More doctors are learning the benefits of becoming a practice owner and starting their own direct primary care (DPC) practice. DPC is a primary care model where patients are not billed by insurance, but instead charged a flat recurrent membership fee. Dr. Cynthia Villacis is a direct primary care physician and one of our life coaches at PhysicianCoaches.com. She opened her DPC over 5 years ago after getting burned out as an employed physician, and then opened her life coaching business a year ago to help physicians who are stressed and want to make a change in their personal or professional lives but feel stuck. You’ll be energized by Dr. Villacis’ inspiring story!
Dr. Villacis’ e-booklet: How to Beat Physician Burnout
https://www.coachcynthiamd.com/Burnout
Transcript:
Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. As this is the podcast for physician entrepreneurs, and I love to spotlight doctors who are in the trenches. Becoming their own boss. And I’ve got another one here and I’m so glad she’s on the program. She has a direct primary care physician as well as a life coach.
She opened up her direct primary care practice about over five years ago, after getting burnt out as an employed physician at a federally qualified health center or FQHC. She then started her life coaching business about a year ago to help physicians who are stressed and want to make a change in their personal or professional lives, but feeling stuck.
So I’m super excited to have her. She’s one of our physician coaches on our physician coaches.com website, where you can find over 200. Physician coaches, but you can pick four in a 12 different specialties. So I love to bring into the program here today, Dr. Cynthia, via VSCs. Cynthia, how are you doing today?
Cynthia Villacis MD: I am doing great!
Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you! Thanks for coming on to the program, I was mentioning just prior to us coming onto the call, I know doctors who started up their own DPC practice and they’re super busy just trying to manage the business and doing all the things that we often don’t think of when we were employed physicians.
And then you decided, you know what? I want more stuff. I want more stress in my life. I’m going to take on more things and I wanted to become a life coach as well. So I want to hear about your journey. We talked about it. We’re probably gradually. Graduated residency, but at the same time, you’ve had those turf wars.
You’ve probably got them experiences, but when they take about your journey from getting into the medical school, then get into residency and then deciding to start up your own DPC.
Cynthia Villacis MD: That’s going back quite a ways. So I am 19 years out of residency. So going into as far as the going into med school part I was a little bit late in terms of coming to the decision that I wanted to be a doctor.
So I graduated back in 1993 from Oberlin and stayed up there and worked a couple of years finishing up my pre-recs and then came down to Wright state. And Dane for med school, I was interested in doing primary care and I had applied to and gotten into two med schools in the state of Ohio. And I had gotten married and undergrad and the other school that I got into.
Was new Yukon. I was one of two people who had gotten been accepted and I didn’t want to be like the only married medical students and I’m right. Stayed had people coming from all different backgrounds. And I had a focus in primary care. So that’s how I ended up down at Wright state. And then I had my first child fall of my fourth year of.
Med school. And I was looking at residences at west. I made it out to Seattle with my husband and a two month old. And yeah, we were like, oh, we love Seattle, but his family is in Ecuador. My mom was in Cincinnati and We just decided that we wanted to be at a place where we’d have more support. And then as we went through med school and I had my second kid at the end of residency at the, my second kid at the end of residency we just decided to stick around the greater Cincinnati area.
My kids would at least to get to know one side of their grandparents. So that’s how we ended up here. So actually on the other side of the river, I’m in Northern Kentucky and family is very important and when we can be starting to raise, yeah, sure.
It is so. Ended up coming back here, figure, we could always go to Seattle on vacation if we wanted to, but we didn’t have to live out there.
Mike Woo-Ming: So you went into residency and this was a time too. It was like, cause I was in that same time, a lot of people say you gotta go into primary care was a lot of your colleagues going into primary care that time because now it’s the, I think, it’s definitely shifted everything now is about specialties and primary care is off after thought. It sounds like at least I perceive it that way.
Cynthia Villacis MD: There was but… Set up with a focus on primary care. I’d helped remember helping organize like primary care day and, we had a family practice interest group and stuff like that coming up. So me and it was the only practice was definitely recognized and encouraged.
