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Inner Compass with Kristi Angevine · Lean Out Podcast

• 0:00
  Dawn: Welcome to the lean out podcast.
• 0:03
  Dawn: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:04
  Dawn: Don baker.
• 0:05
  Dawn: Are you looking for a new approach to finding work-life balance?
• 0:09
  Dawn: You've come to the right place.
• 0:11
  Dawn: Listen, as I interview amazing women professionals, who've taken the steps to lean out.
• 0:16
  Dawn: And find balance on their own terms.
• 0:20
  Hello?
• 0:20
  Hello.
• 0:21
  Thanks for being here today.
• 0:22
  I have a very special guest Christie and Javan.
• 0:25
  Someone who've I have admired for some time now in the coaching space.
• 0:30
  When I wrote the book lean out, she actually reached out to me to ask if I wanted to be a guest on her podcast.
• 0:36
  And I was so psyched because I've been a listener and a fan for some time.
• 0:42
  Christie confided that my professional path really resonated with her.
• 0:46
  As someone who has also struggled with some health challenges early in their career.
• 0:52
  You'll hear all about how this shaped Christie's transition from OB GYN, private practice.
• 0:57
  To full time coaching and why she chose this path.
• 1:01
  Here's a quick bio on Kristy.
• 1:04
  Christie and divine MD is a board certified OB GYN and master certified life coach.
• 1:10
  She specializes in helping high achievers.
• 1:12
  Change unhelpful habits into intentional ones She also has special training in internal family systems and loves blending this to help others find the root causes of their habits Christie lives in central oregon and is an avid mountain biker Please enjoy my conversation with christie
• 1:38
  Dawn: Christy and Javine, thank you so much for joining me.
• 1:40
  Dawn: Welcome.
• 1:41
  Dawn: I would love if we could start with talking about your background and how what you're doing now is different than typical people in your profession.
• 1:52
  Kristi: So let's see, how much time do we have?
• 1:55
  Kristi: So it's so fun to be here and speak with you because, you know, we've spoken before.
• 1:59
  Kristi: And I feel like this is kind of a to be continued of what we kind of started with earlier.
• 2:03
  Kristi: Um, so my background, I'm an OBGYN.
• 2:07
  Kristi: I.
• 2:09
  Kristi: Worked in the Southeast for about six years.
• 2:12
  Kristi: And then I moved to central Oregon and worked here where I'm currently at for about four and a half years and did private practice for.
• 2:20
  Kristi: Roughly 11 years.
• 2:21
  Kristi: And then about two years ago, I transitioned from doing full time clinical practice to doing a hybrid of laborist work plus doing life coaching.
• 2:32
  Kristi: And then more recently, I shifted to doing specifically life coaching without doing clinical work.
• 2:40
  Dawn: I am a big fan of your life coaching approach and the types of things that you focus on.
• 2:46
  Dawn: Can you tell us a little bit about what areas you coach on?
• 2:51
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 2:51
  Kristi: So my business name is habits on purpose and that's, what sort of came to me when I started initially started coaching physicians on a lot of habits that they weren't comfortable seeking care with a therapist or with a counselor with specifically things like busying overworking over drinking, over eating.
• 3:09
  Kristi: And as I was coaching them, I realized that.
• 3:12
  Kristi: Behind all the specific habits was more of a pattern of behavior that was just related to habits in general.
• 3:22
  Kristi: And so I coach physicians as well as most high achievers on things like patterns of thinking, patterns of emotionally responding and behaviors that kind of fall into a category that I call hidden habits.
• 3:35
  Kristi: So this is a, a lot of things like.
• 3:37
  Kristi: Overthinking, catastrophic thinking.
• 3:40
  Kristi: Things that relate back to either self-worth or lots of striving for achievement in ways that kind of feel like the hamster wheel.
• 3:49
  Kristi: Thinking patterns or patterns that relate to self-doubt, how they show up in our everyday life in some of just the behaviors that we may not even notice are habits.
• 4:01
  Dawn: How did you get interested in this particular area?
• 4:03
  Dawn: Is this something that has always piqued your interest?
• 4:08
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 4:08
  Kristi: So I love that question.
• 4:09
  Kristi: My interest in that started really young in college.
• 4:12
  Kristi: My focus was on psychology and humanities, and I was really interested in all of the things about sort of why we do what we do, why we think what we think, how we're socialized to believe certain things in one culture that is completely different than if we had been raised in a different setting.
• 4:30
  Kristi: And so my interest began really early and I can look back through my medical career and I can see very, very clearly that.
• 4:40
  Kristi: I really, really loved the interpersonal connection and that aspect.
• 4:44
  Kristi: And it was honestly sort of my Achilles heel.
• 4:47
  Kristi: It was something that would slow me down in clinic.
• 4:49
  Kristi: It would slow me down in the hospital in ways that were really useful because they helped with, you know, connecting with other human beings, but they weren't easy to do.
• 4:58
  Kristi: And, you know, when you have a 15 or 20 minute time slot for an appointment.
• 5:02
  Kristi: And then my interest specifically in habits that grew directly from coaching physicians on habits that they saw as maladaptive coping mechanisms and trying to figure out what was what was the common thread.
• 5:17
  Kristi: And then I realized, Oh, so this is just a habituated pattern.
• 5:21
  Kristi: And when I realized that I just got interested in all things that are patterns and how we think, feel, and act.
• 5:28
  Kristi: And that's where that focus sort of got some roots.
• 5:31
  Kristi: It got some traction in terms of what I do with my coaching business today.
• 5:35
  Dawn: It's really interesting that you have.
• 5:37
  Dawn: This longstanding background and interest in this area.
