Startup Physicians

You’re Not Stuck: Mindset Shifts for Physician Innovators with Dr. Karen Leitner

• Alison Curfman, M.D. • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Have you ever felt like the system just wasn’t built for you? Like you’re in a role that no longer fits—but you don’t know what else is out there, or if you’re even allowed to want more? In this episode, I sit down with my brilliant friend and colleague, Dr. Karen Leitner, a physician, coach, and out-of-the-box thinker who’s reimagined what a meaningful career in medicine can look like. Together, we explore how to recognize burnout, shift your mindset, and open yourself up to the world of startups, innovation, and—most importantly—possibility.

Karen brings such a powerful perspective to this conversation. From leaving traditional practice in a fog of burnout to exploring roles in startups, advocacy, and executive coaching, she shares what it looks like to find clarity, value yourself again, and take courageous steps toward building the life you actually want. If you’ve ever doubted your worth or felt stuck in medicine, this is the episode for you.

Dr. Karen Leitner is the founder of Karen Leitner MD Coaching, where she empowers women physicians to achieve greater happiness and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives. She earned her undergraduate degree from Brown University, her medical degree from the University of Rochester, and completed a combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency at Mount Sinai in New York. Following her residency, Dr. Leitner practiced primary care and student health in the Boston area and held a faculty appointment at Harvard Medical School. She has also ventured into the startup ecosystem, contributing to medical patient advocacy, transgender health, and consulting for emerging healthcare companies.

Episode Highlights:

[1:49] Karen shares her early career in primary care—and the first signs of burnout that sparked her transition.
[5:32] Exploring non-clinical options: from urgent care to CROs to patient advocacy startups.
[7:49] The freedom of startup life: starting with a blank slate and designing care outside the traditional system.
[11:40] Imposter syndrome in medicine—and why startup skills are more transferable than you think.
[14:18] Embracing the unknown: how curiosity (and asking questions) fuels success in new industries.
[16:36] Moving from silenced to seen: what it felt like to be truly valued in a startup setting.
[22:00] Coaching, mindset, and how our value isn’t dictated by others' recognition.
[26:25] Finding opportunities through simple outreach—and why ghosting is never the end of the story.
[30:46] What it means to have a why—and how mission-driven work propels us past fear.
[37:12] On investing in coaching and personal growth—and the ROI that really matters.

Resources:

Checkout our services at StartupPhysicians.com

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast, rate, and leave a review. Don’t forget to share this episode with fellow physicians who might be interested in startups. Together, we can shape the future of healthcare! See you next time.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

We go from feeling like these unvalued, unvaluable we perceive our value is based on how other people see us. So if someone says, No, Your idea is stupid, or someone says, I'm not going to pay you that we think, I guess I'm not worth it. And what it started with was like, I was an out of the box thinker, like I just didn't fit here. And I was just like, get me out of here. I don't fit. I don't want any more depth of knowledge. I want to live a life and like, I just I don't fit. I think there's something about if you feel like inside you don't fit, in the paradigm medicine is so like, stay do this forever. There's one way, and this is how you do it. And we're like, guess what? There's a million ways you can do it. There's so many opportunities, but you have to start with, and I'm smart and I'm valuable, and I can know stuff, and I have value. I have value, and I bring my value wherever I go. Welcome

Alison Curfman:

to StartUp physicians. Please Like and follow our show to join our community of physicians who are re imagining healthcare delivery. Hi everyone. Welcome back to startup physicians. I'm your host. Dr Allison kirchman, and I am thrilled to be joined by my friend and colleague, Dr Karen Lightner. She is an incredible person and has just this very cool background of having worked in more traditional healthcare and worked in startups and doing a lot with coaching of physicians. And so when she and I first connected, I thought this is someone who has such a wonderful perspective for all of you listeners out here who are maybe working in traditional healthcare and maybe feel a little bit stuck, or like maybe this world isn't quite for you, or you don't have what it takes, and so I am so excited to have you here today. Karen, thank you so much for coming.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

Thanks for having me. I can't wait to get into it with you. Awesome.