And we had great mentoring as far as going towards primary care. And I remember working. Doing some rotations, as far as at the us and the community health centers, up there with Dr. Gala Roy at east Dayton health center. And just really got encouraged to go in that direction. Okay.
Mike Woo-Ming: So you’ve graduated, you completed your residency and now you’re looking at a whole different job offers, I assume. Or did you have a. A place in mind where you wanted to practice, what was that for you?
Cynthia Villacis MD: For me, I was wanting to stay in the greater Cincinnati area, at that point in time. I was pregnant with my second kid and my husband was in school at Northern Kentucky.
We were wanting to stick around the area and yeah, I ended up initially working At a hospital owned group for a couple of years. And as a hospital owned group, you don’t really have much control over what’s going on. And they ended up moving a physician into my office that had a problem with prescribing and it just, it was not a good match at all.
I ended up leaving there. I did urgent care for a year. And then I started working in a community health center systems. I had gotten exposed to community health centers through medical school and really wanted to be able to try to help people from different backgrounds and the community health centers have a way of having sliding scale for folks that don’t have insurance and tend to have reduce fees for labs.
And sometimes for medicines also, but they’ve got this weird thing where the way they get reimbursed by the government, they would get reimbursed like for the same amount, for a level three and a level five. You have the thought that, it’s a more complicated patients that you should get more time with them.
It doesn’t really work very well. But I stayed at a community health center system for a number of years. I was at neighborhood healthcare for three years. And then I was with another community health center system in the greater Cincinnati area for eight or nine years. And I love that.
Mike Woo-Ming: Which one kind of worked better or what was the reason for switching?
Cynthia Villacis MD: But the CEO, to be honest the CEO at the first place I always wanted to provide. Quality care as far as to the patients. And she was more interested in how timely everything was, but didn’t give me support to help make it more timely. My ma had to do the blood draws as well as from the patients.
And. It just it was a very dysfunctional system. There was one time where she came down and knocked on my exam door and told me to hurry things up. This is a community health center system where people like literally would get off the bus, before their appointment and after their appointment, all of a sudden you’d have a waiting room full of patients, that was the way the saran, you just saw whoever was next, but yeah, it wasn’t a physician. No. Oh no. She was definitely not a physician. And what kind of made me move me towards leaving is when they were having economic fit financial problems.
And I was trying to think through, as far as what other things we could change, how I could change things once again, wanted to try to have some influence on how things happened. And the only answer she could come up with to get me about how things were going to get better is that I was not seeing more patients and I was already seeing.
Literally I was like, how about this? This, yeah, no, the only thing that she came up as I would see more patients I’m like, yeah, I can’t do that. I’m already doing 10 to 15 minute visits on the patients and yeah. That wasn’t gonna work. So I left from there and went to another community health center.
And this can be health center. They looked at me house number was not having the same kind of financial problems. But once again, I think it was in that committee health center system when we switched to EHR. So it was a very dysfunctional EHR system. At what point in time I counted, there were over 20 clicks that I had to make to get lab results into my inbox and send it to my nurse. 20 clicks! You can imagine primary care, how many times over and over that had to be happened, and just add to that.
Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. I love that because I’ve simulated done these kinds of passive aggressive ways of explaining things. And I love that it’s constantly 20 clicks to do something that I could just write down for yes, 20 clicks.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah. And the person that they had in charge of the HR implementation I think she was very overwhelmed. And there, I remember one point in time, I was trying to ask her to change the wording on one of the orders that we had to do, because we’re getting called from the radiology centers, asking us what they were supposed to be doing.
Because there was one of the codes was for an extracranial ultrasound. Which a crowded Doppler, but, apparently, it was confusing everybody, but it’s just like something that would go in and you could just change the words really easily, in terms of I knew how to do it, but I couldn’t do it because I wasn’t the person that was supposed to be doing it.
I didn’t have authorization. But it didn’t want to make changes like that, so it’s, it was it was a struggle there in terms of the computer system and I just ended up working longer and longer hours. I had 36 patient contact hours a week, but was probably working more like 60 ish. At least, for all those extra hours. Yeah.
