Carole Warde, MD, FACP, LCS Certified Coach

As a dedicated wife and mother, and a recently retired academic General Internist, I have long been committed to balancing life’s joys, challenges and responsibilities. Early in my career as a clinician educator, I experienced burnout. I took a break to recover and learned more about burnout and how to avoid it. The first step for me was to build and appreciate meaningful relationships with my family, friends, patients, trainees, colleagues. I also became very interested in personal-professional balance, which led me to study the predictors of marriage, family and career satisfaction of physicians and later to learn leadership skills to promote teamwork and psychologically safe work environments. Now, I am a passionate advocate, mentor and coach for personal-professional balance. While workplace expectations and the culture of medicine should support physicians and trainees, we are not always so lucky to be in such environments. Promotion of self-awareness, resilience, and self-compassion are ways that coaching can help us thrive in all aspects of our lives and eventually to gain the strength to promote change. I am very grateful for my 36 years as a clinician caring for underserved populations and promoting interprofessional teamwork, and for my career as a medical educator and researcher. My current and future contributions to medicine will be to incorporate my knowledge and experiences with life coaching. As a coach, my vision is to be present and create space for medical trainees, clinicians and leaders to grow in self-awareness, empathy, vulnerability, self-compassion and resilience. In so doing, my hope is that they will be able to enhance their personal happiness and professional success.