Jillian Bybee, MD • Live at the Summit

Dr. Jillian Bybee is an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital. At Corewell Health West and Michigan State University, she serves as the Director of Wellness for Graduate Medical Education and Associate Program Director for the Pediatric Residency and Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship programs. Additionally, she is a mindset and leadership coach for Corewell Health West. She dedicates her work to fostering an organizational culture of wellness and helping healthcare professionals create satisfying careers. Dr. Bybee is a prolific speaker and has delivered numerous presentations nationally on improving the lives of healthcare workers including stress management, team-based strategies for professional fulfillment, creating a career you love, mindset, resilience, and work-related distress which have positively impacted thousands of people. Her signature workshop 'Transform Your Day' helps attendees go from overwhelmed and frazzled to present and empowered. Additionally, Dr. Bybee writes a newsletter called ‘Humans Leading’ and hosts a podcast of the same name which both help hundreds of high achievers live less stressed, more satisfying lives.

Thanks for tuning in! Check out more episodes of The Well-Being Connector at www.bethejoy.org/podcast.

Transcript

Narrator: 0:13

Welcome to another episode of the Well-being Connector Podcast, hosted by Roy Reid and sponsored by the Coalition for Physician and APP Wellbeing. This episode is one of a multi-part series recorded live at the 2025 Joy and Wholeness Summit. Thank you for listening.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 0:38

And I am joined by Jillian Bybee. I knew I'd get part of your name wrong. It didn't matter how many times I practiced.

Jillian Bybee, MD: 0:47

Yes, all right.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 0:48

But thank you for being here.

Jillian Bybee, MD: 0:50

Yeah.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 0:50

You did a presentation here at the conference yesterday. How did it go?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 0:54

It was great. I had a great time and really enjoyed learning from the other presenters as well.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 0:59

Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's start with your story. How did you come to this work of well-being?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 1:05

So I am a pediatric critical care medicine physician and also the wellness director for uh graduate medical education at my organization. Um but that didn't happen overnight, obviously. Um I came to this work like a lot of people with my own personal story. I had both burnout and depression when I was a trainee in pediatric critical care medicine. And then because I really like to learn things the hard way, um, I did it again and burnt out when I was an early career faculty member. Um, fortunately, I thought I was on a leadership pathway. And so I had applied to and been accepted to an executive leadership program, and they had a coach for me, which was fantastic. Um, and that person really got me to think about how I was handling myself. I came to her wanting to work on my um self-management skills because I found myself getting really frustrated and stressed out in my job, and that was part of my burnout. Um, and so she challenged me every day for a week to keep track of what was frustrating me, where I was, who was there, the time of day, and then the conditions of myself. So was I um running on empty? Had I not had I not taken a break, had I not eaten anything, like what were the conditions? And every time I wrote something down, I thought, oh, it's clearly that person or that person or this condition. Um, and it turns out no listener here will be surprised that the common thread of all those things was that I was running on empty, I hadn't taken care of myself, and that I was contributing to my own burnout and frustration. And it's not to say that systems issues don't exist. Obviously, that's why conferences like this exist and the other work that I do exists, but I think we it really hit home that I had to find a way to incorporate stress management and self-sustainment strategies into my day in order to be able to work in the ICU. Um, and that's where I started. I started with myself and then things started to work, started to learn from other experts, and I created a framework called active stress management. And the active part just means you actually do the thing that you plan to do, not just think about it. Um, and that's how I got started seven years ago.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 3:22

Wow. So talk about where you are today, the program that you've launched, implemented, and maybe a little bit about the impact that you're seeing.

