Latest / The Hidden Load: For the educators and leaders in medicine who hold everyone up. / The Humility Trap: Owning Your Strengths Without Apology
Transcript
- Santina Wheat: Welcome to the hidden load for the educators and leaders in medicine who hold everyone up. We will tackle the hard topics and help you conquer your chaos and get to calm all by starting to acknowledge and remove that hidden load. This podcast is a space for us to name the things that are common, but not normal. Each week, we'll look at the invisible weight you're carrying and explore practical coaching-based tools to help you find more calm, better boundaries, and a sense of purpose that doesn't require you to run on empty. I'm so glad that you've carved time out for yourself today. Let's get into the episode. Welcome back to The Hidden Load. I am your host, Dr. Santina or Tina Wheat. I want to start today by calling out a scene that plays out in hospital hallways, academic faculty lounges, and residency precepting rooms every single day. And maybe has happened to you. Someone walks up to you after a complex clinical save, a beautifully delivered lecture. Or a high-stakes committee presentation. They look you dead in the eye and say, Tina, you were phenomenal in that meeting. The way you broke down that conflict and guided the group to consensus was pure genius. Or whatever it is you just did. And what is our automatic gut level reflex? Almost every high achieving physician or academic leader. that I have interacted with does the exact same thing. We shrink back, we wave our hands, we look down at our shoes and say, it was nothing, I just got lucky. It were it was no big deal. Honestly, the team did all the heavy lifting. I just happened to read an article about that last night. Anyone could have done it. We deflect the compliment in a million and one different ways, like it is an incoming clinical hazard. To be honest, I just recently did that when I received feedback at a meeting that I presented at. Why do we do that? Why is it that professionals who have spent 12, 15, or even 20 or 30 years honing an elite specialized craft? Struggled so profoundly to simply look someone in the eye and say, Thank you. I worked hard on that. And I am proud of how it went. Why do we do this? It happens because early in our education, we were handed a toxic false binary. We were taught that there are only two ways to hold our accomplishments. Either You are humble, which supposedly means that you perpetually downplay your gifts, minimize your intellect, and attribute your success to pure luck or endurance. Or the other end, you are arrogant, which means you think you are better than everyone else, you are impossible to work with, and you suck all of the oxygen out of the room. Because high achieving empathetic clinicians are terrified of ever being perceived as arrogant, narcissistic, or full of themselves, we run as far as we can in the opposite direction. We dive headfirst into what I will call the humility trap. It starts with the fear of being seen as boastful. That leads to Chronic self-minimization, brushing off every win with it was just luck. And that cycle directly feeds imposter syndrome and professional invisibility. This leaves your truest strengths completely unleveraged. We confuse humility with invisibility. We confuse being grounded with making ourselves small. And in doing so, we create a massive hidden load, the exhausting cognitive friction of constantly pretending that we aren't good at the very things that we excel at. Let's dismantle this myth right now and with some precision. What does real humility actually mean? C.S. Lewis famously wrote that humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less. In modern psychological science and executive coaching, many take that even a step further. True humility is simply accurate self assessment. How does that sound? Think of it as a spectrum. On one extreme, you have arrogance. Arrogance overinflates capability and claims superiority where none exists. On the opposite extreme, you have false modesty. False modesty artificially depresses capability, pretending that you are not that competent. Neither of those is wonderful. But sitting right in the healthy center is true humility. True humility is radical diagnostic accuracy. It means that you clearly know. Both your strengths and your limitations. And if I'm going to be honest, in my many years as an educator, it has always been hard for people to clearly know both their strengths and their limitations. But let's look at how those compare. Arrogance is a distortion of reality. It claims expertise where none exists. False modesty is also a distortion of reality. It denies expertise where it clearly exists. Both of them are actually forms of self-obsession. When you are performing false modesty, you are still fixated on yourself and how others are perceiving your humility. But true humility, it is diagnostic objectivity. If you run a cardiac code with exceptional composure, clear communication, and precise clinical execution stating, I am skilled at managing high stress resuscitations, is not arrogance. It is a statement of factual data. Think about this from a clinical perspective. If a patient comes into your clinic with an A1C of 6.2, you do not write down 11.5 to be polite. You do not write down 5.0 to make them look good. You write down 6.2 because that is the accurate objective measurement. Why do we refuse to apply the same clinical objectivity to our own strengths? When you diminish your strengths, you aren't protecting your soul from pride. You are depriving your institution, your clinic, your trainees, and your team of the full impact of what you bring to the table. Here is why this matters so deeply for physician well-being and professional longevity. When you refuse to identify and own your specific strengths, you end up doing everyone else's work. In academic medicine and healthcare systems, if you don't clearly declare what you are uniquely gifted at, the system will gladly assign you whatever work is left over. You become an institutional generalist by default. You might get put on committees that drain your soul because you never spoke up to say, I'm really interested in doing this, or my real strength is faculty development, not policy auditing. Or maybe you're like me and like the policies and don't raise your hand for those. You take on administrative tasks