• 5:42
  Dawn: And I'm wondering how you got into OBGYN when you had that specific interest as a young adult.
• 5:50
  Kristi: I do find it fascinating that.
• 5:54
  Kristi: I didn't like come out of the womb wanting to be a physician and I don't come from a family of physicians or OBGYN specifically that sort of cultivated that interest.
• 6:03
  Kristi: I had this vague inkling that being a doctor would be really interesting.
• 6:06
  Kristi: That the human body is fascinating.
• 6:08
  Kristi: Humans are super interesting for why they do what they do.
• 6:11
  Kristi: And I didn't quite understand how humans worked.
• 6:15
  Kristi: You know, I loved biology.
• 6:17
  Kristi: And so I had a vague notion that being a physician could be kind of cool.
• 6:20
  Kristi: But when it came to college, my interest was very much in anthropology, sociology, psychology, humanities travel.
• 6:27
  Kristi: So I did a lot of work in international humanities and literature and things related to psychology.
• 6:33
  Kristi: And towards the end of my college experience, I remember having a conversation with my dad.
• 6:37
  Kristi: And he basically just asked, like, what are you going to do?
• 6:40
  Kristi: Like, you need to have a job.
• 6:41
  Kristi: It's going to get you some money, like, what would you like to do?
• 6:44
  Kristi: And they didn't have an answer to that.
• 6:46
  Kristi: And I kind of found myself, like, when I look back, what I was looking at in terms of options, And I think that were necessarily drawn towards.
• 6:56
  Kristi: But they were things that I saw that would be really viable, financial, and socially esteemed options.
• 7:02
  Kristi: I remember really thinking, you know what?
• 7:04
  Kristi: I could get into.
• 7:06
  Kristi: Go into law and I could do health policy and maybe I could do, you know, I didn't know much about reproductive rights, but I can see that being a beautiful link for it.
• 7:14
  Kristi: And I didn't know much about the time.
• 7:15
  Kristi: But I thought that would be fascinating.
• 7:17
  Kristi: And then I looked at being a physician.
• 7:18
  Kristi: It's like, I had these two things.
• 7:21
  Kristi: I can't really remember what it was, but I remember doing all these practice LSATs and thinking, okay, these are interesting, but I don't know if this is for me.
• 7:28
  Kristi: And I knew enough of my friends who were in medical school and I related to them.
• 7:33
  Kristi: So I sort of just warmed to the idea of being a physician.
• 7:36
  Kristi: So all that to say, it was almost a bit arbitrary.
• 7:38
  Kristi: Like I did all my prereqs to go to medical school in my last year of college and just crammed them all in.
• 7:43
  Kristi: And then applied and then got in and went forward and didn't really question it much.
• 7:48
  Kristi: And I did have some, I did have some intuition that maybe this was arbitrary and maybe this didn't make sense, but I kind of ignored that if I thought, you know what, this seems good enough.
• 7:58
  Kristi: This seems interesting enough.
• 7:59
  Kristi: And it was, and I really did love so much about it.
• 8:02
  Kristi: Um, so I went through medical school and kind of.
• 8:05
  Kristi: I figured my way out towards OBGYN, which I found really fascinating because of a lot of the reasons that most OBGYNs go into it.
• 8:12
  Kristi: There's short procedures, there's long procedures, there's wellness, there's lots of psychology, there's lots of helping.
• 8:18
  Kristi: And it really did match Some of my interests in helping people and that mental emotional level because of what patients would come with, you know, whether it was body dysmorphia or, you know, negative self talk or just fear about a procedure, meeting people where they were, like I had that opportunity with every patient.
• 8:36
  Kristi: So that's how I found myself being an OBGYN, even though there wasn't like a seed planted at a young age that that made any sense.
• 8:44
  Kristi: I hope that answers your question.
• 8:45
  Dawn: It does.
• 8:46
  Dawn: And I think that some of the stuff that you touched on, a lot of people will resonate with because not everybody who is a physician is called at a young age.
• 8:58
  Dawn: I definitely was not one who was either.
• 9:01
  Dawn: And I also looked into law, and I think that people who Our high achievers who are very academically oriented, who also have invested family units who want to see them succeed and are of the generation that we're of had parents that said to them You need a job that's going to pay the bills.
• 9:24
  Dawn: You need a job that Has a certain level of challenge.
• 9:28
  Dawn: Or else you're not going to be happy.
• 9:30
  Dawn: And so that's what I'm hearing you got from your dad is a little bit of that.
• 9:35
  Dawn: I can totally see it now, especially with the types of patients that you get and the problems that they bring and the variety in how the psychology really plays into it and why you were drawn to it.
• 9:49
  Dawn: So we've talked a little bit offline about.
• 9:52
  Dawn: how you recognized a mismatch between the lifestyle of an OBGYN and what you really wanted and when did you realize that and how did that look?
• 10:02
  Kristi: You know, to be honest, I'm not sure that there was a discreet moment I realized that because I knew early on when I chose OB GYN that there were going to be some challenges.
• 10:11
  Kristi: I think slowly, like through residency early in my career, I realized there were things about that particular lifestyle, which, and I don't want to generalize, I mean, not every OB GYN has the same lifestyle, right?
• 10:22
  Kristi: I love the work, maybe the practice setting.
• 10:24
  Kristi: I had an eat what you kill practice where we deliver all of our own babies in my first job with these amazing partners.
• 10:29
  Kristi: And it was sort of like, you know, that's kind of silly analogy about like, the frog in the pot where the water slowly heats up the boiling, but you don't notice it.
• 10:37
  Kristi: I think I just didn't really notice that there was, there were things in the way that I, in the practices that I was in, like in terms of those practice paradigms, didn't really allow me to do things like get the sleep I wanted or have the energy I wanted or have like the pace maybe that fit my pace in terms of how many patients I would see.
