Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Building Wealth vs. Actually Living

190: Building Wealth vs. Actually Living

Bill Perkins’ book, Die With Zero, has been blowing my mind lately. Die With Zero offers a total paradigm for how to think about money, offering a focus on maximum life enjoyment. If you want to create a life you truly love while you’re on your wealth-building journey, today’s episode is for you.

The truth is, living wealthy means having both the life you want plus money in the bank. Of course, this looks different for all of us. Whatever financial goals you’re working towards and whatever lifestyle you envision yourself having, what I’m sharing in this episode will give you a new perspective on getting everything you can out of your money while still enjoying your life.

Tune in this week to discover what I learned from Bill Perkins’ amazing book, Die With Zero. I’m giving you a new perspective on saving for retirement, discussing why your kids need money the most when they’re younger, not after you pass away, and why some lifelong memories could be worth more in your old age than the money you could have saved.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How most people die at their peak net worth.
Why physicians get tired of the delayed gratification of saving for retirement.
The financial rules I’ve always followed and why this book has helped me in rethinking them.
How saving money to donate or pass down after you die could actually be considered selfish.
Why your kids need money the most when they’re young adults, not when you die.
How to see where you’re giving up too much in pursuit of wealth.
Why what I’m sharing today isn’t about spending money recklessly, but maximizing your life enjoyment.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

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Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life by Bill Perkins
Hosteria Giusti
189: Why You Need a Daily Gratitude Practice

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Welcome to episode 190. So today I want to talk about my thoughts from reading this book called Die With Zero. It’s a book that most of us have probably heard of, and it’s been on my list of things to check out for at least a year or so.

And I kind of knew the basic premise so I kind of was like, oh, I don’t really need to read it, I kind of know what it’s about. But I’ve been listening to a lot more audiobooks lately in the car, I have a long drive to Jack’s school. And let me tell you, it has been blowing my mind. I feel like it is a total paradigm shift for how to think about money.

And first, I just love getting my mind blown and having a total paradigm shift about anything. But, obviously, when it comes to money, I get really excited because this is what I do. This is what I teach. He talks about maximum life enjoyment and that’s basically the way I define living wealthy, right? Living wealthy is having the money and having the life that you want, like a rich life.

And that’s going to look different for all of us. Not all of us are going to want the same amount of money. And when I say the same amount of money, I mean, in terms of using the money for different things, right? One thing I did know, and a friend of mine actually told me about this recently, like it’s something I knew already but bringing it to the surface also made me think differently about money, and that most of us will die at our peak net worth.

Now, when I say most – First of all, I should say that this book and what I’m talking about and, well, my whole brand, I guess, is aimed at female physicians. Meaning that we make a pretty great income, multiple six-figures. And so high-income earners most likely, and I don’t have the percentage on this, but if I had to guess it’s probably over 90% die at your peak net worth.

So what does this mean? This means a few things. Most of us are so worried and obsessed about saving for the future, saving for retirement, right? It’s a form of majorly delayed gratification that I think all of us are a little tired of after spending a decade in training. And it makes sense that you want to take care of your future, your future self. But if you understood and knew that you would die at your peak net worth, you probably would save a little differently and live a little differently.

Now, again, this is something I kind of knew, but I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me. So when I worked with a financial planner early on in my attending career, I remember getting these projections of how much we would have depending on how much we put in and compound interest, blah, blah, blah.

And my goal at the time was to get to about $5 million to “retire.” Because using the 4% rule, which is for every million dollars you have in the stock market, you can safely take out 4% or $40,000. Although some people are saying you could probably go a little higher. Anywho, the caveat with that is that the money is still invested when you’re withdrawing from it. A lot more conservatively and maybe you’ll have a large cash reserve in case there’s a downturn, right?

But I remember in the table using our life expectancy, let’s say it was 85, I don’t remember, we were going to die with $10 million. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, at first I was like, that’s a lot of money and that’s kind of cool. But then also, why aren’t we using the money sooner? Why can’t I take out more? And if I die with $10 million, that’s money I couldn’t enjoy, whether it’s to enjoy spending on myself, enjoy giving it away to either my kids, my family, causes that I love et cetera.

And so this book really talked about how waiting until you die to leave money to all the various people and maybe charities and maybe your alma mater is actually really selfish. I know, that kind of blew my mind too. And he talked about how we’ve all been conditioned to give or leave money for our families upon death.

Now, what he says – Now he has a whole chapter on kids because when you think that you should spend as much money as you can before you die, he has a whole chapter about what about the kids. And so let me tell you what he said about the kids.

Now, what he talked about is something that I already was on board with. And that if you have kids, and even if you don’t, there’s people in your life that you love and you probably enjoy spending money on them or you love to be generous. Your kids need money the most when they are launching. When they’re young adults and starting out.

They’re not going to need it as much when you die and they’re over 50. They really could have used the money when they were younger adults. Maybe it’s to get their first place. Maybe it’s to get married. Maybe it’s to help out when they’re having kids.

He talks about how it comes down to your money, your time and your health. And that when you’re a younger adult, you have a lot more time but a lot less money, and you have a lot of health. So think of it as a triangle, and the triangle – What are those called? The sides, the legs, they change over time, right?

So you can see that when you’re younger, you have a lot of time, you have a lot of health, but you probably have the least amount of money. And on the flip side, when you’re much older, I don’t know over 60, 70, we all can agree that our health is going to decline no matter how well you take care of yourself, right? And so when you’re much older, you have a lot more money, you have a lot more time, but you have a lot less health.

And so I found this framework a great way to think about how I want my life to look. I’m getting a little off course, I’ll come back to the kids. But he recommended thinking about your life in specific time periods. I think we can all agree that there are different seasons in our life in terms of what we do and how we spend our time.

And so he recommended actually mapping out around five-year blocks and figuring out how you want to spend that time using those three things I talked about; your money, your health, and your time. And the one thing I want to say about that before I come back to the idea about kids, is that it helps you prioritize the things that you want to do in terms of like, do I need to do this sooner rather than later?

Like he gave the example of if you want to climb a big mountain. I have no desire to do that. You need to do that when you’re younger, when you have great health, right?

Okay, now back to the kids. Again, as I said, they need money when they’re younger and starting out. And he talks a lot about the ROI of spending money. Now, I talk about this a lot, too, because a lot of us when we’re thinking about spending money, we only see the money leaving our bank account, right?

So let’s say something costs $5,000. You might just look at, oh, that’s a lot of money. That’s $5,000 leaving my bank account. But everything you spend money on has a return on investment. Now, it’s not necessarily quantifiable, but it is in terms of if you’re investing the money, right? You do expect it to go up.

A lot of it could be classified as priceless, right? You get to decide what that means to you, but he talks about how experiences become lifelong memories. Now, I think we all know that when we spend money on experiences or spend time on experiences, that gives a lot more life happiness ROI. I think that makes total sense. And so he talks about spending money on your family when they’re younger gives tons of memory ROI for you and for them.

Now, one of the reasons I mentioned this is I’ve seen a lot of talk about how traveling with the kids when they’re really young, I guess before five years old, is kind of a waste because they’re not going to remember it. And I just want to say that is not true. You will definitely remember it and have lifelong memories of them as young kids, which when they’re super old or even my age, it’s going to be nice to have memories of your kids when they were really young.

And even if your kids might not have what I call picture memories of their travel experience, that doesn’t mean that they don’t have memories. I think of it as like their body and their brain has absorbed that experience and it helps shape who they are, okay?

So just in case some of you are thinking there’s no point in taking them around the world or wherever you want to go because they’re too young and they’re not going to remember it. But remember, you’re going to remember it.

And I think about that when it comes to my mom, who’s in her early 70s. And she has great health, but we don’t know and she doesn’t know how long that will last. And so that is one thing that I’ve been trying to do more of, is how can I create more memories with her and with Jack, at this time her only grandson, so that she can have those memories too, you know?

So back to that little triangle framework. I talked about; time, money and health. And so he says in your peak earning years, you have a lot less time, you have more money and your health is pretty good. And this is sort of the period of time in our life where basically he says we are working too much and we are spending too much accumulating wealth.

And he has this quote that really stuck out at me. “Once you’re in the habit of working for money to live, the thrill of making money exceeds the thrill of actually living.” I want you to spend a second thinking about that quote. Now, I don’t know if I agree that the thrill of making money exceeds the thrill of actually living, but the way I think about it is that I think a lot of us become a little bit too obsessed about building wealth instead of actually living.

Now, they’re not mutually exclusive. And there are ways and I feel like this is something I’ve done, is I’ve really combined how I make money into my life, my lifestyle, right? What I do really lends itself well to traveling. I travel to conferences where I get to spend time with my friends, coaching, doing this podcast, creating conferences, all the stuff I do in my business are things that I truly, truly enjoy. Nothing is 100% amazing, but I will say that I have really minimized the parts that I don’t like about my work. And mainly that comes down to delegation.

Now, you might be thinking, okay, this sounds great in theory, but I don’t want to run out of money. And is Bonnie saying that I should just spend my money recklessly? That is not what I’m saying. And actually, this is going to affect how I teach money.

And, side note, I am rerecording my program right now and it’s going to be awesome. And it will be unveiled in January. So just an FYI, whether you’re a current member or not.

So he really wants you to think about what gives you maximum life enjoyment. And again, this is going to change depending on what period of your life you’re in. And using that to help inform you how you want to spend your money.

Now, he was talking about a period of time when he had a lot more money and he was just spending more on stuff and things that really didn’t give him long lasting joy. And he even says, or postulates I should say, that when you’re a really young adult, I’m thinking like in your 20s, that it doesn’t make sense to save your money.

I think that’s also another paradigm shift because everyone says save money when you’re young, the magic of compound interest, et cetera. And he gives a story about how when he was, I don’t know, some lowly job on the totem pole working at the stock market when he was making like $20,000 a year or something. It was less than $30,000 in New York City.

And how he proudly told his boss that he had managed to save, I don’t know, a certain amount of money. And his boss actually told him, or rather yelled at him saying, what are you doing? You’re going to make so much money, you’re going to make more money as you get older, you should be spending the money and enjoying your life. And it kind of stunned him.

But it really made me think like, why are we so obsessed with saving money when we’re younger? I think it’s because we’ve all been fed, it’s not a lie though, that compound interest and we need time and money to bank on it. I hear this all the time. And there’s nothing wrong with it. That is true. But are we doing it at the expense of enjoying our life in the current?

And what he says is that our fear of running out of money, which is rampant, right? This is a form of scarcity, not enough money. Even though that fear of running out of money is really, really, really unlikely to happen. And he said people who do save for the future, tend to save up too much and wait until too late in their lives to spend it on fulfilling experiences, if at all.

So he actually talked about a friend of his who went backpacking in Europe for several months, and I think actually went into some debt for that. And he actually said he was on board with that, because that gave him a crazy amount of ROI in terms of his memories and experiences and things he frankly you can’t do anymore when you’re older and have a family and obligations, right?

And, obviously, those obligations are a choice, having a family et cetera. But there are certain things you simply can’t do depending on what life season you’re in. Now, I’m going to give you some examples from my life that I didn’t go into debt for but definitely cost more money than I would normally do at that time and basically spent kind of the money that I had.

And I’ve never regretted it, but hearing about how he thinks about experiences when you’re a young adult that you really can’t have when you’re older, first, I was like that was a good thing you did, Bonnie. And second, I realized, not even realized because I knew this already, but the memories I have from those experiences, they will be with me for life.

So when I was in residency I was a resident in Southern California. Many of you probably know what Coachella is, right? It’s that music festival and it’s in Southern California. And I don’t remember how much the tickets were but they weren’t crazy expensive, or maybe they were, I can’t remember. And at Coachella they have different levels of accommodations, right?

So when you’re really broke, you basically stay in this big field and just pitch up a tent, literally. And my friend and I were like, okay, we are a little too old for that, because that’s mostly like high school and college people. And we just knew that just wouldn’t work for us, basically.

And then the second level where you could actually pay for a tent that they had, I mean this was a nicer tent, and have access to bathrooms and showers that were nicer than the pitch your own tent level. And then they have really nice accommodations. And then some people just stay off site, right?

Now, we didn’t stay off site because all those Airbnbs that do that are exceedingly expensive. And I guess we could have found one where they just piled on the people, but we didn’t do that. So anyway, that was what, three days? I can’t remember. This was a while ago, I mean, if I had to give you a year, I guess it was – God, I really can’t think of it, maybe it was 2012. I don’t know, something like that.

But that experience was amazing. I still have memories from that, I have pictures from it. And I am so glad I did that because I probably would not do Coachella anymore. And it’s not that I couldn’t, but I don’t know if I’d take the time to book a ticket to go there. There’s just other types of trips that I really want to take now. So I’m so glad I did it back then.

Now, after I finished medical school and after I finished residency, both times I took a very long trip to Europe. I think the first one was maybe five weeks, the second one was around five weeks. So basically more than a month of traveling all over Europe. And, obviously, the one where I finished medical school, I didn’t really have that much money. But I’m one of those people at the time, I still do it now but a lot less, where I had like this crazy Google spreadsheet of everything we were doing and finding out all the deals.

So these were the days of this is where you hostel around Europe, but I found the nice hostels. I think my flight was actually free on points, so I guess I was into points back then. It was on miles, I can’t remember. But I remember flying into Paris and then out of Rome, and I know at least part of it was subsidized.

Anyway, but the whole trip, if I remember correctly, was like $3,000 for five weeks in Europe. Isn’t that nuts? Now, this was more than a decade ago, so there’s some inflation there but not a whole ton. And that trip I remember I started out in Paris, we went to Southern France, Italy, Rome, Venice, Florence, Cinque Terre, Amalfi Coast. I mean, that was a pretty amazing trip, right?

And again, we stayed at hostels. I think we splurged a few times on hotels, but you can imagine for $3,000 for five weeks, I know you’re doing it on a little bit of a shoestring budget. Now, I don’t recall feeling deprived or thinking this was not good.

The only time I thought that, actually, was the hostel in Rome because that was the only hostel where we had to share it with like 10 other people and I did not like that. I remember thinking, someone’s going to steal my stuff, et cetera. I think in the other hostels, I was able to find a single room.

And then after residency, for that trip I had a little bit more money. And also I think I probably did go into a little bit of debt because I knew I was going to be an attending. So for that trip, we started out in Italy, a different part of Italy. I love Italy. I started out in the northwest area known as Piedmont, which is an area that most people will never go to because, I mean, it makes sense, if you’re going to go to Italy, you probably won’t go multiple times and you’re going to hit the hot spots, right? Rome, Venice, Florence, Positano, Amalfi Coast, et cetera.

But Piedmont you fly into Turin for that. There really are no American tourists there. In fact, I don’t think I saw one. And that’s where Barolo wine is. That’s where Alba is. That’s where the truffles are picked. And so it was an amazing time. There was food there that I had not experienced before because the food in Italy is very regional.

And I have not actually been able to find this type of pasta called pin, P-L-I-N, the way I had it there. I’ve seen it pop up on some menus, but it’s nowhere near as good as it was there. Anyway, that was a bit of a side note.

So we went there and then I went to Bologna. And then from Bologna, we went to Modena, then Croatia, we took an overnight ferry to Croatia. Then we went to Athens, Santorini and ended up in Istanbul, Turkey.

Now, I want to talk about this amazing memory I had from Bologna that I still think about and my friend and I will still talk about, okay? Especially when it comes up on our Facebook memories. So when my friend and I, we were in Modena, which is a short train ride from Bologna. Modena is where the vinegar, the famous vinegar, is made.

I had booked lunch at this restaurant. Now, I’ve always been a foodie and so I had to find the places that were really good, but also not going to be like $500 a meal, because that’s just not what I could afford back then, right?

So I found this restaurant, it’s called Hosteria Giusti G-I-U-S-T-I. I think it’s still there, because I looked it up recently. And if you look at a picture of it, it looks like an Italian deli. But in the back they have a really small dining area with just a few tables. And so my friend and I were dining there, the food was ridiculous.

While we were eating, we saw this group of men, younger guys and there was like an older guy leading them. And they clearly knew the owner because I saw them, you know, the whole group went down to the wine cellar and came back up, and then they had their lunch.

And then they started talking to us because, basically, they were shocked that there were two American girls eating lunch there. Actually, it was the older guy, his name is Emilio. He said, how did you guys know about this place? And then I told him that my careful Google research found it. And basically, he was so impressed. He’s like, I’ve never seen an American here.

Anyway, so we got to talking and then he said, we’re all going to the Ferrari Museum, which is a Modena, would you like to join us? And we said, sure. And so we went to the Ferrari Museum, and totally not my thing but it was just a fun experience. And then I found out that Emilio was actually, I don’t know what his position was, but I think he is the winemaker and owns this wine label. And I can’t remember, but his name is in it.

And then we ended up going to a dinner, like a private dinner at this restaurant in Bologna where there was all this amazing food and all of his wines. I mean, it was kind of like those weird, crazy experiences. And these are experiences you can’t plan for, right? You just have to be in the right place at the right time. And these are the things you do as a young adult.

Now, some people could be like, how did you know they were safe? I mean, that is a valid concern but, I don’t know, I guess I wasn’t worried about that. I feel like my people reader antennas are pretty high, having spent decades living in New York City. But it ended up being an amazing, amazing experience.

We have tons of pictures from it. My friend and I still talk about it. And I think I’m friends with that guy on Facebook still. Anyway, that’s just one of the many examples I have about amazing memories from when I was younger and didn’t have as much money. And I’m so glad I decided to take those trips, right? Because those are the types of trips I’m not going to be able to do right now. Like I’m not going to go to Europe for six weeks without my family.

All right, so that was a lot of information and let me just close with this. It comes down to don’t save so much that you forget to enjoy your life. And I really thought about you guys, because so many of my clients, and they range in age from mid-30s to I would say even upwards over 50, they’re so busy working. And the ones who have young kids, they’re always saying how they feel like they’re missing out on their kids’ lives. And they are. I’m not saying this to guilt them, but they are because they are working too much.

But what I hear a lot is, but I can’t because of money. And I just want to challenge that. Like is that really true? We all have different seasons and periods of our lives, and so the question that I want to pose for you is how do you want your life to look? How do you want to live it? What are experiences that you know you want to have? Or have you even thought about that?

People call this your bucket list in terms of travel, but what are the bucket life experiences that you want to have? And they don’t have to be trips. It could just simply be like, I want to be home by six o’clock to have dinner with my family every night. Or I want to be able to go to my kid’s games, or whatever it is, you want to take your kid to school. It’s going to look different for all of us, right?

Is that something you need to do now or later? The examples I just gave are going to be things you need to do now because kids grow up. How much money do you actually need for that life? What I have found is that many of my clients simply spend too much money on things that really aren’t that important.

A lot of it’s stuff. And I’m an over spender, too, so no judgment here. It’s so easy to do that, to shop, because you can shop online. And if we all had to still go out to buy things, most of us probably wouldn’t have this problem. But I think this is a good time to really think about what actually gives you joy in terms of spending your money. Stuff is nice, but it only gives you a short-term dopamine hit versus the lasting ROI of spending it on experiences.

So wherever you are right now, whatever period of life, no matter what your money situation is now, how could you do parts of that now? Because I know you can. Also this might be an opportunity for you to really realize and appreciate that you may actually have everything that you want right now. And what I mean by want, I don’t just mean things, right?

So actually, this is something I just realized really recently. And again, our brains, our brains are crazy, man. They forget that what you have is something that you wanted before. It’s so easy to be focused on the next thing.

So in terms of sort of my life goals or things that I want, I realized I actually have it. I love where I live. I live in a luxury high-rise building where I don’t really have to worry about anything. We rent, we love renting. I get to travel and I don’t need to ask anyone how to do it. I’m able to travel a lot more using credit card points. I have time freedom. And I have the money I need to live the life that I want.

Now, I would definitely welcome a bigger space. You know apartments aren’t super big, I’d love to upgrade to a bigger place. I’d love to have nicer clothes and maybe go out to some more fancy dinners. But in terms of what I actually am able to do right now, I realized I actually have it and basically how, ungrateful is not the word, but how I really haven’t spent the time appreciating that. Because when you keep thinking, “This isn’t it and I’ll feel happier when,” the arrival fallacy, then you never give time and attention to what you actually do have.

Now, I talked a bit about this on my last podcast. I think it was the one before this about gratitude. How important it is to train your brain to see and appreciate what you do have. That helps you get out of money scarcity, but it also just makes you a lot happier and fulfilled, right?

Because if you keep thinking, “I don’t have this, I don’t have this,” and forget that you have so many things that you wanted already, and maybe the things you want are just going to add to your life, but that your life is already full, you’re just always going to live in the future and not the moment.

The final thing I want to say is I am still figuring out how these concepts and, again, paradigm shifts, how it’s going to affect how I think about money. Like my money, but then also what I want to teach to my clients because there’s a balance, right? Because you don’t want to save too much for the future, you don’t want to die with $10 million. But then you also don’t want to run out of money, right? So what’s the balance?

So my guess is it’s not going to be some nice, neat formula. Sorry. My guess is that it’s going to be a part plan, because obviously you want to have an investing plan, but also reevaluating your life at probably at least annual intervals. So stay tuned. All right, I will talk to you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Why You Need a Daily Gratitude Practice

189: Why You Need a Daily Gratitude Practice

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How many of you take the time to intentionally be grateful for something every single day?

A daily gratitude practice has been proven to not only improve your general well-being and overall happiness, but can also open your mind up to new possibilities. Gratitude is about so much more than just giving thanks, and I’m showing you why this week.

Join me on this episode to learn how important a daily gratitude practice is, why it’s a quieter emotion that tends to be harder to feel, and how to let it rise up in your body and take shape in the form of creating more of what you want.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why practicing gratitude daily is important.
What happens when you take the time to intentionally channel gratitude.
The value of giving air time to what could be possible for you.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Follow me on Instagram

Read the transcript

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone, this is going to be super short and sweet because I hope you’re busy celebrating with your families, whether they’re your biological or your chosen ones, or maybe some close friends.

So we haven’t had much childcare this week and next. I’m recording this on a Saturday, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, actually. My son’s school had parent teacher conferences. This was kind of the first one, he’s in kindergarten. And then next week, he’s off starting Wednesday. So it’s been challenging for me to get work done, but I wanted to make sure I recorded something for you.

So it’s Thanksgiving and so, well, it’s about giving thanks. Although the origins of it, I know, are not great. But now it’s become a time when people come together and eat a lot of food, Turkey, et cetera. We’re actually hosting it for my family this time. I’m going to make the turkey, or maybe Matt will.

FYI, unless you have one of those deep fryer turkeys, which I really want to try but we just haven’t had a chance to experience that. I think the secret to a really, really juicy breast, because you know it tends to dry out and just be gross, is to just roast it upside down. It’s so simple, you literally just roast it upside down because all the juices from the thighs and the fatty things drip down and keep the turkey really moist.

The only bad thing about doing this is that it doesn’t look as nice. You could just flip it over and brown it, et cetera. But who cares? You’re going to cut it up anyway, okay? So that’s my little Thanksgiving tip.

All right, so really all I wanted to say today is how important a gratitude practice is. And it has been proven that it improves wellbeing, happiness, et cetera. But it’s not just you should give thanks every day or et cetera, but it’s really taking the time and feeling in your body what you have now, what you can appreciate. Jack, do you want to say hello real quick?

Jack: Hello.

Bonnie: Do you want to say what you’re grateful for today?

Jack: Who is that?

Bonnie: No, what you’re grateful for. Do you want to say thank you about something?

Jack: Who is it?

Bonnie: Oh, I’m just talking to my friends.

Jack: Hi.

Bonnie: Do you want to say something you’re grateful for?

Jack: Hey, why are they not talking?

Bonnie: Because I’m just talking to them. They can hear us.

Jack: Why?

Bonnie: Do you want to just tell them real quick, what you’re thankful for?

Jack: To go to the bagel store. Yay!

Bonnie: Okay, how many of you take the actual time to be grateful for something? Something specific. It could be one thing, it could be three things. And the reason why it’s so important, well, there are many reasons. But the reason in terms of the context of what I teach about coaching is that it shows your brain what you do have.

Our brain defaults to what’s wrong, what’s missing, just commenting all day long about what we don’t have, what’s not working and simply, it’s scarcity thinking, right? It’s like I don’t have enough of this, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough money. And that is like the default. And that’s normal. So if this is you, nothing is wrong. This is just literally how our brains are designed out of the box.

But with a daily gratitude practice, and I don’t just mean like, I’m so grateful, I don’t know, for my morning coffee. And there’s nothing wrong with being grateful for that, by the way. But many of us just go through the motions and we’ll maybe say one thing or two things. But you really want to spend some time, and I’m not even talking a lot of time, okay? This could be 10 seconds, 30 seconds, really sinking into that feeling of gratitude where you can really feel the sensations of it in your body.

And one thing I’ll say is that for most of us, the feeling of grateful is what I call one of the quieter or softer emotions. I’ve seen this emotion volume chart where it’s four quadrants. And so basically two are positive, two are negative. And then there’s low volume and high volume emotions, right?

So feeling angry, feeling scared, those are, A, negative emotions and, B, pretty loud, right? It’s really obvious that you feel that way, it kind of takes over your body, right? And my experience is that a lot of the positive emotions are actually pretty quiet. Things like joy, things like feeling grateful. And so it’s so easy to not feel them.

And when I say feel them, I mean feeling them in your body. Feeling all the sensations associated with it. And you kind of have to be still and quiet in order to actually feel them rising up in your body. It’s going to feel different for everyone, okay? Maybe it’s a warmth in your chest area or just a feeling of lightness overall.

And so this type of practice shows your brain what you do have, what’s going right. And you can even turn these into questions, right? A lot of us when we’re trying to do something new, we’re so worried about it not working out, right? This is how many of us are scared of taking risks in terms of money, or really anything you’re doing in life.

And so first, it’s normal to be scared. That’s how our brains are designed. But the problem is, most of us just go into it, “What if this doesn’t work out? I’m scared. Something bad might happen.” But we don’t spend any time in the opposite. “What if this could work? What do I know about this? What skills do I already have? What do I believe about this right now?”

And honestly, this is part of practicing new thoughts, looking for evidence of what you do have. This is how I kind of think about gratitude. I feel like level one is saying thanks for XYZ, really appreciating what you have. And that’s really important. But I think level two is what I’ve just described, really spending time looking and feeling what you do have, and then also spending time really visualizing and feeling that what you want is possible. What if it could work? Why not?

