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Episode 32 - Setting Boundaries and Dealing with Internalized Shame with Dr. Megan

Nov 30, 2023

 

Episode Notes

Dr. Kevin Mailo welcomes board-certified family physician and obesity medicine specialist Dr. Megan Melo to the show. Megan has a coaching business, Healthier For Good, focused on transforming the lives of physicians through one-on-one or group coaching. Megan and Kevin talk about burnout, shame, and how physicians can learn to set boundaries and overcome perfectionism. 

 

Dr. Melo explains how perfectionism sounds benign and hardworking but is actually often shame avoidance. If we are perfect enough, we can avoid being shamed or called out. She talks about how that plays out in affecting the day-to-day lives of physicians. Megan and Dr. Mailo share stories from their own experiences and discuss what steps physicians can take to start pulling out of perfectionism and shame cycles. They address setting boundaries for self-care and why taking care of ourselves is such a vital aspect of being a physician. Megan offers coaching for physicians to help them achieve these goals, and this episode highlights some of the insights she has that can change lives for the better.  

 

About Dr. Megan Melo

Megan Melo is a physician, board-certified in Family Medicine and Obesity Medicine, as well as a Certified Life Coach for physicians. She helps physicians struggling with burnout and overwhelm to feel better, including those who have been labelled "toxic" or "difficult" by their employers.

Megan is on a mission to help physicians and other healthcare professionals heal from burnout and change their lives for the better. She does this through one-on-one and group coaching, as well as podcasting, blogging, and speaking to groups.

 

Resources discussed in this episode:

 

 

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Physician Empowerment: website | facebook | linkedin

Dr. Megan Melo: website: HealthierForGood.com | linkedin | instagram

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Transcript

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Dr. Kevin Mailo, one of the co-hosts of the Physician Empowerment podcast. At Physician Empowerment we're dedicated to improving the lives of Canadian physicians personally, professionally, and financially. If you're loving what you're listening to, let us know! We always want to hear your feedback. Connect with us. If you want to go further, we've got outstanding programming both in-person and online. So look us up, but regardless, we hope you really enjoy this episode.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:00:34] Hi, everybody. I'm Dr. Kevin Mailo with Physician Empowerment, and I am very, very pleased to introduce you to Dr. Megan Melo. Megan is a board-certified family physician and obesity medicine specialist based out of Seattle, Washington, and she has an incredible coaching business focused on group as well as individual sessions called Healthier For Good. And the goal here is to transform the lives of physician clients who are coming through. And I think you've kind of got a focus, if I can describe it as that, Megan, on perfectionism. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your career journey to start with and how you got to this place, and then we'll get into today's topic?

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:01:20] Yeah. So I grew up in a household of two nurses, and from a very young age I was like, I'm going to go be a doctor, right? And when you grow up that way, you get a lot of positive reinforcement. Oh, a doctor is a great thing to be. And oh, you sort of learn a lot of sort of people pleasing things along the way. And of course, socialized as a woman, we can throw that in there as well. Went straight from college to medical school and then into family medicine residency and did well, but was always kind of looking for gosh, like I wonder when things are going to feel better. And I remember my residency advisor would always be like, oh, second year is easier than first year, and third year is easier than second. And I was like, that doesn't seem to be true. I'm not sure why you keep telling me that over and over, because it seems like things are getting harder, more responsibilities, more people asking me to do things. But regardless, I graduated and went into practice doing pretty broad scope of family medicine for the United States. So I was delivering babies, doing clinical practice, occasional hospital medicine as part of teaching residents, and started a family at that point as well, pretty early in my career, and again, just had this experience of constantly looking for, When am I going to feel better? When is it going to get easier? When have I done enough that people will sort of start to ease off on all the things they're asking me to do? Along the way I picked up teaching in our family medicine residency, joined the faculty there, two kids by that point and life just kept feeling harder and harder, and I didn't know why and I thought it was me. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I don't feel happy. I feel like I'm constantly working harder and harder. And it never feels like enough.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:03:22] Wow. I think we can all relate to that. I'll share my own reflections. I mean, it's, you know, you sort of touched on this. This starts long before we even enter medical school. I mean, medical schools select for conscientiousness and a sense of duty and obligation, which is not a bad thing. I mean, that's how you want your doctors, but it is a perfect recipe for this perfectionism burnout cycle. And we're all surrounded by each other on top of it.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:03:56] Right? And we're all hiding how we feel from each other.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:03:59] We're hiding how we feel. Right? 

