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Images I Can’t Unsee

Sure, there are happy images from my clinical days—before I left primary care for a writing career—like the sheer joy of birth when suddenly another live being entered the room; the relief on a patient’s face at being heard and helped; the grateful smiles from...

Why We Need Rituals, Now More than Ever

A few weeks ago I started a ritual that I’ve only done once before, and come August, won’t do again. I began creating a “movie” for my 18-year-old son to mark his leaving home. Three years ago, I spent several months before my daughter left for college creating a...

We kept arguing at home about COVID-19 safety. This simple exercise helped.

Last week my husband Sam and I started arguing. Frequent episodes of bickering about what used to be regular household decisions like whether we need to go to the grocery store. After several days of really resenting his take on almost everything, I realized we were...

Is Collegiality a Ghost in Your Organization? Try This.

Oct 10, 2019

When my co-author and I interviewed Christina Maslach, PhD, social psychologist and professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, for our book, I was struck by her observation that of the six domains she and her colleagues had identified...

The Dimension of Leadership That No Leader Should Ignore

May 20, 2019

El Pescadero, Mexico In a previous post I mentioned Leading Change in Healthcare: Transforming Organizations Using Complexity, Positive Psychology, and Relationship-centered Care, as an interesting take on creating positive organizations. I had an opportunity to speak...

Moving Forward Because Burned Out Clinicians Can’t Wait

Feb 5, 2019

Health care organizations are moving to address clinician burnout with a real sense of urgency. It is now commonly accepted that burnout is widespread among health care professionals and has serious repercussions for patient safety and the quality of care....

How a Social Psychologist from the 1950’s Got It Right and Why It Matters

Dec 14, 2018

I was intrigued when I read in Beyond the Wall of Resistance by Rick Maurer about Douglas McGregor’s theories on leadership. (Apparently, McGregor wasn’t the first to put forth these theories, but was the first to name them, back in the 1950s.) McGregor was a...

The Power of Words: Avoiding the Trap of the Physician Identity

Oct 19, 2018

I love the idea of turning a negative approach to improvement in health care—looking for problems—on its head. Appreciative inquiry, a process of focusing on a group’s inherent strengths and fostering positive interactions among group members, is one way of...

Musical Theater: a Vehicle for Humanizing Medicine

Sep 2, 2018

Research has demonstrated the benefits of integrating the humanities into medicine. What about bringing medicine to the arts? There are countless examples of physicians in literature: John Keats, Williams Carlos Williams, Anton Chekhov, Abraham Verghese....

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