18 - Dr Phil Sherrard

Today, I'm joined by Dr Phil Sherrard, consultant anaesthetist, educator, digital instructional designer, and actor. Phil shares his unique career journey - from becoming one of the UK’s youngest consultant anaesthetists to building a portfolio career that blends medicine, teaching, creativity, and performance.

He opens up about overcoming anxiety, rediscovering his love of acting and music, and how creativity has fuelled his resilience and problem-solving as a clinician. Phil also reflects on negotiating a flexible career that honours both his professional expertise and his artistic passions, offering valuable insights for health leaders seeking balance, fulfilment, and sustainable ways of working.

Together, we explore the intersections between medicine and the arts, digital innovation in medical education, and the power of values-based leadership. This is a conversation for anyone navigating career complexity, looking to bring more of their whole self into their work, and daring to design a life that feels both meaningful and joyful.

Connect with Phil on Instagram @philsherrard3, and on LinkedIn. His MOOC course is here: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/perioperative-medicine
HealthProMatch: https://healthpromatch.com/

Reflective Questions for Health Leaders

1. What creative outlets help you maintain balance and perspective in your work?
2. Which parts of yourself have you put aside for your career — and what would it take to reclaim them?
3. How might you use your values to guide decisions and conversations about your next career step?
4. In what ways can creativity and compassion improve your team’s approach to complex problems?
5. What’s one small “next right step” you can take towards a more fulfilling, authentic professional life?

If you’re interested in exploring coaching or learning more about leadership in healthcare, visit my website, where you’ll find a wealth of resources tailored to medical and public health professionals. Sign up for my newsletter to receive 3 hours of free CPD through the Health Career Success Programme and access a range of articles, tools, and guides to support your career journey.

Dr Fiona Day is able to help you thrive like no one else. She is the only Coaching Psychologist in the world with a background in medicine and public health. Her coaching practice is grounded in evidence. Over ten systematic reviews demonstrate the benefits of workplace coaching. Coaching psychology, the science of potential, performance, and wellbeing, has an even greater impact. Book a free confidential 30 minute Consultation with Fiona here.

Transcript

Welcome to Series 2 of Transformational Thinking for Health Leaders. In the last year, the podcast has been downloaded over 1300 times and briefly appeared in the Apple Top 10 health podcasts. I had planned to do an initial six interviews and ended up recording 14 because I love doing it so much with my wonderful guests. 

If you haven't heard Series 1 already, do go back through the archives. I've also loved all the comments and feedback. Thank you so much for this and please do keep letting me know what resonates with you and what you would like more of. 

And of course, if you're a medical or public health leader and would like to be a guest, then please do get in touch. Enjoy Series 2 of Transformational Thinking for Health Leaders. Welcome to Transformational Thinking for Health Leaders. 

I'm Dr Fiona Day, EMCC Master Practitioner Coach and Mentor and a registered Chartered Coaching Psychologist with the British Psychological Society. This is a podcast that will help you meet your most complex leadership challenges and transform your perspectives, helping you to become a more effective and creative leader with a deeper understanding of yourself and your own world of work. I'm committed to transforming health outcomes through my work and to supporting and developing outstanding medical and public health leaders who are able to thrive in complexity and chaos, bring clarity and compassion to those they serve and improve health outcomes whilst also taking care of themselves in order to enable their own best work. 

I hope you enjoy listening to today's episode. Dr Phil Sherrard is a consultant anaesthetist working in Brighton, specialising in perioperative medicine and obstetrics. He is lead for anaesthetics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School and works as a freelance digital instructional designer for Health Pro Match. 

He's recently completed a foundation course at the Academy of Creative Training in Brighton and is currently performing on the Camden and Lambeth fringe. Welcome to Transformational Thinking for Health Leaders, Phil. Thank you very much, Fiona. 

Hi. Hi, thank you. So Phil, tell us about your early career and your journey to becoming a consultant anaesthetist, please. 

