coachingfordoctors Archives - The Resilient Doctor

Can elite sport performance hacks for doctors really work? The concept of periodisation has long been used to plan and optimise the performance of elite athletes. These performance psychology principles can be used to sustain high performance for doctors, building workplace resilience and wellbeing to reduce stress and build resilience. Here’s how to borrow work periodisation performance hacks for doctors from elite athletes.

Periodisation and Performance for Doctors

Periodisation is used to break training into cycles. It recognises that in addition to high intensity training, there needs to be downtime for rest and recovery. Alternating phases of complexity and intensity is central to periodisation. Overtraining is the route to burnout and injury in the sporting world. When we work with sporting bodies like the FA and UK Sport we use periodisation training to help clients prepare for events more efficiently. When we coach doctors, we use it to manage energy levels and avoid burnout. Periodisation is bespoke and based upon the needs of each client.

Vary the Volume & Intensity of Your Day

These sports principles can be used in everyday life. It’s a way of constantly changing the volume and intensity of performance to suit individual need. We introduce Resilient Doctor coaching clients to this concept to help them create professional momentum alongside an effective work life balance. Performance and time are chunked into a framework that includes:

Macrocycles – a long term goal e.g. 6 months of a year
Mesocycles – smaller cycles, e.g. 6 to 8 weeks long
Microcycles – short cycles e.g. a session at the gym or project at work

Periodisation is a simple, data driven technique that when used with positive psychology will increase your performance and enable you to develop a growth mindset.

The Benefits of Periodisation for Doctors

Whether you’re adapting your performance for a busy period or you simply want to sustain your performance, periodisation has multiple benefits. Introducing this easy to use concept into your day will enable you to;

Manage physical and mental stress
Maximise performance during high stress periods
Increase endurance
Enable you to avoid plateauing
Maintain momentum
Avoid working practices that lead to stress and burnout
Improve your wellbeing
Better manage the stress of busy periods
Help you to monitor and assess progress

Periodisation – Sustainable Performance Hacks for Doctors

If long term performance is important to you, periodisation is a systematic strategy to help you sustain high performance. When your performance threshold is permanently set to high, just like elite athletes, you’ll eventually burn out. Healthcare is a high stress, high performance, burnout culture. Periodisation will help you to dial down the intensity, manage stress and develop resilience. Here’s how.

Identify Peaks & Troughs. Look at your work and home commitments over a period of weeks and begin by identifying any natural peaks and troughs. Start to plot your time daily based upon those periods of high and low activity. Specificity is key. Chunk your time into cycles that work for your personal schedule, macro, mesa and micro.

When planning time chunking we use areas that include professional, exercise, personal and downtime. You can create addition categories as needed.

2. Intensity Map. When work demands high, intense energy and focus, identify where and how you can take regular breaks and include downtime. Next to each activity estimate the intensity required, for example, let’s take a look at a typical day.

Intensity Mapping

5.30am Wake up. Run 30 mins (80% intensity)

6.30am Commute and check emails (50% intensity)

7.30am Walk from station, meetings, completing work tasks, planning (40% intensity)

10.30am Break (downtime – if you’re lucky)

10.50am – 1pm See patients (60% intensity)

1pm Lunch walk and eat (again, if you’re lucky enough to take a lunch break. Many of the health professionals we work with don’t)

1.30pm – 5pm Surgery & meetings (80% intensity)

5pm Commute. Listen to podcast (20%)

6.30pm Dinner

7.30pm Working on personal development project 9pm (60% intensity)

Why Ploughing Through Won’t Work

It’s common to see people overextend themselves by ploughing through the day performing at high intensity without pressing pause, especially in healthcare settings that demand a high level of focus. Notice where high levels of intensity include regular breaks and periods of low intensity afterwards. If your entire week were to look like this with periods of high intensity (over 50%) dominating, we recommend that you include either a full day or a weekend of downtime for renewal. It’s important to create these chunks of time to stop yourself falling into the trap of sacrifice syndrome.

3. Vary Intensity. Make sure that your planned work and exercise cycles aren’t both set to intense on the same day. On a high focus work day, keep your exercise moderate to low and vice versa. Recognise that extended bouts of high intensity exercise can increase cortisol levels adrenal stress and feelings of depletion. You need downtime from work and exercise. Adjust the intensity level of tasks daily and weekly depending on the level of performance you’re working at.

4. Flexibility is critical. You’re constantly working with variables and it’s ok to make adjustments. Recognise where there are fluctuations. When you feel overwhelmed, give yourself permission to to take a break. Go for a walk, stretch, grab a coffee. Even if it’s just 5 minutes, incremental steps will begin to make a difference to your overall energy levels. Build down time into your schedule. Keep at least one weekend out of the month when you have real down time. That means no work, no work related emails and your alerts are switched to off. You’ll be better prepared for periods of high intensity in the days and weeks that follow.