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:04:03] Absolutely.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:04:04] But you just, you don't want to raise your hand and say, I'm not happy, right? Or I don't feel like doing it.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:04:10] Like this isn't enough for me.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:04:12] This isn't enough for me. So then talk about, talk about perfectionism. Talk about how this impacts us in a very real sense. I'd love to dig down on this and hear more.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:04:28] Yeah. So you probably grew up with this same idea that perfectionism sounds great, right? It sounds like, oh, I'm just a perfectionist, right? It sounds like this very benign, hardworking sort of process. But a lot of the way that it's defined, especially by Brené Brown, who I follow closely, is that perfectionism is really shame avoidance. Right? So if I act perfect enough, if I know enough, if I, you know, look right and sort of perform excellently, then no one can shame me, right? No one can cast me out. No one, you know, I'll have to be a part of the group. And no one will see any flaws in me. And there is a huge difference between that perfectionism, right, that desire that I have to do everything just right, and excellence, right? Wanting to do a good job, wanting to learn more. If you've got a knowledge gap, you know, wanting to do the right thing. Those two things are not the same. But often, you know, again, our medical training has really reinforced this notion that I need to avoid shame at all costs. I mean, that's literally, you know, when we're on rounds, right? And we're being pimped by our attendings, you know, they're trying to find out all the things we don't know. And we are humiliated.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:05:53] Yeah, it's a shame-based learning system.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:05:56] So we're all steeped in that. Right? And it often, for many of us, just keeps going. But the stakes get harder. You know the responsibilities get more. We throw families and other, you know, kind of outside responsibilities in there. And then we're trying to keep up on those planes too. Have that perfect Christmas card or whatever the keeping up with the Joneses is. It's an unwinnable game and it's so toxic inside.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:06:24] And you know, I'll share my own reflection. I mean, you know, we talk about those external voices, right? Whether it's, you know, family or friends that have expectations of us, our broader community, of how we should behave or look, what colleagues say, superiors say. But the hardest one, the hardest voice, is that voice inside saying I'm not good enough. Or not worthy to be here or shouldn't be here.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:06:51] Yeah. And often that person that you may see, you know, and may be working alongside who is someone who seems really harsh, really judgmental, really, you know, kind of always unhappy with other, your performance, other people's performance. If we could listen inside of them, we would often find that that negativity, that judgment, that shame is even more intensely turned towards themselves because we can't shame and blame others without having a high degree of it within ourselves.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:07:26] Wow, wow. So. How does this play out in terms of our day-to-day practice as physicians who have now, you know, settled into our careers? Talk about how it impacts our scheduling, our patient interactions. Our, you know, vacations. Talk about how this, you know, bleeds boundaries, if you will.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:07:56] Yeah. And I often talk about this, you know, looking at perfectionism and people-pleasing and lack of boundaries together. Because there's a lot of overlap between them. But, you know, it shows up as us being unwilling and afraid to say no. Unwilling and afraid to set boundaries on our schedule, or whether we can throw in an extra patient or, you know, whether we'll set an agenda with the patient and say, I'm sorry, we don't have time to continue today. I know that you'd like to discuss these other things, but we're out of time for today. Right? So much of the time, too, we're operating in very broken healthcare systems, which are strapped and under-resourced. You know, there can be things like, you know, lack of beds, as we've discussed earlier or, you know, we don't have nursing staff or things like that. So everybody's responsibilities seem to have gone up, right, while our bandwidth has gone down. But if I'm internalizing that I'm not doing enough for my patients, and I'm bearing the weight of all of the shortages and the brokenness of health care, then that is a recipe for disaster, because I will not take the time to take care of myself. Make sure that I'm eating, sleeping, peeing, you know, feeling connected with my family, having some fun, God forbid. Right?