Jillian Bybee, MD: 3:32

Sure. So um I have a couple hats that I wear. So as a wellness director, I help the 40-something GME programs in my organization think about how they can do well-being in their programs, like building a better culture, and also by creating dialogue sessions rather than just mandatory wellness sessions. So that's part of my work. The other part, like speaking at conferences here, is teaching primarily women physicians, but really anybody, how to incorporate what I call sustainable stress management, um, which just means that you can actually do it during your day, during your life, because none of us have enough time to complete our to-do lists. And so that work really is how can you do things that tell your nervous system that it's okay? How can you, you know, eat your food? How can you take a break? And how can you set yourself reminders for check-ins throughout your day so that you're not adding one more thing to your to-do list, but you're actually prioritizing your stress management at the place that stresses you out the most, which is usually the workplace.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 4:37

Yeah. So talk about the model a little and how the model works for people and where you're working with people in that model.

Jillian Bybee, MD: 4:46

So the framework active stress management, again, is just in what it says. It's actively managing your stress. And there are a lot of different ways to do that. One of the ways that has been shown in trauma literature to be helpful is through parasympathetic recovery or by activating the part of your nervous system that does the relaxation. And so that's what I try to teach people to do. Some of the ways that you can do that that I work with teams for is debriefs can help you really process feelings and emotions. Some of the other things that I call micro breaks are how can you build something between 30 to 30 seconds to five minutes into your day to actively recover? So the way that looks in real practice, I have a framework called I C I S E E. The I is just set an intention. I'm gonna intend to check in with myself several times throughout the day to see how I'm doing. The S is to set a reminder because if you set an intention without a reminder, you often will forget that you set intention. Um, the E is when the reminder goes off to evaluate what you're feeling. So stress is a sort of continuum, it fluctuates throughout the day. You won't feel the same level of stress. And so when the reminder goes off, just say, Hey, how am I doing right now? And maybe you're doing great. Sometimes I find during my day I'm actually doing pretty well. And in that moment, I always encourage people to think, well, why am I feeling well? What have I done today that is different? Or what have I done right now that's different? And a lot of times it's just those basic things. I've met my basic needs, maybe I connected somebody socially, I'm doing okay. And then if you find that you aren't doing okay, you've evaluated that your stress level is really high. You can ask yourself, what would make me feel better in the next 30 seconds to five minutes? Okay. And then the final E of IC is execute, because that's really where I find myself and other people are really good at saying what could help. It wouldn't it be nice if I had time to? Um, and I work in a place with emergencies uh in the ICU. And it turns out it's not always an emergency. There are more seconds of the day for us to be able to think about what we're doing. Um, but it takes that intention that we said in the I, and then the E of executing to actually do the thing that you said would make you feel better, and then evaluating did that actually help or not. Because I think physicians especially, but everyone in healthcare really likes the silver bullet. This will be the one thing that I do that fixes my well-being. And that doesn't exist, right? We're different people at different times, different things work for me compared to you. And so you have to actually evaluate did the thing I did help. And if it didn't help, it doesn't make you a failure. It just means you need to try a different tool the next time.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 7:39

So, how are you engaging uh the team? Uh, what's the structure of the program and how does it work? And what are your metrics, or maybe how do how do you measure success in the work you're doing?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 7:52

Um, so I think this type of work is really hard. Um, I, you know, I was listening to another session earlier today. Dr. Bryan Sexton was talking about um does the thing in improve the likelihood that you'll experience a positive emotion? And that if the answer is yes, that could be a reliable marker of it improving well-being. Okay. And I think that's what this is on an individual basis. The way that this could look for teams, um, I often talk to leaders about modeling their own vulnerability to be able to say, I'm experiencing stress. Here's how I'm dealing with it. Um, and then it really comes with what are the spaces in which you can just drop your guard and be a human being. Um, so that's what I try to teach leaders and teams to do is these individual practices are really important. We are responsible for structuring some of that into our workplaces. But as leaders and organizations, part of building a culture of well-being is modeling that that type of thing is okay. But telling people to take breaks when you don't take any yourself won't get you anywhere. Um, and the fastest way to get somebody not to listen to you is to say, do what I say, not what I do. Um, so that's where a lot of the structure comes in in leader trainings and in other things. And then my job is really to help other people deploy that out in the wild and then follow up and see how it's going. I think that follow-up is variable. When I give sessions like this, I kind of get immediate gratification. And then sometimes I get texts randomly or social media posts or emails that say, I was feeling really stressed, and it dawned on me that I hadn't eaten any lunch. So I decided to go to the fridge and get my lunch and eat it, and I thought of you. And like that's the best feedback that I ever get is I was I helped contribute to somebody else taking care of themselves because that obviously lets you then go on and do a better job in your day than you otherwise would.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 9:55