Get in touch

The Resilient Doctor are experts in sustainable high performance, consultancy and leadership coaching. We work with Fortune 100 companies, elite sporting bodies and international start ups. Contact us to find out how we can work with you.

Overcoming the Healthcare Burnout Epidemic

In 2019, for the first time ever, the World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised workplace burnout as a diagnosable condition, adding it to the International Classification of Diseases. If you’ve ever ever experienced burnout, you may be left wondering what took them so long. We take a look at how to overcome the burnout epidemic in healthcare.

What is Burnout?

Now reported to be at epidemic levels, the WHO state that “Burnout is a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Serious stuff. Healthcare burnout is at an all time high.

Burnout affects our motivation, our performance. It even bleeds into our personal lives leaving multiple casualties. Take a look around and you’ll see examples of workplace stress in healthcare, with professionals constantly being stretched. But how do you know when you’ve crossed over into burnout?

The 3 Domains of Healthcare Burnout

Christina Maslach and Susan E. Jackson designed the the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to measure occupational burnout. Maslach and Jackson identified 3 components of burnout;

Emotional exhaustion This is when you feel tired, fatigued and exhausted at work. Maybe you can manage to get through the day but your reserves are depleted and you have no energy left for anything else.
Depersonalization Think of this as indifference at one end of a spectrum and a callous/uncaring attitude at the other. You might even experience hostility towards colleagues or patients. This is about feeling so numb, that there’s nothing left in the tank for anyone else, your energy reserves are simply too low.
Reduced personal accomplishment You may feel that there’s no stretch, no challenge or that you aren’t accomplishing anything worthwhile. The result? low levels of motivation and productivity.

Still Wondering if you’re burning out?

Healthcare burnout symptoms can be varied, but if you find you can answer yes to these questions, you may be experiencing burnout;

You dread going to work
Sunday becomes poisoned by the thought of Monday
You feel exhausted and drained of energy
The prospect of work fills you with joylessness
There are low level, nebulous aches and pains that you can’t explain
You genuinely don’t have enough time in your working day to complete all of your tasks
You’re playing constant catch up – with everything
Your day is clouded by overwhelm
You feel guilty
Sleep is difficult
You’re short tempered for no reason
You frequently feel hopeless about life and work
One bad day at work merges into another
You frequently feel resentful towards your friends and colleagues or patients
You’ve stopped doing the things that used to renew and energise you a long time ago

Healthcare Burnout Recovery

When you’re experiencing burnout, things can feel harder than usual so don’t beat yourself up. But there is a way forward. It’s important that you create the space to address the underlying causes of burnout. Ignoring burnout won’t help, it isn’t something that will just disappear.

Talk to someone. Sharing how you are feeling with a professional will help you to begin the process of addressing the reasons for burnout.
Identify what the trigger for burnout is. There might be several reasons, work related stress, taking work home, working patterns, shift work, lack of time for self care or family and friends. This can take time, try journalling or talking therapy to dig deep and discover what’s going on for you.
Self care. This one might sound obvious, but when we’re stressed or burning out, sometimes we stop doing the things that renew and re-energise us. Get back to basics and take stock of your nutrition, exercise and general wellbeing. Are there areas where you can be more gentle with yourself or create more opportunities for self care? Start small and build up your routine slowly, one thing at a time.
Audit your assertiveness. Are there times when you find yourself saying ‘yes’ when you really mean ‘no’? Brush up on your assertiveness skills and give yourself permission to say no when you need to.
Values. Often when we start to talk about work life balance and wellbeing in coaching, we start with values. When our values are congruent with what we do on a daily basis, we have meaning and purpose. Research around wellbeing and happiness suggest that living with purpose is key to our happiness and wellness. Doing some homework around what’s important to us and whether our working life is in alignment with those values can be an enormously useful starting point.
Focus on what you can control. This is the cornerstone of many resilience models. Take a look at Susan Kobasa’s 3 Cs or Martin Seligman’s PERMA model to find out how to develop resilience. Our free Resilience Toolkit is also a great place to start learning about resilience.

Work with the Resilient Doctor

Want to know more about burnout or building resilience? We work with the NHS, FTSE 100 companies & sporting bodies to develop resilience and optimise performance. We offer training programmes, consultancy, coaching and keynote presentations. We’ve also worked with hundreds of individuals to help them optimise their wellbeing and performance. Get in touch to discover how we can work together.

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Elite Sport Performance Hacks for Doctors