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:09:18] And let me interrupt there and just say that this notion of shame in our careers and perfectionism bleeds into our inability to be present during family and personal time, because you feel this nagging inadequacy eating away at you in the back of your mind that you should be doing more, or that you could have done more. Maybe I should have.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:09:39] Or maybe I didn't do that right. Or maybe...

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:09:42] Maybe I should have squeezed this other patient in.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:09:44] Absolutely, absolutely. And we often interpret, if we're used to sort of people pleasing and lack of boundaries, we often interpret other people's disappointment as proof that we're wrong or, you know, proof that we can't do that. Right? If I'm uncomfortable with saying no to you and you get upset with me, right? If my default is just to roll over and do it anyway, right? Like, oh, okay. You know, I guess so, I guess I'll do that. I guess I'll join that committee. I'll do these extra things for you today. Then I'm interpreting my own discomfort with their disappointment as proof that I shouldn't be trying to set boundaries, right? And that's where we often really hit a struggle because we can talk about boundaries, but we need to talk about us not controlling other people's expectations as well.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:10:34] That's theirs.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:10:35] That's theirs.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:10:36] You don't have to own that. You don't have to internalize that. That's an iss-them, not an iss-you.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:10:43] Right? I love that: iss-you. Yeah. Because, you know, I don't control, you know, how sick my patients are when they show up. I don't control that they've got a list of 17 items. What I'm working in, though, is, you know, a health care system that has, you know, time constraints and constraints on what is available to me to solve that day. Similarly, you know, sometimes in primary care or in the emergency room, right, we might get pushed to do things that, you know, are really, you know, at a specialist level. We want to help. We want to do more and provide the care that the patient needs. But that's not always the best solution. And the difficulty with finding, you know, finding specialists, if we continue to sort of suck it up and take on more than is reasonable for us to take on, then we're enabling the health care system to not make any changes. And as long as we do that, there's no pressure on the system to hire the appropriate amount of staff or resources, you know, get the appropriate amount of resources because they'll just continue to push us. Well, you care about people. Just take one extra person. Just do more.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:12:01] One year at our conference, we had an incredible speaker come who cares for physicians primarily in her practice as a psychiatrist. And she stood up and told the whole room, don't tell us to be more resilient. Don't give us another online module to do telling us to be more resilient.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:12:22] Yoga at lunch.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:12:23] Yeah, yoga at lunch.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:12:25] Or yoga before work.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:12:27] Yeah, like goodness, it is not about doing more and adding more to our to-do list. It's actually about doing less and doing it happily. But yeah, don't tell the profession to be more resilient. We are already highly selected for this resiliency. And we are trained in it and we practice in it. It's what is the limits of human capacity?

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:12:51] Yeah, we need to learn how to turn it off.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:12:53] And most physicians who are burnt out are working beyond what is a reasonable limit for human capacity.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:13:00] Yes, yes, we need to learn how to turn it off. To say yep, even though I see it's very busy here and technically speaking, I could stay longer and do more, but it's ultimately better for me and every other person that I go home and rest, that I go home and take care of myself so that I show up again tomorrow.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:13:23] Yeah, yeah.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:13:25] But that's not something that often comes to us from the outside. People don't sit us down, our managers and clinical leadership and hospital...

