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Lead Well MD: Transforming Healthcare Through Effective Clinician Leadership
Welcome to Lead Well MD where we dive into the art and science of effective clinician leadership. Through compelling stories and insightful conversations with guests from across healthcare, we explore the intersection between the foundational skills of emotional intelligence and effective clinician leadership. We examine how leaders can drive meaningful change and transform how they care for their teams, their organizations, and their patients.
Join Ashley Wendel, MA—physician leadership consultant, 1:1 advisor, and trusted guide—as she shares practical leadership tips and strategies honed over 17 years of partnering with clinician leaders like you. Each episode is designed to empower you with tools to lead more effectively and inspire change within your teams and organizations.
Our mission is to help you understand yourself and others more deeply while building the critical leadership skills needed to make a lasting impact. Together, let’s equip you to be the most effective leader possible, driving meaningful and transformative change in healthcare.
Tune in and lead well—because your leadership matters more than ever.
Lead Well MD: Transforming Healthcare Through Effective Clinician Leadership
"When Working Harder Isn’t the Answer: How to Reclaim Your Life in Medicine" with Dr. Ben Reinking
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What happens when doing everything “right” still leaves you feeling stuck, exhausted, and disconnected from the work you once loved?
In this honest and deeply human conversation, Dr. Ben Reinking - a pediatric cardiologist, educator, and founder of "The Developing Doctor", a physician coaching practice - shares a story many clinicians may recognize. From the outside, his career was thriving. But beneath the surface, the strategy that had always worked when things were tough - keeping his head down and working harder - was no longer sustainable.
Dr. Reinking describes his realization that something wasn’t right, the burnout he didn’t initially recognize, and the cultural conditioning in medicine that keeps clinicians pushing forward instead of pausing. Through coaching, he began to look inward - and what he found changed not just how he worked, but how he led and lived.
From learning to say no, to asking better questions, to embracing vulnerability, Dr. Reinking shows how small, often resisted shifts can create meaningful change. More than anything, this conversation offers permission - to question, to recalibrate, and to believe there are more options than we’ve been trained to see.
This episode is a powerful reminder that continuing to develop ourselves as humans, not just clinicians, is essential.