And I remember talking about wanting to cut back on my hours at one point in time. Because I’m like, this is too many hours. But then I was going to be part-time and wouldn’t call it for the benefits that I needed. So I just felt really stuck, and I, got burned out I still wanted to provide good care for the patients, but I really ended up feeling like I couldn’t, I just couldn’t make the system work. I was running behind. I didn’t like being behind, but I thought it was more important to take care of the patient in front of me than to get them in and out the door.
Mike Woo-Ming: Who did you were able to talk about these things? Did you talk about this with your husband? You have to plan for dots at work?
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah. I talked to my husband about it. I was on the leadership team. I talked with the medical director of. Oh, yeah. I brought up, my concerns, my issues.
I made some suggestions, I was having problems with charting and I was like Hey, can I have a scribe? Could I have Google block? Could we try the Google goggles? Could we try the way scheduling? And it was like no. And I’m like, okay. I basically just end up getting really burned out and it didn’t I feel like it was it wasn’t sustainable.
And I was trying to figure out how to make it change or what to do differently. Cause I, I didn’t know what to do. I thought it was me. I didn’t burn out. Wasn’t a thing that people were talking about in the early the night. Not nineties, but it’s 20, 2010s, right? Whatever year that is. Moving people, weren’t talking about that back then. At least not people that I knew. So I thought it was just me. I didn’t understand that I was getting burned out or whatever else was going on, but I know I needed to change.
Mike Woo-Ming: There were no internet discussion groups back then.
Cynthia Villacis MD: No. Don’t remember any of that. Anyways, I was reading a medical economics journal and I wrote about this thing called direct primary care. And I Googled direct primary care near me and found a lady that was about an hour and a half away. And then a little Dr. Molly Rutherford, and she had opened a direct primary care practice. So I went down and visited her software office, went to a conference with my husband and came back and was like, “Hey, this is what I want to do. How are we going to make this work?”
Mike Woo-Ming: And I’m curious, how did that conversation, did you just email her or pick up the phone and say, Hey, I want to do the same thing. Can I shout at you? How did that happen?
Cynthia Villacis MD: I don’t remember, this is those like six or seven years ago, but I either called her, emailed her, but she was, super helpful, very open to, yeah, come on down and shadow me and I’ll show you what my offices like. And that’s one thing I really appreciated about the DPC community is there’s a lot of.
Helping each other that’s going on? I think part of it comes from being a relatively newer practice style and not being quite so many of us, there it’s, that’s, it’s been a good community. But I still felt stuck. It was hard to make a change. One of the things that helped me move towards making a change though, is I also do addiction medicine yet.
I forgot to tell you about that half. So I started doing. Started doing that year or two before I opened my DPC and I was as an employee And I had seen what people were able to do to change their lives, to improve their lives and to get back on their feet. It was all these things against them.
They were able to make things better, and I’m like, whoa, I don’t have any of that stuff going on. I’m just talking about, opening a business and even if the business has problems, I can go get another job. As an employee someplace, if that’s what I want to do, so worst case scenario is I go back to doing what I’m doing now or to urgent care.
And you know what I’m saying? It’s so that you put things in a whole different perspective, and helped me move forward. And I think that, and seeing that there were other people out there. That we’re doing something different. That, that probably was, that was super huge. I think if I had just read about it and hadn’t gone to the conference and met these people who were doing things other than being an employed physician, I, that would have been so much harder for me to move forward.
Mike Woo-Ming: You saw some people who were actually implementing it. Wasn’t just a pipe dream,
Cynthia Villacis MD: Exactly. It wasn’t a pipe dream. And everybody was happy. It was like the only medical conference I think I had been to, at that point in time where people were actually like, happy about what they were doing. There were hopeful, and I think it’s the whole. Being able to have some control over your practice or how you do things. Yes, you’ve got the responsibility for it. You have to make payroll, there’s certain things you have to, do. But to be able to decide, if you want to do something or not that was one of the things that I had challenges with as far as an employed physician, is that.