Alison Curfman:

Well, I'd love if you could start by just telling us a little bit about your journey and your career, and maybe a brief background of where you went and when and how and what sort of insights you gained about startups and mindset along the way. Yeah, I'm going

Dr. Karen Leitner:

to start back with when I was in my primary care practice. So I did med, peds, internal medicine, pediatrics, and I was double board certified, and I got my first job after residency in this community. It was a very cool community practice where it was like an academic, it was a Harvard teaching clinic, but it also was part of a health safety net. But it also was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we had, like, startup people and software people, so the patient population was fascinating. And I thought I was gonna, you know, the people who I worked with, my colleagues, were wonderful. They'd been there for a long time. And I thought, I'm gonna go here forever. You know how we learn? You think like, I'm gonna be the person who is, like, 90 years old and showing up at Grand Rounds still in like, my little suit and tie, you know. And I remember just I went through, you know, I had some kids, and I was like, This doesn't feel sustainable. I feel super overwhelmed. I actually was burned out. I didn't know that. I just remember sitting in, like, I don't know where I was sitting one day, and one of the nurses was talking about her background, and she said, Oh, well, yeah, I do this now. But before that, before that, I was like a rheumatology nurse, and before that, I did some research, and then I did infusion. And I remember thinking, Gosh, as a doctor, it sucks, because this is all I can do. This is all I know how to do. There's nothing else I could do. And I really wanted to do something else, because I felt like I was drowning. And now that I look back, I think, oh, naive, young, burnt out, Karen, like you were so wrong, but that's how I felt, and I think that's how a lot of doctors feel. So I basically left after about seven years in burnout, not sure what I wanted to do, not thinking like I'm going to start a career in all these other things, but feeling like I have to get out of here because I'm not healthy and I'm not well. And I did a bunch of things, which I guess I will tell you what they are. I just thought, let me, let me try a whole bunch of different things. What can a doctor do? I have a training. I have a background. What can I do? And I remember, and it's funny now looking back, but one of the things was I looked at like a doc in a box, you know, like a little urgent care. Oh, maybe I can do that. They wanted to pay me $80 an hour. I look back on that, and I just think, why did I consider that? Because for i i sold myself to continue to do per diem work at the clinic I worked at, and they were going to pay me, I think, like $120 an hour, which still seems too low. But why was I considering a job that would pay me $80 when I knew at least someone was going to pay me 120 I have no idea why I decided I didn't like Doc in a box, because it was really important to me to follow up my patients, and I didn't like the idea that someone's gonna come to me, I'm gonna treat them for something, and then what the heck happens to them, and if something bad happens, I won't know. So then I found out there was something called a CRO which is a contract research organization that wanted doctors to it's like part of the pharmaceutical world, and they needed people to screen patients to do research studies. So if I you know all these big pharmaceutical companies, maybe they're testing a new drug for cholesterol, and they need someone to read the protocols and then interview the patients and be like, do you have this problem? Do you have this problem? Whatever they want it to pay me $400 an hour. I was like, Yes, do that. That sounds great. And turns out I really hated that, because I didn't like. Like several things, but I didn't like that I was paying patients to be in trials that like I literally, if I wanted an extra blood draw, I had to decide how much they would get paid. That felt really icky to me. And what I loved about primary care was like educating patients. And so if they came in and they were using their preventive maintenance inhaler as a rescue. I wanted to be able to say, Don't do that. That's not going to get your and I was prohibited from doing that because that would affect the study integrity. If all of a sudden the people who joined the study, their asthma got much better, I would have been messing with you know, that's not what they're there. It is study. So that was not a good fit for me, so I ended up leaving that role. But I also did some teaching. I volunteered in a homeless shelter for women, and ultimately, I found a role at a startup that I fell into that was doing expert patient second opinion and medical patient advocacy. That was really how I got my eyes opened to the startup world in the sense that I didn't even, I don't think I knew it was a startup, but the role was talking to patients at various companies, eliciting what their medical questions were or their concerns, and then depending on how simple or complicated they were, I could make a recommendation which would be in the, you know, air quotes like, talk to your doctor about this. Because I wasn't giving medical care, but I was helping them navigate. Talk to your doctor about the fact that you had an echo at that outside hospital that shows you have serious valve problems, you know, and they might not know about that. Talk to your doctor about that, right? Or we could get all the medical records, all the labs, all the X rays, even the path slides, and have an expert in that discipline review it and write a report, and then I would get to explain that to the patient. So it was like patient education. It was spending lots of time with patients. It was not being paged and not directing care. So I wasn't responsible if, you know, to get paged in the middle.

