What Healthcare Leaders Will Take Away
For clinical leaders, physicians and APPs, nurse leaders, and healthcare executives who feel like they spend every shift putting out fires: the problem is usually not how hard you are working. It is that you are leading on autopilot, from an energy you never chose.
Host Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP talks with Vicki Landers, DPT MHA PCC — a professional speaker, coach, and consultant at Transforming Healthcare Coaching — about awareness as the most useful leadership skill most of us were never taught. Vicki's premise is simple: most healthcare leaders are running on autopilot and do not know it, and the energy they bring into a room spreads to everyone in it. The good news is that noticing takes seconds, and it can be practiced.
By the end of this episode you will be able to:
- Recognize when you are leading on autopilot and from a draining, reactive energy.
- Use the “thinking, feeling, doing” pause to notice your stress in about 30 seconds — before it leaks onto your team.
- Read the energy in a room and intentionally set the tone with simple check-ins and huddles.
- Lengthen the gap between what happens and how you respond, so you choose your reaction instead of defaulting to it.
What Does It Mean for a Healthcare Leader to Be “On Autopilot”?
The tell is familiar: answering a text or a page while someone stands waiting at the nurse's station, half-present in every conversation. Lillian names what is really happening underneath it — leaders “leading from a place of scarcity and not even realizing it.” The first move is not to work harder. It is to notice.
Why Does a Leader's Energy Matter More Than What They Do?
The reverse is the leadership opportunity: “you behave in a way that shows compassion, care, concern, curiosity,” and the team reflects that back to you. The contrast between draining (“catabolic”) and constructive (“anabolic”) energy comes from energy leadership work; Lillian is an Energy Leadership Index™ Master Practitioner through iPEC. And as Lillian notes in the episode, emotionally aware leaders catch the early signs of depletion in themselves and their teams, so they can act before it gets out of control.
Awareness is a skill you can practice with support
If you want a dedicated space to see your own patterns as a leader, book a complimentary Clarity Call with Lillian.
How Can I Become More Self-Aware in the Middle of a Busy Shift?
The point is to insert a beat between the thought and the action. Our thoughts “don't necessarily need to come out of our mouth.” Simply noticing that your “heart rate went up” or your breathing got tight takes two seconds and changes how you lead in the next moment.
Accepting the chaos is part of the same skill. Rather than resisting a hard shift, Vicki suggests naming it — “Yes, we're gonna have chaos today” — and even finding some humor in it. Accepting what is frees you to manage how you show up instead of fighting reality.
What If I Feel My Stress Before I Can Name It?
That access is what makes the skill useful with a team:
- Thinkers can ask, on purpose, “how am I actually feeling?” — and use an emotions wheel to name it precisely.
- Feelers can pause to name the emotion, which tends to release some of its grip.
- The embodied can read the physical signal as early data.
Tapping all three — thinking, feeling, and the body's signal — makes you more connected to the people around you and, in Vicki's words, “a better leader.” A low-effort way in: watch Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Both are accurate about how emotion and memory work, and once you can spot which “character” is driving you — or a colleague — you cannot un-see it.
How Do I Read the Room and Set the Tone for My Team?
In virtual and hybrid settings you have to build that connection on purpose, because you lose most of the nonverbal cues. A few things that work, straight from the episode:
- A one-word check-in. “What's one word on how you're arriving? What is the weather today?” People answer “I'm a rain cloud” or “I am a thunderstorm” — and naming it lets it settle.
- A gratitude round. “What's one thing you're grateful for?” Vicki ran this for two years with a team, and people said it changed how they experienced the meeting and their day after it.
- Leadership huddles and walking the floor. Physically walking through your clinic or unit — visible and present at once — improves engagement, raises the sense of being listened to, and creates a felt sense of safety for staff and patients alike.
None of this takes more than about five minutes. The leader's real job here is to intentionally cultivate the relationships and the room, rather than leave the culture to chance.