I felt that I had all these responsibilities over the outcomes. I had all these boxes that I had to check all these criteria, but I didn’t have any control over the process. And so here I am, I’m like, okay. Yeah, I agree. Those are great ideas. We should do things. We should make sure that people have their
But if you only have 10 or 15 minutes to do it, And you how was all that supposed to happen? I don’t want to not educate them on their diabetes medicine so I can ask them if they have gotten that at all these other things done that. Anyways, so try to do PHQ cycles around that.
But it never got things working well enough that I felt I could do what I wanted to with the patients.
Mike Woo-Ming: I read this somewhere and it was a great description of why we were anxious or why we have anxiety. And it wasn’t, it was simply a math equation. It was anxiety equals uncertainty plus.
Powerlessness. So in the future, we can, when you’re an entrepreneur, you’re always going to have uncertainty, but you have power. You empowered yourself. And often times as employees, we have both, we have this uncertainty and we feel powerless. Does the DPC, you found a way to empower yourself. It’s
Cynthia Villacis MD: Perfect.
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the empower. Yes. You hit it right on the nail.
Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. So you just, you go in you go to this conference, you’re surrounded by like-minded individuals. They seem really happy. You tell your husband, I want to do this. What was that timeline like? And when did you actually, like, how did you work on your business, working your practice while still probably work in, full-time schedule I assume. And your FQHC?
Cynthia Villacis MD: How did I do that? Actually I, I told them a little sooner than I was planning to. They were asking me to start up a new line of service for the company doing addiction medicine services. And I was like, oh, I have to tell them because I can’t be responsible for starting a new line of services and then leaving.
Yeah. So it was. Basically evenings and weekends, and it was hard to find the time to do some of the things that I was wanting to do. I did have a brief period of time where I wasn’t open yet after I had left. The employed position, but that was really because I outed myself earlier than I planned to in terms of letting them know what’s going on.
That was actually really helpful because it is hard to make calls and find out about things during the day. It’s hard to look at commercial properties that, if you’re not getting home until eight o’clock at night, how are you going to go look at the properties?
Mike Woo-Ming: If you do have to, when you’re looking for a place, did you want to make sure or where they’re like non-compete clauses or anything like that? I know it’s probably a different type.
Cynthia Villacis MD: No they’re told they’re totally were non-compete clauses. So my community health center that I was working at with was over in Ohio. And that was part of the reasons why I came back over to Kentucky besides the fact that I lived here. There was a non-compete.
So it was really irritating because, I’m working at a community health center with patients with Medicare, Medicaid and our insured. And there, there are more people there, more patients needing those sorts of services, and there are places for people to get it, and I just honestly personally have a philosophical issue. People having non-competes I understand as a business owner, why you’re concerned about losing your patients, but from a patient perspective, people should have the right to follow their physicians.
They should be able to, have their physicians tell them where they’re going, some of my patients got their letters and some patients just had me disappear on them because not all my letters were sent out appropriately and there wasn’t anything I could do about that, but yeah, so I moved to a base of basically I was starting from scratch, over here in Kentucky. And one of the big things I had to figure out though, was how was I going to finance it? ’cause, I’m not independently wealthy. I’m the primary bread earner, so a lot of those things were things that had kept me stuck before.
But it’s one of those things that you have to, if you agree to move forward before you have all the details figured out, you’re more likely to figure out the details, So initially, I increased the number of hours that I was doing the addiction medicine. So I was doing that with twice a week and in part to our money part, because I like it.
I’m there one day a week still at this point in time. But also in the practice, once I was talking to more people about, the practice and what I wanted to do, and I found other things that I could do in addition to seeing the patients as I was trying to get more patients come in physicals, for vets. I could do telemedicine. There, there was all these other opportunities that I wasn’t aware of. Immigration physicals. I do those. I started doing those actually like right before the pandemic. So I didn’t deal with this initially. I love doing immigration. That’s actually one of my favorites.
Things just because I love meeting people from different backgrounds and cultures. And I’m mean, you can see that looking back that I was an exchange student for a year. I remember, back in 88 and I speak Spanish as a second language. That’s something that. I like and I also haven’t brought my husband through the immigration process.