So I think my early career is pretty standard in the sense that I finished school, I got my A-levels, I went to medical school in Nottingham, I bumbled through with a fairly unremarkable academic career, I'd say at Nottingham, probably slightly below the average student if I'm really honest, and then I came down to London to start my training and started my training foundation year in Bromley and then moved to Brighton for my F2 year and then had no idea what I wanted to do at all with my future medical career. I liked everything. I loved surgery, I loved medicine, I enjoyed every single attachment I'd done. 

So I went out for drinks with a careers counsellor at the time who said I don't think it will take me long to figure you out and at the end of a couple of hours he said you just really seem like an anaesthetist, why don't you go and do that? I'd never had any experience in anaesthetics, I did a taste a week, enjoyed it as I'd enjoyed everything else. I applied for ACCS training, I think it was the first ACCS year of training, so that's the acute core common stem programme and that feeds into anaesthetics, critical care, acute medicine and accident emergency and it's a really fun two, three year training programme that sets you up to progress further than any of those specialties and at the end of it I went into anaesthetics. I went straight through my training, didn't take any breaks and got really fixated on the idea of getting to be a consultant and I finished my training at the age of 32 at which point I moved down to Brighton and took a consultant job in anaesthetics down here.

Wow, so you actually were a consultant quite young then, weren't you Phil, I guess from that kind of going through those stages quite quickly and interesting that kind of two hours experience with a career counsellor at that point in time and yeah and do you kind of feel like that was the right advice for you at the time? At the time I think it probably was and I think that's a common theme with me at all times is that to not focus too much on what's going to happen as a result of a decision. What is right at the time is probably what's going to be right long term. What was I being what 24, 25 at that point in time with no idea what I wanted to do. 

I needed a direction and I really enjoyed my training so I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't taken that advice but what I was was a clueless 24 year old, 25 year old who really enjoyed everything that I was doing and I did a bit of help to focus on where to go and I think he saw in me what makes what is good in anaesthetics which is a real dedication to wanting to give excellent one-to-one care. A really focused mindset that actually once I'm doing something I am only want to do that one thing. I don't want to think about other things. 

I really want to focus on the task at hand and get really involved in that whilst acknowledging that I liked everything so far. So I want to be involved a bit in medicine. I want to be involved in surgery. 

I want to be involved in decision making. I want to be able to do practical skills and there's not that many specialties that once you you've finished your training you get to be involved in such a diverse range of care both in terms of patients from kids all the way through to 100 year olds in terms of the specialties where you're dealing with patients with complex rheumatological, endocrinological, neurological as well as then their surgical complications on top and being involved in all of that and really one of those specialties that involves just generalism. So a lot of specialties really delve into specifics of things. 

You're going to be a technical surgeon. You're going to be a complex cardiologist interventionist and the generalist specialties that are left open are really paediatrics, general anaesthetics, geriatrics and health care of the elderly and anaesthetics and intensive care and so in that it becomes clear that I'm heading towards that generalist route but with an eye in those medical procedures that I really enjoy doing which cancels out GP, which cancels out health care of the elderly and really leaves us with these acute core specialties. So although I've questioned a lot whether my career was the right thing to do actually I think that person gave me solid advice, saw what made me tick and yeah I think it was the right advice at the time. 

And it can be really hard I think you know like that kind of love of everything can't it can kind of in a way make it harder to make some decisions as well but as well as this kind of love of all the different areas and different medical specialties you've always had a love of acting haven't you so and I know you're obviously you're you know performing at the moment but tell us about your love of acting when that started and you know whether you managed to keep that up as a doctor how that experience was for you. Mixed answer I guess. In terms of keeping keeping the acting up I started acting, started performing at least from a young age. 

I know my dad has a memory of getting home and finding me in a Care Bear dress tap dancing in front of a mirror when I was about four years old. So it's clearly started from a very young age of just wanting that and the only way I could be get to sit still as a child was listening to ABBA music. I just loved music and that style things from the beginning and I wasn't that again the strongest academically at school. 

I was very much at the bottom of my class and it was a drama teacher who gave us a drama afternoon and just said look I really think you're going to enjoy this why don't you come along and be in a play. I think you'll like it and I absolutely loved it. I loved the sense of being in a team working towards a common goal. 