And so that’s all I wanted to say on this really short podcast for Thanksgiving. Also, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time you heard Jack. I decided if he’s going to come into my podcast recording, he may as well say something. We are about to go to the bagel store, he’s been begging for it all morning, so that’s what he’s grateful for.

All right, happy, happy Thanksgiving. I hope you are having an amazing time. I hope you’re getting some rest. And I will talk to you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Black Friday Is Here: Get 15x Credit Card Points

188: Black Friday Is Here: Get 15x Credit Card Points

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We all love a bargain, and Black Friday is just around the corner, so this is the perfect time to revisit the topic of credit card points, specifically how to 15X your points from the money you’ll spend in the Black Friday sales. You still have a couple of weeks, so now is the time to put what I’m sharing into practice.

Rakuten is famous for the cash-back opportunities they provide. However, around Black Friday, Rakuten carries some amazing opportunities to earn credit card points on purchases you’d be making anyway. If you’re ready to earn up to 15X credit card points in the Black Friday sales, today’s episode is here to show you exactly how to do it.

Tune in this week to discover how to 15X your credit card points this Black Friday. I’m sharing a super simple way to maximize your credit card rewards points while picking up some amazing deals in the process over the Holidays.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How credit card points have changed the way I approach purchases.
Some of the bonuses on offer from Rakuten this Black Friday.
Some tips to avoid making unnecessary purchases.
How you can earn up to 15X points using Rakuten.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Follow me on Instagram
137: 10X Your Credit Card Points on Black Friday
My Rakuten Link (Disclosure: I will get a commission if you use my link)
Chase Freedom Flex
Chase Sapphire

Read the transcript

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Welcome to another episode. So I am going to play for you an episode I did last year but the timing didn’t quite work out because it was about Black Friday shopping and how to maximize earning credit card points. And I think it came out literally the week of Thanksgiving which really didn’t give you guys time to listen to it because I know not everyone listens the week an episode comes out.

So I did a little bit better planning this year and so this episode, obviously, is really talking about how to maximize credit card points and some other things that you may not be aware of. Now, the good news is nothing has really changed, it’s kind of the same method, so to speak. But it really comes down to stacking and just taking advantage of the amazing bonuses and point multipliers that are available Black Friday week as well as Cyber Monday.

It can be 10X, 20X, et cetera for categories that traditionally are maybe 3 to 5X. So what I recommend is to start making a list, I’m sure you probably have already, of the things that you want to purchase. Now this could include gifts, but I think this is also a great opportunity to make a list of things you may want to stock up on, like things you know you’re going to use for sure. And not only are there sales, obviously, but again, point multipliers and other great things.

So one example I do want to give that is sort of timely for 2023 specifically is that if you have the Chase Freedom Flex card, now that’s the card that has to be linked to a Sapphire card to get points, otherwise it simply acts as a 5% cash back card, but if it is paired with a Sapphire you get 5X points. Now, Flex has rotating categories every quarter, but this quarter it’s PayPal. And you can use PayPal to pay for many online purchases.

Now, it is limited to up to $1500 of shopping so you want to loosely keep track of that, otherwise you’re just going to get one point. But this is the power of stacking, right? So if you find something through Rakuten or a portal like United or Chase, let’s say you find Lululemon that has a 10X multiplier through Rakuten. And then you could use your PayPal using the Chase Freedom Flex and then you actually get 15X.

So this is what I mean and that’s a great example of how powerful it can be to do some planning for Christmas shopping, holiday shopping and also for staples.

And with regard to shopping, because I know pretty much all of us tend to spend more money this time of the year, one thing I do want to say about that is this is something you can plan for in terms of your budget. And if you haven’t specifically done that, I really recommend setting an actual amount of money that you want to spend. It’s just so easy to go a little crazy, I’m talking from firsthand experience here, especially when you see so many good deals. You’re like, oh, but it’s on sale, et cetera.

So I really encourage you to be intentional about it and what helps, obviously, for sure is having a shopping list. We all know that you should not go to the grocery store hungry because you’ll just buy a lot of extra stuff, and this is sort of the same thing.

So that’s what I would recommend, get as many credit card points as possible to fund future travels.

Hey, everyone, I believe this is coming out Thanksgiving. And I want to apologize in advance because I should have recorded this episode topic, it’s going to be short and sweet, probably a few weeks ago to get you started. But I know some of you do listen to the podcast the day it comes out, thank you so much. So I wanted to make sure that you heard this before you start shopping, basically.

But before I tell you my top tips for maximizing all the sales that are going to be happening this weekend and through early next week with Cyber Monday, I wanted to thank all of you who attended the Make Your 2023 Money Plan workshop. I’ve gotten so much amazing feedback about it. And right now inside of Live Wealthy, I’m working closely with the members to really help them shape up their plan.

And if there’s one thing that I can reiterate, whether or not you went or not, is that it is so, so important to have a clear and specific money goal. And here’s what I mean by clear and specific, I actually was just coaching a few of the members yesterday on our weekly coaching call and the first person I coached started talking about how she really wants to get started in real estate and start her next income stream.

That sounds like a goal. It is a goal, it’s just not clear and specific. What we did is we actually talked about two goals. One is her sort of overarching goal in the future. And I believe she said in five years, I can’t remember the exact timeframe, it doesn’t really matter, but her goal is to create $200,000 of non clinical income in five years. If you’re not a doctor, just think of income that’s not related to your current job, non W2 income. That is her goal.

And so then we decided, or rather she decided, okay, what is the 2023 version of that? And she chose, I think, again the numbers don’t matter specifically, $20,000 of non clinical income in 2023, basically by 12/31, right?

And so that is a clear and specific money goal, because when she talked about real estate, that is just a possible way to get there. Because I asked her like, hey, in three, or whatever the goal is, in five years, like do you really care about the specifics? Meaning do you care if it ends up being real estate or a business? There are just so many possibilities. And obviously, the answer is no.

But now that we have that 2023 goal, now she can think about, okay, what are the ways I can create this? In fact, I would say pretty much that’s everyone’s goal, is to create a certain amount of income a year that’s not based on your current job because, ultimately, you want to create what I call a very solid wealth table.

I want you to think about wealth as a table, and tables have legs. And the more legs you have, the more stable your wealth is. Because for most of us, our only real stream of income is our current job. And ultimately, that is setting you up for failure because you can lose your job. There are no guarantees, even if you have a “stable” job.

Most of the women in my program are physicians, we have pretty much always believed it is a stable source of great income. And even before the pandemic, that belief has been shaking. And when the pandemic did happen, many physicians, some did lose their jobs, but many of them “got furloughed” and ended up being paid a lot less.

And I think that really showed a lot of people, not just physicians, that really, you can’t count on a job. And if you really think about it, even without all the specifics and specific circumstances surrounding this, ultimately, you’re not in control of whether you get to keep a job or not, because you are not the business owner. It’s pretty plain and simple. And so knowing that, really, you need to work on your other legs.

And so, ultimately, that translates into income coming in that’s not related to the job that you currently have. And anyone can do this. And the first thing you need to do is get really specific, and then start mapping out the way to get there.

Now, what I want to say real quick is that everyone gets stuck in the how. Well, how am I going to do that? And actually, that’s a great question. How are you going to do that? And even asking yourself that question is going to start getting those creative juices flowing because what I have found is in all of our current jobs, we’re kind of in this position, this framework where we don’t have creativity. You’re just kind of showing up doing your job.

You might have a fantastic job that you love, where you are able to be creative, but it’s all in the confines of your current job. And I think so many of us have forgotten that we do have the skill to create beyond what we’re thinking and doing right now.

Anyway, I can go on and on about this, but I’m just super excited for the ladies in the program who are creating goals. Goals that make them a little uncomfortable, but goals that also really excite them about it happening. Because you have to decide that you’re going for something in order for it to happen. I mean, that just makes sense, right? Like, unless you’re sitting around waiting for the lottery to happen or for some inheritance to come into your lap.

Most of us won’t have that happen. And so for those of us who don’t, including me, we have to make goals. And the point of goals is not to actually achieve it. Goals and a deadline guide your decisions.

You will make different decisions based on the goals you have and based on the timeframe because if you just pick a goal, like, oh, I want to make $100,000 a year non-clinical income in 20 years, you just may not do anything about it in 2023 because it’s so far away. But when you create an annual “deadline,” literally, then you’re going to get your butt in gear because you have to start making decisions and doing things.

And one thing I always tell my clients is like, okay, let’s say I have a goal of $20,000 of this type of income in 2023. Do you really care if it takes 18 months instead of 12? I don’t think so.

Okay, here is my quickie for today’s episode. I know a lot of you are waiting for all the deals for Black Friday because, let’s just face it, some of the best deals in the year are during the next few days. And I just want to tell you about this app called Rakuten, R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Some of you are probably familiar with it as the cashback shopping portal.

Basically you go there and there are deals. Like actually I’m looking at it right now and today there is what they call early Black Friday deals where you get 10% cashback. Sounds amazing, right? But what you may not know is that you can actually decide not to get the cashback. And instead, to get credit card points instead. Specifically American Express points, I call them Amex points.

So instead of 10% cashback, you’re getting 10x points. And this is how folks like me are able to accumulate so many points. We do spend probably more money than most people because we are high-income earners, and we try really hard to never get just one point per dollar spent.

So you can imagine if you’re getting multiples like 10x, and sometimes the deals during Black Friday are like 15, 20, even higher, you can see how quickly you can accumulate credit card points. And so this is one of the ways to do it, there are actually other ways to maximize credit card points.

So if you own a Chase card, sometimes they will have deals where you can get extra points specifically for those what we call points currency. But I’m going to focus on Rakuten because it’s simple. So you want to go to rakuten.com and sign up for an account. I do have a referral link where we will both get some money, specifically $40 or 400 points. I think that’s the right math, don’t quote me on that. And then you can get started.

But here’s what’s really fun. So right now I’m looking at Saks Fifth Avenue. So if I click on there and purchase something, let’s just say just for the purposes of math it’s $100. And I will get 10x. American Express points for that, so that’s 1000 points. But it gets even better because let’s say – It doesn’t matter which card you pay with, by the way.

So then I can pay with a credit card that also gets points. And right now I happen to have a card, it’s the Chase Freedom Unlimited, where I’m actually getting 3x points, no matter what the purchase is. So when I purchased this $100 thing on Saks Fifth Avenue, I’m going to get 10x Amex points, 1,000 points, and I’m going to get 3x Chase points or 300 points. So basically, I’ve gotten 1300 points for a $100 purchase.

So basically, you can see how this is a really powerful way to rack up points quickly. And around this time, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the bonus points are very plentiful. Now, it’s really easy to be like, well, it might go higher, like right now it’s 10x. I personally would not wait.

For example, I’m going to buy some things today because Carter’s is 10x, that’s where I buy a lot of the clothes for Jack. He is in need of some clothes, he’s growing. That’s what’s annoying about kids, right, they grow so fast and you’ve got to keep buying clothes. And so I’m going to buy some clothes. It’s possible that there might be a higher multiple during Black Friday.

There is a way to kind of see the history of how many bonus points they’ve given, and it’s not a guarantee. So you have to have a specific American Express card to take advantage of this, and the two eligible cards are the Platinum card or the Gold card. And so you need basically one of these two cards to link.

And so if you don’t have one of these cards, you are not eligible to get American Express points from Rakuten. I’m sorry I got this episode out so late, I should have really done it at the beginning of November to get you guys prepped because then you’d have enough time to get the card.

I don’t believe you can use the electronic version because these days when you do get a new credit card you can often start using it right away by linking it to your Apple Pay on your iPhones. I believe that that will not work, but don’t quote me on that.

Meaning that you can’t use Apple Pay if, let’s just say Saks Fifth Avenue does accept Apple Pay, I don’t know if they do to be honest, then you’re not going to be able to get the American Express points until you get the physical card. But for those of you who do have one of these cards, I would definitely link it immediately on Rakuten so you can start to really maximize your credit card points.

Okay, that’s what I have for you today. I will talk to you guys next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | How to Get Clear on Your Values with Dr. Hala Sabry

187: How to Get Clear on Your Values with Dr. Hala Sabry

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The term “values” gets thrown around frequently in the coaching industry, but what does it really mean? How do we identify our values in the first place? And how can we use our values as a personal compass for making our most aligned decisions?

To dive into the topic of values this week, I’m speaking with the founder of the 1% Women’s Club and Physician Moms Group, Dr. Hala Sabry. Dr. Hala is a life and career coach for successful women who are in the top 1% of earners, and she’s an expert when it comes to values work. After years of trying to find the right answers, she’s found conviction in identifying her own values, and she’s here to help you do the same.

Join us on this episode to discover why investigating your personal values is a worthwhile investment of your time and how we often mistake our priorities for values. Dr. Hala is offering her thoughts on the ultimate goal of getting clear on your values, how integration is the missing piece in values work, and a simple exercise for clarifying your own.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Dr. Hala’s interpretation of what values mean.
The difference between your priorities and your values.
Why the way you commit to your values can be infectious.
The importance of getting clear on your values.
What happens when you operate from a place of overwhelm and lack.
How to use and integrate values in your decision-making process.
Dr. Hala’s exercise for clarifying and integrating your values.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Follow me on Instagram
Dr. Hala Sabry: Website | Facebook | Instagram
Grab Dr. Hala’s free values workbook here!
If Disney Ran Your Hospital by Fred Lee
First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy by Stephen Covey

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode. So living in the northeast, the weather is so crazy. Over the weekend, I think it was Saturday, it was literally like 75 degrees, almost 80 and sunny. And then like two days later, actually three days later I woke up and it was like 40 degrees in the morning. Like it just doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand.

Anyway, but we are in the season where the weather is just so up and down you don’t know what’s going to happen. Although everything I’ve been reading or what Google News has been telling me is that this is going to be a really bad winter for the northeast. It was so mild last year we couldn’t even go snow sledding even once. I like snow, but not so much that it’s going to create very dangerous driving situations.

So today I have Dr. Hala Sabry on the show. And many of you who are physicians listening right now probably have heard her name. She is the founder of the Physician Mom Group or PMG, which has, I don’t know, 80,000 members or so. And she really is the one, well besides being the creator, but I think she is the one who really started communities of women physicians because now there are so many, I want to say off-shoots, but they’re not part of the official PMG of just anything you can think of, right?

So there’s local groups, right? There’s a group where I live. There’s a group on knitting, there’s a group on cooking. I’m in a lot of these groups. There’s a group on stay-at-home moms, there’s a group on kids with ADHD. So it’s like every topic, and the community is female physicians.

And I think when you meet another woman physician there’s just an immediate rapport, like an immediate knowing like, oh, you understand what I’m – Not necessarily what you’re going through right now, but just in terms of our life, how hard we’ve worked et cetera. So it’s like this instant, I don’t want to say instant friend, but it’s like you just feel safe and almost seen by them. So I think these communities are really special.

So one of the reasons why I’m having Hala on, besides just having her on because I love to have my friends on because they’re all amazing, is she has a coaching program called The 1% Club. And I think even before that started she was doing a lot of values work. Meaning like teaching values, how to find your own values. And I remember thinking like, okay, that’s nice.

But then I actually downloaded her worksheet, although I can’t find it now. And I learned so much about myself. And so that’s what we’re talking about today because a lot of us, we hear the word values and it’s like, well, what does that actually mean? And so we’re going to talk about that, what most people think it means, how she defines it and why it’s so important. I want you to think of it as like a personal compass.

And in terms of how this relates to money and living wealthy, I think it’s just going to help you even verbalize like, well, what do I want? Because I think it’s really easy to verbalize what you don’t want or what you want to stop doing, right? So it’s like common things are like I’d love to work less. Maybe work three or four days a week, and not the five or six I’m doing now. I’d love to travel more. Understanding your values is going to be so helpful in that.

So I think you’re going to really enjoy this conversation, and obviously, if you want to take this work further, you want to check out her website, drhalasabry.com, and she does have this free values workbook that helps you start getting clear on what those are.

All right, onto the show.

Bonnie: All right, Hala, I’m so excited that you’re here.

Hala: I feel like we’ve been talking about doing a podcast together for a long time, it just never happens.

Bonnie: I know, sometimes I’m just like, what, I haven’t had you on the podcast yet? So it’s so bizarre. Anyway, why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone?

Hala: Yeah, my name is Hala. I am a physician, I’m an emergency medicine physician. I’m a mom to five kids. And you probably know me, if you’ve heard my voice before, as the founder of Physician Moms Group, or I also coach in a coaching group called The 1% Women’s Club that I created to help women maintain their success in all the ways that is going to help them become more successful, which is not exactly how we created the success from overwhelm and a little bit of hustle.

I deprogram women, so that way they can actually accept that 1% earning identity and start carrying themselves in that way at work and in the rest of their life. And so it’s been really fun. And I’ve been on this journey with you actually, Bonnie, and so it’s been really fun to have a friendship with you and to text back and forth and really kind of pave our own way in helping women have independence, not only in their life, but with their money. And it’s been a ride, so thanks for having me on here.

Bonnie: Yeah, no, it’s been – I was actually just thinking about that. I was like, when did we first connect? Do you remember? I don’t remember.

Hala: I think we’ve always known people and there’s always been this like peripheral connection. But you and I did a feminist coaching certification together, and I think that’s when our relationship actually started. That’s the first time I actually had your phone number and we started texting back and forth and I’m like, oh my gosh, I think I’m friends with Bonnie.

Bonnie: I think I felt the same way too. Yeah, I knew we were, I know, we definitely connected more during that mastermind. And I know we both learned so much and I know it totally added so much value and just knowledge to help our clients, right? Because just learning about the socialization of women, it’s stuff I knew but it wasn’t at the forefront. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.

Anyway, the reason why I wanted to have you on today, I’m sure we’ll talk about a lot of things, but I know you teach values. And I think you have a freebie on that as well.

Hala: Yeah.

Bonnie: So we’ll definitely link that in the show notes and you can say what it is at the end. And I feel like the word values is just thrown around a lot. But it’s like, what are they exactly? So I thought it would be really interesting for everyone listening because I think it’s really important to, A, know what they are, like really get clear. And then I’m sure you have a way to teach it, like using it as a compass or something. So I’ll just let you give your spiel and we’ll go from there.

Hala: Yeah. I mean, everybody kind of has an idea of what values are. So even as I’m talking, I want you to think about your definition because there isn’t just one definition. So I’m going to offer what I interpret values, but I want you as you’re listening just to think about what your values are. If somebody asked you right now, what are your values, I want you just to think of the top two or three. And if you need more time, pause this podcast right now and I want you just to answer.

And so when I started kind of having – Actually, you know what’s so funny? I actually had your phone number way before I just claimed I did because I remember texting you. And this was maybe about five years ago. And I don’t remember how I got your phone number or why, but anyways I texted you and I was like, I think I’m going through an identity crisis. And you were confused because I was confused, and so nothing happened on that text message.

But I think what I was not understanding and what I went to the next moment was like, what are my values? And I started reading more about values. And I think that’s when I started discovering what values were. So if you asked me that question, what are your values, at that time I would have said, my family, my health and my career. That’s what I would have told you. And if you answered one of those three things, I’m going to say you’re exactly where I started. Nothing is wrong with that, but those are not values, first and foremost.

So what are values? Values are the ideals in which you make your decisions. It’s how we make decisions, okay? And we all have values, even though you may not be able to verbalize them. But those are not values, our health, our money, our career, our spirituality, our romantic relationships, even if that’s just intimacy with ourselves and loving ourselves, and then our relationships with our friends, family and community.

Those six avenues of our life or the way that we express our values. And we may prioritize where we express our values, which is what I think most people do, like me, right? Like, I was like, oh, family, my health and my career, which are three of the six.

Bonnie: I think those are what people prioritize, but not values. Yeah, exactly.

Hala: Yeah, but those are not values, okay? Those are like where you’re making your decisions, not how you’re making decisions. And so I had to kind of go back to that drawing board. And I went, and just like any high-functioning woman, I went and I bought books on Amazon. And I have probably 20 books about values, and I will tell you that all they did was give you many different definitions.

I’m giving you my definition today, but what all those books lacked is learning how to, not only just identify your values, which my values now I can stand strong and say it is knowledge, love, inspiration and innovation. Like I can tell you that with conviction. But yeah, from the 20 books I read, I could figure out what my values were, but then nobody actually taught you how to actually use your values. Like okay, now what? Okay, now you have this.

And then what I remember one day is I was thinking about this a lot, you guys. Like it was living rent-free in my head. And I remember I was getting coffee at the hospital and I was walking in the lobby. And at that time, the hospital I was working at, they had all of their values framed in the lobby. And clearly it was like a downtime, this is before Covid.

And so I was walking and it was like service, and it was like all these other things, right? And I remember reading the text under it. And I was just like, I call BS. I could tell you how many ways our hospital is not honoring that, is not honoring this, whatever it may be. And so I started being more curious for myself. Well, if I think innovation, knowledge, inspiration and love are my values, or how am I expressing them in my life, right? And so I had to ask myself that.

So it was a lot of self-discovery. And then how does that pertain to all aspects of my life? Not only my family, my health, my career, but all of the other ways that I mentioned earlier on the podcast. And so, as I started figuring that out and developing strategies for myself, I started teaching it.

And what I didn’t realize is I already knew the answers. And how I knew the answers is from my first job I ever had in my life, which is working at Disney. And Disney actually functions on a values-based practice, which they call their five keys. And I worked there for eight years, it was my first job. So impressionable, your first job. You learn all your good habits, all your bad habits there, right?

And I think I didn’t realize, like I already knew the answers. And so I started applying the Disney way to my life as if my life was a business. And then everything became easier. My decisions became easier to make. My decisions were stronger. I had less regret. I was not resentful. And I just created more success.

And I was able to maintain the success I had without overwhelm. I started understanding where I was hustling, why I was doing that. And then I can, you know, it’s almost like peeling the layers of an onion. And I was like, oh, I’m going to work on this now. Or I’m going to work on this now. I’m going to work on this now.

And so it’s been really fun. And the way that other people have noticed, it is just me being really unapologetic. Me showing up. Me being me. Me helping people from a place of abundance, like not holding back. I give away a lot of stuff for free, including, as you mentioned, my freebie on my website. And it allows people to better their lives, whether or not they’re working with me. But when they do work with me, they just go way deeper and it’s just really, really fun.

So yeah, so that’s what it is. It’s how we make decisions. And then I teach you how that shows up in real life. It’s not just like the concept, but how to actually integrate it, which I think is what coaching is. I think we can consume, like you’re consuming on this podcast. But when you work with a coach directly, like say with Bonnie or with myself, then you actually integrate what you’re learning.

So, like Bonnie has this amazing course on money, and you can learn everything about money. But how are you going to put it into action, right? And there’s a lot of thoughts and feelings that get in the way of putting it into action. And so I think that’s the value of coaching. And so when you do the work yourself, you become an even more successful coach.

Bonnie: Yeah, as you were talking I was like, I know I downloaded that freebie and I know I started it. And I’m pretty sure I got to a short list. I don’t know if I got down to like three or four because I remember you saying it can’t be a list of 10 because you’re not going to remember it. And I literally, I’m going to have to rummage and find it. I have so many papers lying around. But I remember doing it. And, of course, I can’t tell you off the top of my head what they are.

Hala: Yeah, and that’s usually where people are at. And you know, it’s funny because when you start to, what I find with my clients is that they’ll do the freebie, okay? And they may put it away, they may bring it back out, right? So they pick one and what happens, what I find – and this is what I learned in that mastermind that you and I were doing together – is that these women tend to pick things that they think they should pick. Like their definition of what a good woman is, they will pick those things first.

And so then, usually when I’m working with them, I have to deconstruct, like I really ask them, why did you pick that? Let’s talk about that. Where did you get that idea? Where’s that belief that that’s what you are? Show me how you are now in that situation? Do you like situations like that when you show up like that?

And what I find is usually a couple of the things that they pick tend to get changed a little bit. That’s like a lot of people pleasing to society. Like, if I do this, then I’m going to be liked more. Or if I do this, I’m going to have more success. Rather than, hey, this is who I really am authentically. This is what I love about myself.

And so there’s a process. I think it’s picking your values, really understanding why you pick them. And then learning, now that we’ve really got to the root of it, and obviously we can always upgrade these values and things like that. We can always change them. It’s not like just because you pick three or four, you’re stuck with that for the rest of your life, right? But I tend to pick the ones that I am still actively working on, that I don’t question some of my decisions from and things like that. But anyways, so then you actually learn how to integrate it.

Bonnie: Can I just pause you for a second? I just want to make sure I understand and make sure it’s clear to people listening.

Hala: Yeah.

Bonnie: So one thing I’ll just say about getting to know you is I definitely feel like in the last, I don’t know, year, that you’re being really true to yourself. And I’m assuming that has to do with you really understanding your values and now you’re expressing it into the world. I feel like, I mean, you were never inauthentic, but I just feel like we’re really seeing, or at least I’m really seeing that, Hala, you seem so grounded in what you’re doing et cetera.

So are the values, like if I do the exercise, are they a reflection of what my current values are? And then, obviously, we can change them in terms of the values that we want? I guess I’m just trying to understand exactly.

Hala: No, so I think it’s really who you are. And sometimes that’s who you want to be and you are a little bit of that right now, right? Like for example, I picked love, okay? If you asked me back then, okay, tell me how love plays into your life. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I love my kids, you guys. I have five kids and I love my family, I love my in-laws. I know a lot of people don’t have those thoughts, but I really love my in-laws.

They’re here actually right now, and that’s why they are top of my mind. I wish they would live with me, but they don’t want to live with us because I don’t think their retirement plans had to do with living with more kids. But I had a lot of people on that list, but you know who wasn’t on that list was me. I didn’t love myself. I had a lot of body image issues and a lot of self-doubt, a lot of self-esteem issues that I was having.

And no matter how big you are, like I know I created a really big public presence, but you have to remember that you can still have your thoughts about yourself that are different than what other people think about you. And so that’s, I think, what you started seeing, Bonnie, and what other people around me started seeing. Is that when I started loving myself more, I started showing up differently.

And that’s why I keep it as part of my values, right? So yes, to answer your question, I think love was part of who I was, but it just wasn’t being directed in all parts of my life, right? And so I just wanted more of that. And, for me, I think that there’s a big return on investment with that. Obviously there’s no going wrong with loving yourself. But, for me, I feel like I was loving my kids so much that if I love myself more, it’s actually modeling behavior for them that they will already know it. They’ll be able to model it when they’re older.

And I’ll give you an example. My child, she wanted a dog. And I did not have the desire to have a dog, but she was really on it. And my husband, he was in breaking. And I kept telling her – The real reason was I don’t want to take care of another thing. I have five kids, I do not want to take care of another living thing.

