Latest / The Hidden Load: For the educators and leaders in medicine who hold everyone up. / Unlearning Independence: The Skill of Asking for Help
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. And today I want to ask you a question that might require you to dig back into some of those childhood memories. And that question is, did you actually ever learn how to ask for help? Now, if I am being completely honest with you, this is something that That I don't think I ever really learned how to do as I was growing up. And I think that's true for so many of us who end up in healthcare, education, and leadership, because things came naturally to us early on. For many of us, school was easy. Learning was intuitive. We picked up concepts quickly. We checked the academic boxes, and we navigated. the early systems of life without a whole lot of major hiccups. Sure, there were absolutely things that I was not particularly good at as a child. And some of those things I was totally okay with not being great at them. And of course, there were things that I got coached on. But none of those things were super high stakes. I could grow with those hobbies or subjects simply because I enjoyed them. And I could stop doing them when I didn't enjoy them. But I didn't have an absolute non-negotiable imperative to succeed. And I find that there's so many of us that follow this interesting high achiever reflex loop. We start with early academic ease, and then we encounter a hard problem because of course you come through hard problems, and you just work harder at it. And that working harder simply becomes a reflex. This means that you're then able to solve that problem alone and then you reinforces the fact that you're able to do this independently. And it teaches you that you don't need to delegate anything and that you don't need support. In fact, I would say that as I grew up and as I moved down the path towards being a physician, that internal work ethic didn't just continue. It really solidified inside of me into an unwritten. When things got tough in college or medical school, my algorithm was simple. I would look it up myself. I would go to a tutor for one specific hyper-focused question or area of the subject. I would put my head down. I would grind longer, maybe pull an all-nighter, and I would figure it out myself. And the commonality for me, as I'm sure it is for so many of you, was the exact same hidden dialogue. Work harder, look it up, you've got this. And because working harder worked, because pushing through always yielded what I needed, whether it was the grade, the test score, the acceptance, or the match result. It insulated me from ever having to develop a fundamental human skill. And that is the ability to raise my hand and ask for help. I never quite figured out how to sit down with someone and say, I am actually not the best suited person to do this thing. Can you help me? I never learned how to delegate. My brain was hardwired to view independence as the ultimate proof of competence. And of course, I know that's not true now, but that was what I told myself. But it wasn't just my work life. Because let me ask you, what happens when that preexisting independent personality trait meets the former culture of medical training? Medicine takes our natural tendency to push through and it codifies it into a professional requirement. We were initially socialized to believe that to be safe, respected, and authoritative, we had to be the smartest person in the room. We were taught that a doctor must appear all-knowing in front of patients, the clinical teams, and especially in front of our learners. Even though we now hear people saying today that it takes courage to say, I don't know, at the bedside or in front of learners, that is honestly a recent cultural shift. For decades, admitting a gap in your knowledge or asking for operational help was treated as a sign of weakness and even poor preparation. And let's be completely honest, this wasn't just about my professional life. It bled straight into my personal life as well. I will never ever forget when my mom had her stroke that ultimately led to her death. I had to work over a long weekend. I worked a 24-hour shift on the Friday, and it was a very busy shift. I had Saturday off to sort of recover. And then on Sunday, I had another 12-hour shift. And as I walked into my house from that shift, I received the call that my mom was on the way to the hospital because of not being responsive. So I got to the hospital and learned that she had a stroke. And as I was at the hospital and hearing that she was finally ready to be moved to the intensive care unit, the sheer physical and emotional weight of the weekend and the day just crashed over me. I called my husband from the hospital hallway. And for the first time probably ever, I said, I can't drive home. I'm not quite sure what to do. Should I leave the car here? Or what should I do? He didn't hesitate for a second. He said, No problem, give me thirty minutes. I'll be right there. Now mind you, we had two very young children at home who were already in bed and could not stay home alone. And what I didn't realize in the moment was that my husband had already predicted that I would potentially need help and had reached out to our neighbors. And he asked them for help. We are very fortunate to have neighbors who live next door to us, who are our friends and who have children that are of similar ages and know our children. And so he asked our neighbor to come over. to sit in our home for about an hour and be able to watch our kids. And we are so lucky that even if one of my kids had woken up and seen him sitting in the living room, it wouldn't have been scary to them at