Episode 21: How to Custom Craft Your Life as a Physician Mom,

with guest Sharon Hull MD, MPH

“What if we custom crafted our lives to fit our needs, and we didn’t apologize for that?” (Sharon Hull MD, MPH)

Dr. Sharon Hull believes this is a “bespoke life” and entirely within reach.

My special guest for this episode, Dr. Hull shares her wisdom culminated from over 35 years as a primary care physician, and over 13 years as an executive coach for women.

Relevant topics include:

• Illuminating what matters most to yourself and your loved ones, and how this can help
• Weighing the tradeoffs of balancing work and life as a physician mom
• Crafting a life that gets better, with increased agency and control
• Reconciling change in the post pandemic world

Her warm and thoughtful leadership had helped over 500-600 clients in her coaching practice alone, not to mention those lucky enough to be her patient!

Listen to my conversation with Dr Hull and get inspired!

As the founder of Metta Solutions, Dr. Sharon Hull has been a professional executive and leadership coach since 2011.

She was the founding director of an executive coaching program for faculty in a large academic medical center.

She has been a family physician for over 30 years and is dually board certified in both family medicine and in general preventive medicine and public health.

Her clinical and academic medicine career spans roles in solo rural private practice, academic and organizational practice, and administrative leadership as a member of the Dean’s staff, an active teaching faculty member, a clinical division chief and a department chair.

Her areas of coaching expertise include physician leadership development, career strategies, communication skills, organizational and institutional awareness and time and energy management.

She has a particular passion for working with women leaders in academic medicine.

Her primary goal as a coach is to help leaders become the best version of themselves, in service to their own values, and to the benefit of their stakeholders, organizations and the broader community.

I am delighted to talk with Dr. Sharon Hull today! Please listen in now on our conversation.

Dr. Cindy:

Hello and welcome Dr Sharon Hull. Thank you for agreeing to join me today.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Hello. It’s wonderful to be with you. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to your audience.

Dr. Cindy:

Oh, of course, now I am so excited to speak with you today to really tap into your knowledge and your experience and your own drive to help other women physicians in particular.

And, in my intro to this podcast today, I did include a lot of information about you, including verbatim, some of your own words which were and let me tell you what those are, so you know.

Your “primary goal as a coach is to help leaders become the best version of themselves in service of their own values and to the benefit of their stakeholders, organizations and the broader community.”

That such a poignant sentence, I highlighted it, and I wanted to read that back to you.

Now you just released a new book this year called Professional Careers by Design, A Handbook for the Bespoke Life.

I was excited to receive a copy of this from you, and I read it cover to cover. I folded over so many page corners because it is truly a handbook. It has the succinct takeaways with each chapter. It has tools and it has next steps. And my first question today, I’ll stop talking now, is what sparked the desire for you to write this book?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Well, you know, it’s interesting. This book is a culmination of somewhere between 12 and 13 years of coaching, largely in the space of health care, not exclusively.

I coach a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, but it’s the culmination of 12 years of sitting with people trying to make great decisions about their own lives and watching patterns.

I’m trained as a family physician, and we’re trained to watch patterns, right? So as people kept showing up at my coaching table and in later years, on my coaching zoom table, I kept saying I’m hearing common themes here.

I can kind of see where people are struggling and everybody’s different. There’s this is not a cookie cutter approach, but there are some common, common points of concern for people. And over time, and especially with the pandemic and people beginning to talk about really changing how they made decisions about what they were willing to do with their work lives, I decided I had enough patterns I could write about it.

So what I will say is it’s a distillation of the work that my clients have taught me.

Dr. Cindy:

Yeah, you’re giving, you’re giving credit back to your clients.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Yeah, I learn with them and from them every day, so I have to give them some credit, right?

Understanding the Bespoke Life

Dr. Cindy:

True and tell everyone, what do you mean by the bespoke life? I mean, I know they know what that word is, but what does it mean to you?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

>You know, it’s interesting. I have some friends who said I had to go look that word up. I don’t know what that word is. I assume everybody does. Some people said, “Don’t put this in the title, because nobody’s going to know what you mean.” And I thought most people are going to either go look it up or find out, right?