Bring this work to your team
Health system, academic center, or team that wants a culture of awareness and psychological safety? Explore our coaching programs for healthcare leaders and organizations.
How Do I Lead My Team Through a Change or Policy I Don't Agree With?
Vicki's case study makes it concrete. A leader she coached had struggled for years in a role where she could not show up the way she wanted, drained by other people's energy. The turning point was a single question — “what would it be like if you thought about what was possible?” — which unlocked a wave of options. She sorted through them, separated what she could control from what she could not, and eventually moved to an organization where she is now thriving as the role model she wanted to be. Sometimes the answer is a different internal choice; sometimes it is a different room. The awareness is what makes the choice visible.
What Is the One Shift That Changes How a Leader Shows Up?
And the effect does not stay with you. Your awareness changes how your team experiences you, which changes the culture. As Vicki reframes it, “Your coworkers are not your enemy. They're your army to help the patients.” Once you start seeing your own patterns — and everyone else's — you see them everywhere, which is exactly the point.
Key Takeaways for Healthcare Leaders
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to lead “on autopilot” in healthcare?
Why does a leader's energy affect the whole team?
What is a quick way to become more self-aware during a busy shift?
I feel my stress physically before I can name it — is that a problem?
How can a leader set the tone in a meeting or huddle?
How do I lead my team through a change I don't agree with?
Keep exploring
More on energy, teams, and influence in the Leadership Collection, and sustainable practice in the Wellbeing Collection.
Episode Transcript
Download transcript (.txt) ↓︎Segment 01 · 00:00 – 00:44
Introduction: The Impact of Leadership Energy
Segment 02 · 00:44 – 01:21
Guest Introduction: Vicki Landers on Leadership Awareness
Segment 03 · 01:21 – 02:35
Understanding Autopilot in Healthcare Leadership
Segment 04 · 02:35 – 03:23
The Importance of Emotional Awareness in Leadership
Segment 05 · 03:23 – 06:33
Practical Tips for Gaining Self-Awareness
Segment 06 · 06:33 – 08:31
The Role of Attitude in Leadership
Segment 07 · 08:31 – 20:51
Techniques for Self-Reflection and Awareness
Segment 08 · 20:51 – 27:14
Reading the Room: Understanding Team Dynamics
Segment 09 · 27:14 – 32:51
Case Study: Transformative Leadership Awareness
Segment 10 · 32:51 – 34:24
Conclusion: Moving from Awareness to Action
Read the full transcript
Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast — Episode 93: Awareness as the Greatest Superpower for Healthcare Leaders. Host: Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP. Guest: Vicki Landers, DPT MHA PCC — professional speaker, coach, and consultant at Transforming Healthcare Coaching. Published January 26, 2026.
Lillian Liang Emlet: What if the difference between burning out your team and building them up isn't about what you do, but about the energy you're leading from without even realizing it.
Vicki Landers: All multitasking is attention shifting and when we attention shift, it wastes time. And then we're not actually getting the full benefit of any of the things that we're either trying to do or we're trying to consume.
Vicki Landers: if you can start to recognize that other people might have a different perspective on a situation that tells us that you can too. So you can change that lens you're wearing
Lillian Liang Emlet: Hi everyone. We're super excited today to be talking with Vicki Landers about all things awareness that leaders need to have. So you're about to walk into a meeting where you know someone's going to push back. Your jaw is tight, your shoulders are up by your ears, and you're already rehearsing your defense. What if you could shift that energy in 10 seconds flat before you even get into the room? What if the difference between burning out your team and building them up isn't about what you do, but about the energy you're leading from without even realizing it.
Lillian Liang Emlet: And I want to start with something that, Vicki, that you said to me before we hit record the most healthcare leaders are running on autopilot and don't even know it. What do you mean by that?