Alison Curfman:

It sounds like more of like a wraparound model, yeah, if our system was working the

Dr. Karen Leitner:

way it should, you wouldn't need it. But we can talk about our system another time. So I loved that job, and it really put me into this world of like corporate medicine. And starting to realize, as I got more involved, we started, I started to go on the sales, sales business trips for this company, and so hearing about how companies are using their funds versus insurance. You know, this is all self insured employers, so they could make different decisions about how they wanted to spend money to improve healthcare outside of the healthcare insurance system, which I think is part of what is exciting to you. It's like we're kind of constrained when we're only in these set models, you know. But if I want to do something that helps people with diabetes, like a startup, could approach it from a very different angle. Yeah, I talk

Alison Curfman:

about it as like with startups, you can start with a blank piece of paper and then try and build something that fits kind of between the gaps in the system, as opposed to being in such a rigid and bureaucratic system that there's very little that you can change,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

yeah, which is kind of a very novel thing to think about when you consider that physicians, it's like, the pre med path is very set and established, like, you just take these courses, then you opt into residency on this it's like, we just, it's like, the road, yeah, we just follow the road, and all of A sudden you're like, No, you can design your own road. And our brains are like, what I can and we're like, Yeah, but we don't. We're not. We haven't been used to thinking that way. So that was one startup that I was involved in. Another one I was helping out with was that was in value based healthcare consulting, actually, which was just random, like, I saw an ad on LinkedIn, and they were doing some interesting things, and I got to participate in that. And I think that was really interesting, because now, from my experience working in corporate health already in healthcare, you're just seeing everything. You just have a different perspective. And I think that's one of the things you wanted to talk about, that I'm happy to with you is that our perspective as physicians, we think it's like, but everyone knows this, but everyone doesn't know this. When startups are like, What do you mean? You have to check the blood pressure with a cuff that fits someone's arm. They're like, Oh, I didn't know that the size of the things that

Alison Curfman:

we consider to be just like common knowledge, they're very much not common knowledge. Yes, that is true.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

So I was in that world for many years. I talked to lots of physicians. I realized the value of our ability to think critically, that is the skill we have. And so much of the time doctors are like but I don't know that much, or I'm just this, and your fund of knowledge matters, but what we learn in our training is a way of thinking that is so valuable that most of us under

Alison Curfman:

underestimate Absolutely. And I tell people that all the time, I have people come to me and they're like, well, would I be a good candidate to work with startups? Because. I just or I don't, or I haven't, and it's like you're a doctor. Do you know how to talk to humans? Okay, good. That's a basic foundational need. Do you have any ideas of how where the problems are in the healthcare system? Do you any idea whatsoever on how they could be changed or fixed or better? Like, do you have any opinion whatsoever on that? Well, then yes, you actually do have a you would be a great fit for working with startups. And I think that, you know, we have to train ourselves to think differently, because I was in the same boat when I was approached by a firm to come build a company. I i My first reaction is to get more information. And I, like, went to the library, like the actual library, and I got, like, startups for Dummies, or like startups 101, and I was like, I don't know any of this stuff. I need to read a book on it. I don't actually know if it even, like, finished any of those books, because what I ended up doing was working at the firm for a year, and I learned everything I needed to know, but it is this inherent reaction that, like, I don't know enough, because our standards in in medicine are are so incredibly high. Like to graduate medical school, you have to do so many things and do them well, to match in residency, or to move on to fellowship, or to, you know, get a job as an attending and they're the standards are so high for good reason. And I'm not saying that the standards are low in startups, but it's like some of these skills that you feel like you don't have yet, like a lot of them, are just very learnable in in in your practice, or as you're as you're growing,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

yeah, I think also what we're touching on a little bit is just how prevalent imposter thinking is in health, in medicine, in general, and not just among women, but probably everywhere. It's this idea that, like I'm I don't know enough about this. I don't know how to do it's just thoughts we have that maybe don't align right, like we have it about our own work we do, let alone a whole new industry. We're like, Well, I'm just a primary care doctor. I mean, I don't really know. And it's like, no, you do know. And you have to expect to have those impostery thoughts. You have to expect to have them and to feel uncertain when you're going to do something brand new, it's like starting internship again. Of course, you're going to feel like, what the heck am I doing? And then you have to be able to remind yourself, well, I this is not Doctor hard most of the time. This isn't like, no one's going to die if I'm at a startup and I'm wondering how to, you know, start, like, make some slides that talk about this thing here. I don't even know what we're talking about. It's not as hard as what we as hard as what we already do. And like, You are so good at figuring things out, that's what we do as doctors. Figure stuff out every day, all day long, totally.