Bespoke is a word that comes from the tradition of custom-made suits for men, right? You go to a tailor, you get measured, you get fit, you get a custom made suit that is made to suit your body.

That does actually happen for women, but we don’t talk about it as often.

The point for me about using the word bespoke is, what if we custom crafted our lives to fit our needs, and we didn’t apologize for that, and we acknowledged that our needs change over time and at different seasons and with different life circumstances, and we just kept custom tailoring them to our needs. That’s what the book is. It’s a handbook for how to do that over a lifetime.

Dr. Cindy:

Wow. So it does apply to, and you mentioned it’s a career guide, but it applies not just the beginning of a career, but your entire journey through your life.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

That’s what I hope. I hope my readers will tell me whether I hit the mark or not. But it’s, it’s intended for somebody to pick it up and say, look at the table of contents and say, this seems to fit where I am right now, let me go read that section. Some people will read it cover to cover, and that’s wonderful.

I hope it becomes the kind of book that people read cover to cover once and go back to turn those turn down pages like you have when it’s appropriate. Because sometimes we’re ready to change jobs or careers. Sometimes we’re just trying to figure out what matters when something wonderful or catastrophic happens in our lives, and how do we make decisions?

And sometimes we just want the long view. What is this life we’ve made over time, and what have I accomplished? And am I still on the path I want to be on in this book, different parts of it speak to all of that.

Dr. Cindy:

So you’re speaking to all the various different situations that people might find themselves in today, and even there might be something different tomorrow in a different part of your book will apply to that, and you kind of carry it through.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

That’s what I hope. Thank you.

Dr. Cindy:

Well, I just to put in my plug. I did find that that it. I did read it through cover to cover. And I do, just give you a little feedback, I do plan to go back and to those pages that will apply. As you know, I’m part way through my career, but I have more to go, and it’s kind of exciting to see the future.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Well you know I think sometimes, I think for young people just starting in a career, having a sense of the long game will help keep perspective.

People in the middle of their career, they’re often moving about and trying to figure out, do I stay where I am? Do I go? What’s the right timing here?

people who are at the end of a phase or a section of their career and really ready to put a capstone on what they’ve done may not be ready to retire, but this helps them put a nice bow around what they have accomplished and decide how or whether they want to change gears.

Dr. Cindy:

Exactly. So what I’ve heard from some women is that they they’re not feeling in control of their career right now. Decisions are being made for them, and their goal or desire, of what they want is to live intentionally and to be able to choose their own life. And so how would the role of “design thinking” in their career planning help these women?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

So, I’ll say two things about that.

First, design thinking means you try something and keep trying to make it better. It may or may not be perfect, but you keep designing and retooling till you get closer to what you want. So that’s the idea of design thinking, and it applies to careers.

Most of us don’t have the perfect job or work life most of the time, but if we can get closer and closer to our ideal, we’re usually happier, and if we feel like we have some control over it. That is the thing that really makes the difference between throwing up your hands and feeling like you can adjust for things the way you want them.

So that’s the first thing I’ll say. That’s kind of how I look at design thinking.

The second thing I will say is, when you are trying to figure it out. Think of something that will make your current situation 10 to 20% better.

You don’t have to make it perfect next week.

You might like to. We all would like to. But I found that if people can make things 10 to 20% better in their own mind about what they’re doing with their energy, they feel better, and they have a little more resilience to be able to make the next 10 to 20% better.

So that’s how I think of design thinking.

Dr. Cindy:

So taking control on small steps enables them to get more control on future steps.

What are the Top 10 Things that Matter to You as a Doctor and a Mother?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

And it gives the most — yes, they not only get more control, but they also believe they have control.

I find that the most frustrated people that come to my door are those who just feel that they have no sense of control at all. They don’t believe there’s anything they can do.