• 10:55
  Kristi: But over time I realized.
• 10:57
  Kristi: There was something off about this and it was kind of scary to realize.
• 11:01
  Kristi: I remember having some moments when I was really honest with myself early in my first job where I thought I have messed up.
• 11:07
  Kristi: I have completely just picked the wrong things to do with my life.
• 11:11
  Kristi: Like not just OBGYN, but medicine.
• 11:14
  Kristi: I remember really questioning me like, what was I doing?
• 11:16
  Kristi: I remember like I connected with some architects that like, I thought maybe I should have been an architect.
• 11:21
  Kristi: Like, And again, I started thinking about, why did I pick this?
• 11:24
  Kristi: Why am I doing this?
• 11:25
  Kristi: Does this make sense?
• 11:25
  Kristi: Can I make this work in a way that works for me, works for my family?
• 11:29
  Kristi: And I would always come back to, you know, I can make this work.
• 11:32
  Kristi: And I think a lot of that was.
• 11:34
  Kristi: It was very soothing to tell myself I can make this work no matter what I can figure this out because there are enough things I loved about the field that I really wanted to make it work.
• 11:44
  Kristi: But it was very scary and discon sort of disorienting to question is this path leading me to a life that I want when I look back and think, oh gosh, should I have done something different?
• 11:54
  Kristi: I remember being sort of tortured by those questions and not really knowing how to process them all.
• 11:59
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 11:59
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 12:00
  Dawn: Yeah, I definitely resonate with what you're talking about going to some random field and thinking maybe I want to do this because I did that and I talk about it in the book with just wishing that I was working in a gear shop or working at a coffee shop or something like that and wondering why I didn't just go down some different path and, feeling like maybe you chose the wrong specialty or maybe you just chose even completely the wrong profession.
• 12:29
  Dawn: And I think it's very natural to have those feelings.
• 12:33
  Dawn: One thing I want to talk about if you're amenable is how your health played into the realization that you wanted something different and that you wanted to lean out of the traditional OBGYN lifestyle.
• 12:48
  Kristi: Absolutely.
• 12:49
  Kristi: I feel like most of us who are in clinical medicine in whatever capacity that we're in it, have a really, a heightened sense of appreciating how finite the quality and quantity of our life is.
• 13:01
  Kristi: We see patients who get sick out of the blue.
• 13:03
  Kristi: We see people die.
• 13:04
  Kristi: That's just almost part of our day to day life in clinical medicine is seeing challenges that people did not expect and seeing how jarring those are.
• 13:13
  Kristi: And so we know that for other people.
• 13:17
  Kristi: And I think I intellectually knew that for myself, like you just never know.
• 13:22
  Kristi: Um, my dad had a, you know, sort of like the athlete's cardiomyopathy and ended up ultimately getting a heart transplant.
• 13:30
  Kristi: And it was one of the things you can never look at this, Then athletic man who didn't fit the sort of stereotype in my head of cardiovascular disease and think, Oh, this guy in about 20 years is going to have heart transplant.
• 13:42
  Kristi: So I even had personal experience seeing people really close to me having health issues.
• 13:47
  Kristi: But I don't think I quite absorbed it for myself until I ran into my own health issues.
• 13:53
  Kristi: So I also had syncopal event.
• 13:56
  Kristi: Mine was very different than my dad's, but we have this, we carry this familial genetic.
• 14:01
  Kristi: Thing.
• 14:01
  Kristi: And I have this sort of more rare hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is an apical manifestation.
• 14:09
  Kristi: And so I had the syncopal event after we'd just gotten home from camping.
• 14:14
  Kristi: So we were out camping, had come home and I passed out in our kitchen and, you know, ended up going to the hospital and getting the full workup and being like told, Hey, you can't do surgery tomorrow morning.
• 14:24
  Kristi: You can't leave until you have, you know, An ICD.
• 14:28
  Kristi: Um, so going through that, I remember just being so grateful.
• 14:34
  Kristi: Like my whole family were, um, like, wow, so glad that this didn't happen when we were out camping.
• 14:40
  Kristi: And I remember I got my defibrillator, went back to work.
• 14:42
  Kristi: Um, sort of just life went on as usual.
• 14:44
  Kristi: And I honestly didn't give it too much thought.
• 14:46
  Kristi: I just thought, you know what, well, this is kind of what I've got.
• 14:50
  Kristi: And then on the heels of that, I had a diagnosis of DCIS, um, and ultimately went and had mastectomy, you know, didn't have to do any chemotherapy or radiation or anything like that, but just had a double mastectomy and reconstruction and having those things sort of happen, in close succession really did make it more clear to me.
• 15:09
  Kristi: Those very things that I said that we see in our patients that, you know, our quality and quantity of life is not guaranteed.
• 15:14
  Kristi: It could change tomorrow.
• 15:16
  Kristi: And so I, it didn't really at the time, like when I look back, those things didn't really change how I practice, they didn't change what I did, but I think they were very much in the back of my mind as I was discovering, coaching.
• 15:30
  Kristi: I remember.
• 15:31
  Kristi: Having in the back of my mind, wow, if life is short and I have something that I really, really, really love to do that, like gets me out of the bed in the morning and at like four in the morning, I love to learn and read and do all these things just because it feels good.
• 15:47
  Kristi: Why would I want to spend time doing things that are not going to be in service of that?
• 15:54
  Kristi: And I think that was just, it wasn't an explicit question, but it very much was guiding a lot of my thoughts as I was considering doing something radically different than I ever imagined I would do with shifting my clinical practice.