And so but instead of saying that I was like, I was telling my daughter, I was like who’s going to take care of the dog? And she’s like me, right? We’ve all been there, right? And what ends up happening? Your parent takes care of the dog or you take care of the dog, right, if you’re the parent. And so I said, well, okay, let’s talk about this. Because at the end of day, I know I’m going to take care of the dog, okay? And if you heard any barking in the background, that’s the dog. She’s making her appearance.

Bonnie: So you got the dog, obviously.

Hala: Yes, we got the dog. Spoiler alert, the dog is here. But I told her, I was like, you need to take care of the dog. She’s like, I will. And I was like, well, let’s talk about this, how do you take care of yourself first? You cannot take care of anybody else unless you take care of yourself first. And so we started talking about, like, what does that mean? What does it mean to take care of your body, your hair, your mind, your teeth, your this, your that, right?

We went through all of those things. So she gave me all these answers. So I was like, okay, listen, the dog needs to go out to the bathroom in the morning. She was like, okay. I’m like I’m going to do it, unless you take care of yourself first. And so she’s like, okay.

And what’s interesting is over time that became part of her internal dialogue with herself, okay? And now when she’s giving advice to her sisters, right, like the sisters will be like, I want to take the dog out, right? Because sometimes they get a little jealous of each other. And she’s like, oh my God, it’s a dog. But then she’s like, well, did you take care of yourself first? And so she kind of repeats, like she parrots what I’m saying to her.

And I know that she doesn’t understand the words right now. She’s 10, so I know she doesn’t understand that. But this will click when she’s like 20 or 30. Like all the things that we had to unlearn when we were 20 and 30, she will already have those skills. Like, oh, that’s what my mom was talking about, right?

Bonnie: Yeah.

Hala: Don’t pour from an empty cup, right? Like, that’s what she was talking about. And so that’s how love, I mean, there’s so many ways love shows up in my life, but that’s the return on investment where it helps everybody around me, right? Or even you noticing it, Bonnie. That helps me and you, right? It makes you interested, like what are values? Maybe I’ll download this and come back to it later, whatever it may be.

And so I feel like love is infectious. Values are infectious. The way that you’re radically committed to your values are infectious. And if you don’t believe me, look at Disney. Why is Disney so successful? And it’s because they’ve stuck to their values. Every decision they make is from their values. And their values are safety, show, courtesy, efficiency, and then diversity, or inclusion, I forget what they added. They added that just a couple years ago and I didn’t work for the company at the time.

But notice how I have not worked for the company since 2003 and I’m able to name them. And the order I named them in is significant and it’s the order of importance of how they make their decisions. It doesn’t mean that safety, which is their first value, and inclusion, their last value, is any different as far as importance. But it’s in the level of how we make decisions. It’s an algorithm for them.

So, for example, say we wanted to move a trash can. Like say we’re setting up for a parade or something like that and we want to have a trash can. Literally, every cast member goes through this algorithm in their brain. They’re like, is it safe? And they think of all the ways it’s not safe. Is this courteous? Does this really help the user experience? Show? Is this still within the theme of what we’re trying to do here, right? Like if I move it to the other side of the walkway here, is that theming there different than the theming here, because sometimes that’s true at Disney. And then is it efficient, right?

And I think a lot of times as successful women, and this is where the hustle and overwhelm comes, is we put efficiency first. There’s a really good book on that if you want to learn more about it. It’s called If Disney Ran Your Hospital. And if most people that are reading this are doctors, I think it will hit harder.

But even if you’re not a doctor and are listening to this, you’ve been to a hospital and you probably have your complaints about a hospital. And it probably goes something like, they didn’t listen, they didn’t care, they don’t have room for me, I feel like I’m at a number, like all these things. Go back and read this book, it’s really interesting.

I teach this exact same system, but with your personal life. And so it’s really just like how to have this lasting impact, not only for yourself, but for other people around you by being more you. But what that is for you, Bonnie, and what that is for me are different things, right?

But that’s the value of coaching, right? You’re helping someone take their thoughts and their feelings and help them be more expert in their life to create the result for themselves. Whether it’s with money, whether it’s with values or whatever it is that they’re trying to make decisions with.

And so for me, it’s living a sustainable life. Like for me I was working crazy amounts and always feeling like I couldn’t catch up, I was always behind. Not like a burnout, I don’t really think I was burnt out but I was just sick of all the work it took to be successful. I was like, man, why is this so hard? I thought it would be easier right now.

And then when I leaned into my values I realized, oh, it’s really easy. It gets super easy when I stop fighting myself. It’s really easy.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, now I’m like, I have to find this thing. I’m pretty sure I didn’t finish it. I think I got to a point and I think I was like, oh, I don’t know if I can whittle it down to three or four. I was probably at that phase.

Hala: I’ll do it with you. Look, it took me a while. It took me 20 books on Amazon. Tons of like listening, consuming stuff, right? And that’s the other thing too, I think when women, highly educated women, I think that they, and I say this a lot, they rely on their two assets, which is their brain and their wallet. And that’s exactly what I did in this situation.

I was like, I could study my way out of this because I have taken a lot of tests, I’m so smart, right? And so I would read 20 books. Eventually if I just read, if I just listen to enough podcasts the answer will come to me, right? I just don’t have the information, right? But that’s not true. I could read all this stuff. And it wasn’t coming to me.

And then as far as our finances being the other asset we have, I would outsource everything. I was like, oh, I know I’m just overwhelmed, I just need a vacation. Let me just go buy that. Or, oh, I just need more help with my nanny. At one point I had three nannies, right? But at some point, when you’re outsourcing from a place of overwhelm and lack, you will never have control over your life, right?

And so for me, it was no wonder that it took me a long time. And so even if you’re doing this values exercise and you’re finding that hard or you’re finding that you’re doing the same type of behavior, where you’re listening to this podcast and then another podcast and then reading a book and you just really think you just need the right information to be in front of you, like that is your time to hire a coach, whether it’s Bonnie, me or whatever.

Whoever you connect with, like this is the time to learn how to integrate it. You have been studying your whole life. You don’t need any more tools. You don’t need any more courses. You just need to integrate it. And I think that’s what I love about what you do, Bonnie, is that your course says literally like, here’s the information, now let’s do it, right?

And what I like about you too, is that you don’t lollygag with them where you give them such an ample amount of time where they could just turn off their brain. Like you’re holding them accountable. And I think that’s a sign of a really, really good coach, is that you want them to have the results and you’re setting up your container for them to get results.

And I think that’s another thing about coaching and ethics, especially in coaching, is like making sure that we’re setting our clients up for success. And so those are the things that I would advise any of you guys, because when I was at this point I was like, I think I should really hire a coach. And I just didn’t know where to go. And so those are the things that I would say, like know exactly what the result is that you want.

I know this is not even part of your question, but this is kind of a tangent. But know the result that you’re trying to create, and then really understand, whether it’s Bonnie, me or a third person or whatever it may be, like how is that set up for your success? Because I think that every coach really does set up programs that they believe will be successful for people who go through it, but you also know yourself more.

And coaching is meant to stretch your mind a little bit and it’s meant to be a little uncomfortable, it’s meant to go to the gym, right? Nobody goes to the gym and is like, oh my god, I had such a great workout. I was not sore tomorrow. Like that’s the sign of a good workout, right? And so it is something that takes a little bit of a stretch.

But for me it was a lot of discomfort to get through where I’m at today. But I can say that I stand with conviction about my values. I love them, I love the way that I show up. And when I’m not loving myself or the way I’m showing up, I can easily course correct and not sit there and dwell on regret or like, oh my god, I’m so stupid. I should have said this or that or whatever it may be. I just love myself through it.

Bonnie: Yeah, as you’re talking I’m actually seeing, I think I’m probably going to have you guest coach on my program because I really could see how knowing your values is going to help really get clear on their money goals. You know what I mean? When I say money goals I don’t necessarily, I mean, it is a number ultimately. But, ultimately, the reason why people have money goals is to live the lifestyle that they want, right?

And so I could see how getting clear on your values, it does help you kind of decide, well, how do I actually want to live my life? Because a lot of people I work with, they’re like they want to work less. Like, I’ll feel better. I’m just so burned out, overworked, I’m tired. But I think really understanding their values will help them make better decisions, ultimately, right?

Hala: Yeah, for sure. I think that thought, “I just need to work less,” I mean, and sometimes that is true. Sometimes we’re so overextended and that is true. But what I find often is that people will work less, this happened to my cohorts too. A lot of people go to a four day work week, that is a very common thing for my clients. And then they’re like, what do I do with this fifth day?

And then they fill it with overwhelm, right? Because that’s where their brain lives, right? That’s its thermostat, right? And they’re like, oh, I’m not overwhelmed enough, right? And you’ll see this if you haven’t done this four day workweek thing and understand where that comes from.

If you are a to-do list person you’ll see that, right? You’ll get through your to-do list, or there will always be something that’s lingering on your to-do list because you have to have that to maintain enough overwhelm and hustle to maintain the way that you actually continue working.

And so it can be a little jarring to disassociate from that identity. But I will say that when you do it, you start making better decisions. And I just hired a new financial planner, I moved on from my last one. And he made a comment at the end of our first meeting. And he was like, I just want to say it’s a joy to work with someone that really knows what they want.

Like I told him, I was like, hey, listen, I’m not going to be the kind of person that’s going to cut out coffee in the morning. I’m not going to be the kind of person that’s going to be XYZ. This is what I want my life to look like. I want this to look like this for the unforeseeable future. I have no problem working.

I love working. I will work, like not from a place of hustle, not from a place of overwhelm, but I will work. But I just need to figure out like these are my money goals. And they were very specific. And he was like, honestly, let’s just cut to the chase. He’s like, most of my call is coaching people on that for the first like 30 minutes, right? Like really trying to get through the mind drama and the shame and all this other stuff that they bring to these calls.

So, for me, I just feel like that means I’m going to be making money faster. Because the less drama I have about working within my goals with my financial planner, then that money is going to grow faster than kicking the can down the road for five more years and being like, oh yeah, what was I doing?

And then I see what a lot of people do, I don’t know if you see this in your container too, Bonnie. But I have some clients that are like, then they become resentful. I should have done this 10 years ago. Or regretful, you know, I can’t believe that other physicians are doing this at a younger age. I wish that was for me. I wish I would have done it. Instead of like, you know, telling myself I didn’t have enough money or I didn’t have enough time or whatever it may be.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Hala: And so yeah, I’ll say I love working, I’m not a burnt out person. I love everything, I love my life. And I’m so glad that I can say this now. And I never said the opposite of it years ago, but I would say it like tired. I would say it like I wanted to believe it. But now it’s a little different, I really live it. It’s not that I just want to believe it or I tell myself, but I really live it.

Bonnie: Yeah. I’m actually glad you said I love working because I feel like there’s a lot of messaging out there to work a lot less. And especially in the coaching world it’s like, oh, I want to work like a 10 or 15 hour work week. And the number of hours ultimately doesn’t matter, but it’s almost shamed if you work more than a certain amount of hours. I don’t know what your experience is in our world, but I feel like everyone’s trying to work as little as possible.

And I don’t think that’s a problem, per se. But I also agree with you, I love the work that I do. I think I could be more like, it’s not even efficient, but like more focused because I definitely have, you know, I’m like, oh, let me just scroll and see what’s going on before I start the next thing, right? Then it’s like a distraction. So that’s kind of what I mean by working more efficiently.

Like I know I can get the work I do now in less time for sure, but I enjoy the work I do. And I’m not thinking I want to work less, except in the context of just getting rid of that distraction time, which definitely slows because then I’m like, literally sometimes I’m like, oh, I have to look something up on my phone. And then I get caught up in scrolling and I’m like, I picked my phone up what?

Hala: All of a sudden you’re shopping on TikTok. I know, that sometimes happens. I don’t even feel like I’m working. Like my financial planner had asked us what age we want to retire, and that was like the hardest question out of all the questions he asked me. It was like a whole intake questionnaire and the first question was, what age do you want to retire? And I could not answer that because I feel like I’m already retired.

Bonnie: I think that’s the wrong question. Yeah. I just had a call with one of my clients, and people use the word retirement and I’m like, well, what does that actually mean? Because I think that word, retirement, is from our parent’s generation where you work for a corporation for X amount of years, and then you retire at age 65. But I think our generation, really the generation that’s younger than us, what is it, Gen Z?

I don’t even know. I’m apparently in between X and millennials, whatever. It’s very like all or none thinking, if you think about it, right? And I think people think retirement is like the goal in terms of money. But I really think the goal, and I think you’re basically describing it, is to create a life that you love, right? Like, whatever that looks like, it’s going to look different for a lot of people.

I think a lot of people that I talk to, they love to travel. So they want to be like, I want to be able to travel, I don’t know, two or three months a year or whatever it is for them, and maintain the lifestyle. It’s usually some version of that. But I would say most of my clients aren’t trying to retire, if that makes sense. Because that’s so, like I can’t imagine just retiring and then what, like sit on the beach all day? Like, I don’t understand what that means, you know, retirement.

Hala: I mean, and that’s awesome, too. I think whatever people want to do, and I totally support that. For me, I just feel like I am retired. I tell people that all the time. Like, oh yeah, I’m retired, I just do this for fun. And they’re like, what? Especially even when I’m at the hospital. They’re like, Dr. Sabry, you’re crazy. Seriously, is that what you think?

And a lot of the patients are like, wow, did you just come back from vacation? You seem really happy. And I’m like, no, I’m just always like this. I’m always really happy. I mean, obviously, there’s times that I am not happy, but those are just normal human emotions. But honestly, I just feel like it’s such a privilege to be at work.

For those that have followed my story, I was off of work medically for a year and a half because I had some health challenges. And I’ll tell you, I went through a really deep depression. I mean, I think part of it was that part of my identity was taken at that time, but also I didn’t realize how much I loved being at the bedside. I love coaching as well, I love both of them. And I love my career, what I built of this amazing coaching practice. And I still work clinically and I love that.

But for me, I think the goal, like my money goals were really based on what I learned with my parents. My parents were first generation here and with each of their passing I learned a lot more about money as far as like from a legacy standpoint. And so for me, all my money goals have to do with that personal experience.

And so it was really neat to talk to my financial planner and he’s like, man, you already, like you have that unfortunate experience but I think that’s really helped form very strong decisions that you’re making now. For me, I mean, I felt like it was a successful call. My husband got off and he text messaged me after and he was like, how do you feel? And I was like, amazing.

I mean, we have a lot of work to do to get to the goals that I want, which I think are maybe an overdeliver for myself and my kids, but I’m okay with that. And my husband was like, yeah, I feel a mixture of that and a little bit like we’re a little bit behind. I’m like, no, we just have a goal to work towards. I’m excited.

Bonnie: What I’m hearing is, I think a lot with money is people don’t know where they’re going. Like they’ll say things to me like, oh, I want to work less, I want to have another income stream, right? But it’s like, well, let’s get specific. Kind of like you were saying, get specific money goals. And ultimately it’s math, and then it’s like, well, how do you want to get there, right?

So that’s kind of what I help them with when I do these introduction calls, is like, well, what’s the math? Because it’s a math problem, it’s solvable. Then you know what you have to do. It informs what decisions and what actions you need to take in terms of money.

Okay, so to wrap this up, we’ve talked about a lot of things, it’s all amazing. I think, my guess is people listening to this are like, okay, how do I figure out my values besides downloading your thing? Or do that and then what?.

Hala: I think the easiest way is just to download my download, because I think it was just made from reading 20 books. Like literally, it’s the most efficient way, I think, in my brain to do it. But if you are very averse to doing that, that’s okay.

I would say maybe just whatever form that you love to learn from, whether it’s podcasts or whether it’s like a book on Amazon, or whatever it may be. I would just start off with like, one, identifying what your values are. There’s a lot of different resources that you can use to help you identify what your values are.

Bonnie: Is there a book that you’d recommend?

Hala: Oh my gosh, I think the one that I – It was so dense though, you guys. Like it took me forever to get through it. But it was a Franklin Covey book about legacy. I’ll give it to you right after this podcast. But, I mean, there was a lot. I mean, I can go through my library, and it’s been a couple years. But there isn’t one, I think I just highlighted a whole bunch of things.

And then I start realizing, oh no, I know this, I know this system really well. But I would identify your values. I would really question like, why? Like why did I choose those, right? And then whatever answer you give yourself, ask yourself why.

So for example, love. Well why is that important to you? And then you’ll give an answer. And then take that answer and be like, well, why is that important to me? Why is that important to me, until you get to where you cannot answer anymore.

And just make sure that you love your answers that lead you there. So, one, pick your values. Make sure that you love your values and that you have a strong why for those values.

And then I would start looking around your life, and I would start to ask yourself about those six avenues that I talked about: money, career, health, your romantic relationships, your relationships with your friends, family, community and your spirituality. Whatever that means to you, whether it’s organized religion, or it’s just feeling spiritual, connected to the universe.

I would go through each one and just ask like, how does that show up in each one. And I’ll tell you like, there isn’t really a good source for that. I don’t know anybody, maybe there are other coaches that do this, I have no idea for me to recommend anybody besides myself. But you can even sit down with your coach and ask them if they feel comfortable with doing values work.

But that’s exactly what I would do. I would do more of an audit on what you are doing, what you’re not doing and kind of understand what your goals are with your values in each avenue of your life. And then just start to create your life to meet those goals. And I think that the goal really here is to be more authentically yourself.

And I think when you’re more authentically yourself, not only are you pleasing everybody else around you, but you’re pleasing yourself first. And that’s kind of like paying yourself first or doing anything else that I think is really important with investment.

Or as the famous Jill Cruise has said years ago that has affected so many of us coaches, the first artery branch that comes off of the heart is the coronary artery. And nobody calls the heart selfish, but the heart has to replenish itself with blood to be able to continue to pump the blood to the rest of the organs.

And so I think that that’s how values are. It’s like the heart of how we make decisions, and we’re making decisions every single day. So you are doing it, but you would do it with such a clearer lens if you knew exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, which is a combination of identity and what we didn’t talk about is identity and values.

But yeah, so I hope that answers your question.

Bonnie: Yeah. Okay, how can people find you?

Hala: My website is drhalasabry.com and you can find me there. Or if you follow me on social media it’s Dr. Hala Sabry on Facebook, that’s where I mainly show up. I do apparently sometimes have a presence on Instagram, but Facebook is probably the best way to get a hold of me.

Bonnie: Yeah. And I’ll just spell your name just in case. So it’s H-A-L-A and then the last name is S-A-B-R-Y, right?

Hala: Yep, you got it.

Bonnie: I’m making sure I’m getting it right. Okay.

Hala: Spelling bee, you’re like, ding.

Bonnie: Yeah. Okay, so we’re going to link the values freebie that we talked about a few times and her handles, et cetera. So when you’re listening on your podcast app, just go to the description and you click on the show notes page, that’s where everything will be.

All right, well, thank you so much for being here.

Hala: Thank you.

Bonnie: I know I learned a lot. And like I said before, I need to find that sheet and or just redo the work because, like I said, I wouldn’t say I feel lost and confused, but I definitely know I could use more direction and help in terms of making my decisions. So I know it’ll be helpful. Thank you.

Hala: Yay, thanks.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | The Truth About Your Clinical Income

186: The Truth About Your Clinical Income

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One of the most common things I hear from my clients as well as from women physicians in general is that they’d love to work less, but they can’t take the financial hit of losing their clinical income. We'd love to work less especially for those of us with kids at home, but we feel trapped because we need our full-time income to survive.

However, there are a few things we need to address here. The idea that if you work less then you’ll earn less is just a thought. I know it feels true to you right now, but there is a whole world of opportunity you aren’t considering when your only focus is the money you receive for your clinical work as a physician.

Tune in this week to discover how it’s possible to work less without taking a massive financial hit. I’m sharing why your current income level is always temporary, your clinical income is never guaranteed, and I’m giving you some practical tips for working less, spending more time doing what matters to you without earning less money in the process.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why your lifestyle should not depend on your full income.
Some of the specific money mistakes I see physicians making.
Why your current income is always temporary.
How you can use your physician brain to generate extra streams of income.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hello, everyone, welcome back for another episode. So today I’m talking about something that I can’t believe I haven’t talked about. I’m sure there’s been some of the ideas sprinkled into my prior episodes, but one of the most common things I hear not just from my clients, but other women physicians that I talk to between speaking and et cetera, is basically some form of I would love to X, but the money.

A lot of it is they want to work less. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. We are so overworked as physicians, we would just love to work a little less, especially if we have young ones at home. But so many of us feel trapped because of the income that comes in with a full-time job and thinking that less money will basically suck for a number of reasons, right?

So a few things I want to talk about with this topic. Now, obviously, that is a thought that you can’t work and that your money will be affected. I know it feels very true to most of you listening, but hear me out. The first thing I want to say about that is your lifestyle should not depend on your full income. This is especially true if you are a two income household.

I see this a lot when both people are not necessarily physicians, but both people work. And that both incomes are required to sustain your current lifestyle because that is just a recipe for, I don’t want to say disaster. But the truth is we all know that active income, your job, isn’t guaranteed and things can happen all the time. And so having a robust reserve, also known as an emergency fund is critical.

But also if your mortgage, and I think that’s the biggest expense for most of us, if your mortgage, if you’re private school tuition for your kids, et cetera, if that is dependent on both incomes, that is not setting you up for success. And so I want to take this concept in terms of your full-time income, whether or not you’re the primary breadwinner, or if you’re single this applies to you as well. Because like I said, we don’t want you to be in a position where you have to rely on your full-time income to support your life.

I also want to remind you all that we all used to be residents making a lot less money, and that most of the country lives on much less income than our physician income. This does not mean that you should not want a great lifestyle or be able to pay for the things that you want to pay for. But please don’t do it at the expense of your current financial situation or even your future.

Now, now that I’ve sort of given you sort of my spiel about that, now I want to talk about sort of those of you who really do want to work less and you don’t want to make less money overall, because you know that extra income will provide either the quality of life that you want or the money that you need to invest. And so the first thing I want to say is if there is a temp, well, of course, there will be a temporary loss of income.

Actually, notice the word temporary. I just went right into temporary. Less income, let’s say you decide to work one day less a week, you know, go 0.8. That loss of income, that less income is temporary. Your current money situation is always temporary. And I really can’t harp on this concept a lot because what I’ve seen a lot is when you’re thinking about working a little less and that subsequent loss of income, our brains feel like that’s going to be forever.

And so when we sort of project that loss of income into the future, into the permanent future, of course that’s going to not feel good. And I also know it’s not going to feel good even if you know that it’s temporary. But what I do know as well, is that most of you are overworked. And when you’re overworked, you just don’t have any extra mental space, whether it’s for you, whether it’s for planning or whether it’s for your family. And so that’s why I know that many of you want to work less.

And who doesn’t want to work less? Or maybe you would just want some additional flexibility so you’re not tied to going to your office every day, right? You want some more time flexibility. And so I talked a little bit about this in the last two episodes and so I’m just going to reiterate it, so many ways to you Is your physician brain to create income.

I think one of the best ways to do this if you want to stay at your current job is to simply work less and do something like expert witness work. I think this is something that’s really under utilized, under thought of. It’s such a great way to make additional income because your per hour rate is much higher than your current clinical job. And it gives you so much flexibility because you can do it from home.

Now, obviously, there is a ramp up period because you have to find a case to work on. But it’s the type of thing that once you start expert witnessing, other lawyers will start calling you because they know you’re available as an expert witness.

I do have an episode with Dr. Gretchen Green, who does teach positions, how to do this. How to start from really A to Z. In addition, she has such a robust network of lawyers that she will also help you get started by those introductions. I think that’s an important thing in general, learning the thing and having access to connections.

We do that inside my paid program, Live Wealthy, in that whatever I recommend, I usually have a vetted resource or person to talk to versus just saying invest in real estate. And I will give you specific names to look into to work. It doesn’t mean you have to work with them, but at least it gives you some concrete steps that you can start immediately.

Now, back to the less money is temporary and the mental space that most of us are just wanting to have, right? When you work less, you have more time to figure things out. But when we’re focusing solely on the loss of income, it can just really stop us from seeing the big picture, right? You are not going to be making less money forever, unless that’s something that’s okay with you. Great.

But if you don’t want to make less money than you currently are and you want to work less, you need to listen. What I have found, and this is not just me, but when you are completely at capacity, mental capacity and having decision fatigue and just having burnout and all the things that come with overworking, if you’re parenting et cetera, you cannot be creative. You cannot think outside of the box. You literally just don’t have any more mental space to think.

And my clients who have decided to work less because literally they’re on the verge of burnout, aside from taking care of themselves, they have found that ideas just start coming to them. They’re able to talk to other people, network, attend some conferences and really spend the time to kind of figure out how to create more money, how to invest their money smarter and to literally think beyond your clinical income, which is what the last episode was all about.

But you can’t do that when you’re overextended and exhausted. So the thought I want to offer you is that what if working less is what’s required for you to make even more money? I’m going to repeat that. What if working less is what’s required to make even more money? Again, this is temporary and I want you to consider that your quality of life, your financial future may actually depend on you making less money temporarily.

Now, my version of this for myself is that becoming an entrepreneur was definitely making less money in the short term. Now I didn’t quit my job and decide to be an entrepreneur. I actually was starting my side gig while I was still working full-time as a dermatologist.

Now, I have not replaced my clinical income, although every year I get closer and closer. And, of course, I could supplement that with working part time. I’ve just decided at this time it doesn’t really work for my current lifestyle. And what I mean by that is my time freedom, my time flexibility. Once you’ve tasted that, it’s really hard to go back. And you will figure out how to make things work in the meantime.

So I know in my bones and I have enough entrepreneur friends to see that this can be true for me that this period of making less money is what’s required for me to make even more money. Of course, it’s not always easy because my brain will offer, “Well, maybe you should work again or maybe you should just work full-time again.” And that is not a wrong decision, it’s just, at this time, not the right decision for me.

So I want you to brainstorm at least 10 ways you can create money. Again, this is hard to do when you’re overworked. And what if you just told yourself I’m going to go part time because I want to. And if at some point you need to work more to bring in income because you either haven’t quite figured it out or you would like more income while you’re figuring it out, you can always go back full-time. It’s always available to you, okay?

Other ways to sort of free up your clinical time, and many of you do this already, is to get admin time by taking on some leadership or different roles where you will get admin time in return. Now, of course, this means you’re still working full-time. But a lot of my clients have found that just breaking things up, you know, working less so that there’s less of that sort of seeing so many patients and all the work that goes on with that, that this really gives them some breathing room.