So with those folks, I will sit down and say, let’s start with, what are the top 10 things that matter to you? You saw that in the book. What’s your top 10 list? And just make that list.

Now let’s talk about, if you could move toward getting more of that list in your life, what would be the top priority and what are you able to do right now, right so coming back to that touchstone of what are the top 10 things that matter the most to you at this season, really is how I would start with somebody who feels like they have no control and no choice.

Dr. Cindy:

Now, often when I ask people that question, “What matters most to you?” they will say, family. I’m one of the first people to say that.

So for that physician mom who’s listening, how can physician moms think about the stakeholders in their lives, their loved ones, and balance their personal needs with what their loved ones need?

How do they balance all these things when they’re trying to make a career decision? Sometimes their career takes a back seat to the spouse, and sometimes it doesn’t. So how do, you what do you say to them?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

I’ll say a couple of things. The first is that you’re always approaching your ideal and for any given decision, talking with, engaging with your stakeholders, at least the adults in your life.

And frankly, if you have children over nine or 10 years of age, they can have a conversation like this with you what matters to them.

Each of you make that list and then come together and talk about it. Maybe the adults come together first, and then you think about how to talk with the kids, but you make a conscious decision as to which priorities are going to win.

For most of us, every decision we make has some form of trade off. That’s the second thing I’ll say about this.

It’s a matter of weighing the tradeoffs and saying, “How long can I live with this trade off? And when do we reassess?”

And you can begin to hear how I’m describing this that I don’t think we make three-, five- or 10-year career plans.

When I was in high school, they asked us to do that right, and it’s like nothing I wrote in high school came true because I didn’t know what really mattered to me. I knew what mattered to everybody that I thought had a stake in it, but it wasn’t me, and what has evolved over my life is what matters to me.

So, what I would say here is, start the conversation with yourself, engage the other adults in your life about the tradeoffs. Have them make their own list. Come back together where you have children who can participate in the conversation at some level. Do it in an age-appropriate way and agree on the tradeoffs and a time frame for when you reassess.

Dr. Cindy:

I love that you included the children in that. And this just a personal aside, when I was in high school, my parents did the same thing.

They actually approached me to ask my opinion about moving across the country, and that was decades ago. Wow. It really mattered then, but now that I think back on it — that that they took my opinion into the into consideration. Oh my gosh, so valuable and very respectful.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

What an empowering thing to do for your child, right?

I’ll share, if I can share a story with you. This is from my coaching practice, and not identifying anybody by name or location, but I had a woman physician whose children were really struggling with her work hours, and we were talking about these things, and I said, “Have you asked them what really matters to them about your work time?” She said, “I haven’t.”

She decided that she was going to go home and ask. And they were, like, eight and 10 years old, and one of them, the oldest was a daughter. And the daughter said:

“You know, mom, all I really want is to know that you and I can go out to dinner once a month or every couple of weeks. It’s just the two of us. I just want to spend some time with you alone.”

And this woman said, I can make that happen, right? Okay, putting that on the calendar.

She talked to her son, who was a couple years younger, and what he said to her was:

“Mom, the only thing I care about is not being the last kid in the pickup line from after school programs, every day. If I could just not be last one or two days a week, I’d be happy.”

Well, she cried with him, and she cried with me and I and then she said, “but I can do that too. I can organize my day so that that one thing that’s really bugging him, I can do.”

She implemented those changes, and her kids weren’t happier. She was happier.

And she then ended up having a similar conversation with her husband, and you know, it just you can use that question as a way to get at the root of what’s the current big issue that needs to be addressed? What’s the tradeoff that’s hurting for someone? And how can we fix it?

Dr. Cindy:

Oh, that’s a beautiful story. Thank you.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Great story. It’s one of the best coaching stories from my career. So, yeah, oh, yeah.

The Pandemic Changed the Practice of Medicine

Dr. Cindy:

So I’m going to pivot a little bit. You mentioned a few minutes ago, you referred to the pandemic. COVID has affected so many of us. One woman in particular, this won’t identify her, but she said that:

“COVID taught us that we can be worked to the bone and tossed aside.” That was her impression of COVID.