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:13:33] Nobody is going to sit you down say you know what --

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:13:36] -- they do not share that with you --

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:13:37] -- don't worry. Things are rough right now, but it's important you get home. But we actually need to start having those conversations in the workplace. Saying like, listen, you know, I know it's really busy today, but none of us is going to fix this. Let's just go home and, you know, we'll have to just hit it again tomorrow, right? So then okay, so talk to us about like some concrete steps to make this better. I mean love on your website it says I am a recovering perfectionist. Right? And in recovery, always in recovery.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:14:13] Right. Always in recovery.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:14:15] Because we always have those tendencies. I know for myself I've made a lot of progress in this space, but I always feel this backslide to take another sip of perfectionism. You know what I mean? And so talk to us about like, what we can do in a concrete sense. Because if I can be honest, I think a lot of this goes back to even early developmental stages in our childhood.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:14:37] Absolutely.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:14:37] Right. So how do you begin to rewire? What does that look like, Megan?

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:14:45] Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one really important step, right, is really tuning into our emotions. We've been taught to ignore our emotions often, the same way we've been taught to ignore our bladders, right. Or our stomachs. And this can be hard to do at first. Because if we're tuning into our emotions more, we'll often notice more negative emotions. We'll notice that we're feeling frustrated or resentful or overwhelmed or angry. But if we can start to understand what the thoughts are that are creating that, and often that's really where we see that perfectionism or that people pleasing, because the thoughts that are connected to those things are, I can't believe someone is asking me to do one more thing. Or don't they see how hard I'm working? Or how on earth could I possibly do more? Or I have to do this all right. You know, when we can start to really understand those negative emotions and those negative thoughts, we can start to unravel them and start to say, you know, it doesn't actually serve me to think that I'm the one who has to do all of this, that I can't ask for help. It doesn't serve me to continue to use other people's disappointment as a reason why I can't set boundaries for myself.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:15:57] Wow, that's a wrong fuel.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:16:02] So really sort of tuning in to understanding that dynamic. And it's hard work at first. Right? Because the well-worn ruts that are, you know, kind of that we're used to are saying yes, doing more, you know, not disappointing other people. And when we're doing this work, when we're tuning into who we are and what we need, we have to get out of those ruts. Right? And that's uncomfortable. One of my group members was saying, yeah, not only is it uncomfortable to, like, bump ourselves out of those ruts, but we're exposed. It's cold. You know, we're up at the elements. And I'm like, yeah, that's a perfect way to think about it because it's different. Right? Change is something that we have to put more energy into than following the well-worn ruts. But we also have to. You know, tune into ourselves and realize that I don't actually control other people's experience, right? I don't control whether my patients are happy, I don't control what their expectations are. But if I want to take care of myself and continue to serve patients in this model, in this place that I work, or however I take care of patients, then I'm going to have to set some limits on what I do for me. Because ultimately taking care of me is my job. No one's going to do that for me. And I think for such a long time, I wrestled with wanting and expecting that the healthcare system would somehow take care of me, right? That they would somehow, you know, tap me on the shoulder and say, hey, you need a break. Like, you know, here's a week's vacation. Or they would lighten my load somehow or pay me more or something.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:17:35] Or even just the reward and joy of practice.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:17:39] Right? Right.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:17:40] It doesn't...