Again, so many options. I’ve given you a few. You can obviously switch to locums or per diem. I think of per diem as a local locums so you don’t have to travel. I think of locums as mostly traveling to a different place. Although you can definitely find a local locums job.

Now zooming out again, I really want you to think of how do you want your life to look like? And I want you to think in terms of your time lifestyle, your flexibility lifestyle. Do you want more time flexibility? Pretty much the answer is yes to everyone I talk to, right? Like do you want the ability to go on a trip or go to a conference and not have to get your call covered or move mountains to figure out how to do that?

I know physicians where the call schedule is figured out a year in advance. That is really crappy flexibility, right? And so I know that if this is new to you, the concept, or just really taking on thinking about how you can make this work, well, the first thing is to notice I said how. Even that question, if you ask yourself that question every day and brainstorm 10 ways you could do this, how can I make this work? That is such a powerful question for your brain.

Any how question is a powerful thing for your brain because when you keep telling it, “I can’t do this because of money,” that’s what you are creating. That’s what’s going to continue. Remember, if nothing changes, nothing changes. And change is hard. It’s so much easier to keep doing what you’re doing, even if you don’t like it, because you don’t have to do anything, you don’t need to expend more time and energy, mental et cetera in order to keep going.

So how can you make this work? How can you go part-time? What if going part time is how you’re going to figure out how to make more money and also give you the rest that I know you so deserve and want? Versus just sort of accepting and thinking there isn’t another way because of money.

And, like I said in the beginning, if your current lifestyle is dependent on you working full-time, whether it’s you, whether it’s you and your partner’s income, I want you to take another look and figure out how you can make it so that that is not true.

I see so many people buying a home where they really need both people’s income to make it work. And I just really advise not to do this. So if you’re someone who doesn’t own a home, but you are looking, please do not take on a house that you would not be able to afford if there was a sudden loss of income. And I don’t mean like 100%, but let’s say 30%, right?

I know there are sort of rules of thumb about what percentage of your mortgage or rent should be based relative to your income, and I really want you to take this advice. I just see this a lot where people are buying more house where they can, I don’t want to say barely afford, but that loss of income will really jeopardize their ability to pay your mortgage. Of course, there are other things like how you’re spending your money in many different areas as well.

Okay, so that’s really what I wanted to talk about today. I really want you to think about how you can work less. I want you to understand that this is temporary. I want you to understand that this might be what’s required in order for you to make even more money or even just make the same amount of money you’ve made working full-time. How there are so many ways to do this, and how freeing up your mental space, your workload is going to help you figure this out.

So many of my clients have been able to do this. When I say able, they have decided to make that jump to work a little bit less. And the things that have unfolded since have been amazing. I was going to say miraculous, I guess it is miraculous because they had no idea that they could do this and that other types of opportunities were available to you.

All right. I hope this has inspired you to take action and to consider going part-time and to start asking yourself how can I make this work? I’ll see you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | How to Create Multiple Streams of Income as a Physician

185: How to Create Multiple Streams of Income as a Physician

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Over the course of this podcast, we’ve explored what it means to find financial freedom as a physician and the different options available for you to up-level your money. Since this show is on the crux of hitting 200 episodes, I thought I’d take it back to basics this week by diving into why creating multiple streams of income matters in the first place.

Who doesn’t want multiple streams of income? We know it’s the key to minimizing anxiety in our lives around money and finding financial empowerment faster. The hurdle most physicians face is the how and why behind creating additional streams of income, and this is what I’ll be walking you through on this episode.

Join me today to learn why having multiple streams of income matters, and the truth about all the different ways you can diversify your income as a physician. You’ll hear how physician job security isn’t what it used to be, how to begin shifting your mindset around your money-making ability, and why this will take a leap of faith.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How physicians often have a limited view of what’s possible.
Why there’s now less of a sense of job security among physicians.
The alternative streams of income available to physicians beyond patient care.
Why most physicians don’t take advantage of the ability to create multiple streams of income.
How I make multiple streams of income as a physician entrepreneur.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. So it is full-on fall here. It’s actually the end of October here, and so we all know that the days are just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. I feel like I podcasted about this but maybe it was on my social media, but last winter I actually bought these glasses called Luminette. L-U-M-I-N-E-T-T-E, something like that.

I have no conflict of interest with them, but the reason why I bought these glasses is because I definitely get a little more depressed during the winter, and I know many of you do as well. And so most of you have probably heard of a traditional light box that you can buy that has like, they’re like measured in something called Lux, L-U-X, like 10,000 Lux or whatever it is. And it’s a measurement of light to simulate the sunlight during the winter when it’s dark in the morning.

Anyway, I got offered that, but the reason why I bring this all up is that I have discovered a podcast, it’s not new but new to me, called The Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N, I am currently obsessed with this podcast. Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and he just has these podcasts that go really deep into the science, the neuroscience of lots of many topics.

And the first several are about how our sleep cycle works and how light is so important. And he just nerds out and I love it. So if you’re a physician or just someone who loves to get nerdy like that, you will love it. He has pretty long episodes because they are so full of information. In fact, some of them I’ve had to listen to twice, it was that much information.

But anyway, the reason why I’m bringing this all up is that he talks about how getting that morning light and specific type of light in a specific amount, again, that’s where the Lux thing comes in, in terms of regulating your sleep and mood, et cetera. Now, you all know this, but it just made me realize that I don’t have to wait until like December, I think that’s kind of what I was thinking. Like, oh, I have to wait till it’s actual winter before I start using these glasses.

But after I listened to that episode I started wearing them in the morning because I wake up between 6:00 and 6:30am on the East Coast and it’s dark. The sun doesn’t rise until, I don’t know, 7:15 or so. And, of course, in his podcast he says the easiest way to do this is to actually get outside during sunrise. And that’s just not feasible for most people. It’s not really feasible for me, especially when it gets cold outside. The last thing I want to do is go outside.

So I started wearing these glasses. I know that was kind of a long-winded, totally random introduction. But when I started telling people about the glasses that I have, a lot of my friends and even people on social media were really interested. So I just wanted to bring that up again.

Another thing that I’ve been using these glasses for is for jet lag because, again, one of the ways to beat jet lag – And actually, in that podcast I just mentioned he has a whole podcast on jet lag and shift workers and how to deal with that. So I’ve actually been using that when I travel time zones. I used it when I went to Paris and I definitely felt like it was helpful. Okay, totally unrelated to today’s episode.

So today I’m actually going to do a replay of episode number four. In fact, I wasn’t planning on doing that, I just wanted to record a podcast about why it’s so important to have multiple streams of income. At this point we’re almost at 200 episodes, which is kind of crazy to me. And I already talked about this very topic in episode four, but that was a long time ago. And if you are a recent listener, it’s unlikely that you’ve gone through every one of my episodes.

And so the only thing I really want to add to this episode is how I love to describe investing now. It’s taking today’s cash flow for tomorrow’s cash flow. I want to talk about the concept that I teach my clients inside my paid program, the wealth table concept, and how important it is to have multiple streams of income.

Now, when people are asking me, well, how long will it take? Different types of streams take different amounts of time and effort. And I really want all of you listening to consider that this is a must, not a nice to have, okay? And so I’m going to be going over the mindset around this, why you should definitely do this. And I would love for you to get started before the end of the year. And what I mean by that is to decide what stream you’re going to work on. And what if you could take three action steps before the end of the year?

I give some examples on the podcast and I have several podcasts talking about sort of the different types of streams that are available to you. We have quite a few podcast episodes on real estate with special guests, on passive and active, and then we also have a few episodes on entrepreneurship. So this is a great sort of introduction and orientation to the concept, and then you can move on to some of the other podcasts that I have.

Speaking of which, I’m actually in the middle of creating a podcast guide, because I know many of you are new to the podcast. And like I said, there’s almost 200 episodes, so kind of a lot to wade through. And so my goal with this guide is to kind of give you a framework of how to approach the podcast and sort of give you specific podcasts to listen to, to kind of get you oriented and so that you can start taking some action.

Okay, so here is the episode, Think Beyond Your Clinical Income.

I am super excited about today’s topic because it took me a long time to even consider this as something I could do. My hope is that it will inspire you to get started. What am I even talking about? I’m talking about thinking beyond your clinical income. In other words, creating multiple streams of income. I have heard this concept so many times, but it wasn’t until recently that I truly understood why, or how, or even what it really meant.

Now that I’m actually saying this out loud, I feel a little stupid, because who doesn’t want multiple streams of income, right? One thing I’ve learned as a physician is that most physicians, we often have a fixed mindset. We kind of are somewhat narrow-minded in terms of what we think is possible.

When we talk about working as a physician, at least for me, when I was in residency I thought my only choices were to find a job in academics or find a job in private practice. And yeah, I knew there were things in between. But basically, I just assumed I would do patient care and that’s all I would do pretty much 100% of the time. It’s so interesting to look back at that time.

I’m talking about our jobs, obviously. I like to joke that job stands for just over broke, because if you think about it – Or let me ask you, if your job suddenly dried up, and up until recently physician jobs were pretty much secure, would you be okay? Is your physician job your only source of income? Or is it the main source of income in your family? Because assuming you’re a two parent household or two partners in a household, you both might be working, but maybe you’re the breadwinner as a physician.

Up until recently physicians really enjoyed amazing job security, and multiple things have changed slowly over time. For example, most physicians, outpatient like me for example, we often opened up our own shop immediately after residency.

But in the past 10, 20 years or so that’s changed. We’ve come to have more of an employee mindset and an employee model, whereas we just want to find a job. We’re not really interested in starting our own business. I really wonder why that started changing. Now, obviously, if you are in a certain surgical field, you often do work for a hospital, but there are several private surgery groups that just contract with the hospital.

Back to the original question, how secure really is your job as a physician? And with the recent pandemic we’ve found out that our jobs really aren’t as secure as we think. I like to imagine our income as a table, think of a table, let’s say a round table just for illustration purposes. And think of the table having traditionally four legs, but you can have as many legs as you want. And each leg represents a stream of income.

If you’re a typical physician working in a typical patient care job, you have maybe one leg for your physician income anyway. And I’ll talk about how most of us have a second leg for retirement and things like that, but let’s just talk about our physician income. Most of us only have one way we make money as a physician. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. I just want to present that there’s multiple ways to go about this.

If you think about it, there’s so many ways to make money as a physician. I talked about private practice, I talked about academics. Now I’m a dermatologist, so my view might be a little skewed. But I also could have done research and got paid grants, maybe apply for the NIH. I know many physicians who also work in research and they also still see patients as well, but they’re making money in a few different ways.

A lot of doctors also do consulting on the side, whether it’s for pharmaceutical companies, whether it’s for startups, things like that. You can also be on advisory boards because your knowledge as a practicing physician is super valuable to many companies. And I’ve done a few consulting gigs here and there for companies to talk about medications.

We all know that some people do some telemedicine on the side. You’ve seen people doing surveys. Don’t forget that things like moonlighting and locums, I would consider that a separate stream of income if you have another stream of working as a regular physician. You might have your regular four or five day a week full-time job, but maybe occasionally you add on some extra shifts with moonlighting or maybe you do locums. I know people doing that for sure. I would consider that separate streams of income, okay?

Anyway, you get the point. There are so many ways to make money as a physician. There are so many options besides good old patient care. In fact, I think in this day and age it’d be remiss to not think about other ways to bring money using your physician brain.

Okay, so I think I made that point clear, you can have multiple legs just using your “physician brain.” Now, most of us have at least one other leg to stand on, the stock market. I hope all of us have retirement accounts. With a lot of employers, even during residency, you get an automatic 403B or 401K. And oftentimes, they’ll automatically sign you up and put a small percentage for you.

Obviously, you can go in and change that to zero if you want. I actually did that. I don’t recommend doing that, by the way. We do have a second leg, and that’s the stock market. And that’s usually via retirement accounts, so 401K’s, Roth IRAs, IRAs, even brokerage accounts. We all know that it takes a long time for that leg to firm up. Meaning that if I lost my job today, I do have a stock market leg, but it’s not going to really pay me all that much.

At least for me, and I think for many people, we think of our stock market accounts as something that’s going to pay us in “retirement,” like after age 50, or 60, or 70. So we’re not really worried about it providing income for us right now, but we’re actively putting money into it and letting compound interest do its thing.

But as you know, or maybe you don’t know, compound interest, it just takes a long time because you need two things for compound interest to work. You need time and you need an interest rate. And the third thing is you need your contribution or your principal.

And so, unfortunately, you can’t really speed up the time. You can play around with the interest rate or rate of return a little bit by your asset allocation. But at the end of the day, it generally takes years, if not decades for this leg to become firm and provide you with a steady stream of income.

I think you’re starting to see the point of this round table with legs. You want to have as many legs as possible. At least four, don’t you think? If not more. And you can add on as many as you want. And it seems like it would be a lot of work, but I just showed you earlier that even with just your “physician brain,” you can have multiple legs in the sort of physician brain category.

Let me give an example of mine. I can make money seeing patients as a dermatologist, and I’ve certainly done that. I also do some teledermatology, that’s a little stream of income as well. I don’t do surveys, but I certainly could. I have done consulting in the past. I’ve done some advisory board stuff in the past.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that some doctors also do casework for lawyers. You can testify on behalf of a physician. You can also just review cases. So there’s just so many ways you can use your physician brain to make money.

This concept of multiple streams of income, it’s simple and it totally makes sense, right? But how come so many of us don’t do it? My take is most of us, we’ve been taught our whole lives that money wise, all we had to do is to study hard and get a good job, especially if you’re a physician, right? We were told, you’ve got to study hard to get into a good college. Get good grades so you can get into medical school and so forth. You always had to work hard and study hard to eventually become a physician.

I find it really strange that there’s this concept in our society that you want to do, AKA your job, has to be tied to one primary source of income. And so when you ask little kids what they want to do when they grow up, the real question, I think, is to ask how much money do you want to make? And that might seem bold, and maybe you’re feeling like, oh, did she even say that? But that’s because a lot of us just have weird, and I would say negative, money beliefs because of the way we were brought up.

But that’s really the question we’re asking. We are asking, what do you want to do? Do you want to be an architect? Do you want to be a physician? Do you want to be a fireman? But all of these things, they’re tied to a certain range of income. I know there’s a range, especially among physicians, right? Some of us barely make six figures and some of us make over a million dollars. So there’s a range, but there is pretty much an agreed upon range for each career choice.

I actually think this is where we get into trouble because why does your life passion, what you want to do in your life, your gifts you want to share with the world, why does that have to be directly tied to your ability to make money? I actually think we could separate that. I’m going on a bit of a tangent right now.

Have you noticed that no one has really questioned that sort of societal teaching that your job has to be tied, one stream of income, or that your life’s passion, your life’s work has to bring in the majority of your income. And I’ll be honest, when I first heard about the concept of multiple streams of income, I just assumed it wasn’t for me. That’s something only rich people do.

And maybe you’re thinking the same thing. Or maybe you assumed your job is secure. I think it’s safe to say that we don’t know what’s going to happen, short-term or long-term, but what’s certain is that we and life is always changing. And that’s just the way it is. Even though today I might think I’d like to work “forever,” 20 years, 30 years as a physician full-time, and that I like working hard right now, it doesn’t mean I’m going to think the same things in five years, 10 years, or even just next year.

We’re always changing. And things happen, like having children or having a life event like someone close to you pass away. Suddenly our priorities change rapidly. What am I doing, or I should say what is my family doing right now for sources of income? At the time of this recording it’s actually during the pandemic, and so I’m not seeing patients right now.

I am doing some teledermatology, so I’m still using my physician brain to bring in some money. I’m not doing surveys. I haven’t really looked into anything else in terms of my physician brain. I obviously have Wealthy Mom MD, and it is a profitable business. But even within this one business, or this one umbrella of Wealthy Mom MD, the business makes money through multiple streams, literally.

One stream is I coach physicians one on one. And so that’s one stream of income. I also have an online course, Money For Women Physicians, that also brings in money as well. I make money through affiliate marketing.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, that means that if you buy something through me by clicking on a link, at no extra cost to you, I may get a percentage or a flat fee when you buy something through Amazon, for example. That’s probably what a lot of us use. The commissions for Amazon are pretty low, however, unless you have high volume.

If you buy, for example, I’ve partnered up with other physician entrepreneurs who sell courses that I think are useful for my readers that have to do with money, I will get a commission from that as well. So that’s my affiliate income stream. I also have a few sponsors. I used to have a lot more, but I’ve sort of whittled that down to just a few core sponsors. So that’s another stream of income.

I am planning some live events, including a retreat and a conference. So that will be, once again, another stream of income. I do some speaking. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge source of income, but I often do get paid for that.

So as you can see, even though it’s one business, Wealthy Mom MD, there are multiple ways that the business makes money. And I’m always thinking, how else can I create income that’s not going to be necessarily related to affiliate income, or my course income, et cetera? I’m always looking for ways that I can create streams of income that are unrelated or just separate so that I don’t have to rely on any one stream.

As of this recording, I’m actually working on a skincare line. So stay tuned for that.

Okay, so I hope we’re all in agreement that having multiple streams of income is key. And yes, we should all be interested in doing this, right? I’m guessing you probably have a lot of questions. Questions like, well, how do I get started? How much time will it take, because I don’t have a lot of time? Is it worth it? And I don’t have any money to get started. These are totally valid questions. But before I even go into them, I think it’s really important to sort of take a step back and think about why.

Why are you even interested in having multiple streams of income? Now, I realize the surface answer is, well, to have more money or to have more security. What does that security do for you? What mouths are you trying to feed? I think for many of us, it’s pretty simple. We just want freedom, we want peace of mind, we want security. We want to feel like we can always take care of our families, things like that. And some of us have bigger goals. And that’s super awesome.

I think if you kind of go to that core why, you know, what’s the point of all this, because otherwise it’s really easy to get lost in the details, it’s really easy to stop and get stuck because let’s just be honest, I wish there was a very easy way to make money super fast, but that’s not the case. If that was true, we’d all have multiple streams of income and you wouldn’t need this podcast.

But the truth of the matter is, things that are worth doing usually take some effort, there are going to be obstacles in the road. And so this is also why I decided to become a coach, because I started to see that it was critical to be able to handle these mental roadblocks because pretty much 99.99% of the time, they’re roadblocks that only exist in your head. They’re actually not real, based in reality.

But here’s the good news, you are a physician. What does that mean? That means I know you can do hard things. You had to in order to become one. There are so many obstacles on our path to becoming physicians. And I want to remind you, when you got into medical school, when you got that acceptance letter, didn’t you truly believe that you would become a physician? You didn’t quite understand or you didn’t quite know the how.

Yes, I know that you knew medical school is four years. Residency is three to seven years or more depending on the specialty. I knew you understood the sort of basic pieces and there would be all these tests involved. You didn’t know exactly what you were going to learn in terms of the day to day stuff. You didn’t realize exactly how it was all going to fall together, because you couldn’t have known that, right? You didn’t know what your rotations would be like.

Sure, you may have heard from people who have gone through it before, but every school is different, every experience is different. And so that’s kind of the analogy that I like to give. You just have to commit that you’re going to create multiple streams of income. You might not know the how, and that’s okay. And in fact, I’ll say it’s actually not as important as you think it is. But it’s so funny, in some ways, our brains can’t see that it’s possible unless we know all the exact steps to get there.

But I want to remind you that you did not know all the exact steps to become a physician, yet you believed you would become one after you go into medical school. That is having that leap of faith that you know you’re going to get there without having to know all the itty bitty details.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Locums & Side Hustles for Physicians with Dr. Carrie Reynolds

184: Locums & Side Hustles for Physicians with Dr. Carrie Reynolds

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One thing I see so many doctors wanting to do is give themselves some breathing room while they figure out what they really want for their lives. How can you take a break without experiencing a significant loss in your income? Making the switch to locums is an amazing place to start.

Locums provide time freedom, and you could possibly make more money than you already do. I have my own experience of shifting to locums, so I’m sharing all of that this week. To get you started finding a side gig that works for you, I’m sitting down with my friend and fellow physician, Dr. Carrie Reynolds, who is a specialist in showcasing the lucrative side work that physicians can undertake.

Tune in this week to discover how switching to locums could change your life. I’m discussing side hustles with Dr. Carrie Reynolds, and we’re showing you how to start thinking beyond your clinical income and sharing some options available to you. Carrie is sharing why she decided to switch to locums and hasn’t looked back since.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

What I love about locums.
How to get more information on locum opportunities near you.
What you can expect to get paid for locums, and how to avoid getting low-balled.
How Carrie became super passionate about helping docs with their side gigs.
Some examples of amazing physician side hustles.
Common misconceptions about locums.
How to decide what you want to do differently in your career.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Read the transcript

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome back. So today I have an episode on all things locums. This episode was actually recorded quite a while ago when I started this podcast back in 2020, but the reason why I wanted to reprise it is that this topic comes up a lot for my clients.

One of the things that many of my clients, members of Live Wealthy, are working on is to give themselves some breathing room and figure out next steps. And what I mean by figure out next steps, I don’t mean they’re trying to quit medicine, but people want a break. And I think one of the best ways to do this without a significant loss of income, and honestly, quite frankly, probably an increase in income is to make the switch to locums.

At least temporarily, right? You could always stop because the nature of locums is that you’re basically a contractor so you can stop whenever you want and you can do some pretty significant negotiation for your hourly rate. Typically you’re paid an hourly rate, but I also know, for example, I have a client who is a laborist, she gets a flat fee for the shifts that she does.

I think locums are really underutilized or just not thought of by a lot of physicians because we’re so used to working at a sort of full-time employed job with a large group. But as many of you know, I did do two locums and it really provided a lot of freedom and flexibility and a lot of, frankly, time when I was not working. Like weeks at a time and actually sometimes even at least a month. What could you do if you had those kinds of breaks built in?

And when I say what can you do, I think of it more as alleviating mental space. Giving you some time and space to just really think about what you want to do, get some projects done, spend more time with your family, et cetera.

What I also really loved about locums is that it’s a discrete job. So there’s a start and end date, generally speaking, and you really don’t have to take work home with you. You know what I mean? And so in this episode I have my friend Carrie Reynolds on and she is the host of the Hippocratic Hustle. She also has a couple of other podcasts, but this is the main podcast for women physicians, and I think she just revived it after a long hiatus.

So the question people always ask me is, okay, how do you find these jobs? How do you know how much you’re going to get paid? Now, I believe there are some locums specific groups out there, but you can also just post this in your community physician group or your specialty group.

Many of us have Facebook groups for specialties because you want to know what people are getting paid, right? Because if you work with an agency, and I’ll talk about that in a second, they will generally low-ball you, which makes sense, right? So you really want to get clear on sort of what the range is and what you can negotiate for.

And it’s not just about the money, right? There’s other things you can negotiate for like paying for travel and putting you up. That’s pretty standard and so it’s really important to know what’s standard and what may not be standard but is worth asking for.

So the two locums positions that I did, they flew me there because they were not near my home. One was in Seattle, one was in Hawaii. They basically gave me a place to stay and I believe they both – Yeah, the Hawaii one definitely provided a rental car. I’m not sure if Seattle did because I don’t think I always needed a rental car. But basically transportation.

They don’t pay for gas or food, which is fine because you’re going to pay for that anyway. I do believe they might be deductible, you’ll have to talk to your CPA, I just don’t remember off the top of my head if they are.

Another thing that’s great about being a locums is that generally speaking you’re a 1099 employee, which means you’re not a W2. And what this means is a few things, a few considerations I should say. One is you’re going to have to put money aside for taxes and you’re also going to want to keep track of expenses you can deduct.

They can be significant, right? So anything related to being a physician. So that could be your license fees, your board certification fees, any conferences that you go to, home office space if you do have one, computer, internet, that sort of thing. And if you are someone who wears scrubs and or a white coat, that’s also deductible as well. As long as it’s something you can only wear as a physician, right? Like you can’t write off regular clothes, basically.

And something that I think it also provides that is really great in terms of your finances is that it gives you the ability to open an individual or solo 401K. I think I have an episode on 401Ks. I don’t know if I specifically talked about self-directed 401Ks, but let me put that aside for a second.

So an individual 401K, what’s nice about it is that you get to pick the custodian, like Vanguard, Charles Schwab, et cetera. And you can roll over all of your previous 401Ks, 403Bs, pre-tax IRAs as well, all into one place. And I think just to simplify finances, one of them is to really just combine like accounts.

Now, another thing you can do is open a self-directed 401K. And what this is, is it’s a 401K where you can invest in other things besides the stock market. So I have one, for example, and I have been able to invest in real estate syndications and you can do so many other things that are non-traditional. You can buy crypto with it, for example.

And so what I like about this is that it gives you access to capital to invest in these types of things because what a lot of my clients say is they want to get involved in passive real estate investments or other alternative investments but they simply do not have the cash laying around. Most of us have a decent amount of money inside of our retirement accounts, we just are unable to access it for other things.

There’s a reason why it’s affectionately called money jail. And so a self-directed 401K is one way to tap into that money jail so you can use the money for alternative investments.

So, to summarize, a few reasons why I think locums are great, at least to try out, is, one, you’re going to work a lot less because you’re generally like one week a month. They’re all different, so I don’t want to generalize, but sometimes they’re just one week a month, sometimes they’re a few weeks at a time, like in terms of a stint. The two locums assignments I did happened to be covering two maternity leaves, and so that was fantastic.

You get to visit places that you may not have been able to visit before. I mean I got really lucky in terms of the locations that I decided to choose. And here’s the thing, there are so many locums jobs, and so you are bound to find one that works for you, your schedule, location, and I know if you’ve got children that’s also a consideration, right, because you might not want to be away from your children that long. And so there’s lots of different ways to do this. And then, finally, it gives you some extra options when it comes to money, investing it, et cetera.

People always ask how do you find these jobs? Now, I can really speak to my experience as a dermatologist, but there are agencies, there are some big ones out there that you probably have heard of. They probably already emailed and reached out to you already. Find out by talking to colleagues. Ask around, who’s done locums? Ask that person, they might have a specific contact.

Now, you’re going to get paid the most if you avoid an agency because they take a big cut because the hospital or employers pay them a lot of money, and so they take quite a hefty fee. And then the question is, well how do you find these types of positions?

And also locums, you can also think of it as a per diem job. A per diem job, I think of it as like a local locums, you work sort of as needed or when they need help. And again, per diems are generally directly through an employer.

And so I’ve had clients actually figure this out with their current employer, they want to leave, they don’t want to work full-time anymore, but they still want to stay involved. And the thing is, your current employer, if they do have the need for more physicians, they’re much rather going to want to have someone who already knows the system and is in the system, right? And so you have that sort of leg up in that regard.