Alison Curfman:

And I always like to align it to my own, like, personal specialty in emergency medicine that, like, what we're really good at is triaging problems, knowing what we know and knowing what we don't know, and pattern recognition and and then calling consults on the things we don't know. So I've started so many things that it's like, Am I an expert on all of that? No, do I have an idea and some ideas of how it could change? Yes. Do I know how to identify where the pieces or gaps in my knowledge are and what sort of person would be able to fit in to help me figure that out? Yeah, it's like calling consult. So I think that so many of the skills we have as physicians are actually quite transferable to the startup industry.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

Yeah. And another thing I like to tell people is like fear and courage are, like, very closely tied. So we can feel like it's scary to do this, and it might be scary, it's like, yeah, but you can also just be courageous about it, and like, we're so reluctant to fail or to make a mistake, that's part of what that's part of why you went to the library. You're like, well, if I read everything, then I can't look like an idiot, or I can't fail. Oh, I definitely

Alison Curfman:

look like an idiot, yeah. And then I just have to look and it. Nobody thought I was an idiot, because I was like, this doctor with a great idea that was going to be building the foundations of their company, and they didn't expect me to know all the VCPE stuff. So I just asked questions, and I was like a sponge,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

yes, yeah. We don't have to know everything, but we have to be willing to admit what we don't know. And that is not something that we are trained to embrace, right? We think we're supposed to know you have to let go of that. You're not going to know anything. So let go of that and be willing to ask what you don't know. That's, I think, a huge part of why you've been so successful is you're just open to being like, yeah, I don't know that. Can anyone explain this to me, if you hadn't had that mindset and you showed up in this investment banking world or equity world you're in, how much would you have learned?

Alison Curfman:

Nothing? It's a matter of like, how much does our pride hold us back? Right? Because it's like, oh, I want everyone to think I've got a. Everything together, and then I know everything and that I'm like, really, really, really an expert, whereas if you actually come as your more authentic self that's imperfect and and doesn't know everything, but knows a good amount of of something and knows what you have to contribute. Like, that's the beginning of collaborative relationships. That's beginning of like, real in in anything building a company like these, these are real other humans. These are relationships. Everything is based on relationships. And so I think that people let fear hold the Mac, and then they let pride hold the Mac that like, No, I don't want to step into a world and make it clear that, like, there's a bunch of stuff I don't know, but if you own the part that you do know, and you feel really, really confident in the part that you do know, and you can start finding pathways for where your knowledge can add value. That's where I think the magic happens.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

And I think pride is just fear said differently, right? It's like, I'm afraid people are gonna think negative things about me. It's like we're actually wired to be worried about that, because in the planes or whatever, we're a tribal the humans are wired to live in connection with others. So if I seem like I don't know anything, and I get rejected, I might die. That's what our brain thinks, when, in reality, if you're like, oh, I don't know what the valuation means. Like someone explains it to you, you don't die. So it's just having that. It's like your nervous system has to calm down. How did you calm your nervous system when you started that and you had no idea about anything?

Alison Curfman:

I was just so excited, like, I couldn't believe that somebody wanted me to I was so used to my voice being silenced. I felt like, in the traditional healthcare system, I had like, like, layers and layers and layers of people telling me, like, you can't do that. Please don't say that. This is like, you know, we do things a certain way, like you're not going to be able to make an impact and or people taking credit for my work, because that's how a lot of, like, toxic, yeah, environments work. Is that, like the people who are the the hierarchy, or, you know, it's such a totem pole environment, it's like, oh, you're just a men's student, you're just a fellow, you're just a, you know, junior attending, or, you know, whatever. And I just felt like I was always fighting against in part of it was that I was in peds, and it's like even, no matter how much advocacy I could do for, like, investing in children really is, like a good investment. And it's just like in the traditional fee for service health care system, it was not the priority. And so I felt like I was, I was, it was ingrained in me that like people wouldn't want to listen to my opinion, or wouldn't would would say no or like, would kind of be like, I need to put you in your place, like you This is you're not. You're not C suite, you know, and and I remember when I moved into this new world. I was brought there because of a very specific set of clinical knowledge that I had and some thoughts and ideas that I had, and they valued my opinion so much they'd be like, Oh, well, we can't make that decision without asking Allison, like, she needs to be the one to take a look at this. And we are building this, you know, financial model, but it needs to, you know, mesh with the clinical model. And and I felt so valued all of a sudden. And I It wasn't until that I was in an environment where I had, like, true executive sponsorship, that I realized how bad it was when you don't have that.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

