If you are listening to this, chances are high that you’re a woman physician leader juggling:
- people at work who rely on you
- people at home who rely on you
- a calendar that feels like a high-speed train with no brakes
There is simply too much input, too many people asking for your time. Some days it feels like clearing the entire calendar and starting fresh is the best answer.
I recall some women in my life saying they experienced this kind of reset during the early days of the pandemic — when everything just stopped. School, work travel, sports, and recitals. For a moment, the family unit was the center of the universe again.
Everything slowed to a pace that allowed for reflection. Some were able to take their foot off the gas.
That did not happen for me, my family, or most women physician leaders that I know. While the world came to a screeching halt, we kept going.
Without the time or energy to even stock up on toilet paper.
But what if you could just press pause?
Can You Create Time?
As a woman physician leader, there’s always a deadline looming.
- A meeting to prep for
- A workflow to update
- A quality dashboard that needs fixing
- A grant that’s been sitting half-written for weeks…
Oh — and that never-ending to-do list? Still growing.
Then come the last-minute fires to put out. The urgent patient cases. And on top of it all — your kid’s soccer tournament and your partner’s birthday.
I mean, honestly? I’m exhausted just thinking about this Tuesday.
When do you get time to recalibrate? When do you reflect, recharge, or remember what you wanted your life to feel like?
Time for yourself is necessary to build the resilience needed to face the daily challenges in medicine and leadership. But time won’t just appear. It’s not waiting in the pantry next to the protein bars.
We must create time. Set an intention. Claim it.
Where the Pause Meets the Purpose
I believe you can build a habit of pausing — in your day, in your week — so you can think clearly, act intentionally, and live aligned with your values.
When I started setting aside 30 minutes every weekend to outline my week ahead, I soon realized I really wanted 60 minutes! And I took it.
The jumble in my brain — the mental load that felt like trying to solve a sudoku puzzle with only pens in the drawer and no eraser — started to settle.
The meetings, slides, teaching, rounds, flute & baseball practice, a power walk for me… it all started to flow a bit more smoothly.
- I forgot fewer things.
- I asked for help more often.
- I canceled the stuff that didn’t make the cut.
With that one small pause, I began to see my time through a values-based lens.
And it became clearer — painfully at times — what wasn’t truly a priority.
From there, I could navigate my time in a more productive way.
- It became obvious where I could delegate at work.
- It opened the door to conversations at home about what needed to shift.
- I could even track the blank space in my calendar — and instead of doom scrolling, I could treat it like it mattered. Because it does.
Leading with Heart
With my team, we started every meeting with a simple pause to share a meaningful moment.
At first, there were long silences.
But I let the silence be. And slowly, the moments came. Small things. Important things. Real things. And over time, it became second nature — something we all looked forward to.
It was as if everyone started noticing more meaning in the little moments around them. And little by little, the culture shifted. It felt like a warm hug at the start of every meeting.
Pressing pause has shown up with real value in other rituals as well. Like our family dinners.
These days, we fight to preserve at least three nights to sit down and eat together. Just the four of us.
And during those meals, we do our little ritual: roses, buds, and thorns. What was good, what was hard, and what we’re looking forward to.
It’s simple. But it slows us down. It makes us reflect. And it gives me a glimpse into my sons’ world that I might’ve missed otherwise.
This practice generally shines a light for me on the values held by my family – sometimes for my young sons it’s simply a wish to get to the weekend so they can play video games! But sometimes they have a reflection so profound I must take a mental screenshot.
The kids have even broadened their topics to include “stems” and “roots” because sometimes there is a grey area that they long to discuss.
I’ve learned so much from them.
Pause. Reflect. Realign.
Learning to build in these “purposeful pauses” — the weekly calendar check-in, the caring moments with my team, the family dinner conversations — they’ve saved me from the brink more times than I can count.
They’ve pulled me back when I wanted to throw in the towel. They’ve slowly helped me feel more balanced, not because life got easier, but because I started living it more intentionally.
The daily and weekly habits of pausing have helped me navigate the multitude of demands in my professional and personal life that are always coming at me and to face them more in stride and less like I am getting hit by a firehose.
So here’s my invitation to you:
What would it look like to build in one pause this week?
Maybe it’s 15 minutes with your journal. Maybe it’s a meeting with yourself on Sunday night. Maybe it’s just five quiet minutes in the car before you walk into the hospital.
But whatever it is —
Protect it like it matters. Because it does.
We don’t need to wait for a global shutdown to reset our lives. We can start now. One pause at a time.