I loved the creativity of it and the fact that there were so many different ways to solve a problem and not just like you know you've got a script in front of you and you're trying to achieve a storytelling through that script. There's no one right way to do it there's that sense of experimentation and fun and play and trying to find the best way for that team to tell that story and just that freedom and the creativity that came with it I enjoyed. Particularly the idea that there wasn't a right or a wrong way to do something there was just different ways to experiment. 

I really enjoyed that as well as I'm I love being on stage. I love the buzz of the performing. I love the feeling when you when you finish a performance the applause and then sadly for me anxiety kicked in around the age of 14 or 15 and I got incredibly anxious about performing and the feeling there was a wrong way and that actually what if I wasn't good what if I wasn't good enough and it was paralyzing and about 15 I was in a performance of Romeo and Juliet. 

I was playing the apothecary and I couldn't get into the theatre for the dress rehearsal. I was stood outside being physically sick with the fear of it all and I just realized that I couldn't I just couldn't do it and that's when I started to think about what else might I want to do and that's when I figured out that actually I could I could succeed academically if I applied myself and that's when the desire for medicine started to come in. Sort of this alternative career pathway because at that point in time it wasn't right for me. 

I was an anxious not very confident 15 year old going into a performing career was not going to be right at that point in time and medicine came the next right decision for me. Throughout my medical career I did keep up performing and what I couldn't do was act. I couldn't be on my own speaking out and trying to be eloquent and embodying these other roles when I had fear but what I could do was perform in a team. 

So at university I was in orchestras and not even orchestras musical theatre bands so I played piano behind the scenes and kept my toe kept my foot in that arena and I started singing more. I've always loved singing and singing in a group is somewhere where the anxiety didn't kick in because as part of a group it was less about me it was less about this more about what we created together as a group of friends and the pressure got taken off and that's how I got back into performing again and when I left medical school and moved to London I got involved in a classical choir and got involved in the behind the scenes management of that so a choir called the London Oriana Choir. It's a hugely successful choir and with that I started organising events and getting some organisation skills. 

So I organised a TEDx event at the Houses of Parliament, I organised the backing singers for Barbra Streisand's 2012 arena tour so suddenly was involved in organising things at the O2 arena and organising these big concert events so completely outside the arena of medicine but getting these exciting skills of how do you manage large teams, how do you deal with people from different backgrounds, musicians, corporate events, corporate sponsors as well as the Houses of Parliament and the team at Westminster and as a 25 year old it was a wild experience, a wild year getting involved in that side of things whilst starting to perform again in the classic environment and from then I joined an acapella group called the Buzztones and that's a group of anywhere between 8 and 14 of us and that creative juice just started flowing again. We wrote a couple of shows to take up the Edinburgh Fringe, I got involved in the music arranging side of things, I started doing solos with them again and finding my voice, again particularly my singing voice not necessarily my acting voice and found a way of yeah work, I found medicine a really supportive environment for keeping all of these things up. The people that go into med school and my friend was saying this over the weekend, said med students were just the most annoying insane group of students because they'd exceeded academically, they got these A's at med school and then also they were in all the choirs doing Duke of Edinburgh's doing these other things and a lot of people give that up at some point during the med school career. 

We're sort of fed this idea that medicine's an all-consuming career, that you've got to give it everything you have and that is a way to practice it successfully. It's never a way that I found to practice medicine successfully. I found that if I gave medicine all of my energy and all of my time and it was all-consuming and it destroyed the parts of me that want to create that, that want to do these other things and I found that when I had more energy to do choir, to do singing, to do buzz tones, to a cappella, I had way more energy again for the job crossing back over. 