Yeah, yep, I have two questions. The first is, how much of that do you think? I mean, I don't know. Do you do you think there was a gender bias against you when people weren't listening to you and people weren't willing to like you? Said, I'm a pediatrician, yes, check, I'm also young, check I'm also a woman. Check, like did you ever, um,

Alison Curfman:

I mean, it's hard to say. I mean, I think that there is inherent bias in everything that everyone does, because we all look at the world through a specific lens that has been subconsciously built our entire lives. For me, I think a lot of my challenge came from the fact that my ideas were so far outside of mainstream, that they didn't fit in the system. So it was more that I was in the wrong place. So it's not like anyone was inherently like, horrible or anything, or like putting me down. It was just like, it was like a puzzle piece that didn't belong there. And it took me a while to realize that I had other options, like I have now, like, twice in my career, walked away from a very secure job that wasn't the right fit for me at the time. And I don't think a lot of physicians feel like they have that option. I definitely had a ton of limiting beliefs. I was like, I can't leave St Louis, I can't leave this, I can't do that, I can't all these. I. Ants. And it was like, it really took a lot of work on my end to start breaking down those beliefs and start thinking like, well, what if I, what if I did do that? What if I did what if I didn't move, and what if I did some other type of work? And actually, I had started with a coach in early 2020, 2021, and was doing a lot of work on my mindset. And then when this opportunity came, that before my mindset work, if I had been approached by this firm, I don't know that I would have, like, quit my job and gone and done this. And it was like I needed that preparatory work to be able to realize, like, there's a whole big world out there. I can do any of it. And the freedom that you have when you start to realize that, like, I can make money, I could do a bunch of different things to replace my income if I needed to, I'm not reliant on my employment. I have so many skills. Yes, it just gives you so much freedom. And then I noticed this in a lot of the individuals that are taking my course that I've been working with on how they're framing their narrative and positioning themselves in the market and finding startup opportunities. A lot of them like, it's just like this big light bulb has gone off that. Like, my gosh, there's a lot of things out there that I could be doing. So why would I be continuing to make myself mis one of them is like, I'm on call 24/7,

Unknown:

365, days. And I'm like, That's stupid. Why would you do that? Like, and I was like, Okay, we gotta talk about

Alison Curfman:

some boundaries, but maybe I should send you to life coach. But you know, all of a sudden, realizing that, like, you don't have to do that nobody's making you do anything, all of your boundaries are self inflicted. So, and I love how this has turned into, like, Karen, who's trained as a coach, has like, turned into, instead of me asking you questions about her career, she's like, I'm gonna ask you questions.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

Oh, sorry, I just know I love it nice. Well, so Okay, so what I just got so excited about is like, you basically just walk through because we talk about minds and people like, oh, no, minds I would. I just think happy thoughts. Like, what does that even mean? I'm like, No, we go from feeling like these, unvalued, unvaluable. Like, the way we we perceive our value is based on how other people see us. So if someone says, No, Your idea is stupid, or if someone says, I'm not going to pay you that we think, I guess I'm not worth it. And what you started with was, like, I was an out of the box thinker, like, I just didn't fit here. And I was like, Me too, me too. I remember in training and all the people I was at a very academic medical center, they're all going into fellowship to, like, get more learning and whatever. And I was just like, get me out of here. I don't fit. I don't want any more depth of knowledge. I want to live a life and, like, I just, I don't fit. I think there's something about if you feel like inside you don't fit in the paradigm medicine is so like, stay do this forever. There's one way, and this is how you do it. And we're like, guess what? There's a million ways you can do it. There's so many opportunities, but you have to start with and I'm smart and I'm valuable, and I can know stuff, and I have a communicable not communicable. I have a communicable disease. No, I have a like. I have value. I have value. And I bring my value wherever I go, not someone else has to recognize it in me or not, and that for me was so at the heart of my burnout. And even, like, at this tech company where I start up, had a lot of like, political capital, and was really thriving, then we got acquired, and I lost all of that, and I was back into the mindset of like, well, now great, like, you know, feeling resentful, feeling angry, and that's what made me hire my first coach. And then then I really, because I had done, you know, I listened to like, a million coaching podcasts, and done self help things and done therapy, but getting coached to realize, like, oh my god, I'm amazing, and I can do anything, then going back into the world with that mindset, then you find all the opportunities if you don't have that don't even