He came over on a FIA fiance visa back in 91. So I have some experience that way, but being able to do the immigration physicals for patients who speak Spanish in their native tongue. That’s. That’s really nice, to be able to actually have a conversation with somebody, as opposed to having them have to do everything through an interpreter.
Yeah, it’s fun.
Mike Woo-Ming: We have a number of people who listen to our podcasts. You want us to set up their direct primary care practice? What are some like two or three things, advice that you can give them? Lessons that you’ve learned after starting a beer DPC.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Let’s see. I would say network, both with other people who are doing direct primary care with people in the community so they can know you’re there and know that your services are something that they want.
And with other physicians who are doing things outside of employed medicine, both to learn of opportunities as well as just to get support, cause it really helps mentally when you are working with and talking with. I have support with other people who are also trying to do something different.
Mike Woo-Ming: Now, when you signed up, did you there’s a bunch of DPC companies out there, like MD VIP and some other things like that. Did you go with one of these companies or did you just do this on your own?
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah, no. MD VIP is really concierge more so than DPC I was wanting to provide something that’d be more accessible, coming out of the background, the community health centers then MD VIP was and yeah no, I did it on my own.
With, support and talking to friends and stuff, but it was a lot of learning, but I think being open to learning and I think that’s another big thing as far as learning when you’re starting your own business realizing that. If you make a mistake, you didn’t kill anybody.
And it’s actually a good thing cause that’s how you learn. You know what I’m saying? And there’s, it’s much easier to fix things somewhat and in business if you miss something on the lease that you should have found that you stopped well, the next time you see it, at least you’re not going to miss it.
You learn something, and don’t beat yourself up about it. Take it as a lesson and go on,
Mike Woo-Ming: Tell us about your practice now. Is it a small practice? Micropractice how many hours are you working on your business right now? And, yeah,
Cynthia Villacis MD: so I have gone back to forth between being a small practice micropractice I had an ma with me for a bit.
A year and a half and then COVID. So then I would, then I had no MNA for quite a while. Probably about a year and a half, and then I just hired her back in January. And I also have a virtual medical assistant that’s with me two days that answers respond Tuesdays two days a week. So I’m currently working in my DPC.
Four days a week combination of practice stuff, seeing patients syndrome. You’ve seen direct primary care patients doing immigration physicals, and then the business part of it, it’s obviously a mixture of all of it. But I’ve really been able to, I think, grow a little bit more again, these last couple of months since I’ve had Danielle back, because it’s hard to answer the phone in a schedule appointments when you were working with patients,
Mike Woo-Ming: What surprised you, is there anything surprised you after you’ve launched your practice?
Cynthia Villacis MD: I’m trying to think one thing there were lots of surprises.
Mike Woo-Ming: I would assume. So we knew everything before it happened.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say honestly, I can’t think of one thing that was a surprise. It’s just been an ongoing learning experience. Which is good because, I like learning and trying new things, but Yeah, I’m sorry, I can’t think of one thing.
Mike Woo-Ming: In terms of a physician who wants to do this kind of practice, what type of skills do you think should they have, if they want to take this on?
I think being willing to learn about the business aspect as well as the medical aspect. I think being not being as scared to make a change, if something isn’t working.
Being willing to put your out yourself out there in terms of talking with people about your practice because you do have to go out and find patients they’re not just going to magically appear on your doorstep and that takes word of mouth and networking and it’s different than when you are.
If you’re an insurance-based practice, people, a lot of times would show up because your name was on their card or they look to see, where, who is the doctor that’s close to them, or that has the, the reviews when you’re starting from zero and you don’t have an insurance feeding your patients, you have to get them from someplace.
So you have to be willing to be a person to get out there and put yourself out there.
So how do you put yourselves out there doing community talks? Are you marketing online? What are some ways that you market your practice? I’ve done a variety of things. COVID mess with some of them, but things that I have done, like over the last five to six years I was in BNI for, at one point in time.