• 16:08
  Dawn: Yeah, so talk to me about that transition
• 16:13
  Kristi: The clinical practice I joined here in central Oregon is, I mean, I can't say enough good things about it.
• 16:18
  Kristi: It's just like a good, group of people, like people that I genuinely liked.
• 16:22
  Kristi: I liked working with, I had so much trust with them, meaning leaving my patients in their care.
• 16:28
  Kristi: I felt amazing.
• 16:29
  Kristi: It was really good.
• 16:30
  Kristi: And that actually made it extremely difficult to make this transition because I wasn't thinking, God, these people are awful.
• 16:37
  Kristi: This is a toxic workplace.
• 16:39
  Kristi: I need to get out of here.
• 16:41
  Kristi: It was, I had more thoughts like, yeah, this is a challenging field.
• 16:45
  Kristi: We're all in this together.
• 16:46
  Kristi: There are some challenging lifestyle aspects.
• 16:49
  Kristi: And even though that's the case, basically, if I hadn't found something, I liked more, I would still be doing that.
• 16:58
  Kristi: So when I found this thing and I say liked more, like, I think it's like differently, My love for coaching and the craft of coaching is very different.
• 17:09
  Kristi: There's an overlap there, but it is quite different than clinical medicine and there's something about it.
• 17:14
  Kristi: That was just different enough and I missed it when I wasn't doing it.
• 17:18
  Kristi: So all that to say when I was thinking about making this transition.
• 17:22
  Kristi: I mean, the timing was awful.
• 17:25
  Kristi: We had just, we'd had an emergency COVID meeting for our practice, right?
• 17:29
  Kristi: When things were, we were realizing, okay, we need some like really massive changes to our approach and our protocols for office.
• 17:36
  Kristi: And it was right around that time leading up to this meeting that my husband and I were having, you know, repetitively for, many months, these deep conversations about, okay, what do we want in life?
• 17:47
  Kristi: How do we want our life to look?
• 17:49
  Kristi: And What I was experiencing at that time was a lot of working more than I wanted to work in terms of the hours, not the work itself.
• 17:57
  Kristi: And I just hadn't figured out a way to make the lifestyle match what I wanted.
• 18:04
  Kristi: And I knew I loved coaching.
• 18:07
  Kristi: And I had the sense that I could make it work.
• 18:10
  Kristi: There was something else that I wanted that was very different than what our life was right then.
• 18:16
  Kristi: And it had the sense of like, collectively, we're going to figure this out.
• 18:21
  Kristi: And so I think that sort of just sparked in me this sense of possibility that, okay, I found life coaching.
• 18:29
  Kristi: I realized that I can do it.
• 18:31
  Kristi: So why not give it a shot?
• 18:33
  Kristi: And it was so scary.
• 18:34
  Kristi: I mean, Donna, I mean, I, it was, it was scarier than going into the labor, you know, with my kids where I know anything can happen.
• 18:42
  Kristi: The idea of changing anything with clinical medicine, stepping away, even doing part time, even doing laborious work, the idea of, you know, possibly stepping away and wishing I hadn't and then trying to figure out, well, how do I, how do I go back?
• 18:56
  Kristi: It was extremely intimidating.
• 18:59
  Kristi: I just remember being so scared to communicate this to my partners.
• 19:03
  Kristi: Um, and then to actually follow through on it.
• 19:06
  Kristi: And yet, despite that, there was something about it that felt really right.
• 19:11
  Kristi: And really true.
• 19:13
  Dawn: These are such good themes of how to navigate uncertainty.
• 19:18
  Dawn: I hear open communication with your husband and really having a attitude of we are going to figure this out.
• 19:27
  Dawn: We are going to work this out.
• 19:28
  Dawn: It is going to be okay.
• 19:30
  Dawn: And then also just going full force with the hard thing of talking to the partners, telling them what you need to tell them, even though you know that it's a really hard, it's going to be a really crappy conversation,
• 19:46
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 19:47
  Dawn: but knowing that you have a guiding light and a reason to do it.
• 19:52
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 19:53
  Kristi: I mean, at the time I just remember feeling like This is too important to not do.
• 19:58
  Kristi: And so I'm willing to do it, but you said it perfectly.
• 20:02
  Kristi: I mean, Talking to the stakeholders and having those difficult conversations.
• 20:06
  Kristi: I mean, That the difficulty in my mind was different than the difficulty in reality.
• 20:13
  Kristi: Like it was hard in reality, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.
• 20:15
  Kristi: When I look back on it, but I I can see how that could deter someone from even taking that first step because it is, I mean, that's a big deal.
• 20:26
  Dawn: Did you approach them with the idea that you would transition to laborist work only, or was that already in place?
• 20:38
  Dawn: Mm
• 20:39
  Kristi: No, that was not already in place.
• 20:40
  Kristi: There were a variety of creative iterations and, you know, for many people in my practice, trying to figure out what would work out well for their life, like how much they would work and things like that.
• 20:50
  Kristi: So we already, as a group had what I would say, quite fluid and open conversations about how everybody could get what they needed in terms of have the volume they wanted.
• 20:59
  Kristi: And I feel like that sort of open communication as a group made things a lot easier to talk about.
• 21:07
  Kristi: So that being said, I wasn't able to figure out a way to work significantly less in the particular practice model that we had that would work well for everyone.
• 21:17
  Kristi: So those conversations sort of preceded this bigger conversation of, Hey, PS, and this was, you know, like, so I guess the comic absurdity of this is we, literally just.
• 21:29
  Kristi: We finished up our emergency COVID meeting on, a Saturday and the very end was, and by the way, guys, here's my nine month notice.
• 21:37
  Kristi: Um, all right.
• 21:39
  Kristi: I told him I had to tell them something very difficult that.