Alison Curfman:

look and the other thing is, like, I feel like so much of this, there's such a low barrier to entry. I mean, I don't encourage people to, like, quit their job and move across the country and make their husband quit their job and all that. Like, I mean, maybe I've taken some very drastic steps in my career, but I more just encourage people to, like, start exploring this, like, start, start thinking about it in a different way. It doesn't cost you anything to think about it in a different way and get more information. And even in in some of the first weeks of my course, where I work with people on starting to prospect leads, and I'll, I'll do like, some Google searches while sharing my screen about their specialty, and they're like, what like, oh my god, there's like, hundreds of companies, or there's venture firms completely focused on ophthalmology. Are you kidding me? And it's like, and then when they're like, but I don't know how to work with that, and I've gotten a lot of people to the point where. They now are actually having meetings with companies and VC firms, and they come back to me. They're like, Oh my God, they're just humans. They're like, just other humans. And I'm like, yes, if you can walk into room after room after room after room in your physician job and talk to a new person every single time and have a engaged discussion like that. You're able to talk to people in this world, and they're they're curious, they're interested, they're excited. And I think the value of the venture world is making, like, as many connections as possible, and trying to piece it all together as a puzzle. Yeah, and I've told them, like, if you are a doctor, you're a doctor. If you're a doctor that, like, reached out on LinkedIn to a venture person, partner or whatever, and tell them you like their concepts and would love to chat, you're in a totally different league, right? And all that is is a LinkedIn message. But they take that seriously. They're like, Oh my gosh. Like, wow, this is so cool. There's a doctor that's, like, stepped out of their like, you know, Silo over here, and they're interested in what we're doing. All of a sudden, they're, they're super interested to talk to you. And I think that it takes people a long time to even get to the point where they think that, like, I, as an academic physician, or, you know, as a more traditional physician, could even have that conversation. Yeah,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

that was a huge way that I found some of these opportunities. Was a friend of mine suggested I go. She called it a listening tour because I was like, I don't know what I want to do. I really want to do digital health and virtual care. Run master. She's like, go on LinkedIn, Google a bunch of stuff. Find people who look like they're doing interesting things, and just talk to them. And that's what I did. You could send one email a day. You just have to make it feel so tiny for your brain, because your brain is like, oh my god, your brain doesn't want to change. Your brain is like, That's so dangerous. Going into another industry like you might as well be running from a tiger. We're like, no, actually, I'm just going to talk to maybe one human. And

Unknown:

if you want start with

Alison Curfman:

doctors, start with doctors who are in startups. Because guess what? Like, I got outreach from people all the time to be like, Hey, what are you doing? How are you doing that? And, and even if it was more of like a messaging conversation, it's like, we're all colleagues,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

okay, but some people are not collegial, okay? My experience, like, I remember a

Alison Curfman:

little Pollyanna with my views. I I like to paint people in a good light, I know. But the

Dr. Karen Leitner:

other thing is, like, if you, if you only reach out to one person, and they're not nice, and they say, No, we can just, like, die. But if you reach out to 10 people and then one of them says no, but like, six of them say yes, it's just a volume game. It's like, time on that. I can't

Alison Curfman:

even tell you how many people the I think the most common response for me, like just kind of chatting or outreach to people, is ghosting, like, not abnormal, totally fine. I just figure they've got their own lives, or they didn't see it, or whatever. I even have that, like with clients and stuff. I'll, like, have a discovery meeting. I'll do it. I'll ask them if they want a proposal. They say they want a proposal. I'll send them one. I never hear from them again. That's like, very not uncommon. But I've been on the other side. I've been on the side of the startup where it's like, everything's on fire and like, you have to figure out what's important. And just because you went down this one direction and thought you needed a consultant, and then, oh my god, we're not even, like, we're not even doing that, and I forgot to even respond to the email again. So I don't take anything personally, and it's all about, like, relationships and connections. And so I do have a lot of core relationships with people that I talk to every month, and it's in the setting of like, Hey, how can we support each other and their true friendships, you know, and people in the industry and and I'm constantly giving them ideas. They're constantly giving me ideas. And I don't care if some random person says no to me or blows me off or ghosts me, because it's like, well, there's a billion other people in the world doing these sorts of things, so, like, that's just not the right one to talk to. Yeah,