I found that particularly anaesthetics was a career that lets you have days off, there's not that much continuity of care, so if I'm not there on a day at work it's all right, somebody can fill in for my position, so there's this flexibility in the career that allows me to. For example, a few years ago I had four weeks of working singing, so I did a week and a half doing rehearsals in a warehouse in West London with Madonna, I was a backing singer for Madonna, we then went out to the Eurovision Song Contest, sorry this was longer, it was in 2019 before the pandemic, and then a week out singing with Madonna out in Eurovision doing that, followed by a week touring in Moscow with my a cappella group, followed by a week touring with a classical group singing at the Vatican and touring in Italy, and work were all right just to sign me off for those four weeks, and there wasn't that issue of what will happen to your clinics, what will happen to your inpatients, because that doesn't exist in anaesthetics. So yeah, work had been really accommodating in trying to find a way to let me keep up this performing side of things, and then a couple of years ago the acting bug hit me again, and suddenly something about approaching 40 and realising that no one's thinking about me as much as I'm thinking about me, no one's thinking is he terrible on stage, is he, you know, I'm just part of an ensemble group, just that confidence that I built up through the years of performing bit by bit, getting to this point where that anxiety hasn't gone, but it doesn't control me anymore, and I realised I could probably get back on stage again, and that's when I started, I attended a foundation programme at the Academy of Creative Training, which finished a couple of months ago, maybe six to eight weeks ago now, and as it came to the end of that, realised that I could actually start applying for professional acting jobs, and I've just finished my first one at the Camden Fringe, a fun show called the Swedish Furniture Store Musical, a fringe production, a new musical, we won't name the Swedish Furniture Store that it's based on because we don't wish to get sued, but yeah, and again work just that accommodating of being able to swap shifts around, swap days around, to have that flexibility to keep that performing side of, and yeah, and I don't think I'd be as good an anaesthetist if I wasn't able to keep up that performing side that just gives that joy, light, creativity, and sense of play in your life, but I think is important in anaesthetics as well, the idea that there's not a right or a wrong way to treat a patient, there's not a right or a wrong way to approach a decision, but there's got to be a sense of creativity and freedom, I think particularly as we see a more complex elderly group of patients coming through, where I'm getting emails about patients in their mid-90s wanting procedures that we'd never have considered 10 years ago, but suddenly we're now considering actually the object, the objective isn't to get somebody better, the objective is to give somebody the right quality of life that they wish to have before they die, and it's a real shift in that decision making process that I think the creativity and the play and the no right or wrong and the creative problem solving that comes about from acting, singing, all of those things applies in these situations, where we've got to throw the traditional sense of what we define as a good quality of life and say actually my opinion on this doesn't matter, what matters is a patient-centered decision making process and there needs to be creative problem-solving solutions to get to what is right for them, not what we historically think is right and are told at medical school. 

Sorry that was a long convoluted answer Fiona, for two how do you enjoy acting ahead of your career, there we go. Yeah well fascinating and thank you for sharing that and I'm sorry to hear that you had some difficulties with it when you were younger and I really love how you've kind of found a way to re-engage with it because clearly it really feeds you and I think there's something around that, that creativity like you say, you know from a psychology perspective that actually it helps to shape your brain in a different way, which then enables you to be able to deal with these more complex scenarios in the workplace as a clinician and as a leader as well and I think you know that you don't get that through the kind of more traditional rote learnings you know following nice guidelines type way of thinking, this kind of really does help you just to regrow your or to grow your brain in different ways that then does put you in a deal with the level of complexity that you're facing in your clinical role as well and funnily enough I've just come back from the Edinburgh Fringe for a few days last week and we're recording this. Oh brilliant. 