• 21:42
  Kristi: It wasn't a reflection of the practice.
• 21:45
  Kristi: It wasn't a reflection of my feelings about them or medicine or anything, but that I had found something else that I wanted to do, and it was too important not to do, and I'm crying during this and feeling very emotional and wanting to also be very clear about here's my notice, this is what I need to do, but I didn't have a plan for doing any clinical work after my nine month notice.
• 22:07
  Kristi: Doing the laborist work is sort of the part time hybrid work that came, you know, later, like after they, probably all discuss things privately.
• 22:14
  Kristi: And then probably a few months later, somebody said, Hey, would you be willing to do some laborist work for us?
• 22:20
  Kristi: Because we had great rapport.
• 22:21
  Kristi: They trusted me.
• 22:22
  Kristi: I trusted them.
• 22:22
  Kristi: And so it was a great thing because we had somebody out on maternity leave and they said, Hey, if you could do some laborist work and then we don't have to find somebody else.
• 22:29
  Kristi: And that was a beautiful match for me.
• 22:31
  Kristi: I thought, you know what, a few shifts a month, this will be perfect to cover things like Cobra, allow me to still do the stuff I love, but just do less of it and have more time for this other thing that I love more.
• 22:42
  Kristi: Um, so that came later.
• 22:44
  Kristi: That wasn't something like, okay, here's my notice.
• 22:46
  Kristi: And by the way, I want to do this.
• 22:48
  Kristi: And it worked out really well for the time that it worked out.
• 22:52
  Dawn: I'm wondering if you remember what the reactions were what kind of things did they say?
• 22:58
  Kristi: You know what, I feel like after the meeting, I think I wrote that stuff down because I feel like it was, I kind of knew that it was important, but at this moment I don't remember what I do remember is somebody saying something like, I know this must've been really hard for you.
• 23:14
  Kristi: Thank you for telling us this, you know, we've got lots to talk about, we'll figure this out together.
• 23:18
  Kristi: So I remember leaving there feeling solid.
• 23:22
  Kristi: And at the same time, I left there feeling like, okay, I did a really good job, excuse me, I did a really good job communicating what I wanted to communicate in the way I wanted to communicate it, even though it was really hard.
• 23:32
  Kristi: So I had a sense that like I had to use a lot of courage to do that.
• 23:36
  Kristi: And it worked out okay.
• 23:37
  Kristi: Like I had like little notes for myself in case I froze and couldn't speak and couldn't find like bad word finding difficulty because of the panic of speaking.
• 23:46
  Kristi: Um, and I felt really proud of myself for getting through that.
• 23:50
  Kristi: But at the same time, like I got to my car, I'm pretty sure I texted my husband.
• 23:55
  Kristi: I was like, Oh my God, I did it.
• 23:56
  Kristi: And I'm still alive and I think I can drive home and going straight to all these like imagining sort of like getting kicked out of the club like the rest of the group is now.
• 24:08
  Kristi: A cohesive whole.
• 24:10
  Kristi: And I am the outsider and they probably hate me and they're probably going to be talking about me and they're probably going to be like looking sideways at each other.
• 24:17
  Kristi: And I'm the bad one and I'm no longer in the group.
• 24:20
  Kristi: I remember feeling very vulnerable thinking that, and there were no external me.
• 24:25
  Kristi: Um, nobody was bullying.
• 24:26
  Kristi: They were, I mean, they're just a great group of people.
• 24:28
  Kristi: Nobody did any of these things, but in my mind I had, Hey, I just, I felt like I had outed myself.
• 24:35
  Kristi: And I had nine months in which to possibly suffer through feeling like the outsider, despite the fact that like they did nothing, they were nothing but supportive.
• 24:43
  Kristi: But I remember feeling that way and having to really be mindful of not going down the rabbit hole of, you know, just feeling, sort of ostracized or rejected, even though I was the one who was saying I was making a change.
• 24:56
  Dawn: Yeah.
• 24:56
  Dawn: Well, so what did you do to get out of that mindset?
• 24:59
  Dawn: Any particular exercises or tips?
• 25:02
  Kristi: So first off, I didn't notice that I was doing it.
• 25:05
  Kristi: I was just doing it.
• 25:06
  Kristi: So I didn't have the awareness of like, Oh, I'm doing this.
• 25:08
  Kristi: And I, the first thing I do when I'm like feeling sort of like flooded with something like that is I usually reach out to people who I think can relate.
• 25:16
  Kristi: Texting friends who are physicians who've either had big transitions in their life or were, you know, still in medicine, but they, I knew they got it or friend who had transitioned out of medicine and sort of just saying, okay, this is what's going on with me.
• 25:28
  Kristi: And the most helpful thing was just having trusted resources.
• 25:31
  Kristi: Tell me this is totally normal.
• 25:34
  Kristi: Of course it makes sense.
• 25:35
  Kristi: And of course your partners are going to be talking about things.
• 25:39
  Kristi: They, they, they have things to figure out.
• 25:41
  Kristi: They are going to be doing these things that you're thinking, but it doesn't mean anything bad.
• 25:45
  Kristi: It's normal.
• 25:46
  Kristi: It's okay.
• 25:46
  Kristi: It's fine.
• 25:47
  Kristi: And so that was the first step.
• 25:49
  Kristi: And then after that, I, it wasn't perfect.
• 25:52
  Kristi: It was probably like, I don't know, 75% of the time I would just feel, you know, awful and 25% of the time I would catch myself feeling awful and I go, Oh, I'm feeling like people are talking about me.
• 26:04
  Kristi: That feels this way.
• 26:06
  Kristi: I'm feeling this way because I'm thinking this way.