Dr. Karen Leitner:

I think about too. Like, for some of us working in in medicine, is so siloed and it's kind of lonely and it's like humdrum, that even the act of like, knowing this is an outlet for you to find someone interesting doing something else and just make a connection and have a conversation that, in and of itself, can restore some of your enthusiasm or energy for what you're doing, because you just feel like there's other stuff out there. I might use to stay exactly where I am, but now I'm not telling myself there's nothing else out there. I have to do this for the rest of my life, and I'm going to hate it. That's like, the learned helplessness. It's like, we want to shift into what if there is some what if there could be. And then I go explore it, and then I'm like, actually, I don't want to do any of that. Okay, now I'm back doing of that. Okay, now I'm back doing what I'm doing, but I'm happier about it, you know? And then another thing you said that I just wanted to highlight on is part of what was so motivating for you was you had a really strong, compelling why you were like, This matters. I want to help these kids in a different way. I see, like, maybe you can. I. I'm sure you've already told your audience, the way, I imagine it is just you seeing kids like bouncing back and bouncing back and all this healthcare wastage and all this suffering that's not necessary. If there was a better system. If you're doing this just because you're like, I hate what I'm doing, and I'm going to force myself to go to a startup, even though it sounds totally awful to me, and I hate the idea of and it's so boring that might not work out well for you, you know, just like for me, and coaching, I wasn't, like, what else can I do? Oh, I'm gonna be a coach. Because that seems like an easy, you know, way to, like, earn another income. It's like, no way. If you're not, like, fired up by in some way, by what you're doing, it's gonna make it that much harder for you to do all the uncomfortable stuff you have to do to get yourself in it. You know,

Alison Curfman:

it's true, yeah, and I lot of that came from my clinical practice and just these very, very deep and raw emotional experiences I had with some of these families that it lit a fire under me and I, I just feel like there's so much pain and suffering that we see as physicians. When we see people in their most vulnerable state, or, you know, for peds, it's like we're trying to support these parents that would do anything for their child, and the system is just failing them again and again and again. And I think that when you have that very deep emotional connection to a problem or to something that you like to solve, it propels you forward so quickly. I remember very early in my in my journey with this, this new firm, I hadn't even moved yet, hadn't signed anything with them, but I did get a call on like a Friday from the head of the firm that said, like, Hey, I'm going to go up to Minneapolis on Tuesday. We're going to meet with the CEO of United Healthcare, not not the not that one, a Denver one. And he was like, Can you come with me and tell me you can talk to them about your idea for kids? And I was like, Sure. And I remember thinking like, so I say yes to a lot of things. It's like, Why say no? If you could say yes. And so I had no idea. I honestly don't even remember. I have no idea what we talked to this guy about. We definitely did not have a pitch deck yet because it was so early. And I remember going up to Minneapolis and going to the UHC headquarters and going up this very fancy elevator and going into this room, and he was like, Okay, well, like Allison, I want you to tell him what you're thinking about for complex kids and what they need. And so I just told a story. I told the story of, like, the work I had done at a small hospital and the patients that we had impacted and and just some stories. And like, one of the executives, like, started crying and said, My child lived this. My child had cancer. We have lived this story. And the funny thing is, with with complex peds is like, somebody knows, everybody knows somebody who has had a sick child if they have not had one themselves. And then I just remember the conversation going in this direction that was just like, what are we going to do about this? Like, how are we going to fix this? How can we partner? How can we grow together? How can we build something and and united became one of our first partners in our first state, which you know, was well over a year later. At this point, we had no model. We didn't build anything. It was like me, Allison, a pediatrician from Missouri, who wants to tell the CEO of United how the system is broken for these children and families. And so you're right that like having something pulling you as opposed to something pushing you is so much more compelling, not just for you, but for everyone around you. Like I just, I felt like, I like, walked around and told stories for a year. I was like, This is what happens to kids. This is what happens to their families. This how it could be different, and it's mobilizing. It's meaningful. People care about it, whether they're an investment banker or a payer or an analyst at a PE firm, like, people care about, you know, meaningful concepts. And so, yeah, I think that having this concept of, like, what's the pull, as opposed to, like, what am I trying to run away from? Yep.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