What are some ways that the work world, or medicine, has changed post pandemic, particularly for physician moms?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

I could talk about this for hours, and I won’t. I’ll try to get right to the point I actually think we’ve gotten to be witness to a major social upheaval around the contract we make with each other about work in our society.

That’s the fundamental thing I think that COVID pointed out for us. And for physicians and women physicians in particular, it pointed out this sort of pain point around, what are the tradeoffs I’m making?

What have I agreed to that I’m no longer willing to agree to?

And I see more and more people saying, “I’m not willing to keep doing this, and it has to get different.”

I think that coming back to what is the pain point, what really needs to be addressed right now? And it won’t be everything on your top 10 list, but usually for most people, they can identify one or two things that they really need to have change.

Sometimes it can be an incremental change within the current work situation, and sometimes it requires a change of the work environment, a new job or even a different career.

I see people shifting their careers. I see people shifting in and out of the workforce, and I honestly think talking about it in my coaching practice, probably the gift that it gives people is a chance to believe that it’s normal, that they’re not flawed, that they’re not crazy for wanting to say this is not okay.

So normalizing that is really having a trusted listener who can help normalize it and make you not feel like you’ve thrown away something that you shouldn’t throw away in a career.

I think that’s a gift that we can give each other. I think the profession doesn’t let us talk about it. What does it mean to leave right? What does it mean to step away for a little bit and come back and how do you do that? We don’t talk about it.

I’m hopeful that we can normalize the conversation and say we made bargains about how to work as a physician when we came into the field that I don’t think hold true anymore, and we’re all looking for those employers who get it and who get that. We’re changing the contract, the social contract, about work in medicine. I and like I said, I could talk too long about this.

Dr. Cindy:

Of course, is a huge topic, and it’s led to so much burnout and moral injury from COVID and I hear what you’re saying that it’s not what these women agreed to when they started in medicine.

And, and the situation has changed. And, and the way to climb out of that, the way for the women who are up against a wall and say, “I can’t take it anymore”, is just, is to talk and what do you say to that woman who just can’t take it anymore?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

I think the first thing is find a trusted partner, or place that you can talk safely. That’s, that’s the first task.

The second task is figure out where the pain points are, make a list of what’s important to you, what needs to change about those pain points, and then go back and look for a 10 to 20% improvement in something.

If you could make this week 10% better than last week, that helps, even if it’s that you get 10% more sleep, you can make better decisions next week. If you’ve had a little more sleep this week.

Or, you know, take your kid to dinner with you this week. Now that you know that that’s important to them, and you begin to build the muscle of what we as coaches often call agency.

You have the agency to be in charge.

Do something every day that reminds you you have agency in your own career, in your own life. Those are the things I often say in those situations.

Dr. Cindy:

I love that you keep coming back to what matters to you and your list, and picking the most valuable things on your list and just making a small change in that this week, and you can tackle something next week. And incremental change can lead to big change.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

It can lead to the power and agency to make a big change to leave and say, I’m going to change employers, I’m going to go work for myself. I’m going to leave the this environment. I’m going to leave this profession.

By the way, I’ve probably coached five or 600 hundred people over a dozen years, and probably less than 5% of them have changed out of medicine. And I don’t take credit for that.

I think for many of us, life just needs to get better, and for some of us, that means we need to get out of the profession. But not all. I don’t have a vested interest that people leave the profession. I do think people choose to, and we have to make that okay. We have to make that not a failure for somebody, but most people want life to be a little better — every day.

The other thing is, I think that women try to take care of everybody else. We do that, and some men do that. I don’t want to, and not all women do it. So it’s not just gender, but it’s a common gender pattern in our culture.

When I have people make these top 10 lists. I don’t ask them to share their list with me unless they want to. I’m happy to see them. But my real question is, “what surprised you about your list?” Do you know what the most common answer I get is, what are you thinking?