And what are some of the maybe macro related results that you're seeing within the system or within the teams and within the individuals, even that you're working with?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 10:06

So, my primary workspace in the pediatric ICU. I have a lot of other great wellness, we call them champions in my organization who help with this type of work, including an APP, some of the residents or some of the nurses. Um, and you know, during the pandemic, like many emergency medicine or ICU spaces, we have pretty high levels of burnout and high levels of distress on the well-being index, which is what we use at our organization. And we were trying to figure out ways that we could help each other. And so we just started doing targeted reach outs, checking in with people, seeing if people got breaks, covering. Um, some of the physicians actually started covering nursing lunches during the pandemic in order for them to be able to step away for somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes. Um, and that was something our leaders came up with. I think we have a great culture of our team in the ICU. And I think that's really the foundation that we see. But through our teamwork and also through these targeted interventions, we have gone from one of the most distressed places to on our last well-being index, one of the least distressed places. And it doesn't mean that we don't have distress, right? Um, but it does mean that the organization well-being team, which I'm also part of, came to survey us and did what we call bright spotting, which was looking at what are the factors associated with these good things that are happening on the team. And it's no surprise that in our space, just like the data show, leadership and feeling supported by your colleagues. Like when I was caring for so many patients during our respiratory surge after the pandemic, I had colleagues coming out of the woodwork to check on me to see if I was okay. People brought me lunch. I brought lunch to people, I covered so somebody could go and pump because they had an infant at home. And I think those are the things as you start to work on yourself, then you have a little bit of breathing room to be able to say, okay, I'm doing okay. How can I help somebody else in my culture? And so starting with yourself is actually the fastest way to changing organizational culture because we're all part of an organization.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 12:18

So what's next? What are you working on now that a year from now or two years from now you'll be out advocating for and talking about?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 12:26

So I think one of the greatest opportunities we have is um how we support our leaders. Um, and that includes uh our medical training leaders, so our program directors and associate program directors. And then also, you know, coaching has been shown to be a great intervention for physician well-being, but it's really hard to scale to all physicians and especially to trainees. And so with our team, we're really working on how we can get group coaching and some more things to our residents, and then also how can we get digestible skill building to our frontline leaders, like our program leaders? Um, the last program director committee that I was at, I did a five-minute here's how you help do organizational resilience and how you acknowledge and validate your learners. Because I think what we know is if you feel supported in your environment, that's protective against burnout. And so it's really how can we equip leaders with that, but also support their well-being? Because I think it's really hard to be a leader as well.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 13:32

So, our audience obviously are people that are in the wellness space, and some are probably just now beginning a journey to create something that might look like or feel like the program that you lead on. What advice would you give someone who's taken those first steps into this and what helps get it to a place where it sticks and it's supported and it continues?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 13:55

I think the advice to those people is the same I give to people who are experiencing burnout or overwhelm and it's start by starting. Um, we can get so paralyzed by the multiple things and also wanting to have the exact right plan and making sure that it's the exact right wellness intervention. But I think everybody is working in some workplace, no matter if it's a private practice or inside a large organization of 60,000 people like the one I work in. And really, it's your microclimate that affects your well-being anyway. So you can start with yourself, which is where I had to start as I was recovering from my burnout. And then it turns out as you start to talk about that process with other people, other people will resonate with that and you'll start to notice this is a common theme, this is something that we could work on. So we started with no one doing wellness check-ins and nobody really talking about well-being, to us standing in the middle of our unit, being able to um compare who's going to which therapist, um, and really be able to talk openly about that. And so it's don't wait for the exact right thing or the right time. Or I get a lot of people asking me about what if I don't have the highest level of leadership support. I think there are a lot of these culture building initiatives and teams that you can do without any funding. Um, and that's really where we should start.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 15:27