Yeah and we're recording this in late August. Did you see anything good, what did you see? Well I was there to see a friend's daughter's production, 22 year from Jacques Lecoq acting school in a physical theatre in Paris and it was a show about neurodiversity and sexual identity and it was fantastic and just so innovative but I went to Edinburgh Medical School myself because I was backstage manager for Death of a Salesman at the Fringe when I was 17 so yeah I kind of totally love that world as well but I've never been on the stage but yeah thank you for sharing all of that and I guess you were just kind of like touching on how you know how you integrate this into your day job and the anaesthetics has meant that because it's kind of more shift work that it's been easier to to kind of integrate your your different areas so I mean obviously you have quite a complex portfolio these days and we'll we'll kind of come on to some of the other areas of your role in a minute but in terms of how you integrate your portfolio now and your job plan and how did you go about kind of negotiating with your managers, your colleagues? I thought it was I thought it was utterly undoable honestly it felt like such when I sat thinking and when I realised that how many years ago that I wasn't happy with my career as it was with this kind of mainstream being anaesthetics and set out on a process with a careers counsellor yourself hi and set out on that thing of actually what drives you and what what do you want out of your life and what do I want out of my career and as you say there's weird complex portfolio that starts to develop where anaesthetics was a part of it but obviously teaching for me and education was going to be a big part of it and creating and learning new skills was going to be a part of it and that brought in some of the digital education side of things and then acting and performing which is more rapidly now becoming a larger part of this portfolio career it took a bit more a bit of time to get off the ground but it's starting to pick up pace and it just it felt really unachievable and I think for me the idea of starting at one point where I did one job full time the idea of then getting to this place where there's this flexible portfolio career where I'm spending you know one and a half days on one thing half day on the thing half day another one day and another it didn't seem possible and for me the main bit of advice I wish I'd heard a little bit earlier was just breaking things down into chunks that it is impossible to get from point a to point z and see that as an achievable thing and if my goals are too far in the future and if I'm thinking too far in the future it's too overwhelming my brain simply can't compute of several years of work it takes to get from one point to another but it can compute of the next right step and so I think how I started out going doing it was talking to other people and so first of all just voicing what I wanted so voicing I want a portfolio career that has these things because no one in the world is going to give you anything if you don't if they don't know that you want it and if you're not willing to ask for it so this kind of getting rid of the fear and the anxiety that's unachievable first and saying well I'm not trying to achieve end goal here I'm just trying to achieve net right next right step so the next step is to voice my wants to the world start talking to people who then say they've had similar careers and similar experiences and finding out how they did it by doing that I started to talk to really interesting people who um you know a colleague who'd started a started a company called health pro match and she was starting to integrate that into her clinical career and she had moved to France to manage a chateau property and then had moved to Vienna to to manage that property from there moved to Vienna to start this health pro match company as well as coming back to Brighton to commute to do clinical anaesthetics she started to see these weird careers another person that apartment who'd moved to Norway to write a book on cold water swimming as well as then being a career in anaesthetics and intensive care you start to once I'd started to put this my wants out into the world people started getting contacting I've had this weird career I've done these weird things and just chatting about how they did it and it suddenly it started to feel a little bit less scary because there were role models who'd done similar things and it said didn't seem unachievable it then became easier to take the next step and the next step was making sure that I was trained in the things that I wanted to be trained in and so saying I want a career at a university is a great idea but what do I need to do that so then putting these things at the next step well I would like to get a a certificate or diploma in medical education I'd like to start talking to people at university I'd like to get experience in practical teaching a level before that with the digital education things again what do I need to do well I need to train I need to get a qualification I need to start networking in that environment and getting a diploma from the um oh I can't remember what it's called are they wow that has slipped my mind I spent six months studying there anyway at a institution that will come back to me at a later point and again with the acting I need to start networking I need to start training so getting the skills so starting to acquire skills and practically talking to the people in department so talking to my general anaesthetic lead and then the lead for anaesthetics as a whole the clinical lead and saying this is what I want to do I want start getting a portfolio career um and starting to be flexible in the job planning so realizing one that I'm an asset to the department even if I'm not working full-time I'm still an asset I've got years of experience I know the department department knows and likes me so I won't be working for them as full-time I'll bring that and also I'll bring all of these other skills from the area to the department to help mentoring trainees and even with things like the anxiety it's seeing trainees in difficulty who are struggling with certain things actually I've got experience in that I can help them with that and and realizing that I'm worth more than just my clinical skills