• 26:07
  Kristi: And I just did a lot of the things that we do with coaching, where I just brought in awareness, broadened self compassion and just try to meet myself where I was with.
• 26:16
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 26:17
  Kristi: Of course, this is uncomfortable for you.
• 26:18
  Kristi: Of course, this is particularly uncomfortable for you because it's kind of reminds you of being in middle school.
• 26:23
  Kristi: Okay.
• 26:24
  Kristi: This is what's going on right now and grounding myself and then just bringing myself back to, okay, so how do I want to think about this on purpose?
• 26:30
  Kristi: What's going to be a useful neutral ground to kind of get through the day.
• 26:34
  Kristi: And it was a lot of doing that.
• 26:35
  Kristi: I mean, I don't know how many times a day I would be doing that, but sometimes it was more than others, but it was a lot of like constantly noticing and deciding what I wanted to think, noticing, meeting myself where I was.
• 26:46
  Dawn: This is a perfect example of how even people who know about coaching who've been trained in coaching, still need coaching themselves, and need to remember the tenants, and it's a constant practice.
• 26:59
  Dawn: So thank you for sharing that with us
• 27:02
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 27:02
  Kristi: I think, I mean, for anybody listening, like if you ever run into somebody who seems like they've got it totally figured out, it's not true.
• 27:09
  Kristi: I find that It's so useful.
• 27:12
  Kristi: I mean, I, all of these tools that you and I use and know they're amazing.
• 27:17
  Kristi: And if I didn't have them to fall back on, my experience would have been like so much more difficult.
• 27:21
  Kristi: And even having them though, it's exactly, as you said, it's a, it is a life practice on a day to day basis.
• 27:28
  Kristi: And it is something that it's like, it's a remembering like where we're constantly going, Oh, okay.
• 27:36
  Kristi: That thing that I intellectually know to be true.
• 27:38
  Kristi: Okay.
• 27:38
  Kristi: That's what's going on here.
• 27:40
  Kristi: Okay.
• 27:40
  Kristi: Let me actually execute and implement that tool in this setting.
• 27:45
  Kristi: When we practice these things ourselves, it's not that we get to this place where we're constantly in a state of bliss and serenity.
• 27:52
  Kristi: It's that we recognize things more quickly and we can meet ourselves where we are with kindness.
• 28:00
  Kristi: In a way that's maybe a slightly faster than we would have done like last year.
• 28:05
  Dawn: Yes, I've definitely experienced that as well.
• 28:09
  Dawn: You're totally spot on there.
• 28:11
  Dawn: So let's talk a little bit about what your current work life balance looks like.
• 28:16
  Dawn: What is a typical day for you now?
• 28:19
  Kristi: So the cool thing about what I do now is that there's total time agency in terms of, I make my own schedule and.
• 28:27
  Kristi: I never felt a sense of like, I'm in charge of my own schedule until I, basically until I was doing a hybrid, like when I was doing labor shifts and I was picking my own schedule for coaching.
• 28:38
  Kristi: Um, that was very new to me.
• 28:40
  Kristi: And it is something that I am like, I'm still figuring out, like as a family, we're still figuring out when does it work best for me to work?
• 28:49
  Kristi: And does it work best for me to work really early and have my husband do drop off for the kids?
• 28:54
  Kristi: And then I do pick up or vice versa, or does it work best for me to batch some days?
• 29:00
  Kristi: My husband and I are very much the mindset of let's try this out for a few months, see how this works.
• 29:06
  Kristi: And then let's assess what works, what didn't, what should we adjust going forward?
• 29:10
  Kristi: Um, and what I do now is I love getting up very early in the mornings before anybody else is out.
• 29:16
  Kristi: So I get up really early.
• 29:18
  Kristi: I get some coffee.
• 29:19
  Kristi: I usually do some either administrative work, like answering emails, going on to Slack, coaching people there, or I just spend some time for me, just whether it's reading or stretching or something.
• 29:32
  Kristi: And then more days than not, I have coaching calls, which my coaching calls are all by zoom that are with my private clients.
• 29:40
  Kristi: I have those different times through the day.
• 29:43
  Kristi: And a mix of group coaching calls for either my group or contract coaching.
• 29:47
  Kristi: I do for other people's groups.
• 29:49
  Kristi: And those are, you know, they're in my home little office.
• 29:51
  Kristi: What I do with.
• 29:54
  Kristi: Sort of working with my husband with childcare and like us having time as a family is we kind of look at things like three to six months at a time and go, okay, when during these weeks, do we want to block off time to go do something where we're going to be off grid and not be able to have reliable access to internet?
• 30:11
  Kristi: Or when do we want to block our time and have a couple of days where I work when we're out of town and how are we going to do pickup and who's going to drop the kids off at soccer?
• 30:19
  Kristi: We kind of work on those things in advance.
• 30:21
  Kristi: And then I build back in a Working with clients or working on the podcast or things like that meets sort of like my circadian rhythms, what works well for me and what works well for my family.
• 30:33
  Kristi: It's a lot of experimentation and finding what doesn't work, what I thought would work and then figuring out like what works and what works better.
• 30:41
  Dawn: I love that you pointed out the idea of experimentation, because I think that a lot of people that want to lean out are a little bit afraid of the amorphous schedule and not having to be somewhere at a certain time, it is a completely different mindset when you go to work that way and you get full agency of your schedule, like you said, but at the same time, it opens up some areas of overwhelm that.
• 31:09
  Dawn: Can deter people.
• 31:10
  Dawn: And so, this is a great way of dealing with it.
• 31:13
  Dawn: Checking in, building in the non negotiable time of being off grid, being out camping.
• 31:19
  Dawn: I know you guys like to do some outdoor things.