all. But as I reflect back on this situation, what I have shared with my husband is that I would have never thought of doing that. It sounds like something that's so simple. But if I had been in his shoes, my brain would have run through a strict and narrow, pre-calculated list of official backup options. I would have tried to orchestrate a complex logistics plan or push through my own exhaustion before I ever even considered asking someone that wasn't part of my regular backup plan. Because what is my mental algorithm? Well, it's rely on those backup plans that I've already vetted, already thought through, and treat asking for help as a last resort crisis management tool, even of those backup plans, versus the way my husband thought of real relational support, which was accessing immediate organic community connections without hesitation. And treating support as an everyday natural human strategy. As I reflect back on this situation, I have thought, how did I get this far in life? Through medical school, residency, becoming a parent, becoming an attending, and even a leader, without developing that basic human capacity to lean on community? And the answer was simple Medicine trained me to carry everything alone. So how do we unlearn thirty years of work harder? How do we break a thirty plus year habit of self-isolation? Well, in addition to what happened in my home life, I have to say I also had a specific memory in my professional life. It wasn't a shift because I read a self help book. It happened when someone forced my hand. It took a colleague literally taking a task away from my hands and saying, Tina, you need to be working on other things. Let me take this. And then they produced a final product that was light years better than anything I could have ever imagined or built on my own. That was a profound and humbling threshold for me. It forced me to realize that asking for help or delegating a task is not an admission of inadequacy. But that delegation can actually be a multiplier. And it allowed me to learn to rethink the way I was doing things. It's important to remember that when you try to do everything yourself, you aren't actually protecting the team. You are starving the team of the opportunity to bring their own brilliance to the table. If you're listening to this right now and you recognize that your default setting is still work harder, I want you to know that you're not alone. And I also want to give you a concrete tactical two-step framework for how to start asking for help without feeling like a fraud. So step one is to narrow down your question to the exact block. I don't want you to dump vague, overwhelming burdens on other people. When high achievers struggle to ask for help, It's often because they feel like asking for help means saying, I can't take handle this project, just take it all. But that's not what you need to do. Instead, I want you to do the internal audit first. Isolate the exact point where you are stuck. Say, I've built 80% of this operational outline, but I am completely stuck on the clinical scheduling logistics for weekend coverage. Can you spend 15 minutes helping me solve this specific block? When you isolate the block, you make the ask manageable and targeted. And then step two is to tell them why it is that you are asking them. This is the piece that changes the entire energetic dynamic of the conversation. You are not just asking for a favor and you don't want to present it that way. You want to articulate why it is that their specific skill set makes them the right person for the job. You want to say, I'm coming to you with this because you have an incredible eye for a clinical workflow design that I simply don't have. Your perspective on this will make the final project ten times better. When you tell someone why you chose them, you're able to reframe the ask. You're no longer placing a burden on their shoulders. You are recognizing their expertise and inviting them to collaborate. You move from an isolated hero to a connected leader. Now let's be honest. Unlearning decades of I've got this, I just need to push harder absolutely takes practice. And you won't get it right every single time. But recognizing that saying, I need help with this or I don't know actually can build trust with our patients, with our learners, with our teams, and with our families. is one of the most liberating transitions that we can make. So here is your challenge for this week. I want you to look at your workload right now. And that can be at home, at work, A special project that you're doing. And I want you to identify one task that you are currently white knuckling out of habit. Something that you're telling yourself you just need to work harder to finish. And I want you to pick someone on your team or in your department or in your neighborhood. I want you to practice that audit and isolate the specific block. And I want you to tell them why their expertise matters and then ask them for help. Drop the armor. Stop doing the heavy lifting alone. The people around you want to step up. You just have to give them permission to slip into the room. I want to thank you for joining me on this episode of The Hidden Load. If this conversation about unlearning self-reliance spoke to you today, I hope that you'll share it with a colleague or a friend who might be working a little too hard on their own right now. Let's lighten the load together. And if you're listening to this when this comes out, then I just want to honor that it is September and that is Women in Medicine Month. And I hope you will celebrate a wonderful woman in medicine in your life and maybe share this podcast with them. I'm 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.