Cynthia Villacis MD: I gave different health talks as far as to the library on different topics. I have had open houses. I have done cold calls and showed up at people’s offices. Hey, why don’t meet you? Also like in the like the local, like physicians, mom group, so like putting that out there and then they I guess I’d like to say obvious, but maybe it isn’t obvious.
Cause I don’t know that it’s obvious to me originally just like having a website and a Facebook page and then that kind of stuff. I’ve done different forms of marketing, but really the. Word of mouth has done the biggest
Mike Woo-Ming: return. Yeah. That always is the best.
It just word of mouth and let’s add your name of your practice is
Cynthia Villacis MD: health connections, direct
Mike Woo-Ming: primary care actions. Okay, great. And we can put a link to that too, in our show notes. You’re also a life coach and we were joking. I was like, sounds like you don’t have a lot going on right now. So tell me how that journey started being a life coach.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah. I you had brought up is it not stressful? Like doing all those different things and actually, I think coaching helps me with stress as opposed to adding stress. So it goes on the other side of the equation, but I was struggling with some things, my practice in terms of.
The ability to pivot and make changes and let myself do some of those things. And also having some issues in my relationship. I’ve been married for a long time now. I think anybody who’s been married for 30 years be lying. If they didn’t tell you, they didn’t have some things that they wanted to work on.
And I was at the lever nigger, some that back in 2020, and there was a physician on there and she was talking about what she was doing with coaching. And I was like this sounds like this could be really helpful. And I signed up for her summer coaching program and just fell in love with coaching.
And it was a really deep dive, was like, at least four days a week, I was doing something related to coaching. And either, one-on-one coaching or the group coaching or having a guest speaker coming on, it was pretty awesome. And then I went on and I did. Enrolled in the life coach school.
As far as for training to be a life coach, I had actually I had heard of coaching before and that I’ve been listening to Brook’s podcasts for a number of years. I knew that I knew that it was out there. I had done self coaching scholars at one point in time. But I had never been in a coaching program.
I had never invested in myself that way. And it’s definitely different when you are. Really investing in yourself and doing a deeper dive than when you’re meeting with rotating people, for 20 minutes, it’s a very different experience. So I signed up for the life coach school and that was my start.
Mike Woo-Ming: So tell us about your experience. Now you’ve been doing this for about a year or couple years.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah. So I’ve been certified for about a year now. So the certification. Yeah. So I’ve been doing this for probably about a year and a half, as far as from the beginning of the coaching program, but the business for about a year.
Yeah, so basically I. I have worked with different groups of people, but probably the group that I worked with the most and who I probably relate with to the most is other physicians who are. At a place where they want to do something different, but they’re feeling stuck, and they’re trying to make decisions in terms of how to make things better for themselves.
Mike Woo-Ming: So you didn’t have that?
Cynthia Villacis MD: No, I did not have a coach just want to, would have been so helpful. Because there are some things. That, we can change internally about things about the way we think about things about whether things are stressful or not. And there are other things that just need to get changed in terms of the circumstance, and just having somebody to talk through.
About what kind of a change that I wanted to make and work through some of what we call limiting beliefs that would have been super helpful. And I think I would’ve been able to move faster, in terms of towards making a change in a way that was healthy and helpful for myself, if I’d had somebody to work through those lists.
So limiting beliefs are beliefs that we have that we are like, we really believe are true, that whole is back from moving forward, So so that’s something that I work with folks on and that can be really helpful.
Mike Woo-Ming: So why do you think it just seems, I was reading a thread on physician coaching. There’s definitely people who have gotten benefit from coaching. It’s still a majority or maybe just my perception of docs or say, you know what, this is a bunch of bologna. I could just do it on my own. What do you say to those folks who feel that coaching is a bunch of woo woo and stuff?Cause I’m sure you’ve seen this too.
Cynthia Villacis MD: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there are a couple of different groups of people you mentioned. There are people that thinks the whole thing is blue and blue. And those people make well, they obviously have a closed mind against coaching. They haven’t probably tried it themselves.
And that’s too bad, I would love to talk with them and, have them see what coaching is like if that’s something that they’re interested in, but then there’s the other group that I can just do it myself. And I think a lot more people are in that camp, and what I’d say to that is, yeah, you probably could do some of that.