• 31:22
  Dawn: What kind of, me time activities do you focus on?
• 31:27
  Kristi: I'm glad you asked that.
• 31:28
  Kristi: One of the things that I think just being really transparent about this is really key for, just bringing everything out of the shadows, even though there's a bunch of experimentation and things are evolving and I feel so happy with how we are approaching things.
• 31:43
  Kristi: There are periods where there's like lots of overwhelm and there are periods where the uncertainty is something that I have to be very proactive about handling.
• 31:54
  Kristi: And sometimes I've recreated for myself.
• 31:58
  Kristi: The same pressure cooker experience that I created when I was in clinical medicine with sort of overextending or maybe, underestimating how long something would take and overestimating how much I could get done in a short period of time and finding myself through the week being overwhelmed and tense, even though like from the outside, somebody would look and say, Oh, you create your own schedule.
• 32:17
  Kristi: Sounds so amazing and liberating and awesome.
• 32:21
  Kristi: I will be in that self created schedule.
• 32:25
  Kristi: Feeling super behind, super overwhelmed.
• 32:27
  Kristi: And I mentioned that right now, based on this question, because noting that tendency myself, what has been absolutely critical for me to sort of like navigate that tendency that I have is to have me time things that I like to do for myself, I used to like to really, I used to do a lot of hiking, a lot of like, you know, hiking bigger mountains.
• 32:50
  Kristi: I don't do that so much now just because the time commitment, but I've discovered that I really like walking.
• 32:53
  Kristi: So just, I will leave and I will go for a short little walks or long walks in our neighborhood.
• 32:58
  Kristi: We have a little bit, it seems to me a very walkable place.
• 33:01
  Kristi: Also mountain biking is my sport of choice.
• 33:04
  Kristi: I used to do a lot more of it than I do now in terms of, you know, sort of like local racing and focusing on the training and really getting into that.
• 33:12
  Kristi: And the time commitment.
• 33:14
  Kristi: It hasn't been a match for having kids and my old job and my current job, but it's coming back in.
• 33:21
  Kristi: So mountain biking has been something that really recently I've been focusing on building that time and just for me, my husband's much better back than I am.
• 33:31
  Kristi: So he also does that.
• 33:35
  Kristi: And so my me time consists of those types of activities, walking, yoga, mountain biking, as well as my early morning time.
• 33:43
  Kristi: So my early morning time, when I get up and it's dark and nobody's awake, except our cats and I have a cup of coffee and I can just reflect, read, do whatever I would like to do.
• 33:54
  Kristi: Those things are absolutely essential for me.
• 33:55
  Kristi: I'm an introvert.
• 33:57
  Kristi: I really do like time on my own.
• 33:58
  Kristi: So when I go travel to either go speak or go to an event or go to a retreat, I love my time on the airplane.
• 34:05
  Kristi: I see that as my me time.
• 34:07
  Kristi: And I very much recognize that if I do not have that time for myself, I I'm not good for me.
• 34:15
  Kristi: I'm not good for anyone else.
• 34:16
  Kristi: And I mean, as a side note here, I feel really grateful that I have a partner who recognizes this in me.
• 34:21
  Kristi: Like my husband will say, I feel like you're trying to push too much, but too much and too little, like Or I will come out and I will just like while I'm making a cup of coffee or cup of tea, I'll just be like, well, I can like empty the dishwasher like while I'm, waiting for the water to heat up.
• 34:36
  Kristi: My husband will be like, I think you're squishing stuff in where you could just stand here he's like you could just like.
• 34:43
  Kristi: Look at your phone, you could read, you could stretch, you could do something that's not like a task.
• 34:47
  Kristi: Um, and it takes me a while to realize, Oh, I'm kind of doing that thing where I'm squishing a lot into a little, and it's nice to have a partner who can see it better than I can and can say, Hey, I noticed this.
• 34:57
  Kristi: And also I have a partner that does very similarly, like very much feels like his role in our family needs to, he needs to do more, he needs to be more, he needs to contribute more.
• 35:09
  Kristi: And so being able to see his struggle with that.
• 35:13
  Kristi: Is very useful for me so that I can recognize, okay, we both.
• 35:18
  Kristi: And when we don't get our own me time, we sometimes fall into our old patterns.
• 35:23
  Kristi: And when I can see it in him and I can encourage him, like, please go ride, please go take some time for you.
• 35:28
  Kristi: Yes, we have a lot of things we got to do, but it's all going to figure it out.
• 35:31
  Kristi: Please go do this.
• 35:32
  Kristi: And he can say, and you too, like, please do it for you too.
• 35:35
  Kristi: It's super useful because sometimes I forget, I will just forget.
• 35:39
  Kristi: I will look and be like, how did I forget to take care of me this month?
• 35:43
  Kristi: And having somebody kind of be there as my reminder is, has been tremendously useful for me.
• 35:48
  Dawn: It's wonderful.
• 35:49
  Dawn: I love that you have that kind of a relationship, and I definitely identify with the trying to cram multiple things into a small time space.
• 35:57
  Dawn: I do that as well.
• 35:59
  Kristi: Sometimes it's fine.
• 36:00
  Kristi: Right?
• 36:02
  Dawn: yeah, I mean, it works out and then it goads you into doing it more, and then sometimes it blows up in your face.
• 36:09
  Dawn: So.
• 36:11
  Dawn: This has been just a wonderful conversation, and I wonder if you have any sort of advice to others who are navigating a change in their work life balance, who are wanting to lean out and do something different that's unexpected.
• 36:26
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 36:27
  Kristi: Whenever it comes to giving advice, I always want to preface it with, advice that resonates.
• 36:32
  Kristi: Um, with one person will fall flat with another.