that take you five hours, tasks that someone else on your team could execute in 20 minutes, because you were too polite to say. Spreadsheets and operational logistics are outside of my zone of comfort and genius. And here is the cognitive drain associated with it. Refusing to own your strengths forces you to absorb misaligned tasks day after day, which leads straight to cognitive exhaustion. But when you flip that script, owning your own strengths to targeted contribution. Owning your strengths leads to targeted contribution, high efficiency impact, and genuine professional joy. When you operate in your zone of weakness or neutrality, 80% of the day because you were too polite to claim your lane, you accelerate your own burnout. And I don't want that for anyone. Working hard within your innate strengths, what research call your signature strengths, actually generates cognitive energy. It restores your sense of agency. But you can never spend your days operating inside those strengths if you are culturally conditioned to pretend like you don't have any. Now let's look at this through the lens of medical education and team leadership. What are we currently teaching our residents, fellows, students about their strengths? Every year during milestone reviews or annual evaluations, we sit down with our trainees, we pull up a dashboard of competencies, and we spend 90% of the evaluation talking about their deficits, the procedures that they haven't logged, the test scores that are marginal. The chart notes that will relate. And then when we finally get to the section on their unique talents, maybe they have an extraordinary gift for de-escalating angry patients, or they have an intuitive grasp of clinical pathophysiology. What do we do? Often we give it a quick 30-second nod. You're doing great with communication. Keep it up. We are unintentionally teaching our learners that their flaws require obsessive scrutiny, why their brilliance should be acknowledged with a muted whisper. I believe, as educators and leaders, that we must break this cycle. Consider the difference in approach. Traditional deficit-only mentorship basically tells a learner fix these many weaknesses so that you can be an acceptable average generalist. Whereas strength makes Stewart Strength based stewardship, excuse me, takes a completely different posture. Whereas strength-based stewardship takes a completely different posture. Here is your unique clinical superpower. How are we going to build your career around leveraging this for our patients and for our departments? When you see a junior faculty member or a resident demonstrate a distinct high-level capability, do not let them brush it off. When they say, I just got lucky with that family meeting, I want you to stop the conversation right there. Look them in the eye and say, No, that was not luck. You held space for that family with exceptional emotional intelligence. You synthesized complex prognosis data into plain language, and you guided them through a devastating decision with absolute dignity. That right there is a rare clinical gift. I want you to name that strength. I want you to own it and recognize that it is a core part of your value to this team. When you do that, you don't create an arrogant monster. Instead, you build a grounded, self-aware clinician. who understands their utility to the world. And there are many examples of this for all of the different teammates that you have. Humility does not mean hiding your light under a bushel. It means realizing that the light you carry isn't meant to elevate your ego. It is meant to illuminate the room for everyone else. So, how do we walk this line in our daily lives? How do we find and own our own strengths while staying humble? Well, I want you to try a simple three-part alignment filter. Own the data, drop the drama. Acknowledge your strengths with factual, calm objectivity. If you are an exceptional teacher, an incredible diagnostician, or a brilliant systems organizer, state it as a fact. without puffery and without apology. View strengths as stewardship, not status. Your strengths do not make your strengths do not make your superior to the person next to you. They simply define where your responsibility lies. You didn't invent your innate talents. You were entrusted with them. Owning them is an act of responsibility. Accept the compliment with grace. The next time a patient, a colleague, or a supervisor compliments your work, banish the phrase it was nothing. Replace it with thank you. I appreciate you noticing. I care a lot about this work. And with that, here is your Monday morning challenge for this week. I want you to identify one professional strength that you possess, but you've been quietly downplaying or apologizing for because you didn't want to seem arrogant. Write it down on a piece of paper, look at it, and own it. And then identify one area this week where you can lean into that strength unapologetically. Whether that's volunteering to lead a project you know you're built for, or declining a misaligned task so that you can focus on where you can truly move the needle. You don't have to play small to stay humble, own your gifts, serve your people, and stop apologizing for the space that you take up. I want to thank you for joining me for this episode of Hidden Load. If this conversation about humility and owning your strength spoke to you today, please share it with a colleague. a mentee or a trainee who might need permission to stop hiding their light. Let's lighten the load together. I am Dr. Santina Wheat, and I will see you next week. Thank you for listening to The Hidden Load. If today's conversation spoke to you, I would love for you to share it with a colleague who might need to hear it too. It's one of the simplest ways we can start shifting the culture of medicine together. And remember, your time spent reflecting here matters. You can earn free CME or CE credits for listening to today's episode through the Pinnacle app. You'll find that link in the show notes. If you are looking for one-on-one coaching support or want to dive deeper into the resources we discussed today, let's connect. You can find information on how to reach me in the show notes. don't forget to hit subscribe so that you never miss an episode ⁓ and leave me a rating so that others can find me too. and take care of yourself because you deserve to be held up too. And I'll see you next time.