But again, post in your actual local physician group, just ask around because people have this knowledge. I get messages not too infrequently from other dermatologists. I haven’t done it in a while so I really don’t have much advice except some common agencies, my former contact at the agency, but again, it’s best not to go through an agency in terms of pay.

All right, here’s the episode.

Bonnie: So the reason why I brought Carrie on to the show today is I want to talk about side hustles. So as you recall, in a previous episode titled Think Beyond Your Clinical Income, I talked about how many physicians sort of only see their only source of income as direct patient care. But there’s so many options.

And I actually think that everyone should pursue multiple streams of income and think beyond their current physician job. And so a lot of times people ask, “Okay, that makes sense. I should do that. But what should I do? What can I do? I need ideas. I want examples.”

And so I usually tell them, “I have a perfect resource for you.” And it’s Carrie’s podcast, The Hippocratic Hustle, because she basically interviews mostly women physicians who are doing amazing things outside of sort of traditional clinical medicine. And so she started in 2017, is that right?

Carrie: Yeah, I think so.

Bonnie: So how many people have gone on? Do you know the number?

Carrie: I have over 100 episodes now and probably over 70 or 80. I actually need to count that. That’s a really good question.

Bonnie: So, basically at least 70 ideas or so?

Carrie: I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even if someone came on twice, there’s probably two ideas there. So at least 80 ideas.

Bonnie: Yeah, and it’s so amazing what women have been doing. Women physicians do things that I wouldn’t even think of. And I think that also goes to show that so many physicians, they really think they can’t do anything else besides what they do as a doctor. And so I think we forget that there are other things out there besides medicine because we’ve just been doing it for so long.

So one guest that’s really memorable to me, Carrie, is the one who I’m trying to think of. It’s been a while. The one who helps women or men marrying Persians.

Carrie: Oh, yes, she is awesome. Oh, my gosh, I’m drawing a blank, and it kills me that I’m forgetting her name right now because she’s a good Facebook friend. But she married a man whose family background was from Iran, from Persia, and she had to go through the whole marriage process.

And so she ended up deciding, well, it was hard enough for her to understand the traditions and the culture that she didn’t want other people who were going through the same thing to have to try to reinvent the wheel. So she wrote a book about wedding planning for Persian weddings. So, yeah, it’s apparently a really popular book for couples that are going through that. So, yeah, of all things, exactly.

Bonnie: I mean, what an amazing resource.

Carrie: Yeah, for someone who needs something like that, it’s perfect. She said it’s doing pretty good. And then that actually ended up snowballing into a whole another career that she has on the side, which is cultural communication counseling and coaching for people who are doing business with people in the Middle East.

So it even went beyond weddings into a whole other business. So it seemed like something she was just doing for fun on the side, it ended up being a whole other branch of her overall career and who she is. So, yeah, amazing.

Bonnie: I think that’s a perfect example of just getting started with an idea because you don’t know what the end goal will be necessarily. It’s not until you get started that – You just gave a perfect example, starting with this book, and now she’s doing consulting for business. So I think it’s pretty amazing what can happen once you sort of allow yourself to even pursue something different.

Carrie: Yeah, and her name is Christen Behzadi. She’s a physician in Texas. So, yeah, it was a really, really fun episode. I love that episode.

Bonnie: Yeah. We’ll be sure to link that episode in the show notes. So going back to you, Carrie, can you tell us how this podcast idea even started? So you started in 2017. So what was sort of the inspiration for you to even do this? Because I will tell you, as someone who just started a podcast, it’s a lot of work, man.

Carrie: Yes, it is. It is. I know it’s like anything where people are making things creatively, whether it be a blog or YouTube show or a podcast. It looks so easy when people are doing it. But then when you actually realize what they’re doing behind the scenes, there is so much more to it. So it is.

So I started in about 2017. At the time, I had been attending for about three-ish years, maybe 2.5 years. And it was about that time where I had really settled into my job. It felt relatively easy, you know. I mean, there’s always challenging patients that you have, so there’s always something new that you’re doing in medicine. But for the most part, it was, you know, the same sort of patients. It was getting a little bit boring, it was getting a little routine.

And I don’t know about you, but when I was going through all of my training, I mean, whether it be from undergrad to med school to residency to fellowship, there’s always these like 3 to 4 year blocks that we are doing these things. And we’re always looking forward to the next step that we have coming up.

And I think it was in this job that I had that I was like, “What’s the next step?” And I didn’t have a next step and I didn’t have a goal. And I was looking for goals professionally within my job there as far as could I advance myself in the private practice that I was in? Could I join some committees? Could I do a few things on the side that might resemble that next step that I was looking for professionally? But unfortunately, where I was, there just weren’t a lot of options for that, so I really felt a little bit stuck and a little bit bored, honestly.

Bonnie: Yeah, and so for those of you who don’t know, I think that’s around the time Carrie and I met, at least virtually. So I don’t know if everyone knows the story, so I want to see if I can remember it.

Carrie: Okay.

Bonnie: It seems like decades ago, but it really wasn’t.

Carrie: See if you have a good memory.

Bonnie: So my memory is I think I helped you with something. I connected you to Jim Dahle actually, the White Coat Investor, right?

Carrie: Yes, that’s right.

Bonnie: You were having an issue about something. And I guess he ended up emailing you back.

Carrie: Yeah, because he’s a really responsive guy. He’s really good with email.

Bonnie: Yeah. He still replies to emails, amazingly.

Carrie: Yeah, I’m horrible, he’s great.

Bonnie: I can’t imagine the volume he gets at this point.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly.

Bonnie: So that happened. And then, not too soon after, a box of toffee showed up at my apartment.

Carrie: That’s so funny. I have a friend who was doing this thing since he was an attending and he was making a little bit more money. You know, he was a recent graduate, but he was making more money so he started sending chocolates to friends for Christmas and stuff. And I thought, well, that’s really nice. I thought that was kind of cool because we were getting chocolates for him for Christmas.

And then I thought, well, I should do that, too, but as a thank you gift for people who are doing nice things for me. And so I thought, well, since Bonnie really helped me there, I’ll send Bonnie some chocolates and I’ll send Jim some chocolates. I totally forgot to send it to Jim, but I just sent it to you.

Bonnie: We won’t tell him.

Carrie: Yeah, so sorry, Jim, you didn’t get your chocolates. I’ll have to just send them over and he will be like, why are you sending me this? But I still think it’s a great idea. And I, honestly, I haven’t done it too much since I sent you the chocolates.

Bonnie: All right, well, we loved them. We just kept them in the freezer because they were really tiny ones, so it felt like it wasn’t a big deal to have a little piece of toffee. So we’d dig into the freezer and then one day they were gone.

Carrie: Yeah, I know, and then it’s sad. It’s really sad, exactly. But I think it’s fun. It’s a fun little thank you and it’s really funny that it was memorable for you because I think it was not too much longer after that I was basically brainstorming about what to do with my podcast and who I wanted to have as guests. And I thought, well, Bonnie. At the time you had been really vocal and obviously one of the biggest helpers on the Facebook group that we were part of.

So I mean, you were like Facebook famous at the time, right? So I just decided, well, if I’m going to have someone with a personal finance twist talk about money, then Bonnie would be an obvious choice. So I wasn’t sure she was going to say yes. But I emailed you, and you were like, yeah, sure.

Bonnie: Did I even have a blog at the time?

Carrie: Yeah.

Bonnie: I think I had just started it, the first rendition.

Carrie: I think you had just started. Like, maybe it had a few posts or something. Yeah, exactly. It was pretty fresh.

Bonnie: So tell us how the podcast idea even came to you.

Carrie: Yeah. So I think it came to me because there’s a lot of Facebook groups that we’ve both been into. Some of them had tons of people, and I think I was part of maybe three that were most important to me. It was the Physician Moms group. It was the Women Physicians Personal Finance group. And there was the Women Physician Entrepreneur group. And between those three groups, there were often people who would post on those groups about what they were doing.

And I remember there was one memorable time when there was someone who had just left her private practice and opened a solo practice. And people were asking her, “How did you do that? How did you get up the guts to leave your group and do all this stuff?” And she was typing her response, and it was so fast that there were typos and you could just see that it was like a stream of consciousness. And she was trying to teach everybody what she did.

But, I mean, in a Facebook group in a little post, that is not the place where you can really express yourself and get all those ideas out at once. So I thought it would be awesome if we could hear this as a podcast. And I for one, I’m a huge podcast fan. So I’ve been listening to podcasts for years, and I thought I would like to hear this as a podcast. I thought, well, are there any physicians out there who are doing this? Is there anything like this?

So I searched Apple podcasts and at the time, and still, it’s really hard to find good podcasts sometimes. Especially if you’re looking for something very specific. Sometimes the discoverability of podcasts is very difficult to find, even if it exists. Apple has improved that somewhat, but definitely three years ago it was really hard to find things and I couldn’t find anything.

I couldn’t find anything that was related to physicians doing a side gig or a project or business or things like that. And so I had that little spark in my head. I’m kind of the type of person if I’m in a group of people and someone asks for a volunteer and no one’s sitting around, I probably will end up putting my hand up and volunteering. I don’t know. It’s just like no one’s volunteering, I better just do it.

So once I got that thought that I should just do it, I was like, well, I have to do it now. So that’s basically how the podcast got started.

Bonnie: I actually, do you remember you telling me that’s how it started. You were seeing people posting things and you were like, we need a better way to collate all these great ideas into one. Because, as you know, with Facebook posts especially, this is a comment. I’m assuming.

Carrie: Oh, yeah, a lot get lost.

Bonnie: You see it one day. And if you didn’t see it that day, it’s gone. And searching for things in Facebook is also difficult too.

Carrie: Yeah, and I thought, well, that’s a shame that she went through so much to type all that and get it out.

Bonnie: Now it’s gone.

Carrie: And now it’s gone. I have no idea how to find that post again.

Bonnie: And then these days, we’re just in so many Facebook groups. I don’t remember where posts are. I’ll read something and when I try to go back and search, I’m like, “Ah, what group was it in?” Then I just give up.

Carrie: Yeah, Unfortunately, Facebook is just so huge, and the bigger the group, the worse it is, right? So it’s almost like you’re a little better off in a group of like, 3000 or 4000 people because I think there’s enough information there but doesn’t get overwhelmed by the volume. But everything has some value to it.

Bonnie: Now that you’ve interviewed over 70 mostly women physicians, is there anything that surprised you about their hustles. Have you seen themes? And I guess I’m just trying to get a sense of how my readers, what they can expect when they listen to the women saying what they’re doing.

Carrie: I think a lot of people have found that there’s some passion that they’ve always had in their life that they want to get back to, or there’s some passion that ends up being an offshoot of something that they’re doing professionally.

For example, I’m thinking off the top of my head, Make Merry is a lingerie company that I interviewed, I do believe her name is Doctor Katie Deming. And I interviewed her on the show. She was a radiation oncologist, and she found that there were women coming into her clinic with breast cancer who were having really sensitive skin issues and they couldn’t wear regular lingerie.

Apparently, they make this lingerie for people with these problems that are really frumpy and ugly, and she was like, “Well, this is horrible.” A 40 year old woman is coming in, she wants something comfortable and pretty. So she had a passion in her past for fashion design; she’s always been really fascinated by that. I don’t think she had ever really done it professionally, but just almost as a hobby or just something that she liked to think about and read about, that sort of thing,

She decided these ladies need a garment. I know what kind of government they need. I’m interested in making items, fashion items, I guess. Ended twisting all that into something that’s both an offshoot of her passion personally and also of her professional work.

So I think that’s a great example of how she was able to kind of mix that up and make a product. I just saw it on her Facebook that her lingerie won an award for best type of bra for this sort of situation and that sort of thing. So she’s doing amazing work and really helping people and making some really pretty bras in the process. And she definitely was one who was saying that doing the side business is like fueling my passion and helping support me professionally and emotionally at the same time.

Bonnie: Well, first of all, I think physicians are perfectly poised to notice problems and come up with solutions. That’s kind of what we do all day, right?

Carrie: Yeah, that’s so true.

Bonnie: We’re discussing a problem and then we are giving solutions in terms of medical advice, right? But that skill set is translatable to so many things. And I think that’s actually a key point, you notice a problem and you try to come up with a solution, usually either for yourself or in the case that you just said, it’s for her patients. So I think that’s actually a great point right there that you actually might have a solution that hasn’t been given.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a great point that we’re problem solvers. And even if it doesn’t relate professionally to what you’re doing. Like that example of the Persian wedding planner. I mean, we’re helpers at heart. We want to help people. And so I think that’s all coming from who we all are. At the core of who we are is to help people.

So if you find someone who needs something, we want to fulfill that. Whether it be helping them with money, like you do, or helping them plan their wedding.

Bonnie: Yeah. So what have you learned so far after a few years of podcasting? Is podcasting your side hustle? Has it given you inspiration to work on other things?

Carrie: Yes, it’s part of a side hustle. I mean, a lot of people assume that many people who are successful with podcasting and what’s the definition of success in podcasting? Actually, that is a whole can of worms to answer that one, too.

But many people assume that people can make a lot of money podcasting, and there’s really unfortunately not a ton of people who are making a ton of money being podcasters. Really the ones who are making money on them are the ones who are already famous, I think, you know as far as nationally known personalities and things like that.

So it’s not the easiest thing to make money on as a singular task. But it can be quite successful for using it as some sort of promotional tool or advertising tool for something else that you’re selling, such as a course or coaching business. Or, you know, even the Persian wedding planner. I don’t think she has a podcast, but if that was something she wanted to promote, then having a podcast about that topic would be great. And I think people had a lot of success using podcasting as a means for that, so that’s one thing.

As far as success with podcasting, monetarily it’s a little bit difficult to make a ton of money. Especially at the beginning I just tried to break even. When I first started getting rolling with this, I didn’t want it to take any of my family’s money to support the podcast because I still have student loans that I’m paying off and stuff like that. So it’s not fair to use this quasi-hobby/business and start taking away from my family’s finances.

So I’ve always tried to at least break even with my finances and then maybe a little bit on the side because it takes a ton of time. And unfortunately our value, many times, comes from seeing patients, and that’s where we really can make the best money for our time is seeing patients. So when I think about that, I really don’t make very much money per hour that I’m working on the podcast at all.

Bonnie: What you said about it’s not easy to make money as a podcaster, well, it’s not what you just said. But, for example, remember when blogging was kind of the thing? Everyone was trying to start a blog because people had seen bloggers make money. Then, everyone kind of jumped on and assumed they could make money too. The same thing there, you have to have the traffic. Meaning you have to be popular. You need eyeballs for advertising.

So I find it fascinating how the models have changed over time. And so if you’re looking at a podcast as making money by itself in its own sort of vacuum, like a blog, I do agree, you have to get sponsors. It’s kind of the same sort of model, so there’s different ways to look at it. I guess what you said is more about marketing tools or what I call lead generators.

So this is kind of a mini business lesson for those who are looking for a way to market your services as a coach. Obviously, I’m a coach, I do coach people. I have an online course that I sell. So, for me, the podcast is a way to get my free, valuable information out there because I also know that most people won’t ever pay me, which is totally fine. But I still want to be able to teach them and give a “free” or low cost resource for people.

It’s a way for people to get to know me to see if, I guess, it’s worth paying for is one way to say it. And it is also part fun, right? Because it’s fun to have your friends on, like Carrie, for example, on the show. But I do agree, if I was just doing it purely for its own self for money, it would probably not be worth my time to do that.

Carrie: Right. When I think about as far as the value from the podcast is there’s tons of intangibles. Like a lot of intangibles that I’ve gotten from doing the podcast. And actually, one of the things that’s actually more tangible than intangible is that I had my now-good friend Cheri Wiggins. She’s a PM&R physician. She came on the show to talk about a product that she created.

After we got done doing the interview, we started talking about what she does for physician life, which is she is a locums doctor. At the time, I had no idea what being a locums doc was about. And she had said outright, she was like, “This is the best job I’ve ever had.” And I had this whole preconception in my head that locums was for people who couldn’t get real jobs.

Bonnie: For weirdos?

Carrie: For weirdos, exactly. I don’t know why I had that thought, but, you know, so I didn’t really understand what locums was all about.

Right after we recorded the show about the product that she was creating I said, “Can we just record this? This is great information.” And so she was like, “Sure!” So that whole episode turned into how she got into the business of doing locums. And from that one episode with her, I decided to quit my job to find a locums job myself, to basically go out on the road and become a locums doc.

So I’ve been doing that for, oh my gosh, I’ve been doing that for almost two years now. Financially, if we want to talk about financial rewards, that has paid leaps and bounds. I mean, I get paid so much better doing locums with working less and having better quality of life and better satisfaction with my career overall.

I mean, that makes doing the podcast worth it. Even if I was paying for every episode out of pocket, I mean by far, yes. So there are kind of intangibles that come around from doing something like putting yourself out there, that sort of thing.

Bonnie: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great point. Putting yourself out there because you’re meeting, the nature of your podcast is that you’re interviewing people. So you’ve talked to 70 or 80 plus people.

Carrie: I know, I hope it’s right. I better count.

Bonnie: So you’re getting ideas and you’re getting new ideas and thinking about how the whole locums thing. Actually, we have another episode with Carrie coming up about locums. I think because of you, I switched to locums if I really have to think about it. So isn’t that crazy?

Carrie: Yeah.

Bonnie: From that one episode, right?

Carrie: Yeah, all from that one episode. So the trickle down, I mean, and I’ve definitely gotten emails from other people who have listened to the show and not even just locums, but, like, “Oh, someone did this, and so I decided to do this. And now it’s really great, thank you so much.” That sort of thing. So the trickle down effect, I guess, probably is greater than I even realized.

So again, I guess it comes back to wanting to help people. And I just hope every story that I put out there gives someone some sort of idea that maybe they could do something a little bit different with their career.

Bonnie: Yeah. So what other hustles have you been pursuing since the podcast? I know you’ve been up to lots of things.

Carrie: Oh, yeah, I think I had to think about it for a second. Like, what am I doing? Oh, yeah. So I recently got licensed to be a real estate agent here in Colorado. So I’m a licensed real estate agent.

Bonnie: Awesome.

Carrie: This is so funny. And, you know, that came from me going, at one point maybe two years ago someone said, “Oh, if you weren’t a physician, what would you do?” And I think I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’d be a real estate agent, I guess.”

Every time I’ve bought and sold my house, I’ve been so fascinated with the process, and it’s kind of like being a lawyer, but a little bit lighter version of being a lawyer. I also would want to be a lawyer, I think. But then I think if I actually went to law school I would get overwhelmed, and I don’t think I’d actually want to do it. But in my head, it seems like a fun idea. And every time I buy and sell a house, I’m just so fascinated with the real estate and the pricing and all that stuff.

So someone said, “What do you want? What would you be if you weren’t a physician?” I said, “A real estate agent.” And then I thought, well, why can’t I be a real estate agent? That’s actually something that’s relatively achievable even while being a physician. So I really didn’t have a strong plan at the time.

I talked to Peter Kim, who also is a licensed real estate agent.

Bonnie: I don’t think I knew that.

Carrie: Oh yeah. So he was really encouraging. He was like, “Yeah, totally go out and do that, man. It’s pretty ‘easy.’” And yeah, it kind of is. But actually, being a real estate agent itself is not easy; doing the school work when you’re a physician is easy. I mean, we went to medical school, so we’re really good at tests, so it’s not that hard.

Bonnie: I think that’s a great point, Carrie. There aren’t that many things that are really hard for a doctor. If you finished medical school, you finished your training, there’s so much stuff that you’re capable of.

Carrie: I mean, I’ve talked to some people on my podcast who went to law school after they went to medical school, too. So, yeah, I mean, it just takes time and it takes, you know, a little bit of effort and putting your time into something new. So that sometimes can be hard, but yeah, you can really do anything. As a physician on the side, you can do anything.

Bonnie: So tell us more about this real estate thing. So what are you doing with it? Are you actually using it? What was your idea?

Carrie: Yes. So I am a real estate agent with Your Castle Real Estate here in Denver, Colorado. But my side name for it is Hippocratic Homes. But my goal ultimately is to help any physician who’s moving in or out of the Denver market to help find a home here in Denver or the greater Denver area and the metro area, because the market here is really fast paced and it can be really hard.

And as physicians, when we’re moving – After fellowship we moved to Denver from Kansas City, and it was so hard to shop for houses because we really only had a chance to come out here, I mean, maybe one day, maybe two or three times before we actually bought our house.

And it’s just so hard to buy a house in that environment where you really don’t know the neighborhood. You don’t know the school districts. You don’t know the commutes. You don’t know the traffic patterns. You don’t know anything.

And when we moved here to Denver, our real estate agent really didn’t know how to answer those questions. I was really good at finding the answers, so it wasn’t a big deal for me, But I thought a lot of people don’t have the bandwidth to understand all this. I want to help them when they’re moving into Colorado. So anyway, that’s my goal. So if anybody is moving to Denver and needs a real estate agent, I’m your girl.

Bonnie: Well, Carrie, that just brings up what we just talked about earlier. You had a solution to a problem, right? You became a real estate agent to help busy physicians move.

Carrie: oh, I see what you mean. Yes, of course. Of course. Yes, yes, that was right. That was the problem that I felt that I had. And I have a solution for that problem. So yeah, you’re right. I didn’t even think about that. I am helping people. Again, it comes back to us being helpers. You’re right.

Bonnie: Yeah. Awesome. So we’ve got the Hippocratic Hustle, Hippocratic Homes, and don’t have another offshoot?

Carrie: I do because I can’t stop. Hippocratic Holiday. So Hippocratic Holiday is a podcast for physicians, not just ladies, but any physician who wants to come on the show and share a story of their trip or the adventure. And basically, I just really wanted a way to hear stories about people’s adventures. Mainly because, again, I’m on another physician travel group on Facebook, and it’s so hard for people to express exactly what they did and also to then review that again when you’re like, “Oh, someone went to the Amalfi Coast. Where did they go? I knew I saw that. What was that?”

So I wanted just another reference for people who are planning their trips. Honestly, when I was looking through Apple Podcast trying to find podcasts that would fill this kind of thing that I wanted to listen to, I had a really hard time because a lot of times when people are doing these sorts of podcasts, they’re digital nomads.

They’re in their twenties or whatever, and they’re making podcasts about just traveling the world and not having home. And they’re just basically podcasting and blogging and YouTube-ing about these things. But very few of us could be digital nomads. I'm not going to say, I’m not going to have a digital nomad on my show because I know a few physicians who are now basically traveling the world and essentially not staying put in one place, so they exist, too.

But the majority of us have, like, three weeks of vacation, and we really have to spend it wisely. And we all have this pent up desire to kind of get out and see the world. I know I did.

We finally took our family on our first international trip last year, and I had been dying to because I studied abroad in France. Once upon a time, I spoke French fluently, and so I have a strong desire to introduce my daughter to other cultures, but with medical school and work and all that stuff, we just have very limited time to do that. So the Hippocratic Holiday is a great way to kind of get some ideas for different places you can go. Or just a little bit of escapism, if that’s what you need too.

Bonnie: Yeah, I know. It’s like an inside joke. Like I don’t even know where she is half the time. Because between locums and I feel like you’re always traveling now. Like, maybe you are always on a trip.

Carrie: Yeah, there was a moment where I was always traveling.

Bonnie: Yeah, not right now.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly, in the times that we’re at right now. But definitely itching, itching to get back out. We had plans to go to Hawaii again for our 20th anniversary and plans to go to Italy again. And so there’s a lot of places I want to go with it, right now I can’t go. So I really can’t wait to get back out there.

Bonnie: What do you think your first trip is going to be?

Carrie: Oh my gosh. Well, quite honestly, I think my first trip is to take our camping equipment to go camping in Colorado. I think that’s probably gonna be our first trip, which wasn’t something that we necessarily were going to do. But this summer, I think it’s definitely going to be a stay close to home kind of vacation situation. And we do have a whole bunch of camping equipment. So it’s time that we used it.

Bonnie: I actually love camping. At least I say, I do. I grew up camping. I don’t think Matt’s a huge fan.

Carrie: Oh, you guys should come out camping. We’re car camping, we’re not doing anything too hardcore. We have a very plush –

Bonnie: Glamping.

Carrie: Yeah, pretty much glamping. Which is funny, because my husband and I used to backpack and stuff like that. So we used to make fun of car campers. But now it’s like, whatever you’re outside, I don’t care.

Bonnie: Awesome. Well, I think we uncovered a lot of awesome information and hopefully inspired folks not to just listen to your podcasts to get inspiration, but just even hearing us talk. And I think I love that, you know, at the core of who we are is we want to help people, that’s why we went into medicine. And so I see that as a common theme in terms of all the hustles that all the physicians are doing with their time right now.

And so, Carrie, tell us how people can find you.

Carrie: Yeah, well, you can find the podcast Hippocratic Hustle and Hippocratic Holiday anywhere that you get your favorite podcast. So it should be there. Also, hippocratichustle.com, hippocraticholiday.com and hippocratichomes.com are all where you can find all those things too.

Bonnie: Awesome. We’ll be sure to link to all that in the show notes.

Carrie, thank you so much for being here, it was so much fun.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | How to Be a Better Parent with Hope Seidel MD

183: How to Be a Better Parent with Hope Seidel MD

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Today, I'm joined by my parent coach, Hope Seidel. We've been working together for a while now, and I truly believe that what Hope shares will change every parent's life. Kids don't come with an operating manual; they have different needs, and it's super important to get some help in discovering how you can be the best parent you can possibly be.

Hope Seidel, MD, is a mom of two young adults, a pediatrician, a certified parenting coach, and a passionate advocate for children’s wellness. In addition to her pediatric practice, she started Parent with Hope in 2020, a private coaching business where she works 1:1 with high-achieving parents to create more connection with their kids, confidence in their parenting, and wellness in their homes.

Tune in this week to discover how a parenting coach changed my life and how Hope Seidel's work could change yours. We're discussing our experiences as parents, our role in parenting our children, and we’re diving deep into discipline, understanding our children’s behavior, and Hope is sharing her amazing advice for parents who want to show up differently.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why working with a parenting coach has been some of the hardest but most important work of my life.
How kids, just like all humans, want to be seen and heard.
Some of the well-intentioned things we do that are actually invalidating our children’s life experience.
How our kids show us the places we need to heal ourselves.
Why punishment isn’t an effective way to teach your children about their behavior.
How to start seeing where your child’s behavior is coming from.
The impact of the language we use around our children.
How to show up as the kind of parent you really want to be.