I bring more than just that the department giving the confidence to ask for what I would actually like and then just being blunt and saying look I'm not saying this is definitely what's going to happen but what I would like is I would like to only work one and a half to two days of clinical anaesthetics a week I would like to be involved in educational supervision I'd like to be involved in education with the department but I'd also start to like start to want to work with the university working for a day with them I'd like to work in this other portfolio and I would like flexibility in my working pattern that allows me to attend auditions that allows me to work in theatre that might allow me to ask for rather last minute time off at some point in the future and have that flexibility and that conversation that opens up with okay well that works that can potentially work but what we're going to need from you is then greater flexibility in in other working times it might be that during school holidays we might ask you to be a bit more available so when we've got more people off in the summer we might need you to be around a bit more during those times and work a bit more intensely during those times or if somebody falls sick a bit more flexibility in providing more last minute cover on shifts which if I'm doing it for no reason is exhausting but if I'm doing it because I know that being more flexible there gives me the flexibility to live the life I want to lead perform and have those those times off then it doesn't become exhausting it becomes an investment in what I want to be doing as the other parts of the portfolio career and so summarizing yeah it's a for me it was about realizing my wants vocalizing them realizing the training needs I have to make sure I'm desirable in those jobs realizing my own self-worth and being open-minded to not just say what I want but to realize what can I give the department to help make sure that we've got a mutually beneficial relationship because let's be honest at the end of the day performing on fringe musicals pays a grand total of 13 pounds an hour if you're lucky so I do need my clinical job because it helps pay for this lifestyle that I'm enjoying did you know that workplace coaching is very well established as an evidence-based intervention for leadership career development and increasing well-being with over 10 systematic reviews and meta-analyses consistently demonstrating this workplace coaching has also been found to be effective in a recent systematic umbrella review of leadership training in health care specifically as well as in other systematic reviews and meta-analyses of medical leadership development if you're enjoying this or any episode please help me to contribute to transforming health outcomes and supporting health leaders by sharing my podcast with a peer or colleague thank you and now back to the show and there's something in that isn't there around I suppose the kind of the negotiation and the fair exchange so it's got to work for both parties but it does start with that getting really clear about your needs and that's a kind of quite complex nuanced thing to really uncover but like you say being able to identify it and then articulate it actually is then halfway house to actually making it actually happen so yeah thank you for sharing that and you know it sounds like you've got some great negotiation skills as well in terms of you know how you've been able to to secure this because actually you know every senior professional whether they're a you know doctor public health leader or from any kind of background actually you know it is about that whole self isn't it and if you're you're not able to express part of you that's really important because you're um you know you're kind of fully working in a particular area that's not allowing you to express part of yourself then that's kind of not sustainable for most people in the long term so so you've kind of moved into digital medical education over the years as well so tell us about this phil what are you doing around this and where do you see digital medical education going in the future for me it started um i enjoyed teaching throughout uh just getting involved with teaching in departments and things and in my st6 year of training i did a education fellowship at ucl and working very closely with abby whiteman rob stevens and dave walker at the education part of the education team there and that year was very little clinical it was one day a week clinical and then the rest of time working on a project and the project that we decided i would work on was something called a massive online a MOOC massive open online course and it was going to be on peri-operative medicine so peri-operative medicine was something i wasn't that interested in at the time and that for me was one of the poles i love learning new things and there was this idea to learn about a new specialty get really involved and engrossed in it and to write a course and the idea was to create a course that would be digitally accessible and asynchronous so anybody could learn at any time but you could also sign on with a cohort and do it all at the same time together and be involved in the community of learning and it would be about doing the entire course so all the pedagogy so creating the course design creating the learning objectives doing the micro learning aspects of laying out each week how it would look and then creating all the content and it was a project that myself and abby whiteman worked on very closely and i did a lot of the bulk work of the content creation and then together we did a lot of the more high-level design work it was great to work with someone like that and it suddenly involved developing all these new skills because i suddenly had to create videos edit videos and create this online environment and there was a supportive team that we did it with a group called future learn and suddenly just seeing this course come together something that we'd created and launched and it's been studied by about 40 43 or 44 000 people online now and seeing the impact that it makes in in in people's education learning about priority medicine to me it became an idea that i do love teaching and in person i do love it but it's so that it just sparked this idea that there are these creative solutions that in postgraduate learning we don't