at team@surgeonmasters.com and help us help you!

Getting Paid - Life improvement strategies for the surgeon who wants more ... in 10 minutes - Episode 25

Pump the brakes on your week and take 10 minutes to make your life as a surgeon just a little better…

On this episode Jeff welcomes Matthew Twetten, MBA, a health policy expert in physician payment and coding, to talk about financial wellness and being properly reimbursed for MORE of the work we do.

Our time is a valuable commodity. To make the most of our time, it's important to educate ourselves on the rules and processes of billing and coding. This may require additional work and better communication (with the insurance company, patient and billing department), but it will pay dividends in the end.

Matt offers three steps to improve your ability to get paid and receive proper compensation:

• Step 1 - Have a mindset that you deserve and need to get paid, to be sustainable

• Step 2 - Assign a value to yourself and your time

• Step 3 - While staff can track your time, you need to set your value and set the standard

Most importantly, start seeing your value and capturing your time this week!

If you’re not familiar with Matthew Twetten, MBA, he is a health policy and physician payment / coding professional. He has served in the government relations department of the North American Spine Society (NASS) and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS). He is currently an independent RUC and CPT consultant to several medical specialty societies and various stakeholders.

Email Team@SurgeonMasters.com if you would like to contact Matt. 

Getting paid is a perfect example of how surgeons can improve their effectiveness inside and outside of the OR.