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:17:42] It's not enough.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:17:43] That's not, that shouldn't be the fuel. And it certainly isn't the antidote to burnout and perfectionism. Right? You have to be able to go in and love your job even when it's hard, right? And even when you struggle or, you know, you have complex patients or whatever it is, you have to be able to love your job, right? But that can't be the, that can't be the crux of, you know, oh, I'm really exhausted at work at 70 hours this week, but had some great cases. Yeah, that's not sustainable. That's not healthy. That's not the right reference point or goalpost that we should be using.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:18:22] Well in so much of, you know, kind of what we, what we think of, you know, in health care, so much of it seems tied to the physician. Patients do this, hospitals do that, like so much of a patient's outcome seems to be tied to the quality of the physician care. Right? That's what metrics are driven by. And we believe it too. So we are often carrying around this burden: I've got all these sick people, it's my job to make them better. Meanwhile, we're ignoring the fact that most of a person's health outcomes are related to their socioeconomic status, their genetics, how they've been living their life for the last 70 years, whether they got a vaccine, you know, and all of these other components that have much more of an impact than me taking care of them right now and trying to reverse things that are going on that are already pretty deep in the process. But again, when we go back to our training, right, treatment failures, bad outcomes are so often blamed on us, right? I must not have the knowledge, skills or experience to have properly taken care of this. Ignoring the fact that this patient came in septic with chronic kidney disease, poorly controlled type two diabetes, right? A really sick body. And I'm meeting it very late in the process. My ability to actually make impact is quite small, right? Something like 20% of our healthcare outcomes is related to the care provided by the physician and the healthcare team. The majority of it, generally speaking, is so many other factors that are outside of us.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:20:04] Much of the story is told before we ever arrive in the plot.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:20:09] Right. But if I'm carrying around this idea that most of the responsibility is mine, yeah, there's this little lifestyle and, you know, yeah, they inherited bad genetics, but most of the burden is mine, right? I'm going to keep in that perfectionism model. Because I'm going to feel like I'm never going to be able to do enough for that patient. We have to let go of that responsibility. Not to say that we're going to provide poor care, but let's be realistic about what is possible and what's not.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:20:39] Even just accepting the complications, misses inevitably happen.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:20:47] They do.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:20:47] I mean you're setting yourself up for failure if you become a surgeon and you say, I'm never going to have surgical complications. Well, that's, you know, that's just completely unrealistic. And yet when those complications occur, we feel horrible about ourselves. Well, I could have done this differently or that differently, or I missed this, or I missed that. And we, you know, we can tear ourselves to pieces, but without accepting the fact that every surgeon has complications.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:21:15] Right. And every body is a little different.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:21:17] And everybody's a little different.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:21:18] We learn where most of the organs are supposed to be, right, and how they're supposed to operate, but they don't always follow those instructions.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:21:24] So it's this notion of struggle is inevitable in a career like this. Right? I mean, you know, you're a professional athlete and you're going to have bad games. And so it's okay, well, how do I overcome that? And how do I keep going and not just limp along. But truly thrive. Say, okay, something happened. I'm, I've learned, I'm wiser. I put it into context and I can continue to confidently move forward in my career. That takes a lot of work, but it can be done and it should be done because like we said, like we discussed on your podcast, Megan, is if not now, when? If I'm not happy and thriving in my day-to-day clinical practice now, when am I going to? Because it isn't going to be sometime in the future, like you said.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:22:21] Right. We won't get to retirement and magically be a different person. Right? We won't have the capacity, honestly, to feel joy and gratitude because it's been, if we haven't been practicing it, we won't spontaneously experience it.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:22:37] And it's a skill. You have to work at it, but it does get better. So speak, you know, I don't want to keep going on and on and on, although I could. Trust me, we should just get you back on the show and dive deeper into these topics. But talk to me about, like, how coaching in this space can be so helpful for physicians.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:22:58] Yeah, I think a lot of the work that I end up doing with physicians is really about dialing down that messaging that I have to do perfect, I have to do everything perfectly. I have to say yes to everybody. I have to hold all of this. Because so often the messaging and the pressure on that physician is that they should just say yes with a smile. They should, you know, see more patients, make it to all the meetings, they should bring cookies. That's that's often, you know, for us, socialized as women. Right? Like we should contribute to the potluck and be just fine with, you know, being called that lady doctor or being mistaken for the nurse. Right?