always need to be face to face and my own experience as a postgraduate learner is that i'm motivated i love learning and i want to learn and i'm willing to put the time and effort in in my own place and online learning gives me the flexibility to do that around what is quite a busy life and i think it's got such huge potential and it just sparked this idea and this interest that that's what i wanted to be involved in and then it lay dormant because i became a consultant covid happened um all all of the first few years of being consultant kind of put that out and then once i started to get space and ideas and back in my life just a spark came again about digital education i parked it back in 2018 when i finished this project i was exhausted from finishing the project uh and when the spark started again um just the ideas of what could be accomplished with it and it started a bit during covid because we couldn't have in-person teaching so there was the problem solving idea of how do we keep people updated on the changes that are happening one example being that we had to move we had drug shortages so suddenly we had to teach an entire department how to use different medications in spinal anesthetics and how to care for them post-operatively the only way we could do that was with a digital solution at the time i was lead for maternity and midwifery education so it fell onto my plate of how do we train all these midwives and how to care for this different medication i was like great oh i can re-resurrect these skills and get digital digital education back in so again i didn't know what i wanted to do with it really so i trained and i got a diploma in digital uh in digital instructional design from the oh that place i went to um the digital institute of learning the digital institute of technology something digital learning institute dli the digital learning institute um it was a six-month course it was great and it enabled us it challenged us to design our own um online course get feedback i worked with people from google um from other universities from massive multinational organizations who were ahead of their digital uh technologies and again they've just given me this network of people to feed off to uh to help design and learn things with um where i'm using at the moment is as i said earlier i just started putting the word out i wanted to work in digital instructional design and i'm a doctor and the person i mentioned earlier who moved to vienna um to start running her own company she was somebody who got back in touch further down the line and said look i'm running these um seminars uh in america i'm running these pharmaceutical seminars and we want someone to create it interactive online learning content from that so that people aren't just watching the videos that we've created on the day actually we can get involved as quizzes there's these other things but i need somebody who's a doctor who understands what the heck is being said on the day who can then translate it into the content so i started getting involved with her and this company and so now i'm we're creating an online educational hub that does that there's other exciting things where i see it going really is is the postgraduate world i think undergraduate world technology has its place but i think i needed real guidance to my undergraduate years but for me i see it focusing on these postgraduate um motivated learners who want to further their careers and there was a project i was so excited about that the funding has just fallen through on but i'm voicing it because i believe it will happen again and it was going to be the uk's first hybrid postgraduate medical degree it was going to be based in brighton and it was for people who have kids and other jobs and careers actually the first two or three years of learning we were going to be designing it as a hybrid environment so my hope was to be the lead on the digital side of that creating the online environment creating that learning management system and helping with a lot of the content creation so that we could actually get people into medicine from a much broader background of careers if you are a single mother of two at the age of 33 the idea of giving up four years of your life to go back to university is not really achievable unless you've got significant support mechanisms in place but if you can create a hybrid version of that imagine these people we could get that would be so great in the job once they got there unfortunately the funding fell through so that is not happening but that is that's the kind of work i'd be wanting to do to find these new solutions to to get people involved in in medicine who haven't been and to create flexible training solutions for people who don't have the time for the more traditional training problem things throughout there that's where i'd like to take it it's a nascent part of my career but already these opportunities are starting to come about and i am excited about where that could go well thank you for sharing that and i'm absolutely gutted for you that you didn't get that funding because it definitely is kind of part of the future landscape isn't it so i guess it's by holding that vision in mind and continuing to work towards it and i'm sure it's going to happen you know you can see that though these are global trends and accessibility is really important isn't it so yeah and keep us posted about how you get on with that and and i guess you know um phil like kind of looking back so far about what you've learnt about yourself as a leader i mean you haven't really used that term at all whilst we've been talking but you're you know you're innovating you're leading things you're you know kind of pushing boundaries you're doing things with and through other people tell me a bit you know if you would about you as a leader i have avoided the term because i don't see myself as a leader and i think a lot of people have it but a lot of imposter syndrome about the fact that i'm still young in my career i'm 40 i still feel like i'm really the beginning of it and so i'm all the way all the time around quite senior people that i see as leaders and it's difficult to see yourself in that position but you're right i am involved in leadership and i have led on projects and started leading on projects at a young age from 25 with the choir things and working on those