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Read the transcript

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone. So today you are in for a treat because I have one of my coaches on the show. So I had my first coach on the podcast several podcasts ago, so you might want to check that out. It’s with Dr. Sunny Smith. And in fact, it was two episodes and they’re both like an hour because Sunny is not known for her brevity. And we literally would have talked for a third hour, but I had a hard stop because I had a client call.

But anyway, today’s conversation is not an hour, although I think it’s more like 40 minutes. But it’s with my parent coach, Hope Seidel and I guess we’ve been working together for, it’s been more than a month, maybe it’s been two months. But it’s something that I think every parent needs to know as a resource, like whether you hire a one on one coach or join a parenting program.

I personally think every parent out there needs this type of support. Kids don’t come with an operating manual, and every kid is different. If you have more than one kid, you definitely know this. I only have one, although my bonus son is 17. But every child is so different and they have different needs and they’re going to require different ways of parenting. I wish there was one right way to parent and it would work on every kid, but unfortunately that is not the case, as I’ve learned with my son.

And whenever I tell people that I have a parenting coach, it has been the hardest work of my life because a lot of the work is actually more me and not so much Jack, and just really understanding how it is for a child. Like how the world looks to them, and you’re going to hear us talking a bit about that towards the end of the podcast.

And so if you’re a parent I just want to say, it’s so hard, you’re doing a great job. And you’ll sort of hear in our conversation, the type of parenting that we both are on board with. Some people call this conscious parenting. I don’t think gentle parenting is the term because I feel like that almost has a connotation that we’re being soft parents. And that’s not what it is at all.

But some books that I have really enjoyed reading to help me with all this is Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside, and she actually has a pretty low-cost parent membership. I’m trying to think of some other parent, oh, How to Talk So your Kids Will Listen and how to Listen So your Kids Will Talk. That book is more for a bit of age nine and up is my guess.

So I actually just ordered the same book, but the version for little kids, ages four to seven because a lot of the examples from the other book were just not applicable to Jack’s age. But the first chapter in that book is really about validating kids’ emotions. And we talked about that a little bit, but not as much as I would have liked.

And so I just want to put that here, that kids want to be – Well, I think all humans want to be seen and heard. And so if you know that, that’s what your kids want, they want to feel validated. And we often will invalidate their feelings by simple things like if they get hurt, they’re like, oh, no, no, it’s okay, you’re okay. And that seems so benign, but that teaches a kid that their feelings aren’t valid. That their feeling hurt isn’t valid, right?

And so that’s just one example of things that we do that are well intentioned, but actually are very invalidating to our kids. Anyway, I could talk about this forever. It’s something I’m really, really into right now. If you and I have had a conversation, chances are I’ve mentioned that I have a parent coach and that I’m just going down the rabbit hole because, obviously, I want to be a good parent.

But I think one thing I’ve really learned, and also the decision to send Jack to a Waldorf school is, I don’t want to focus on just creating a smart, successful kid, which I think was the focus when we were younger. I really want to help Jack be a good human. A good human who is wanting to do good in the world, that has confidence, that wants to just help people. And I don’t really know how to say it, but I just want Jack to be a good human. Of course he is. I think all kids are, and then our job is to guide that process into adulthood.

Anyway, here’s my conversation with Hope.

Bonnie: All right, Hope, welcome to the podcast.

Hope: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m excited too. I’m always excited about all my guests because I think they’re all wonderful and have so much to contribute. But when I talk to people that I have a parent coach, some people are not confused in a bad way, they’re just like, “What? That’s a thing?” And then some people are like, “Oh my God, I need one too.”

So, first of all, I didn’t even know parent coaches existed. I knew there were parenting courses, but I guess that would make sense that you could hire people. But I feel like maybe the word is getting out. So tell us a bit, introduce yourself.

Hope: I can definitely do that. So I am first and foremost, a mother. I have two kids over the age of 20, which is impossible to believe. And I’ve been a general pediatrician for the last 22 years. And I’ve always had a strong passion for connecting with parents. I really feel like wellness starts at home.

And so even though I’m in the business of being a pediatrician and managing kids wellness, I noticed over time in my pediatric practice that so many of the issues that I was seeing in children, not ear infections and cancer and things, but so many of the issues that were coming up in kids’ homes were parents struggling with what was normal developmentally and how to handle boundaries and noticing when their kids trigger them.

Parent coaches probably are different. So my coaching involves creating norms and giving guidance and anticipatory guidance, because that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. But a lot of coaching is trying to better understand the mindset of parents as they come into parenting, right?

Like how they were parented and what they make their kids’ behavior mean about their kids, about them. Expectations and sort of ways in which we hope our kids would show up. What we’re in charge of and what we’re not, how to control things, what we’re in control of.

And so I do a lot of work with parents on tons of different things, depending on where their pain point is. And some parents hire me just because they want to be more intentional in their parenting and want to come up with a better way to do what they’re already doing pretty well. So it really just depends on the client.

Bonnie: And if you think about it, kids don’t come with manuals. How would I know what to expect? These things, how would I know what the milestones are, right? But then there’s a whole like, well, how do you actually parent? No one really talks about that, but you do hear about strategies that focus on kids behavior.

So let’s talk about that first, because I think a lot of the traditional parent advice was focusing on kids behavior. And one thing I’ve learned, even before working with you, is like all behavior is communication. I actually went to this parenting coaching class when I was at Miraval and I remember him saying that and it really stuck with me.

And then knowing what I know as a coach, it makes sense. Like their behavior, there’s something behind the behavior. So let’s work on that versus just trying to, quote unquote, “fix” the behavior. So what are your thoughts on that and how traditional parenting and the shift that we’re seeing now?

Hope: Well, there used to be a very high priority placed on obedience, right? Compliance and obedience, and that is usually directed towards managing a child’s behavior. And I think that there’s a lot of costs to that, but the bigger issue is that we can accidentally, in focusing only on our kids’ behavior, shut down the part of them that caused it, to your point.

I mean, all of our kids’ feelings are really, or a need that they have, if they’re hungry, or tired, or if they’re sad, their behaviors don’t always look consistent with that. Like if you and I are angry, maybe we’re going to yell. But if a child is tired, maybe they’re going to cry, which can look like sadness to us. Or maybe they throw something when they’re really frustrated.

And so just disciplining the part of their behavior that we don’t like, that makes us feel like bad parents, that is not what we’re teaching our children, or whatever narrative we have, really cheats them out of learning how to better handle the cause of what caused the behavior to begin with.

Bonnie: So talk a little bit on why punishment is not effective. Because even though I think most parents have accepted that hitting your kids or spanking is not okay, compared to when I was being brought up that was considered normal. Actually, this is random, but I remember in preschool, the owner’s son was in my class and we would actually hear him spanking him sometimes, like in the back room. Like that does not happen, right?

So tell us a bit about why that has shifted. Why is punishment, quote unquote, “bad?” What’s the data or the thinking behind that?

Hope: Well, punishment works. I mean, it just aborts behavior and it doesn’t teach anything.

Bonnie: Yes, that’s what I meant.

Hope: So, I mean, just to be clear when you want to shut your kids down, I mean, many kids who are well behaved in our society are afraid of getting in trouble. The current sort of sophisticated way of thinking about managing or teaching our kids is remembering that punishment doesn’t teach, right? It just stops a behavior that makes us uncomfortable, and then the child is still left without the skill set to be able to shift into a more attractive or acceptable behavior in our family system.

And so I think that parents get a lot of feedback that when they hit or when they scream, or when they finally lose their mind or when they take their phone away, or they do whatever they’re going to do to get their kid to stop, we can’t make our kids do something or not do something. We can just make them sorry with punishment that they didn’t make the right choice.

And so I think that the current thinking, Bonnie, is just that we need to do a better job of using these opportunities when our kids, quote, “mess up” or they behave in a way that is unacceptable to us, to use that as an opportunity to teach. I mean, think about every time in medical school or when you were in residency, if you got berated when you didn’t do something well, it creates shame. No one learns in shame.

Bonnie: Yes, totally. So I actually wanted to talk about this at some point, so this is perfect. Yeah, punishment aborts the behavior, doesn’t teach and it creates shame, right? Because I still see in so many mom groups like timeouts. And a lot of people still think those are effective. And I don’t know if we talked about this, Hope, but I stopped doing timeouts.

Well, I did them because the book I had told me to do them. And people in the Facebook group said that’s what you should do. But he genuinely freaked out when we did it. And I asked him after the fact once, basically he said something about being afraid of being left alone, like being abandoned, or I think he actually used the word kidnapped one day. But just noticing that that was really detrimental for his mental health to do that.

Every kid will obviously react to different things, right? But I think the bottom line here is that shame is not a useful tool. And the example you gave, if we were berated all time, like shame does not change anything and they can’t learn.

Hope: Well, it either teaches them to be afraid or it teaches them that there’s a cost to their feelings. We’re not creating an environment where they can really practice a new behavior. And what happens is, to your point earlier, if we don’t recognize that every behavior is coming from an unmet need or a feeling, they don’t get a chance to experience their feelings. We accidentally say to them with our punishments, how you feel is not important, even if that’s not what we’re saying with our language.

Bonnie: Yeah. Can you explain exactly what you mean by an unmet need?

Hope: So an unmet need might look like they’re hungry, or they are thirsty, or they’re tired, or they’re frustrated. They aren’t getting attention from us sometimes. So think about the times when your kids are bugging you or nagging you or interrupting you on the phone, right? Sometimes that looks like a behavior, maybe they’re banging on something when you’re doing an activity where you don’t want to be interrupted, and that unmet need could just be attention. That’s all that they need.

And so one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about together, and I often say with my clients is this idea that if we’re just genuinely curious about what the behavior is about, and managing our own frustration in the moment if the behavior is irritating to us or triggering, you know, if we have thoughts that it’s not a behavior we want.

But really being curious about where it’s coming from, sometimes we can offer to our kid, I see that you’re hitting, are you frustrated? I see that you’re hitting, are you hungry? You can be curious about what the issue is. And that way, you’re not saying the behavior is okay, but you’re able to find out what the need is that they have underneath and address that, which often will abort the behavior without the need for any kind of discipline.

Bonnie: My therapist actually said that, she said, most compliant kids are scared. And that’s why they’re compliant.

Hope: Yes.

Bonnie: What do you think about that?

Hope: I 100% agree with that. I think that one of the things that parents do a lot is they look to other kids. And they say like, how did they get a kid that’s so obedient or compliant or does so well? And I’m not saying every kid that is compliant or who listens correctly or whatever is scared, but a lot of children know the cost of their voice.

And so many of the parents, especially the parents who I take care of who are professionals or physicians, like you do, really want to raise resilient and bold kids who speak their mind and contribute to the world. And part of that involves them doing that in our homes, getting feedback from having an opinion.

And when we tell our kids that isn’t how respect looks or we get frustrated when they exert their independence or tell us when they don’t like something and say no, we’re really chipping away at that long game we have of wanting them to be productive adults that say what they want, that know how to create boundaries for themselves, that excel.

And so I’m not sure if that answered your question. But I do think that shutting a kid down feels good to us when the behavior is uncomfortable, but there’s a very high cost to that in terms of our long game.

Bonnie: I mean, if that’s the takeaway point, if there’s just one takeaway point, I think that would be it. And then also, I don’t want people to think just because, you know, we’ve all lost it, right? And so I think, especially for my audience, we want to be perfect at everything. And so if we do yell or lose our crap, then we feel like awful parents, right? And so I think a lot of what you helped me with is just giving myself grace. Like I’m not going to be perfect, right?

Hope: Yeah, and I also think parents, there’s two issues that you bring up. The first is that physicians in general and professionals are very outcome driven. And so our metrics matter, and so how our kids are turning out, we use as evidence against ourselves all of the time, right?

When they have a normal behavior that’s coming from an unmet need or a feeling, we’re doing that, right? And we can easily catastrophize that into all the places, where they’re going, how they’re going to turn out, or judge ourselves because we’re really not showing up perfectly. And so you’re on point about that. It’s very confusing in parenting because we can’t use the metrics that we use that make us successful in our careers often.

But the second point I want to make is that, and I think you and I have spoken about this as well, the idea that our imperfection can really be a beautiful opportunity for our kids, because we’re all going to half the time be really not great at something, and so are they. Our imperfections can allow us to be compassionate to our kids, when half of the time they’re having a rough time.

And our imperfections can be an invitation to teach our kids what repair looks like. To be able to say to our kids, like I did not show up as the mom I wanted to be today. I’m really sorry, I really shouldn’t have yelled at you. And I was frustrated and that’s not your fault. I’m in charge of how I feel and I made a mistake.

Imagine, I think, for any of us even as an adult, how powerful that would be for our parents even now to say to us, I don’t really like how I showed up in this moment. So I think even when we’re not perfect, Bonnie, people underestimate the power of repair. It’s so important for our kids, and it’s not better than doing it right, I don’t think.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because that’s definitely not something our parents ever did, was apologize.

Hope: Yes.

Bonnie: I’m pretty sure that never happened with me. And I remember when I first read about how powerful repair is, it definitely felt weird to me. But I’ve done it with Jack and I remember this one time where I said it, I really do believe it makes an impact because he just hugged me.

Hope: It’s so respectful, yes. It’s so respectful. And I’ll tell you what else, it may have not happened to you yet, but it will. The better you get at repairing, you’re actually giving your kids a very specific way of apologizing about being accountable. You’re giving them a language that really allows them to use again when they make a mistake.

So many times I’ve said something to my kids and then they’ve come up and made an error or spoke to me in a way that we all have agreed is not okay. And when I just give them a minute and they come back up, I notice they use the very same language that I used with them. It’s extremely impactful for them and so respectful.

Bonnie: Yeah, I mean, I feel like this is basically an example of how they’re always watching and we’re modeling behavior for them always, right?

Hope: Always. Yes, always.

Bonnie: I think we can all agree, so for those listening who are parents, that we all want to be the best parent. I don’t even know if the best parent we can be is the right thing, but the parent that we know we want to be. Because I think all of us have, like deep down, what good parenting looks like, right?

I just think most people just don’t have the tools, which as a coach kind of makes sense because so many of us weren’t taught. When I say tools, I mean, emotional regulation and being able to examine our thoughts and to just think about how, I don’t want to say change because we’re not trying to change everything.

And so what I have found through this work, and when I say this work, working with you and just reading all the parenting books, like the modern ones that teach what we’ve been talking about versus punishing or whatever, this work is mostly ourselves. Not so much like what can we do to change this behavior for our kids, which is what I think a lot of people think parenting is.

But it’s really working on ourselves so that we can, it’s not just modeling better behavior for them. But it is like being the parent you want to be naturally by doing the work ourselves. Am I making sense?

Hope: You totally are. And listen, this is the best thing about having kids, and there’s so many amazing things. But one thing, if you choose to accept the invitation, right, is that our kids show us where we need to grow and heal.

They poke the parts of us that are sad from our childhood, that are – I hate the word trigger, I feel like it’s so overused. But they do kind of trigger the spaces in us that need healing or that were never heard as a child. They show us places where we’re trying to undo the parenting that we had or unintentional ways in which we’re modeling the same kind of parenting that we had and how uncomfortable that felt.

And so I love working with parents so much and I love seeing how your child is reminding you on how to get closer to yourself to heal parts of your parenting, the way you are parented, I mean. And I think they’re such amazing teachers for us. And many parents really aren’t so much looking for tools, although they are, they just think that there’s a right way to do it.

And a lot of the work that I do with parents, when we pay attention to what your kids are bringing up for you, is allowing you to see what feels the most right for your family. We all have different values, we all have different priorities, things that are important to me as a parent are just not important to you.

And when we start looking out at all the other people and wishing our kids were different, we get farther away from ourselves and it’s a lot harder to figure out what feels right for us. And that really is the most important thing.

Bonnie: Yeah, so switching gears here a little bit, one thing that I tend to do, and hopefully I’m not the only parent like this, is does it seem like some parents have it easier? I mean, that’s probably true, right? But it seems like some parents know what they’re doing because their kids seem – Well, just like you were saying, we judge the parents based on their behavior, right?

Hope: We judge the parents based on their kids, right? Let me give you an example, and I didn’t come up with this thought, but I’ll answer this question I think what you’re saying. Which is we have this – So there’s a really great book called The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, that is written by Wendy Mogel, and this is her idea that I’ve embellished.

But it’s this idea that when we get our kids, they’re like a packet of seeds with no label. And we don’t really know what we’re growing, right? And so we plant our seeds and we water them and we just kind of watch. And we’re like, oh, that’s cute. What’s going on there? And some people are growing these really robust seeds and some of us are growing like cilantro.

Bonnie: Hey, what’s wrong with cilantro?

Hope: I love some cilantro.

Bonnie: Okay.

Hope: You cannot have Mexican food without cilantro, in my opinion, unless you have that soap problem where it tastes terrible. But anyway, I love cilantro. But if you’re going next to a sunflower, it’s really easy for you to look over and say, what are they doing right? Their flowers are killing it.

And the thing that comparison does in our parenting, or reading a generic book that tells you what to do, is that it doesn’t recognize that the seeds are predestined and some of us are growing flowers that are more delicate. Some of us are growing plants that are prickly, like my daughter is kind of cactus-y, and so my son is a sunflower. So it’s easy to get mad at what we’re growing, but it’s not necessary.

Some of us have kids, or plants if you want to use that metaphor, that are trickier to grow correctly. But when we’re wishing it was something different, when we’re judging it for not growing correctly, we make it harder. It’s actually not that hard to grow cilantro, not that I’ve ever done it. But it probably isn’t that difficult if you know exactly what soil to have.

A good friend of mine grows orchids and I think they’re impossible to grow, but she knows exactly what to do and so it’s not tricky for her at all. And so when you know what you’re growing and you’re paying very close attention to what you’re growing, it’s actually quite easy. It’s when we’re resisting what we have that things get even harder than they need to be.

Bonnie: Yeah. I think also there’s a lot of like, at least for me it was like why is Jack, Jack? Not like there’s something wrong with him, but it’s like, yeah, sometimes I wish he was an easier kid, for sure. You know?

Hope: Yeah. Yeah, it’s always fun when I have parents, especially in my pediatric office, who get a child that they find more challenging the second time around after they’ve had a very easy, bright, easy to grow flower first. And all of us make it mean we’re doing something wrong.

And let’s just be honest, I mean, to validate what you said, some kids are definitely trickier to parent than others, and that just is what it is. I think that that’s not a matter of opinion. But when you understand your child and you’re really invested in teaching and learning and you amend your control, you amend your health, you amend your soil, when you become someone that is just more attentive, you tend to get a kid that is easier.

A lot of kids respond to our disconnect with who they actually are in a way that doesn’t look so great usually.

Bonnie: Yeah, I definitely argue with reality sometimes because I’m like, he was such a chill baby. He was so great.

The things that are challenging with my son are also his greatest strengths. Like he has so much energy. He’s so kind and he’s definitely a funny kid. So it’s like, yeah, when I think of the whole package, of course I love him and I think he’s amazing. And, as you know, there’s certain things that have been challenging with him.

Okay, and then I think what’s hard for me is the way I was parented, right? I was parented by parents who, more my dad than my mom, who just yelled and hit.

Hope: Yeah, and that’s the toolbox you’re trying to draw from, right?

Bonnie: Yeah, I definitely find myself losing my shit more than I’d like to. It’s a lot better now that I’ve been working with you and just like really noticing and also trying to model to Jack like taking deep breaths or even just saying out loud how I’m feeling, just to model with him.

Hope: Yeah, you and I have talked a lot about how our sympathetic nervous system gets really activated when our kids are really doing behaviors that we don’t love, right? And so sometimes, to your point about really managing us, sometimes our best parenting doesn’t come when we’re activated.

And so when we calm ourselves down when our kids are really behaving in a way that is not acceptable to us and we’re really activated and we don’t pause and take a breath and sort of calm our nervous system down, we tend to show up as the parts of our body that remember our parents. Like we just do our default because our body remembers how bad yelling felt.

If your son is screaming and your dad always screamed at you, the odds of your nervous system being okay with that are really low. And so it requires this constant attention to what we need in the moment, looking at our unmet needs, which isn’t always available to us. We don’t have the time to have these special, beautiful conversations with our kids when we’re getting out the door or when we’re coming home from a busy day at work and we’re exhausted and our buckets are empty as well.

So I do think it’s really important to give ourselves grace and recognize that we’re coming up with our own unmet needs and we are also sometimes parenting from an empty bucket. And that is a tricky place to parent from. And it’s just our reality, especially as full time physicians, you know?

Bonnie: Yeah, I feel like there’s so much we could talk about, but then this would be like a multi-hour –

Hope: Hours, I can do.

Bonnie: Hours, yeah. I just want to say this, I think I told you this the other day, but I just think this is a funny illustration because maybe they want to try it at home. I told you how we switched roles the other day, right? Wait, did I tell you this? I told my other coach.

Hope: No.

Bonnie: Because I have two coaches I forget who I tell sometimes. No, so the other day, one of the things that is almost always a struggle is getting him to brush his teeth. Not always. So yesterday was particularly challenging and he did not want to brush his teeth. And it’s so funny, like when I think about how a kid’s brain works they’re like, well, I don’t want to do it so I’m not going to do it. That makes total logical sense, right? Anyway, that’s besides the point.

So I said, “Hey, let’s play a game. You’re mommy, I’m Jack.” And he was like, “Yes, this is perfect.” So then he’s like, “Brush your teeth.” And I said no. And then he said, “Your teeth are going to fall out.” And I said no, and then I lied on the floor because that’s what he does. And then he said, “The tooth fairy is going to give you so many treasures if you brush your teeth.”

Now, the reason why I’m laughing is this is stuff that I say to him. So he’s literally repeating my words. And then it kind of went on, eventually he brushed his teeth. But what it showed me was that they’re constantly being told what to do and I realized that really sucks.

Hope: It does.

Bonnie: I could not imagine someone telling me what to do all day, that’s one of the reasons why I’m an entrepreneur now, because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.

Hope: That’s so good. That awareness is on point. And being a kid is really hard. Like, imagine if we just remembered that all the time, how much access we would have to compassion and empathy for them. They don’t get to do anything. We tell them what they’re going to have for dinner. We tell them when they’re going to go to bed. We tell them what they can and can’t do and what the rules are. It’s hard.

Bonnie: Although I don’t think I actually tell him the Tooth Fairy gives treasures. Part of me feels like, oh, he’s telling me what he wants.

Hope: I hope you used it as evidence that he really is receiving messages from you, because sometimes it can feel like your kids aren’t hearing you at all. And so to hear him say exactly what you said must have felt a little good too, yeah?

Bonnie: Yeah. But eventually he did brush his teeth because I think he thought it was such a fun game.

Hope: I love it. Play is a really beautiful way to access connection with your kids because connection always results in compliance when you do it well. And what you did in that moment, is you really connected to what he needed, and it usually will result in improved compliance.

Bonnie: Yeah, actually, we should talk about that real quick because I’m definitely not someone where play is natural. We’ve talked about this, like it’s definitely not my nature to be playful. So I do, I find it challenging to do it. And I feel stupid is really the best way to describe it.

Hope: Oh, that’s interesting, yeah. I don’t enjoy it, to be honest with you. And I think that’s okay. I used to spend a lot of time as a young parent feeling jealous or feeling like I had to play Monopoly and do all the things. I try to use play in different ways. I think being playful is like sometimes cooking, which I really do love. You don’t always have to be sitting down on the floor and playing toys with your kids.

However, even if you don’t like it, it is a very valuable connecting skill. And if it’s mind numbing to you or you feel like you don’t have the time, most of our kids don’t need a lot of time but one on one time that’s playful can feel really powerful for them. And I used to do play with books because I could make funny noises, but I really wanted them to read and I wanted them to sit and read with me. And reading was something that I could easily do without feeling exhausted.

And so I would use a lot of play with that, or storytelling. So don’t get limited to one kind of play. You don’t have to play Legos with your kids in order to create connection. What you did the other night was brilliant, and that was play.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think for him, play is doing something fun. Not so much playing with his toys, it’s like playing games or role playing. I don’t even know how this game came out, but he likes to play this game called police and prisoner. And like, the prison is like the area behind his bed. So he tells me to go to prison, to jail.

Hope: Very nice.

Bonnie: And then he’s the police guy and he’s on the bed. And then this is the game, it’s not really a game. It’s basically like he falls asleep and then I break out of jail. That’s literally the only game and we just do it over and over again and sometimes we switch roles.

I think that type of playfulness is what he craves. And I get it, it’s not natural to me. I’m embracing it more, but again, it’s definitely not my natural state because I’m the serious type. Matt is definitely the more playful, funny, that type of guy. But yeah, this is definitely challenging, but I’m trying to do it more because I could see how much he loves it.

Hope: And it’s an easy give, you know? It’s not that hard. It’s just a practice that doesn’t come naturally to you, you have to do it on purpose. And I wish I was more playful, too. I have friends that sit for hours and play with their kids on the floor. And that has just not been something that’s always been a skill set of mine. I don’t make that mean I’m a bad parent, but I do have to work harder at it.

And I think all of us have skills that are trickier for us than others. That doesn’t have to be a problem.

Bonnie: Is there anything that you want to say that we just haven’t gotten to?

Hope: The amount of pressure we put on ourselves to do parenting right is probably the take home that I think is most important. I think parenting is a process and we’re looking to constantly readjust. And we’re talking about parenting a person that changes every day, every year, that’s constantly evolving, that has no frontal lobe.

And so trying to really access curiosity on why it’s tricky for us and why things are difficult for our kids, instead of needing them to fit into some neat expectation that we have really allows both of our growth, which is the whole point.

There’s not an outcome that we can control anyway. We can’t control other people, we have no way of knowing how our kids are going to end up. And when we’re really focused more on the now and how we’re not yelling or managing our own impatience or repairing in the moment, we’re constantly cultivating a child who is more emotionally aware and feels connected to us.

And that’s really what I think all of us really want, we just sometimes go about it in the wrong way.

Bonnie: All right, Hope, how can people find you?

Hope: Well, I coach parents. I mostly coach professionals and a lot of physicians one on one. And you can find me at my website, which is Parent with Hope at parentwithhope.com. And I’m also on Instagram, I post stuff all the time, @parentwithhope. I’m on Facebook too, but if you like to just scroll on Instagram, you can find me there.

So I take a select amount of clients. I don’t like to be too crazy full, but I do have a lot of parents that I do kind of deep work in.

Bonnie: All right, thanks so much for being here.