Absolutely. That’s why Brooke has the self coaching scholars program is, there is a way to go and self-coach on things, you can look at the circumstance and look at the thoughts that you’re having related to her circumstance and what feelings you’re having related to those thoughts and and try to work through as far as the model yourself absolutely. And I do encourage people to do that, but it’s really hard to see. In your own mind, the same way that somebody else can see in your mind? I know for myself, there have been lots of times where I have been stuck on something and I’ve been like, it’s been like, I’ll be trying to figure out, the model for myself okay, I’m trying to coach myself.
And I’ve been like hitting my head against the wall and then, I’ll have a session with my coach and it’ll be like, Something we’ll just click, or sometimes it’s not even right. Then I remember there was somebody that I would…. had done coaching with and I was like at a stop light and it was like, we’d have this conversation like two or three weeks earlier.
And all of a sudden I was like, oh, it was like something just shifted or clicked. And it was just really where it’s I felt the clump, like mentally a clunk. And it was like sometimes when you see things like that, you can’t unsee them. And the problem I had been talking with her about was something that I had been trying to work through for like 10 to 15 years.
I talked to the counselor on and I was still having the same issue. It was a, and it was. It wasn’t in the moment, the conversation with a coach. So the different set that clunk happened, but it got the wheels turning and think about thinking things in a little different way.
And with that, I was able to. The shifts, how I was thinking about something and it really altered a relationship that I had been struggling with. So
yeah, I think too is because as physicians, we are usually the decision makers. We are usually the buck stops here. When our nurses come to us or men come to us, we have to make, hundreds of decisions, if not thousands of decisions, weekly and.
Those same people who say, who are closed minded with coaching also, they don’t really have a solution. They tend not to have a solution to their problems. And they’re in the same situation that they were, three or six months ago. Yeah. Yeah,
go ahead. I was just thinking one thing that I think is, can be a misperception sometimes is that people think that the coaches are going to tell them what to do, we don’t tell people what to do, but we help them figure out what they want to do. It’s a very different mind shift mindset in terms of being a coach versus being a position, in a, as efficient as a physician, when I’m working with a patient, I have certain things that, they should do this, they should do this, they should do this.
Whereas with a coach, it’s really, it’s more inside that person in terms of what is right for them. And it’s more me working with them for, to help them decide what is right for them and decide to have them decide how to move forward and what is going to work best for. I don’t know if that makes sense.
Mike Woo-Ming: It does perfect sense. And Sophia, this has been amazing lots of great information work or they go, if they want to get more information about your practice, about your your coaching practice, where can they go to find out. Yeah.
Cynthia Villacis MD: My webpage for the coaching practice is www.coachcynthiamd.com.
And I do have a freebie on there that they may be interested in talking about overcoming burnout or some things that they can do questions that they can ask themselves if they are looking at trying to make another change in their life to try to help them decide what direction they wanna move.
Mike Woo-Ming: All right. So we’re going to leave that link here too. And again, if there are anybody who’s interested in DPC, are you open to absolutely open for content as well?
Cynthia Villacis MD: Awesome. Totally open for contact. I’ve definitely talked with folks about DPC in the past.
Mike Woo-Ming: All right. Thank you so much. Any final words before we end the call today?
Cynthia Villacis MD: No, just thanks for having me on here. And I think the more people talk about other things that they can do Other things that more than people talk about things that other people are doing out there besides being an employed physician. I think that gives people hope and it gives them ideas in terms of other directions that they may want to move for themselves.
So thanks for having me.
Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah. And again, we’re at a special time now where I go, just like Cynthia, I didn’t see any of this stuff. 10, 15 years ago. Now we’re seeing doctors who are doing different things outside of their typical clinical employee practice, opening up their own practice, starting out on their own online business, coaching business.
What have you. So there are never feel that there’s no. There’s no opportunities out there because the more we talk about it, the more we learn from each other. And as always guys, don’t get too stuck in a rut that you can’t do anything. There are people out there like Cynthia who are willing to help.
And again, thank you so much f and as always keep moving forward.