This is the second post in a series about the systemic impact of coaching in different industries. This week, I’d like to welcome Helen O’Grady, outlining coaching in healthcare. I was touched as I read it, considering the huge difficulties faced by our healthcare professionals.
Before I became a coach, I was a paediatric nurse for 15 years and I loved it!
As a nurse I was great at solving and fixing people’s problems, it made me a good nurse. However, over time all that happened was I was just given more and more problems to solve to the point that I felt overwhelmed and started to lose belief in myself. I then discovered coaching and realised there was a better way that meant helping people figure things out for themselves rather than doing it for them. I have never looked back!
Healthcare is full of dedicated professionals who work tirelessly to provide quality care to patients. However, this commitment often comes at a cost. The 2022 NHS workforce survey found over a third of staff were feeling burned out at work.
Watching highly accomplished, bright individuals who want to make a difference struggle to maintain their passion and look after themselves is heartbreaking. As a coach, I love supporting them to rekindle their passion, find a balance that works for them and enable them to feel hopeful about continuing to work in their chosen field.
Having worked with several hundred healthcare professionals I have noticed some common themes that have arisen in coaching.
Wanting to do everything right!
As a generalisation health care professionals are extremely high achievers, who have worked incredibly hard to get where they are. They set very high expectations for themselves, which is often one of the contributing factors to their success. However, in recent years they often find that the system doesn’t enable them to work in a way that allows them to meet their own high standards. They feel like they are not doing enough or not doing it right for their patients or colleagues. Over time this can lead to stress, anxiety, working longer and longer hours to compensate, and eventually to burnout.
Coaching in this space I have found some of the following questions to be particularly powerful for individuals:
- “What would good enough mean or look like for you?”
- “What difference would it make to you (or your patients, your family) if you provided good enough care?”
- “Tell me 3 good things that happened at work yesterday” often followed by “What part did you play in them?”
These last 2 questions are evidence-based to counteract the negative cognitive bias that we all have. It never fails to surprise me the impact this simple activity can have. A recent client, when we focused on these questions, said: “Sometimes a little goes a long way!”. She shifted in 2 coaching sessions from “I need to find a different job” to “Actually, I am doing OK”.
Emotions, Guilt and Grief
When I ask clients “How do you feel?” it is surprising how often they tell me what they think. Discussing emotions, or even noticing them, is pretty non-existent in a fast-paced healthcare environment. In fact, a Midwife client recently said to me “I haven’t got time to feel emotions, so I pretend they don’t exist. It’s not working for me anymore…”
For many in healthcare, the most familiar emotion is guilt. If I ask “How would it feel to leave work on time or to take time off due to physical or mentally ill health?” the answer is often, “I can’t, I would feel too guilty.”
Since the pandemic, working with healthcare professionals, particularly in primary care, I have frequently offered the following observation “I am noticing you talking a lot about how you used to be able to work e.g. more face-to-face, quicker referrals. How, if at all, does grief relate to this topic?” Nearly every time the individual has realised that they have not acknowledged the loss. Helping them validate their grief often enables a shift from feeling overwhelmed to thinking about how they can find more joy and passion in their current situation.
Supporting individuals to have greater awareness and less judgment around their own emotions can be very liberating and enables them to align their actions more closely with their values, thereby increasing their sense of well-being.
Coaching for Healthcare
Exploring these themes within coaching generally leads to one of two different types of conversations. The first is transactional or behavioural coaching where the client thinks and acts on practical or action things like putting boundaries in at work, leaving on time, saying no to certain requests, or finding ways to work more effectively.
The other is more transformational work where the client examines and challenges their mindset or beliefs such as “providing perfect care and meeting all my patient’s demands”, “I can’t ever make a mistake” or “being a good colleague and team player means I can’t take sick leave or leave work undone”.
Working in this space I have noticed I really need to look at my own mindset as a coach. When clients are vulnerable and either at or close to burnout, if I am not careful, I can rush to “rescuer”. I sometimes only have one 30-minute session with a client. This means as a coach I have to hold onto and believe in my client’s capacity and capability to do the work themselves.
Feedback and experience tell me that coaching healthcare professionals can really make a difference. The recent evaluation of the Looking After You Too coaching intervention in primary care showed that coaching had a significant positive short-term impact on wellbeing, resilience, and burnout.
We all need to be invested in our healthcare professionals as they are going to care for us or our loved ones. Let’s look after them!
If you are a healthcare professional wanting to find out more about coaching or a coach who works in this space, get in touch, I’d love to connect.
Helen O’Grady
Coach – Coach Supervisor – Mentor Coach
07887 421126
helenogrady@outlook.com
www.helenogradyconsulting.com