Hope: Thank you for having me.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Thinking Outside Your Practice with Dr. Zwade Marshall

182: Thinking Outside Your Practice with Dr. Zwade Marshall

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Just like physicians, entrepreneurs solve problems where there is a need, so it isn’t surprising when people take on the role of both. If you’re wondering how you can start a new business while already being a full time physician, this is the episode for you.

I’m joined by Dr. Zwade Marshall, an anesthesiologist, interventional spine specialist, and entrepreneur based in Atlanta, Georgia. He's the founder of Doc2Doc Lending, which is an exclusive lending partner for physicians and dentists who are in all stages of their careers. Dr. Zwade is here to share his personal story of becoming an entrepreneur and how the right support, plan, and mindset got him there.

If you want to discover your capabilities outside of being a physician, tune in this week for my conversation with Dr. Zwade Marshall. We discuss how to have more control over your income, how Doc2Doc Lending can guide you through transitional career points, and how the best businesses are usually birthed from personal experience and need.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Dr. Zwade’s journey of becoming an entrepreneur while continuing his physician practice.
How to approach entrepreneurship from your own personal experiences.
How to have a positive, beginner mindset.
Doc2Doc Lending’s practice, offers, and application process for physicians and dentists.
The impact of responsible credit behavior.
How to create and lead a team.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Follow me on Instagram
Dr. Zwade Marshall: LinkedIn
Doc2Doc Lending
PIMD Con
Peter Kim

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Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome to episode 182. How are you all doing? I just got back from PIMD con, or Passive Income MD Conference, and that was in Los Angeles. This is the third or fourth time that it’s been happening. And, obviously, there was a year where it was virtual because of Covid. But I really love this conference and I actually recommend this to most of my clients.

And it was originally just a real estate conference, but this year he added an entrepreneur track because people who invest in real estate tend to become entrepreneurial. And also Peter Kim has this entrepreneur community, so it made sense to kind of combine it into a live conference.

So I actually had the honor of speaking on something that I don’t usually speak on, because usually my talks are on money, obviously. And my talk was actually on marketing and selling because I was on the entrepreneur track. And so that was really fun to talk about because marketing and selling, if you’re listening and you’re in business, it’s something that most of us struggle with and also it’s a new skill that we have to learn.

And in order to be a successful business, you have to master how to market and sell yourself, otherwise, you’ll just be a best kept secret. And I would even just recommend, like learn to love it, okay?

So it was so fun to meet a lot of people. If you’re listening, maybe I got to meet you. And it was fun to see some of my clients, my prior clients, and just to kind of see what they’ve been up to.

Okay, so today I have a guest on, Dr. Zwade Marshall. And he’s an anesthesiologist. And I wanted to have him on because of a story of entrepreneurship, like I don’t have too many of those people on my podcast, but it’s money related. So I also knew it would be a resource that many of you may need, or at least keep in mind. And I’ve been recommending it to a lot of people who I could tell could use their services.

And so the company is called Doc2Doc Lending. And basically, what it sounds like is they provide personal loans exclusively for physicians and dentists. And, you know, really filling the need or bridging the gap between residency and relocation or being in a pinch, paying off credit card debt, et cetera, because their interest rates are lower than a credit card thing.

So I have had a few friends who needed access to capital for a number of personal reasons. And so it’s just nice to know that this exists and that it’s a company that understands doctors. And so I just wanted to put it out there for you, because I definitely have my share of clients who have a decent amount of credit card debt.

And besides the shame and embarrassment, which I coach them through, having access to a resource like that where they can consolidate debt and be at a much lower interest rate, I think that’s really valuable to know about. So that’s why I have him on. And I’m sure you’re going to get so much value out of it.

And I do have a referral link if you’re interested in applying for one of their loans. My link is wealthymommd.com/doc2doc. And that’s D-O-C, the number 2, D-O-C. And just in case you’re not familiar with what an affiliate link means, it just means that if you sign up for a loan with them, I will get a small commission, but at no extra cost to you. So once again, that link is wealthymommd.com/doc2doc.

All right, here’s the show.

Bonnie: Welcome to the show.

Zwade: Thank you so much for having me, Bonnie.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. And we were just talking, we missed each other at PIMD con.

Zwade: It was huge and it was fun and engaging. I met a lot of cool people and it’s just a great way to spend a weekend.

Bonnie: Yeah, it’s not often that we get to hang out with like-minded physicians. And also, I think it’s a great opportunity to meet doctors of all specialties because usually we’re just going to the boring specialty conferences, right?

Zwade. Absolutely. There’s also a kinship amongst entrepreneurs where we just kind of want to help each other because we all kind of know what it feels like to have that burn of anxiety when you’ve jumped off the porch and there’s no parachute. And you’re trying to make things work and people who’ve lived it as well. It’s validating and it’s also cathartic.

Bonnie: Yeah, you said jump off the cliff. I feel like I’m constantly jumping off cliffs. Just when I think I landed, there’s another cliff.

Zwade: Yeah, it’s self-imposed though because then you get your reps and you know what you’re good at. And it feels a little less frightening with each subsequent jump.

Bonnie: Yeah. I mean, this is what we signed up for, right? It’s frightening but also exhilarating, right?

Zwade: Yeah.

Bonnie: So okay, I definitely want to talk about your story, I know it’s going to be so inspirational to everyone. And so let’s just start with that.

Zwade: Thank you so much. I’m Dr. Zwade Marshall. I’m an anesthesiologist and interventional spine specialist based in Atlanta, Georgia. You’ll hear a little bit of an accent when I say certain words. I was born in the Caribbean, in Guyana. I moved here when I was an adult.

Well almost an adult, I was 17 years old. Went to Emory for college, medical school and business school. I racked up a ton of educational debt because of it, still less than the average medical graduate though. I was at $212,000 and the average is pushing closer to 230,000 now. It’s kind of scary.

But then I left med school here in Atlanta to go to Boston. I went to Harvard for my residency and fellowship. Then I moved back to Atlanta to open my practice. I was an employee at a large private equity back pain group for four years prior to building out my own surgery center, now with two locations.

I’m beginning to see the dream come to fruition in the practice, but then also in my extracurricular gig, which is the lending company for doctors.

Bonnie: Right, extracurricular, I’m like, oh, that’s only an extracurricular? Well, obviously, you going to business school helped with all this, right? Or at least have the mindset to be entrepreneurial.

Zwade: It really did. And I don’t think it’s for everyone. At the time that I chose to go to business school, I was still in medical school. So I did the dual MD/MBA bit. There’s less risk and it’s less expensive doing it that way. If you’re already in practice and you’re thinking about going to business school, you have to consider not just the cost, but the opportunity cost of earning what many doctors make, it’s well into the six figures, right?

At my time, though, it helped me change the lens through which I viewed the world. So I became conversant in the language of commerce, I understood what EBITA means. And the business guys and the finance heads, they like to throw out acronyms to keep people confused. And much of it is pretty simple if you understand the underlying premise.

But I became kind of conversant in that world and was able to kind of think through problems with solutions that enabled me to become a leader and lead teams of people that have subject matter expertise that I don’t have, but I know how to ask the right questions and determine when there’s substance and when there’s not so that I can make good thoughtful decisions.

Bonnie: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s where a lot of doctors, not me, that go into private practice or building something similar that you have, they have no idea how to create teams, lead them, and I know hiring and firing is always like the bane of most businesses, right?

Zwade: Most certainly.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Zwade: The people component is always the hardest part.

Bonnie: Yeah. And you can learn it. Like I have an assistant who’s part time, but I’ve been through many assistants and it’s been a learning experience just to learn how to hire. Like the hiring process, really, if you know how to do it correctly, you can really get at least the best person. But, obviously, you don’t really know how they are until they start working for you.

But I kissed a lot of frogs and also learned how to train them properly. Because a lot of people, they’ll hire someone and then they get frustrated because they think the person should read their mind.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: You have to be willing to train them, give direct feedback, and it’s hard. But now I’ve gotten very comfortable with direct feedback. And I think a lot of doctors are, you know, side gigs are super popular, whether or not they’re doing it intentionally because they’re trying to create a source of income.

But one thing, because people always ask me like, I’m not really entrepreneurial. And I think it really starts with seeing a problem and then wanting to come up with a solution to solve it, right? That’s what we do as entrepreneurs. And so is that what happened with you with your extracurricular?

Zwade: Absolutely. I think it’s always easiest when the entrepreneur is going to solve a problem that he or she lived because you can understand the customer experience. And if you are that customer, you’re in that seat, you don’t have to stretch to empathize with their plight, and you can really create a tailored solution that can truly solve their problem.

My personal mantra is hire slow and fire fast. You really invest the time upfront learning the person, the candidate, and sharing a part of yourself with them. So between the hiring process and then to the point you made the onboarding process, it’s laborious. It takes up an investment in your cash, but more importantly, in your time.

And it’s really hard to sometimes see the future and how that time investment will pay dividends when you hired someone to kind of offload the burden of time and you’re having to put up all that upfront spend. So know that if done well, it’s worth it.

Bonnie: Oh, can I pause you for a second? I just want to say something else based on what you said about what are the values, what’s the culture of your company? Even though I’m just one, I have values and a culture that I want to cultivate and that to hire someone who also matches that.

Because, again, it’s “just” an assistant, but I want her to be bought and I want her to really believe in the company’s mission because they’re going to be better employees if they believe in what you’re doing, right? So I thought that was a good point.

Okay, go on.

Zwade: I moved from Atlanta to Boston, as I was describing before. And this is kind of like my origin story of the company, Doc2Doc Lending. I was going from what’s considered to be a low cost of living city, Atlanta in Georgia, to one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. It was Boston, it was really Brookline, Massachusetts, where that Harvard hospital Brigham is located.

And I needed first, last month’s rent, broker fee. And a third of all relocating residents, I had student loan debt that was north of $200,000. I had income as a resident that was 54,000 bucks a year, which in hourly rate is $13.12 an hour. And my FICO score was sub 700, not because of bad behavior, but because of the toll that educational debt takes on your credit profile.

I was surprised to realize that banks would not give me a loan. Or if they did approve me they gave me a credit card interest rate, which felt unfair. I mortgaged my youth, basically, being in medical school and training. And now I’m being penalized for the cost of it all.

Bonnie: I mortgaged my youth, I’m going to have to use that.

Zwade: The time that we were in the library, that we’re in the hospital, that we’re studying is the time when all of our peers and our friends are building families and buying their first home. By the time we graduate, they’re in their second home for many of them. And our schedule is not our own.

So there’s all these sacrifices that we make and yet we’re not a sympathetic customer, because let’s think of doctors as kind of the superhuman beings that do well financially. So at Doc2Doc we understand that career arc and we underwrite our loans more thoughtfully and specific to the doctor experience.

So we don’t just care about FICO scores and about debt to income ratios, we give our physicians credit for how many years they have left in residency. We care about the specialty that they’re in. We care about their free cash after they pay their expenses.

And we really do want to reward borrowers for on time payments, the ones that are responsible with their debt, and help them to understand the impact of responsible credit behaviors and how it can help put them in a place of accessing capital cheaper in future.

Many hospitals, their credentialing process includes a credit score check, and so helping folks understand the impact of revolving credit card debt compared to installment debt and how one can be really negative and the other can be really positive, but depending upon how you use either of them, it can harm or help you.

It’s part educational, what our company does. The real kicker here is that we’re helping folks find access to money at a time when very few other people would allow them loans.

Bonnie: Yeah, well, let’s backtrack a bit because you kind of just jumped into Doc2Doc because so many people are like, well, what are they talking about? And so do you want to describe exactly what the company does?

Zwade: Absolutely, sure. So it’s Doc2Doc Lending, and we are an exclusive lending partner for physicians and dentists, we lend to no one else. The company was really created to help doctors from the time they match into residency.

So if you’re a fourth year medical student with a match letter in hand, that’s when you first become eligible for our loans. And we’ll lend to any physician with an active board license or active license to practice through retirement.

The most common borrowing reason right now is for debt consolidation. People are trying to consolidate their high interest credit cards into a personal loan. Oftentimes we’re used for transition costs or for a practice buy-in for a partner loan in their surgery centers. We can provide a number of lending options depending upon the use case.

Bonnie: I just want to make sure I understand. So you said you lend to physicians and dentists only. They first become eligible when they have their match letter in hand, so I guess that’s some time in March. And as long as they’re a holder of a medical license or board certification, which one is it?

Zwade: Active license.

Bonnie: Active license. Do they have to be actively practicing?

Zwade: They do not know, no.

Bonnie: Oh, that means I’m exam eligible, I didn’t know that.

Zwade: Yes. They couldn’t have been disbarred. Yeah.

Bonnie: Maybe you were going to get to this, but what’s the minimum loan and the maximum loan?

Zwade: Yeah, so if the physician is still in training, in residency or fellowship, they’re eligible for between five and $25,000. And if they’re in practice, it’s between five and $100,000. It’s a three minute online application. It’s meant to be frictionless, we know doctors are busy. You can get information on the back end of our app. We can offer approval terms within a matter of minutes of that submitted application and we can fund the loan in a matter of days after approval.

Bonnie: Okay, and the repayment starts right away?

Zwade: So they’ve got one month to begin paying after we fund the loan. And if they’re in training, we allow them to have interest only or deferred payments during the course of their residency or fellowship.

Bonnie: So it sounds like it’s really, like you said, customized based on where they are. So, obviously, in residency it’s like basically what you’re saying is we understand that they don’t have attending salaries, so it might be tough for them to do the full payback.

And then what are the interest rates? And I’m sure, it varies depending on a bunch of factors.

Zwade: It does, yeah. And we’re in a high interest rate environment, just nationally right now with the way the Fed rates have been hiked. Our best rate is 8.9% and our worst rate is 19.9%.

Bonnie: Okay, when I was a medical student, and I’m pretty sure they don’t do this anymore because that’s probably why you guys are in existence now. I actually was able to take out a loan before I had the match letter. Basically, I forget, I think they called it a residency loan.

It was by Citibank, and basically it was money so that I could go to the interviews, right? Because it’s an expense to fly and stay in hotels. I think we forget that, right? And I remember having friends who were like, “Oh my God, I can’t afford this.” And they were just like begging people just to crash with them.

I remember a friend of mine asked if she could crash with my boyfriend because he lived in Chicago and I was living somewhere else. And she met him, so it’s not like she was a total rando, you know?

Zwade: Right, did you say yes?

Bonnie: But she was like, “Can I stay with him? Because I don’t want to pay for the hotel.” So yeah, I was able to get a loan, I can’t remember the amount, it was more than 10,000. Maybe it was 15,000. And the interest rate, and this is years ago when the interest rates were stupidly low, right? So I think it was like 3% or something super low. And then I remember telling people about it, and they’re like, oh, you can’t do that anymore.

Zwade: Yes. So, many of those programs no longer exist. There are a few that still do, but they require school certification. So it depends upon how much money you have left in your financial aid allocation oftentimes. And if it’s full, then it requires a co-signing of a parent or a guardian.

And there’s some seasonality to our borrower needs. If it’s spring, it’s a lot of residency relocation. The folks that match into residency need to move or even the residents that are going to fellowship or folks becoming attendings because many jobs now are not paying a relocation bonus, a sign on bonus.

Or if they do pay it, it requires you to start working first. And after the first month is done, your first check includes that bonus payment. So they’ll use our loan to kind of float their expenses until the first payment comes in.

And one of the best features of our loan is that we have no prepayment penalty. So we don’t penalize folks for an early payoff and we encourage them to do so whenever they can. If they overpay in any given month, we apply that directly to the principal to reduce the interest that accrues over time.

Bonnie: Are people using it for down payments?

Zwade: Well, yes and no. Investors are. In a true residential borrowing situation, you can’t borrow money for a down payment for a residential loan, if that makes sense. But if they’re doing a real estate flip, they’ll use our cash to bridge initial contractor expenses until they do the cash on the refi.

Bonnie: Like a hard money loan almost?

Zwade: Exactly right.

Bonnie: Okay. Yeah, and your interest rates are lower than most hard money loans.

Zwade: Exactly.

Bonnie: Yeah, I didn’t get a relocation allowance for my move. And I was moving from California to New York. I can’t remember, I’m like, how did I do that? I know, flying is flying, but I had to put down one month’s deposit and, obviously, rent is not cheap. And I was like how? I’m assuming my parents helped me because I can’t remember. But yeah, I imagine that not everyone has family support to be able to do that, you know?

Zwade: Yeah. So what’s funny is that my employer did fund mine from residency into my first job. I was always invited back to speak to the residents at Harvard about transition to practice, and I would kind of coach them on how to negotiate for relocation bonus, and the sign on bonus and the things that I did.

And I ended up employing one of the graduates from my program. And so she’s using my advice against me. And in all fairness, I ended up paying a relocation bonus for her because she did an effective job.

Bonnie: Smart girl.

Zwade: Smart girl, she did well.

Bonnie: Yeah. Okay. I actually recommended you guys to one of my friends who is going through a divorce and her money was literally locked up because of it. And she’s a very high paying physician, so I was shocked that she didn’t have access to her capital. I don’t know, basically I remember we were just texting and I was like, how are you doing? Just like checking in with her. And then she told me that she basically doesn’t have money and was freaking out.

And then I was like, well, you should check these people out. And then a week later she thanked me because she said she needed that money to float her until her money was freed up, basically.

Zwade: That’s right. And it’s a sad reality of the medical profession that the divorce rate for us is higher than the general public. And that’s already pretty high, 50%. And we see quite a few applicants that are in that scenario.

In truth, it’s also one of the leading reasons for defaults within our community. Bankruptcy related to divorce and debt that a spouse would have accumulated in a partner’s name, and then they don’t want to continue to pay on that loan.

Bonnie: All right, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that I wanted us to talk about. Like I said, entrepreneurs, what we do is we solve a problem and there is a need. And just like you were saying, when you’re that person that you’re solving for, it does make it easier.

Definitely for me I was that person who didn’t know anything about money. It was hard to find a resource, especially that was specific for women, because a lot of the resources out there assume you’re a man and things are different for women, for a number of reasons.

And so that’s kind of how my business was born. And Peter Kim’s too right? Do you know his origin story, by the way?

Zwade: No, I don’t.

Bonnie: I’ll just tell you real quick. So he’s an anesthesiologist, too. He, I think, was doing well because anesthesiologists generally get paid pretty well. And I think one day there was some reorg and then he realized that he had no control over his income really.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: And then that’s when he started seeking out answers and he was proactive about it. And then he said there was a group of older doctors that seemed really happy and then he asked them like, what’s the secret? And they said, oh, we invest in real estate.

Zwade: Yeah.

Bonnie: So then he was like, oh, let me look into real estate. So that’s how that was born.

Zwade: Passive Income MD was born. I can certainly relate to that. I’m anesthesia as well and I’ve always known I wanted to own my own practice in the future and I’ve had this entrepreneurial bug. But what accelerated the path for me leaving an employed role where I was pretty well compensated, to owning my own business is the fact that Covid happened. And this is now March of 2020.

And within a matter of weeks of the pandemic being announced, my employer at that time decided to cut the salaries of all the physicians by 50%. Well in our line of work, you’ve earned your salary three months prior because of insurance payments.

And so it was a convenient way for an institution to cut costs by blaming the pandemic when they were looking to kind of preserve profits. And that loss of control over my income was what inspired me to leave and do my own thing.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think the pandemic really showed physicians like, wow, our jobs are not as stable as I thought. And I’m sure you know the trend of physicians being employees from the get go, that wasn’t the case back in the good old days of medicine, as they say, right? Basically everyone was like, yeah, you open your own practice.

And now people just want to be an employee now, right? There’s pluses and minuses of being an employee versus an employer. I understand both sides now, having been an employee and being an employer.

But is there anything else that you think or that you wanted to say that we just haven’t had a chance to talk about yet?

Zwade: I thought this was great. I think a lot of your audience members are thinking about entrepreneurship. And I’ll tell you that as physicians, we had a pretty rigorous journey to get to where we are and that they shouldn’t underestimate their ability to learn new things, to adapt, and to just be resilient in the face of our new challenges.

And so we are lucky, for the most part, to have a pretty stable income base when we’re beginning. And so don’t underestimate the ability of your background and training and rigor within thinking to be successful at something new. And so go for it.

Bonnie: I totally agree because a lot of doctors think the opposite, that they don’t have any other skills, that they don’t know how to do this. And since I coach on money, they’re like, “Oh, money seems so hard.” I’m like, listen, money is not med school hard.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: And neither is business, right?

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: I think we’re just not used to being a beginner again and so that’s frustrating.

Zwade: Sure.

Bonnie: And then, yeah, I see so many doctors who are like, well, I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t have any other skills. I’m like, what are you talking about?

Zwade: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Bonnie: Yeah, that’s why conferences like Peter’s, I think, are so great, because you meet people, and they’re not necessarily entrepreneurs, like they might just be doing real estate or they just like being in this community because these are doctors who are really looking to improve their lives and have that growth mindset. So it’s contagious. And I think people just go and really get inspired and get ideas.

I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. They are like smart people. I’m just going to be an employee and do my own thing. And then obviously, that’s not the case right now. So I think anyone can do it, just like you said. And we have the drive, the discipline. We’re not afraid of hard work, and so that’s really what it takes to be successful.

All right, so I’m really glad we did this because I know there’s always a need for capital. I have a lot of clients who are wanting to invest in surgical centers, but they don’t have like $100,000 laying around or whatever the investment is. So it’s just nice to know there’s an option versus like, oh, I don’t have the money, so I can’t do this.

All right, so we’ll link in the show notes how to get to you and we’ll go from there.

Zwade: Thank you for having me, this was fun.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | The Brain-Body Connection with Dr. Ali Novitsky

181: The Brain-Body Connection with Dr. Ali Novitsky

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When we talk about mindset, we generally talk about identifying thoughts that aren’t useful and intentionally thinking more useful thoughts. However, we aren’t just a walking brain, so it’s time to take the conversation down to the wisdom that lives in our bodies, which is especially helpful when we’re stressed. To help me bring this topic of the brain-body connection to you, I have the perfect guest to share her expertise.

Dr. Ali Novitsky does an amazing job of combining thought work with body work. Ali designs health programs specifically for physicians, giving her clients the tools they need to achieve optimal mental, emotional, and physical health.

Tune in this week to discover how to form a deeper connection with your body. We’re discussing what it means to ground yourself when you’re stressed, how you can start practicing body work alongside thought work, and why bringing in this physical aspect as you work on your mindset will transform the way you think and feel about money.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How Dr. Ali Novitsky helps her clients gain optimal emotional, mental, and physical health.
The specific exercise Ali offers women to feel better about the bodies they’re in right now.
Why the body is important in helping us process emotions.
How fitness and mental health intertwine.
What grounding yourself when you’re stressed means.
A grounding practice for calming yourself when your nervous system is activated.
Dr. Ali Novitsky’s advice for anyone who wants to form a deeper connection with their body.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Dr. Ali Novitsky: Website | Instagram | Podcast
The Life Coach School
Tony Robbins
Calm App
Tamara Levitt

Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 181. Even just saying that, to me, it sounds crazy that I’ve recorded 181 episodes. Well, close to it anyway, sometimes I do replays when I think there’s value in replaying them. Because if you’re a new listener, you probably haven’t gone back and listened to all 181 episodes.

So today I have a special guest, a dear friend of mine, Dr. Ali Novitsky. I’ve known her for, actually I’ve known her since I was living in Philadelphia. So that was at least six years ago, because we moved there right after Jack was born.

Anyway, the reason why I want to have her on is most of the things I talk about and even inside Live Wealthy, and even in my private coaching practice, it’s really working on your mindset, working on your thoughts, identifying unuseful thoughts, and intentionally thinking, like thinking on purpose more useful thoughts.

Now, in the money world I call these expensive thoughts versus money making thoughts. And expensive thoughts, kind of like what it sounds like, they’re thoughts that literally cost you so much money.

And so back to Ali, she incorporates body work with thought work. And this is something I haven’t really talked about and so I really wanted to bring this to light because you’re not what I call a brain in a jar. Like you’re not just brain, thinking, overthinking. Like there’s this whole other part of you, AKA your body, that we normally don’t even talk about or access because so much of our inner wisdom comes from listening to our body.

And so when a lot of my clients have trouble “listening” to their inner voice or looking within themselves, that is all body work in terms of accessing. It’s not in your brain, okay? It’s not like a sentence that pops up in your brain like, this is the right decision. It’s like really grounding yourself, we’re going to actually talk about what that means, how you can start practicing it, and how important it is for if you do have a coach and you’re working on your mindset actively, that bringing in that physical and this will be helpful.

Now, Dr. Ali will actually be at the Live Wealthy conference, the money and wellness conference for women physicians in March of 2024 in Miraval Arizona, it is currently sold out. I will say, at this point it’s highly unlikely you would get off the waitlist, the waitlist is pretty long at this point. But if you are going and you’re listening, I’m going to see if I can have Ali do some sessions with us. It’s just some logistics I have to figure out.

But if you are coming, you’re definitely in for a treat to do some live body work with her. But we’re going to talk about it and give you some ideas on how to incorporate that. And if you’re inside my Live Wealthy program, or even if you’re a private client, we’re going to have Ali come in and do sort of a session with us. So you’ll definitely get the details when we do that.

Okay, here is Dr. Ali Novitsky.

Bonnie: Welcome, Ali Novitsky.

Ali: Hi, thanks for having me. I love chatting with you, as usual.

Bonnie: I know, it’s so fun to finally have you on the podcast. So why don’t you introduce yourself?

Ali: Yeah, so I’m Ali Novitsky and I am, well, a neonatologist by training. However, I currently do not practice neonatology. I, for the past six years, have been working mostly with just women physicians with optimal health. So mental, emotional and physical health. And then recently became board certified in obesity medicine, which has been awesome because while I don’t do the actual medication part, I use all the other principles within the work that I do.

So that’s been really, really fun. And I spend my time doing that, traveling around, going to some conferences, and raising two girls. And we have a dog now, so it’s pretty busy.

Bonnie: Was the dog a pandemic acquire?

Ali: Absolutely she was.

Bonnie: I’m sure the kids love him, her?

Ali: They do love her and she’s extremely high maintenance. And so it’s funny because my husband never wanted a third kid. So as soon as the second one was born, he ran to the doctor and had a little procedure done. And then we got this dog and she is literally more high maintenance than any of the kids.

Bonnie: Oh gosh.

Ali: Yeah.

Bonnie: So, Ali, I’ve known you for quite a few years at this point. It’s been really cool to kind of see things change. Okay, maybe you’ll see like a snippet of the video, but you can’t see Ali’s arms, her arms are amazing. So I’ve seen the transformation. Not that your arms sucked before, but now they’re really defined and awesome and I envy them.