Dr. Cindy:

Gosh, I don’t know. Surprise me.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

That’s fair. I didn’t mean put you on the spot.

Dr. Cindy:

That’s okay.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

The most common response is:

“I didn’t have a work thing on my list till number seven.”

I had no idea how much discrete stuff was more important to me than my career. And that is eye opening for people, they’re able to say, Yeah, it really is okay to go on to dinner with my daughter once a month. Maybe more than that is really important, and that’s okay. And what got out of balance, and how, and how do I change it?

I remember, I mean, I’ve been in medicine for 35 years. Early in my career, a number of people were complaining about the feminization of medicine, and women were making it all about work, life balance. And I’m quoting, you can hear the guys I’m channeling, right?

And I remember saying about 10 years in, you know, I think you want to go to your son’s soccer game too, don’t you? And the guys would say, Well, yeah, but we don’t get to do that.

I said, “Well, the women are actually changing that. You might thank them because they’ve made it possible for you to do that.”

At that time, you know, 25 years ago they didn’t have a response to that.

But I think that’s actually born out. I think we’re having these conversations because women have been brave enough to have them, first within themselves, then amongst ourselves, and then beyond.

We have more and more women in the C suite saying, No, we have to build the system better, right? It’s what makes me hopeful, and it’s why I stayed in medicine for 30 plus years. But I developed another part of my career that became coaching, and it became a natural segue at a time in my life when my family and I needed it to segue, right?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

But it was intentional. I think I surprised people along the way in my own career, because they didn’t think I would make a decision to do something different, And I was quite ready to do that. When my list drove it there.

Dr. Cindy:

I just thought of about 15 more questions I could ask you, and I would love to dive into but we don’t have time for all of that now. Maybe you can come back in the future and we can dive into some of those tangents. Oh my gosh.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

I would love that. What a treat to talk with you. I hope I haven’t gone off on a tangent beyond what you know.

Dr. Cindy:

No, I think you really drove down to the core issues with what’s facing physician moms these days.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Look, I want to leave you with this.

Everybody thinks that work life balance is achievable. I think it’s like a grade school playground teeter totter. Most of us have had that experience.

And if the people on either end are the same weight and not motivated by anything ill, you can keep it in balance for a few seconds.

If you have a bully on one end, it’s not going to stay balanced, and if the weights on either end are different, it’s not going to be balanced for more than a second or two.

Aiming for balance is hard. Aiming for alignment with what matters to you is easier.

Dr. Cindy:

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

So, yes, that’s design thinking and intentional creation of a bespoke life.

Dr. Cindy:

What a beautiful way to sum everything up.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Thanks for the chance to talk with you and with your audience, and I’m happy to hear from them at any point in time.

Dr. Cindy:

I’m going to list all of your links. You have a website, and you have a blog and and socials that will all be in the notes and a link to your book Professional Careers by Design, A Handbook for the Bespoke Life. What’s your primary choice if they want to if you talk to you?

Dr. Sharon Hull:

If people go to my website, any of those options are available to them. The blog is on the website. There’s a contact form if they want to inquire about working with me or my team. There was a book page. Everything that we do is kind of housed centrally in the website.

Dr. Cindy:

Okay easy, perfect. Well, thank you again for being here. I wanted to express my sincere gratitude for saying yes.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Oh, happy to say yes, and delighted to talk with you for a longer period of time than just a minute or two about these topics.

Dr. Cindy:

Okay, all right, take care.

Dr. Sharon Hull:

Have a good day. Thank you. Bye.

Sharon Hull, MD, MPH links:

• Website: https://www.mettasolutions.com/
• Blog – https://www.mettasolutions.com/metta-insights/
• Join the Bespoke Life Network, an online community for those who want to develop a meaningful and intentional balance between work and life across the span of their entire career.
• Twitter: https://x.com/MettaSolutions(@MettaSolutions)
• LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/mettasolutions/
• Book: Professional Careers by Design: A Handbook for the Bespoke Life