• 36:34
  Kristi: And so the advice that I would share is basically the advice that would have landed with me and my system.
• 36:41
  Kristi: As a younger person, you know, it's kind of hinges on the idea of like what I wish I knew what I wish I could have believed back then.
• 36:47
  Kristi: Right.
• 36:48
  Kristi: If there's a change that you want to make, whatever that might be, like, even if you just have a notion or an inkling, there's something that I want to be different than what it is now.
• 36:58
  Kristi: It's 100% possible to make a change, even if the barriers seem insurmountable.
• 37:05
  Kristi: If you're thinking about entrepreneurship and you think about the ebb and flow of income or the unpredictability or the uncertainty or the change in your identity and the role change that you might be facing in terms of who you are, um, being full time clinician versus being part time or, or being a full time clinician in academia versus being in private practice.
• 37:24
  Kristi: When you think about those things and you notice that that seems really scary, that's okay.
• 37:29
  Kristi: You can both make space for feeling nervous and scared and intimidated and worried.
• 37:35
  Kristi: And you can honor the desire to make a change and recognize that that change is really important.
• 37:42
  Kristi: I tend to think that if we have a desire for some change, that's there for a reason.
• 37:49
  Kristi: Many of us who, like when I was in clinical practice and I wasn't feeling like I needed to make any changes and things were going well, that didn't occur to me.
• 37:57
  Kristi: I wasn't thinking, gosh, I would like something different.
• 37:59
  Kristi: So when you are thinking you would like something different, that's an important message.
• 38:04
  Kristi: And it's okay if it seems hard, that would be my other piece of advice.
• 38:07
  Kristi: It's okay if it seems hard, but that's not a stop sign to keep looking in for what you want to do and being resourceful figuring out how to make it happen.
• 38:19
  Kristi: Learning that you can trust sort of like that inner compass.
• 38:23
  Kristi: And even if that inner compass is telling you to like go towards something that seems scary, or that might be something that you're, you know, your parents or your friends that think sounds crazy.
• 38:33
  Kristi: It's okay to trust that.
• 38:34
  Kristi: And I think learning a growth mindset goes hand in hand with that, because I for sure did not have a growth mindset, but learning how to cultivate that, I think is really critical.
• 38:44
  Kristi: So that would be, if I had to give advice, those would be like the.
• 38:47
  Kristi: The long elevator ride, pitch advice that I would pass along.
• 38:52
  Dawn: I love it.
• 38:52
  Dawn: Thank you.
• 38:53
  Dawn: And tell me the best place to contact you.
• 38:57
  Dawn: We'll have links in the description show notes, but, what is the best place to get ahold of you?
• 39:04
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 39:04
  Kristi: So I keep everything simple.
• 39:06
  Kristi: Everything's called habits on purpose.
• 39:07
  Kristi: So habits on purpose.
• 39:09
  Kristi: com is my website.
• 39:11
  Kristi: And then my podcast is habits on purpose.
• 39:12
  Kristi: And you can find me on Facebook just at Christy Angivine.
• 39:16
  Kristi: And I think my Instagram handle is, at Christy dot Angivine, but everything on Facebook is habits on purpose.
• 39:22
  Dawn: Great.
• 39:22
  Dawn: Thank you so much.
• 39:24
  Dawn: I really appreciate our conversation today.
• 39:27
  Kristi: Yeah.
• 39:27
  Kristi: Thank you for having me.
• 39:28
  Kristi: It's an honor to talk with you because you have such a depth to what you bring to the conversations and the interviews that you have here that I know it's just so important for your listeners to hear.
• 39:39
  Kristi: So thank you for inviting me.
• 39:47
  Christie is such an amazing speaker.
• 39:48
  I love to talking with her and I love her podcast habits on purpose.
• 39:53
  Please go check it out after you're done listening to this.
• 39:56
  Here are my takeaways from our conversation.
• 39:59
  Number one.
• 40:01
  Sometimes your lean out won't look like this dramatic bucking of the system or toxic workplace.
• 40:07
  Sometimes it's going to be more subtle than that.
• 40:09
  Maybe.
• 40:10
  It's just about a calling, a feeling that you're meant to be doing something different than what you're doing.
• 40:17
  This can feel just as scary and maybe not even as legit as the former kind of leaning out.
• 40:23
  But it really doesn't matter.
• 40:24
  Your truth is your truth.
• 40:27
  Number two.
• 40:29
  It can feel like the biggest deal of your life to either announce your departure at work or to make the big ask in a meeting.
• 40:37
  For a different arrangement at your workplace.
• 40:40
  But later you will not remember the details Christie described That really well And i know that i've had that experience also You'll go through all the emotions fear vulnerability Wondering what People are saying About you and.
• 40:55
  and then later On it will all feel completely insignificant Number three Self-awareness is a constant practice for.
• 41:05
  For all of us, even Christie, who's a full-time life coach with.
• 41:09
  Extensive training and experience still needs to bring awareness to her unproductive thought processes.
• 41:16
  And self-sabotaging practices and sometime.
• 41:19
  Times someone else like her husband needs to bring.
• 41:23
  bring.
• 41:23
  the awareness to her You will never master self-awareness and that is okay don't expect to just keep doing it And as christie says remember to listen to that inner compass my question to you is what is it telling you about your direction right now Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast.
• 41:47
  If you like what you hear, please leave a review for this podcast on iTunes or Spotify.
• 41:52
  So other people needing this kind of community and inspiration can find it easier.
• 41:58
  Also, you can support this podcast and learn more about the ideas presented by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance.
• 42:10
  Lastly, if you want more information about working with me.
• 42:13
  Please visit my website@wwwdotpracticebalance.com.