A two-part question. What what what was the greatest hurdle to get over to get to the place where the program could take off and settle in? And then what's been the biggest surprise that you've seen as a result of the work?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 15:42

So the biggest hurdle, I'm sorry for all the physicians out there, is us um and our mindset as physicians about needing to be superhuman and needing to project that we are fine all the time. And I have a social worker friend who likes to remind me that fine is not a feeling. It actually stands for feelings I'm not expressing. Nice. And that was annoying to me and is so relevant. Um, but honestly, I think a lot of people say they're fine when they mean that I've been doing it this way for a long time and I have found a way to just shove it down and forge ahead. But stress affects all of us, whether it's in our personal health, our relationships, or in the satisfaction we have in our jobs. And so once you start broadening the lens of, okay, it doesn't have to be burnout, it doesn't have to be a mental illness, we all bear the brunt of it. Um, and how can we transform the system? I think that helps people start to realize, um, especially those people who don't want to uh accept help for themselves, they will accept that they need to help the people behind them. And so those are a lot of the people who do some of the best wellness work, are some of our senior physicians who don't want to be recognized, but they're more than willing to talk about their challenges. I have one colleague who, when I asked him to be on a panel talking about the mistakes he's made and adverse outcomes, he sent me an email with 15 options and said, which one of them do you think would be the best one to talk about? Because I could talk about all of them. And I think his willingness to do that and be vulnerable actually, he doesn't he didn't know it at the time, but that contributes even more to our organization and our well-being. As far as what was the most surprising, I think it's the fact that it's the simple things that matter. It's the little interpersonal connections, it's the day-to-day, and it's the fact that it's these 30-second to five-minute repetitive interventions. It's not we did a mandatory wellness training or module for an hour and now we're fixed. It's I have repeatedly chosen 30 seconds to five minutes throughout my day. And there are periods where I'll work 17 days in a row, either clinically or non-administratively. And these strategies don't mean that I'm not stressed or tired or need a real break, but they do mean that I'm not screaming or completely depleted, or I've never, like I've never experienced burnout again since that time six years ago, because I intentionally do these things, both when I'm in the hospital and when I'm at home.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 18:31

What else is on your heart today that you'd like to share with the listeners?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 18:35

Um, I think it's really important for us to remember that we're human beings. So I have both uh a blog and a podcast called Humans Leading. Yep. Um, and I think it's really hard for us, especially as me as a recovering perfectionist, to remember that we have imperfection. It's part of our job. And certainly when we go into healthcare, we don't go in to make mistakes, and that it can be really important to have a low-stakes way to make mistakes so that you feel like you can um get some of that out. So that's why I write my podcast, and my podcast production is not uh perfect because I need I need a place where I can get that out because I don't want to do it in the pediatric ICU, even though unfortunately, you know, everybody will make a mistake at some point.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 19:25

And what's the best way for people to reach out to you?

Jillian Bybee, MD: 19:28

So I have a blog, it's Jillian Bybee MD, or sorry, I have a website, it's JillianBybeeMD.com. And then also my blog publication is humansleading.substack.com. I'm also on Instagram at Life and PicU P-I-C-U.

Roy Reid, APR, CPRC, MCPC: 19:44

Very good. Thank you for spending time with me today and sharing your story with everyone. Thanks. It was nice to be here. Absolutely. Safe travels. Thanks.

Narrator: 19:55

Thank you for tuning in to the Well-being Connector Podcast, brought to you by the Coalition for Physician and APP Well-being. The Well-being Connector offers insightful conversations with healthcare professionals devoted to fostering wholeness within their organization. Each episode delves deep into the holistic approach to well-being, underscoring the importance of physical, mental, social, and spiritual health. For more episodes, visit our website at www.bethejoy.org/podcast.