by Ken Jones

Often, healthcare professionals I coach feel a need for change in their lives, but they’re not exactly sure the direction of that change, the shape of the change or the timing of the change. Many of our CMDA members have discovered that coaching can be a useful tool in helping to define and clarify effective change in their personal and professional lives.

One exercise I sometimes use to help focus on change is to ask them to imagine they are sitting in a room and they’ve determined they don’t like the chair they are sitting in. They want to change chairs, but they haven’t decided which chair they want to move to.

Here are some questions I might pose, as a coach, to help a healthcare professional clarify and move forward in “changing chairs” in their lives:

• What’s the problem with the chair you’re sitting in? Is it location? Comfort level of the chair? What’s really motivating you to move or change chairs? What do you like about your current chair that you need to incorporate into any new chair?
• If you were designing your own, personal chair, one that fits you and your life perfectly, what would it look like? What new chairs do you see that are available, when you look at the “room” of your life? What’s God saying to you these days about the chair you’re sitting in? What’s He saying about that chair He might like you to move to?

What obstacles and challenges are in the way of your moving from the chair you’re in to some chair you might want to occupy? How might you get to the chair you’d like to move to? (Will you walk around the edge of the room, crawl under the tables or jump across the tops of the tables? What journey will be most reasonable for you, as you change chairs, and what’s a time frame for that kind of movement?) Do you need to change chairs, or do you need to change rooms?
Healthcare professionals in every specialty are facing inordinate pressures today, with a constant and rapidly changing landscape in healthcare. CMDA is excited to provide excellent Christian coaching that is specifically tailored to the needs of physicians, dentists and other healthcare professionals. All across the country, healthcare professionals are discovering that coaching is a tremendous tool in helping them transition from “where they are” to “where God might want them to be.”