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:23:43] Yeah. I've got daughters myself, and it boils me over, and I'm working so darn hard to raise them without that, you know, socializing, as you call it. Because it is, it's horrifying.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:23:56] And it's quite pervasive. And it's, you know, we'd like to think, oh, we should be done with that, you know, in medicine. But no, of course, it's still just like racism persists, right? Like we're working on it, but we're not done with any of that. But really sort of trying to figure out like, what is that internal dialog that is going on for that physician about what they owe to others? You know, what's getting in the way of them taking care of themselves? Where are they struggling? A lot of times people come to me and they're really struggling with charting, or they're thinking they want to leave that job, you know? And we really sort of use that as a jumping-off point to really untangle this internal dialogue and figure out, okay, you're not broken, and you do have agency and choice, and you can start to say no. And here's how we, you know, start working on this. And through that process, really learn to, you know, be with our emotions, to see that connection between our thoughts and our emotions, and see that we are not responsible for fixing the broken health care system. But if we're going to continue to work in it, or if we're going to choose to leave, right, we need to learn how to take care of ourselves.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:25:07] Mhm.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:25:07] Because so many of my clients, you know, have been working 80-hour weeks and always putting others first and they, don't know how to do self care and they don't know how to answer the question what is it that I want. Like that question just stops them.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:25:23] Yeah. A lot of us don't actually know what we want. We maybe have a sense of what we don't want.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:25:31] I wanted to be a doctor. Okay, well, I am, but now what? What else?

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:25:38] Yeah, yeah.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:25:40] Yeah, yeah.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:25:41] So powerful.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:25:42] It really does a lot to kind of offload the mind. Right? The mind that is telling them you're the only one who's like this. You should be happy just with the joy of taking care of patients and serving others, you know, and the guilt and the resentment and frustration that are kind of all tied into that. So really sort of understanding that internal dialogue and where that came from, and how do we start to undo it so that no matter what you decide to do, you will feel better, you will have better boundaries. You will see that you are not responsible for fixing the broken healthcare system, and you're not responsible for other people's emotions.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:26:21] I love that. Love that. So how do we reach you, Megan? For anyone that's listening.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:26:29] Yeah. So I've got a podcast called Ending Physician Overwhelm, and that's available on all the major podcast players. And then you can also find me at my website which is www.HealthierForGood.com. And I have a blog there. You can link to my podcast from there and you can find out about working with me either one-on-one or in my group coaching program.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:26:49] Wonderful. I love it. Thank you again so much for your time today and your insights, because I think this is the the unspoken...

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:26:58] It's what we needed to learn.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:26:59] ... issue that we have pervasive within the medical culture. Right? And even when you just talked about like how others may be externalizing their internal shame was just eye opening for me. So again, I really want to thank you for, you know, highlighting such a big issue. And it's difficult to, I think I'll just share my own reflections before we wrap up, but it's difficult to, you know, except on the outside, you could say, well, this has been since my childhood. This is the way the profession is. But the truth is, it's highly empowering because it just, it's a matter of turning the cameras inward and doing the self-work. And we are highly resilient. We are highly intelligent and we're hard workers. So if we direct those energies towards self-improvement, it can get better. And it's independent of what hospital you work in, who your colleagues are, you know, what happened to you years ago in your life. The truth is, you can make it better now with that self-work. So I think that's so, so powerful. And again, it was wonderful having you on the podcast, Megan.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:28:11] Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:28:14] Thank you for all your work supporting the profession.

 

Dr. Megan Melo: [00:28:17] And for you.

 

Dr. Kevin Mailo: [00:28:20] Thank you so much for listening to the Physician Empowerment podcast. If you're ready to take those next steps in transforming your practice, finances, or personal well-being, then come and join us at PhysEmpowerment.ca - P H Y S Empowerment dot ca - to learn more about how we can help. If today's episode resonated with you, I'd really appreciate it if you would share our podcast with a colleague or friend and head over to Apple Podcasts to give us a five-star rating and review. If you've got feedback, questions or suggestions for future episode topics, we'd love to hear from you. If you want to join us and be interviewed and share some of your story, we'd absolutely love that as well. Please send me an email at [email protected]. Thank you again for listening. Bye.