projects and leading on those reflecting on yeah what my how i see progressed as a leader and for me it comes down a lot to values and organizations develop these values that their core organizational values and i don't think i knew until fairly recently what my core values are and for me the leadership and i'm finding myself becoming more comfortable leading in the last few years because i feel comfortable in knowing who i am and what's important and how i want to interact and how i want to lead and for me that's things of honesty open-mindedness willingness kindness and adventure and they're my kind of five core values that i want to lead and live in the world by and honesty just coming from a place of being yeah just being really honest about limitations about what i know about what i don't know that there doesn't need to be any arrogance involved in in leadership there's a lot of things that i just don't know that's absolutely fine that's why when we work in teams and we're a leader of a team that there is a team because the leader is not expected to know everything and so there's got to be this honesty and transparency about what i know and what i don't know and to be comfortable with that and to not have an ego around it that i find important for open-mindedness again it stems from the honesty of what do i know what do i don't know i've got to be open-minded about the idea that other people know the answer to things that i don't know and for me this is where a portfolio comes in really minding keeping that that idea alive that when i was just working mostly in clinical medicine actually you i'm mostly as a consultant thesis in a position where i'm leading most days where people tend to but not just not deferential but they tend to defer to my decision that i make and it's easy to get into this mindset that i know what i'm doing i'm consulting these cysts blah blah but then put me in a room with a suddenly of course i'm not the person that knows the most and i've got people who are barely out of secondary school teaching me about things and i'm learning so that open-mindedness that in a team somebody's probably going to know more than i do about almost everything so having that open-mindedness to to listen to people and then the willingness to just do it the willingness to say okay great we've got these ideas as a team i'm now going to make this decision that we're going to go with my idea um creating this kind of space where people are okay to voice their ideas their creative solutions to problems and that i'm willing to listen to them and i'm willing to accept that i had an idea about how i was going to manage this and how i was going to run it but this person's idea is way way better than mine so let's run with it let's not have an ego about it and let's do that um kindness because i just want to be treated with kindness and therefore i need to treat people with kindness first for that to happen um i don't think i need to say more about that and adventure adventure that's just the joy of learning and trying something new the idea that i know everything and i've experienced everything by the age of 40 that's a horrible idea to me i love the idea that i still feel really new and at the beginning of my career and that although i've got a career where i'm a consultant and an assist and i'm reaching the top of that one i'm starting careers where i'm on minimum wage and i'm starting right at the bottom and all that feeds into to what i hope is a leadership style that is open that listens that is kind that's reflective and that values people's ideas and opinions just as much as as a leader of a team my ideas are i think it creates opens the door to creative problem solving creative solutions particularly as i said with the more complex patients coming through we need creative solutions but and i've touched on it with the education stuff creative solutions to problems of how do you get more people involved how do you educate vast numbers of people at minimum cost yeah that those styles and those values yeah infiltrate influence and infiltrate all of those things and the more i've spoken about it maybe the more i've convinced myself i do have a leadership style and that's present in my clinical anesthesia it's present in my university work and particularly with students how fun that a 20 year old medical student when i've got a room of 13 of them together and we open up a discussion i've always learned something from the discussion you know the 20 year old third year medical student knows more than i do about some things because they've read about it more recently i've just got to be open to it thank you so i love that sort of you know values based leadership and being clear about your values and then being really congruent about how you express yourself in the world because really at the end of the day the only things that we can control is or have some control is what comes out of our mouth and what we do with our bodies and i love that kind of like beginner's mind that openness to learning and the excitement and enthusiasm that you get from that and and kind of i guess then role modeling that to other people in terms of you know how powerful it must be for a you know their kind of teacher their educator being willing to learn and how validating that is for other people as well so thank you phil for your time today it's been absolutely wonderful hearing about your career so far and kind of all these different elements that you're integrating into something that really works for you and i'm really excited to see what you're going to go on and do in the future but thank you ever so much for your time today it's been wonderful chatting with you thank you phil really nice to talk to you as well and apologies for waffling at points thanks ever so much if you've enjoyed this podcast and would like to find out more head over to www.fionadayconsulting.co.uk and you can receive three hours of free cpd through my health career success program and there's loads of other resources to support you as a medical or public health leader on my website too i greatly value any feedback and to know what you would like more of so please don't hesitate to get in touch with me at fiona at fionadayconsulting.co.uk to help me to better meet your needs thank you for listening and for your commitment to transforming health outcomes