Ali: Love you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean, well if we’re chatting about arms, so one of the things that happened when I first started work in the coaching world, my business started as mind/body marriage and kind of the theme behind that was like the mind/body connection, but also we talked about relationships. So it was a little bit confusing.

And so my focus wasn’t this real heavy health focus for women physicians at that time. But we did talk about health. And then what I realized is, what am I really passionate about doing? What do I really want to do? And why am I not doing that? And really, what it comes down to is I’m obsessed with nutrition and I’m obsessed with exercise.

I mean, it literally started as something that was not healthy as a younger person. I definitely had body image issues. I had weight issues. I had over exercising issues, under eating issues. And through that work in my own healing, I came to a place where I really felt my calling to help others coming from a very body positive, body acceptance approach.

And so I think once I made the decision that that’s really what I love doing, and why am I not just doing that? You know, I was like, and I think that I will also follow my own principles. And so for the past two years, even though I’d always been fit, I really came into my own authentically with finding my authentic body. And it really came down to just committing to just really simple things.

And then I kind of just took those really simple things and started teaching other people these really simple things.

Bonnie: Yeah, including arms.

Ali: Yes. And again, it’s not rocket science. It’s literally just doing a little bit of weight training, eating a good bit of protein and keep doing that.

Bonnie: Yeah, did you know there’s an arm coach in the LCS world?

Ali: What?

Bonnie: I’ll tell you later. I don’t follow her, but I think she literally calls herself the arm coach, just as kind of like a marketing niche. But it is like, you’re like, “Oh, an arm coach, I need that.” But obviously, she doesn’t just work on the arms because that would be weird.

Ali: I’m like, gosh, that’s a really cool idea. I never thought of that.

Bonnie: But it’s just really specific, right? And I didn’t mean to talk about arms the whole time, but I do think that’s an area of the body that women have issues with. I definitely have issues with my arms. So we can talk offline about how you can work my arms.

Ali: Yes. Okay, so I love that let, so let’s go there for a minute. Because I think that yes, in general women have issues with every part of their body. And so one of the exercises I’ve recently been offering, and I’m going to actually, because it’s super easy so I’m just going to tell you right now.

So we’re so hung up on numbers, and it can be anything from how much we weigh, what size our pants are, what our waist circumference is, what our arm circumference is, how much muscle we have, how much body fat we have. And it’s all these like numbers that we don’t really have control. Well, I don’t want to say that we don’t have any control over, but we basically stand on a scale and we get a number.

What I’m trying to kind of help people do is to define their own number. So I say in your body that you’re in right now, what is your number? It’s not a scale number. It’s literally on a scale from 1 to 10. How much do you feel that you’re in your authentic body? And people that are following principles that serve them in their nutrition, serve them in their exercise, and even we can go beyond that and talk about how much mindset work they’re doing and emotional work they’re doing.

If they can tell me that they’re a nine in their body, yet they don’t weigh what they think they should, then they’re at a huge disadvantage because they’re not honoring that they’re probably authentically where they need to be. And so I think that this idea with this acceptance piece, it’s like we are all different. We all have different body types. And I hate to say, I mean, it’s genetic, it is so genetic.

I mean, where we store body fat is completely genetic. I used to always be so upset because I’m very flat-chested. And I’m like, oh man, I’m so flat-chested. And the advantage is that I don’t store a whole lot of body fat in my front area. So my stomach never had an issue with getting more definition there because I don’t store body fat there. And so, right, but I never honored that I was more obsessed with, oh gosh, my training bras are too big, you know?

Bonnie: Yeah. So actually, let’s talk about that. I remember you and I talking briefly, is this the mesomorph thing that we once talked about?

Ali: Yeah, yeah.

Bonnie: Let’s just briefly talk about that because I remember you telling me what I was. But yeah, I don’t know how many types there are, I’ll let you do it.

Ali: You’re a mesomorph, for sure. So they’re somatotypes. So the three body types, somatotypes. So ectomorph is going to be your naturally thin body type. So this is the body type where they were a kid, they could eat whatever they wanted and they would have comments made towards them like, they might be 50 pounds soaking wet. And just like always just, you know, a smaller bone structure, don’t carry a whole lot of body fat at first until we get a little bit older. But just definitely lower muscle mass even, so just naturally thin.

Mesomorph is more of your muscular body type. So this is the body type where they tend to evenly distribute muscle and also body fat, tend to be pretty even up and down. Strong, so like kind of strong naturally, tend to excel at things that require functional body movement. And again they usually lose weight and gain weight kind of in the same pattern.

And then endomorph is the body type that tends to store additional body fat. They just tend to have a little bit of a higher body fat percentage, and not a big deal. There’s not one body type that’s better than the other and most of us are a combination of.

So the most common body type is going to be a meso/endo combination, which is somebody who has a good amount of muscle mass. And they also like to store a little bit of body fat. So that’s the population that I, in the past, would work with a lot because those are the women that are typically thinking I weigh too much, and it’s that whole thing.

And I also want to say that it doesn’t matter what your body type is, you can be a naturally thin person, it doesn’t make you immune from having body issues, right? We think that it does because society would probably say, oh, an ectomorph is going to be accepted more. It does not make us immune.

So yes, those are the body types. And the reason why I like them is because they will influence our BMI and our weight. And this is the number that we have so much hang-up on, but we really don’t understand actually, what could be normal for our body type.

Bonnie: Yeah, no, I love that because also it sounds like knowing what it is will help you sort of customize. It’s like you know kind of what your body needs, versus a one size fits all, right?

So I’m just curious, are you saying that ectomorph, it’s harder for them to put on muscle or do they have to work harder?

Ali: Absolutely.

Bonnie: Is that what you’re saying?

Ali: Totally. Oh my goodness, yeah. So actually, my women, the really cool thing that I’ve seen in the transition of my business is that I work with a lot of ectomorphs now. And it’s because they’re like, oh gosh, I just had my DEXA scan and my bone density is low. And they start getting nervous and so I’m getting a lot more women coming to me for that.

But yes, ectomorphs, actually they early on in their life will have lower muscle, but also lower body fat percentage. So they’ll appear very lean, you might even see good musculature because their body fat is low. What happens over time as things start slowing down, and again, once we hit 30 we start losing muscle mass.

So if you’re an ectomorph that’s losing muscle mass, you’re going to start to see that you’re going to gain body fat. And they’re like, oh my gosh. All of a sudden they say, I never had this before. And now I have this. And so they have to work harder to gain that muscle back and then also maintain muscle.

So that’s the hard part too, is just to maintain muscle as a woman over the age of 30, you actually have to work to even maintain it. To gain it is way more challenging and the results are very slow, especially once we hit about 40.

Bonnie: Yeah. Everyone listening is like, God dammit.

Ali: I know, I know. I’m like, yeah, do you want to hear the crappy part about it? Here we go. But I will also say that a lot of people think, oh great, now I’m going to have to work out for hours and this is just going to be super hard. And that’s actually not true.

In fact, I used to lead all the exercises for an hour in length. Over the past year, we’ve decreased everything to 30 minutes. And so I would say that 30 minutes three times a week is actually going to be somebody who gets an A plus, plus, plus, plus, on their chart. I would say if you’re doing 30 minutes once a week of strength training, you’re going to at least maintain muscle mass.

Bonnie: I feel like since, I don’t know, since I could remember, I think the day of several hours a week, one hour plus a week of weightlifting, and maybe it’s different for men. It’s sort of not what we’re doing anymore. Like, oh, actually, you can get the same benefits by doing a lot less. And now they kind of know what’s effective. Obviously, this is what you do, so you know probably.

Because I think everyone listening is like, who has time for even one hour, three times a week, right? But 30 minutes seems very doable. Okay.

So one thing I thought would be fun to talk about is, so obviously, all the coaching I do is really focused on your mindset. I don’t really do somatic work, per se, but emotions are somatic. And that is something I’m learning more about, because I think it’s really easy to – Well, since we both coach physicians, they don’t want to think about their emotions or their bodies, right?

And one thing I’ve learned, and I know we talked about this before we started the podcast, is the body is so important in helping us process emotions. And to even take a step further, it’s like the movement is so important. So let’s talk a bit about that and how fitness helps you access that.

And not to make it more complicated because we all know people who are like gym rats, but their minds aren’t necessarily managed either. So let’s talk about that.

Ali: I love this question. It’s so good because one of the things that typically happens, I’ll say, in the work that I do is women might come in and think that they want to start exercising for a physical result. And then they’ll soon find that they’re actually not exercising for a physical result anymore. They’re actually doing it because of how it emotionally makes them feel.

And so one of the things that I got into personally a lot, I mean, I learned, obviously, the model and I really love the CBT component. But there’s Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is DBT, which is a derivative of CBT.

So it really focuses more on the emotional aspect and there’s four components of it. So it’s distress tolerance, emotional regulation, interpersonal communication, those are the three big ones. And there are four components of it and the other part is just along the lines of mindfulness.

Okay, so it’s mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal communication. So the idea is that these emotional regulation techniques have everything to do with grounding. And one of the strongest emotional grounding techniques that you can ever do is to move your body. Just move your body. So whether it’s taking your steps, doing your strength training, whatever it is, and especially moving your body in nature, completely grounding. And when we can ground ourselves –

Bonnie: Can I stop you for a second?

Ali: Yeah.

Bonnie: Let’s define grounding.

Ali: Yeah. Okay, I love this. So picture an electrical circuit and there’s nothing to ground the circuit, right? So if you don’t ground an electrical circuit, what’s going to happen? It’s going to explode. Humans, if humans aren’t able to become aware of where they are currently, to be able to kind of decide what are the state of affairs that exists within you right now, where is your stress level, then if we’re not taking that check-in on where’s my stress level, we’re going to explode.

And that’s when people become overwhelmed, become burned out. They’re completely reactive. They’re irritable. They’re taking on behaviors that completely pull them away from what they want for themselves.

Bonnie: So when you talked about the nature of things, I’m assuming that you bring in sort of like nervous system work?

Ali: Yes.

Bonnie: Explain that a little bit. And I’ve talked briefly about it, but I really haven’t. And this is something I’m learning about. So why don’t we talk about how the nervous system, obviously physicians know what that is in terms of physiologically, but what it means for emotional work and how it’s important.

Ali: Yeah, no, I love it. So, basically, when we’re thinking about our prefrontal cortex, right? And so we take in the information, and a lot of times because we’re so programmed for negative bias, meaning in any circumstance we’re going to probably believe that it’s negative versus positive. We’re probably going to think that the shoe is going to drop versus a miracle is going to happen.

And so what typically happens is when we perceive a circumstance, we’re going to hit the next level, which is going to be where our stress hormones get released, right? So it’s going to, kind of, hit that area of our brain where it’s like, okay, fight or flight. Let’s let off the stress hormones.

And then what happens then is whenever that happens, the next part we kind of call on our hippocampus for old memories. So basically, the tendency is we’re going through this feedback loop of circumstance, we get triggered, and we kind of go to this space where we bring in old memories. And so we kind of stay stuck.

So where emotional regulation can kind of come in and how we can tripwire this, particularly with movement, is a lot of times really using breathwork. And so I use breathwork all the time and I have particularly brought it into my workouts combined with also core exercises. And I’m going to talk about that in a minute because it’s breathwork and activating your core together, which actually we think provides a tremendous amount of grounding and emotional regulation as it relates to exercise.

But the idea is, if we can pause in that moment where we’re noticing that we are in fight or flight, and instead of kind of digging into those old memories to kind of just ramp up that fight or flight, if we can just pause and kind of do the opposite and stimulate the parasympathetics by breathing.

So usually it’s like five deep breaths. If we can stimulate that angle, we can almost tripwire and reprogram ourselves to instead not go through the fight or flight, but instead go ahead and stay in this more neutral position. And then we can start to pull more of the tools to really ground ourselves to an even lower stress level.

Bonnie: Sounds amazing.

Ali: But that sounds complicated, right? Because what we do in the exercise realm is essentially like, let’s say you’re doing squats. So what we’re doing is when you activate the core, so this is the other thing I wanted to tell you about your core.

So any kind of core and abdominal work activation, and I don’t mean we’re going to go to 100 setups, I mean, you can activate your core standing up. Those same muscles innervate the area of the brain where our emotions live. So in other words, when you do core work you are accessing really the same part of your brain where you’re going to kind of generate more of those memories to create the emotion, those thoughts to create the emotion.

And so it’s the simple breathing patterns we do through the movements with core activation. And also, this is like the simplest thing you can do, if you literally just press your feet without shoes on into the ground, that is like one of the easiest ways to perform a grounding technique. You literally are just feeling the earth push against your feet and your feet push against the earth. And you just stand there, a little bit of core activation, take a couple of deep breaths. That’s the easiest way to really physically regulate yourself in a way that will then allow more emotional regulation.

Bonnie: So why would somebody want to do this?

Ali: Because the reason for activating the area where you can find more emotional regulation will allow us to access, the term I’m going to use is not my term, it’s actually like copyright by somebody else. But they say, wise brain.

We know that the lower we can bring our stress level and the more emotionally regulated we can remain, we will access the thoughts in our brain that we actually want to create, to really elevate our lives. And so we call it our wise brain. So I put it this way, when I was a brand new coach, oh my gosh, I feel really bad for my clients.

When I was a brand new coach, they would come and there would be these thought spirals and I literally was listening and I didn’t know when to interject, and I didn’t know when to stop. And then the next week, they’d come back with the same thing. Okay, so over time, I realized it’s because when they were trying to solve the problem, they were completely emotionally dysregulated.

Bonnie: Or disconnected even, right?

Ali: Totally. Yeah, so I’m like, okay, I’m not going to get anywhere with them if I keep them dysregulated and I’m trying to give them new thoughts or help them create new thoughts. So then I started wising up a little bit. I’m like, we need to regulate them.

So what I found is when we do, and my work incorporates the grounding, so I ground them and I help them learn how to ground so that when we come to coaching and actually work on the mindset, they can access the nonjudgmental thoughts, the flexibility in the mindset, the growth mindset. And they get better results overall just by working on that grounding piece. So that’s why I’ve really embraced why it’s so important.

Bonnie: Yeah, so what it sounds like to me, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding, is that I’m just going to call it the physical work kind of creates the optimal environment to do mindset work.

Ali: Absolutely. So before I got, and I use an app now, but before I had the app we used to do live workouts. Now, when Covid kind of took a backseat, people got their lives back so it didn’t work as well. We used to do our strength training workout and then we’d follow it immediately with the coaching call, like as a group. Because the idea was let’s regulate everyone and then let’s go ahead and work on the mindset.

And it really works. And now what we do is we still have the workouts, they’re shorter, but typically they’ll be doing the workout a little bit earlier, and then we come on the call. So it’s always this idea that we’re working on emotional regulation constantly.

Bonnie: It’s like the warm up almost literally.

Ali: It’s the warm up. That’s a great way to put it. Yep, exactly.

Bonnie: Okay, this is so interesting. I think this is such a good conversation because, like I said, this is sort of an aspect, and what I’ve found in the coaching world that we’re in I think there is a lot more awareness, that you can’t just coach on thoughts, right? Like, it’s not so simple and isolated like that. Like I think of energy and physicalness.

You probably know this because you’ve been doing this for a while. Do you know how Tony Robbins talks about state?

Ali: No.

Bonnie: He basically, I think it’s like your thoughts, but then your body has to also be involved. So that’s sort of one of his things.

Ali: I love that. So one of the things similar, well, the way that I interpret it is that, for me, it’s because personally for me this is how I respond. And so, for me, I’m in my head all day long. So for me just to stay in my head all day long I’m like, this is not fun. I don’t want to coach. This is thinking, I don’t like it.

So what I realized and what I’ve been trying to help people do is our higher self or our inner knowing or what we know to be true, let’s lead from what we know to be true. And let’s use our mind to just confirm it. And how I help people do this is I say, notice where you are with your natural energy.

And let’s say you have a decision to make, right? If the decision is going to be a good decision that your higher self, your inner knowing agrees with, your energy is going to feel full and built up. If you feel like you’re completely drained with the opposite, right? Like let’s say that there’s the decision and then you’re like, okay, but if I make this choice it all of a sudden feels deep and heavy in your gut, you already know that it’s not a good decision.

Use your brain for confirmation versus trying to out think it all the time and then just let your body follow. I think we lose that mind/body connection if we don’t sometimes lead with our body first.

Bonnie: I imagine, just because we both coach women physicians, which means they’re literally hanging out in their brains probably 99% of the time unless they’ve done this work. I’m assuming some of the work or introductory work you probably have to do with your clients is to even get them reconnected to their body.

Ali: Which can be a yes. And I have to tell you that it’s been such an interesting journey, which prompted me to get more educated on a lot of trauma work, right? Because, I mean, when somebody doesn’t feel safe in their body and you’re asking them to connect with their body, that’s a big ask. So there’s a lot of things.

So I have my resources of referrals where I’m like, okay, I think we’re going to need to do a little more work here. I love this coach for this, let’s do this. Because sometimes to even get connected with your body, there’s all these obstacles to even go there, but yes.

Bonnie: Yeah, and it sounds like you kind of have the ability to kind of know when someone needs a little extra help for that.

Ali: Absolutely. And to also give the space that it’s not a comfortable journey when we are trying to kind of get into our body more and to trust. I mean, I think that’s the biggest thing. It’s that trusting what we know to be true, I think that can be challenging.

Bonnie: Oh, 100%. Yeah, I think that’s a challenge for just humans, is that we lean so much. And also what’s valued in society is our brains. And so we learn to sort of lean, especially physicians, right? Because that’s all you’re doing during medicine, is you’re using your brains. And then I’m not a surgeon, obviously, so I can go to the bathroom when I want to, for example.

But when you’re in training, you’re kind of trained to just ignore certain body signals because you have to do XYZ. So going to the bathroom is a good example, also sleep. So that just creates a lot of dysregulated humans.

Ali: Well, you’re so right about that. I mean, that sleep thing is huge, right? It’s like that, because I always talk about if we really want to wipe out that ability to make good decisions, drink a whole lot of bourbon and don’t sleep. And also be a doctor. Those three things alone, you’re going to do really well with, and then we just beat ourselves up. We’re like, why didn’t I make a better decision?

No, it’s not your fault. You did the best that you could with the tools that you had. But when this is wiped out, when your ability to make good decisions is wiped out, it’s difficult.

Bonnie: Yeah, and I wonder if it’s even harder for doctors, because we’re making so many decisions a day compared to normal work people, whatever that means. But you know what I mean, if you’re seeing like 30 patients a day, it’s like 30 decisions you’re making.

Ali: Yeah, it’s the massive amount of decision fatigue that occurs just with your daily job to the point where I can remember when Mark and I, you know he’s a doctor as well. But we would be ordering dinner and we would just look at each other like, what do I want? I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, right? Because you’re so tapped out, you don’t even know what you want to eat.

Bonnie: That’s why I love tasting menus, to be honest. I wish there was a takeout version. Like, don’t give me this, but just surprise me.

Ali: I think that actually, that’s a really good idea.

Bonnie: Yeah, for people who just don’t want to think about it. Yeah, I love tasting menus for that exact reason. Or if I go to a restaurant where someone else has been there, I just tell them to just order. I’m sure I’ll like it. Because I also don’t have super strong, picky, you know there’s a few things that I won’t like. But generally speaking I’m pretty minimal, so I just love it when someone just takes over and does that for me.

Ali: I am absolutely in agreement on that, yes.

Bonnie: Okay, so are you saying that we should all do – I don’t know, what do you call this pre-work? Do you call it a grounding exercise thing? I’m assuming you have kind of a name for this?

Ali: Yeah, so I typically say that – Well, okay, this is how I want to say it, because I don’t want you to get the idea that like, anytime you’re going to coach or anytime you’re going to work on your mind, you first need to take all this time to ground yourself. It’s not that either.

So I like to say that I use a stress scale 1 to 10, right? 10 is super high stress and 1 is like you’re sleeping. And the idea is it’s not like how we define stress, it will be more like your symptoms. I know when I’m at a stress level of seven, I’m going to isolate. I’m literally not going to talk to anyone because I’m so tapped out. That’s my symptom of a stress level of seven.

So I’m not going to go through the whole scale, but what I will tell you is that it’s almost like we want to prophylactically ground ourselves. So we almost want to institute something every single day of our lives that’s going to keep us at a lower stress level. When we do that by default, we’re going to be more grounded. So you don’t have to say okay, I’m going to meet with Bonnie on a call, I’ve got to my grounding.

Bonnie: I better do my little pre-exercise.

Ali: Yeah, no. I mean I did that in the past because it made sense for what I was doing. I will tell you though, having a consistent practice, so some ideas – This is what I like to say, however your stress comes out in terms of symptoms. So, for example, I know somebody who’s symptom is their hair is getting twirled like this. They’re super stressed and they’re twirling their hair, this is a symptom.

So their body wants to move with stress. So I typically say, notice when you get really stressed what your tendencies are. Your grounding technique is going to be something that satisfies whatever it is that you do. I am very restless when I’m stressed. For me, it’s movement. So daily movement for me. I’m not saying I’m going and working out all day, but I’m going for a 10 minute walk at least.

I know that if I can incorporate something that will address how I react to stress ahead of time, I’m going to pretty much always be ready, I’m always going to be primed. And remember, the lower that you are on your stress, the easier it is going to then be able to also adapt another grounding technique.

And grounding techniques can be anything from looking around the room and naming five things you can see. I mean, it literally can get super simple. Having on a fabric that you and just kind of like feeling, if you’re a sensory person feeling the fabric. So notice what senses.

People who are super sound sensitive, some real light music might be super grounding. But I would say know what your thing is and do it as often as you can.

Bonnie: Yeah, well, it’s funny, you were talking about the look around the room. I did that with a previous coach and she told me the reason why it’s so effective is it basically is physiological, right? When you’re in an activated fight or flight stress response, think about it, it’s all about your brain is like we have to focus, we have to understand the danger. So it’s like a very single focus.

But when you’re sort of widening your gaze and looking around, it tells your brain like, oh, we’re safe. That’s what I learned about that.

Ali: Yeah, you’re totally right. It tricks the amygdala. So it takes you out if fight or flight by tripping the amygdala. But you’re exactly right, what your coach said, by looking around you’re proving that you’re safe.

So I usually do, it’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So it’s five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Nobody will ever go all the way down to one if you’re doing it right. Most people can’t get past the five things you can see.

But all of those things just trip that amygdala which, again, is going to take you out of that fight or flight. And that’s grounding. Grounding is coming out of fight or flight.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, so what I’m hearing is that it’s not like there’s one way. We kind of have to figure out what it is for us. One thing that helps me, and I notice when I don’t do it, is like even a five minute meditation is helpful just to sit still. I actually use the Calm app and my favorite person is, Tamara Levitt.

Ali: Okay, yeah.

Bonnie: I don’t if you’re familiar with Calm. Her voice is just so soothing to me.

Ali: I love that.

Bonnie: If one out there wants to try it. And so everyday, she has like a daily, it’s called the daily calm. And it’s just five minutes, it’s short. I’m just like anyone can do it, anyone has five minutes, right? We’re scrolling for hours, so you can do five minutes. And she just grounds you, gives you a few minutes of quietness.

And then she always has an amazing quote. There’s like a theme for each call. So today I did it, it was about aloneness versus loneliness. And she kind of explained the connection. So she gives you a little mini lesson.

Ali: That’s awesome.

Bonnie: And then a quote, and then she kind of wakes you up, right? In five minutes. It’s amazing. The longer I do it, the better. But for me, it’s like I’m intentionally spending time quieting my brain. And when I haven’t done it in a while, like today, my brain is just like going in 30 million directions. And, obviously, it’s about noticing it and kind of like bringing yourself back to Earth and trying not to do that. Because high-functioning women tend to be kind of anxious.

Ali: Oh, 100%. I love that you do that.

Bonnie: All right. Is there anything that you think we haven’t said that you think would be useful?

Ali: Gosh, this was so good. I love talking with you because I feel like we said a lot. I think the biggest take home here is that as high-achieving women, right, women physicians, we are going to fall into the all or none so often. All or none thinking is a phrase, a term, a thought distortion that we all talk about. We all know what it is, that polarized thinking. Yet, it’s the one that we always go back to.

And so I think that the best thing I could say is just make the next best decision. So if you feel like there’s something in your life, like your health, or maybe you have a business in your business, or maybe your job at work or a relationship. Instead of going into those extremes, like if it’s a relationship, “this person never respects me.” Try to find that flexibility and that middle ground.

And remember, the idea is just make the next best decision no matter what it is. Like what you said with your meditation, the five minutes. You’re like, I know if I do this for five minutes, I’m going to feel better. This is the next best decision for me today. You didn’t say I’m going to meditate on top of a mountain over a stream for three hours. No, you said I’m going to do a five minute calm meditation.

And so I think ultimately, results come with small consistent actions. That’s it.

Bonnie: Yeah. Oh, one thing I want to say is, it’s kind of a joke but not really. Do you think my clients would get richer by doing more grounding?

Ali: I actually do. I think they would. And this is why I think they would, because a lot of times, think of it, like whenever we’re doing business or whatever, there’s a lot of different thoughts that come in that are going to make us flighty, that fight or flight. And so imagine if we’re grounded and we can really hold onto all of the empowering thoughts that I know you’re helping them create, to create exactly what they want.

So they’re going to just be able to access those thoughts more often. So yeah, I 1,000% think so.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, I think we’re going to need you to guest coach in our program.

Ali: Totally. We’ll do it all. We’ll do the stress scale. We’ll do emotional regulation. We’ll do grounding, because the thing is they’re not hard concepts. It’s just getting in a routine to do them.

Bonnie: A habit.

Ali: That’s it.

Bonnie: Yeah. Yeah, cool. All right, this was so amazing. Thank you so much for being here and it’s nice to see your face again.

Ali: Thanks for having me.

Bonnie: I know people can’t really see what we’re doing, but we’re on video.

Ali: Yeah, no, I love chatting with you. This was amazing. I really appreciate being on. Thank you.

Bonnie: Yeah. So how can people find you?

Ali: Super easy, so recently we have actually rebranded just to kind of represent more of what we do. And so our brand is The Fit Collective, and it’s super easy. It’s just fitwomancollective.com. And on Instagram, I’m Ali Novitsky MD, and that’s kind of it. But fitwomencollective.com is where you can find my podcast and programs we have and it’s kind of a one stop shop. So super easy to get there and check it out.

Bonnie: Okay, cool. Thanks so much for being here.

Ali: Thank you so much. See you soon.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.