So that's like scarcity and abundance, like, abundance as I'm running towards something, and scarcity is like, get me the hell out of here. And I know we're sort of almost out of time, but this ties so closely to my, sort of, my compelling why? Like, the reason I'm even here talking to you right now, in addition to just the fact that I love you and I want to support you in anything you do, is, I know there's doctors out there who are like, I can't do anything, but what I'm doing now, and I'm miserable at what I'm doing now, and I want to be able to tell them, No, you can do other things and you are valuable. And here's what's possible, but exactly like what you're saying about the compelling why? Like, the reason I ultimately became a coach was because I experienced so much. Stress and burnout, that I don't want that to happen to other people. And that's really what's pushed me. You know, that's why I it's like 450 plus women who've coached with me. It's like, I want to go find every single person who felt the way I did, so they don't have to feel that way because it's horrible, and we can feel so much better.

Alison Curfman:

And there's a whole big world out there. We're just not looking at it. We're not willing to see it. Yeah, yeah. And you

Dr. Karen Leitner:

have so much more power than you think, if you can work on helping yourself believe that absolutely

Alison Curfman:

yeah. Well, I think this has been such an incredible conversation. I think that this is one of the most important things that I deal with with physicians, and I'll be, you know, very clear. I am not a life coach. I have, I've definitely had a lot of executive coaching myself, but I am seeing it as a just pervasive issue with people that are like considering dabbling in this, or considering doing something, but just so held back by their own belief system. I know how much I personally got out of you know. I mean, I have had so many coaches over the past five years, but just just continually working on my mindset, you didn't

Dr. Karen Leitner:

just fix everything and stop getting coached. Oh no, yeah. And oh,

Alison Curfman:

this is so interesting, too. So I got my first coach in early 2021 when I felt like everything was falling apart, and I was like, I apart. And I was like, I know I have a lot of things to do and things to say, but I don't know what's what I was supposed to be doing. And then my big, big opportunity came in late 2021 and I was totally positioned to be like, Yes, I am leaping. I'm making this big move. And then one of the very first things that my firm invested in because they knew they, like, plucked me out of a hospital and dropped me into a PE firm was executive coaching, so they they paid a lot to coach me, to form me into, you know, what they needed me to be, and how they needed me to grow. And so it's like even industry

Unknown:

really values coaching.

Dr. Karen Leitner:

Hey, but listen, what was the return on that investment? They invested a lot in you, okay, what do you think they invested? Like,$20,000 $30,000

Alison Curfman:

a lot more than that, okay, $100,000 probably, probably. What

Dr. Karen Leitner:

do you think the valuation is of the company that you built, successful nine figures, right? So it's like if they paid a lot, but actually, they made a really smart investment. It's just a better way to think about it. Um, so everyone listening who's like, I can't afford to invest in coaching. It's like, well, you spent 300 whatever, $1,000 on your medical education. Like, what's it worth it to you to invest in your happiness and your effectiveness and your Yeah, and

Alison Curfman:

now that I'm like building a bunch of different companies, I invest a lot in continued coaching, development programs, masterminds, I find that that is kind of the secret to really rapid and sustained growth, is that you're investing in your own growth. So this has been a great conversation. I feel like, I

Unknown:

feel like you've been like, coaching me a little bit throughout this podcast, which is very cool.

Alison Curfman:

And I would love to be able to, you know, continue to share these concepts with this audience about, like, you know, what does it really take to break out? Yeah, I can give you all sorts of technical things and frameworks and directions and all these things you can do, but you can't actually do it until you like, make a decision to do it or think you can do it. And so I really appreciate you bringing this perspective on mindset, and for anyone that wants to find you, what's the best way to find you online. Karen, thank

Dr. Karen Leitner:

you so much for that. I coach women physicians, women MDs and DOs exclusively, and you can find me on Karen Lightner, md.com and I have a group program that offers CME and my next cohort is starting in May. It's called How to feel better for women doctors. And we work on all this stuff. So anyone who finds me three years, very

Alison Curfman:

cool. Well, we will put that in the show notes that everyone can find that. But thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for listening to startup physicians. Don't forget to like, follow and share. You.