Vicki Landers: Autopilot is just this lack of awareness what you're doing. You're just doing things because that's what you do. That's so much of what happens in healthcare. We do it, "This is just what I do. This is just what I do. This is just what I do." Without stopping to say, "Why am I doing this? Why does this matter? Who am I affecting? And even better, how is this affecting myself?"
Lillian Liang Emlet: And so, so much of what we do in healthcare is almost automatic because we've learned it, we've been trained in it. We are ingrained, and so many of us in the healthcare, the frontline clinical space, and even in leadership, we're making dozens of micro decisions and micro assumptions while we're running around. Sometimes barely even taking care of ourselves. And so the problem isn't about, what we're consciously deciding. Instead, we are leading from a place of scarcity and not even realizing it.
Lillian Liang Emlet: And so research shows that emotionally aware leaders catch early burnout signs in themselves and their teams. And that awareness allows leaders and their teams to proactively take care of each other before it gets out of control. And so in this episode, and especially because it's a new year, Vicki and I are gonna really talk about how do we gain greater awareness? How do we gain greater meta awareness as leaders so that you can identify problems sooner? Find tools to shift it and think about our energy as, and our energy as leaders is the most important thing for your team. And so our main point for this episode is going to be how can we notice first. And then intentionally shift second with our leadership teams. So Vicki, set the scene for us. When you work with healthcare leaders, what does running an autopilot look like in their day to day?
Vicki Landers: It looks like looking at their phone, answering a text, answering their phone while somebody stands in the doorway or stands at the nurse's station, and they're just doing all of the things and they're doing it without really thinking about what they're doing, they're not thinking about the consequences to themselves. They're not thinking about the consequences to the people around them that are the result of kind of the attitude that they have in that moment. We default when we're under stress. Well, we default to all sorts of things, but when we're under stress, we tend to default to a couple of different energetic presentations. We tend to default to a victim or a conflict mode. Conflict mode means "I'm right. I'm right. I'm right. You're whatever. I don't know what's going on with you, but I'm right." And that can come across and it, it comes across in ways that damage the people around us and we don't even know we're doing it. and the, or it can be the victim mentality, which is, it doesn't really matter what I do, so I'm just gonna do things. Again, that bleeds into the people that we're working with. We're pulling them into our energy that's catabolic, that's destructive in nature. and we're doing it because we're just... it's not that we're horrible people, it's not that we have bad intentions, it's that we're just not paying attention to what's happening.
Lillian Liang Emlet: That's really insightful. I do. You know, I can just even picture it like what you described, healthcare leaders are often on their phone, always getting notified, getting paged, sort of semi distracted all the time, even when you're, they're trying to talk with you and you, and whenever people are behaving like that during a committee meeting, you realize they don't have your full attention. And so basically, you really can't feel like they're supporting you in any way.
Vicki Landers: I think everybody knows the research now, the research that says that 'multitasking is a myth'. All multitasking is attention shifting and when we attention shift, it wastes time And then we're not actually getting the full benefit of any of the things that we're either trying to do or we're trying to consume. I would love to see a shift in the way that we experience our world worlds in healthcare. I'd love to see a shift in allowing people to even if giving them 10, 15 seconds to focus on something, and to focus on the, the people that they're with, and recognize that as a leader it is important that you are really focused because your attention and your care to your team will show up when you behave anabolically or you behave in a way that shows compassion, care, concern, curiosity, they're gonna reflect that back to you. if you don't do that, there isn't, there isn't a whole lot of hope, to get that within your team, unless you have really strong participants within your team who recognize this on their own.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Yeah. You know, it's really funny. I was just thinking, it always feels like we're always putting out fires clinically on any particular shift, and even in leadership, how many times do we hear our colleagues talk about the fact that, "Oh, I'm just putting out fires." Like every single manager I know, assistant manager, it's always about. I can't strategically plan because I'm always dealing with a staffing issue or some kind of emergency. They always put other things like professional development, leadership development, education programs will love to do. Everybody wants this programs on the back burner because they're always doing that firefighting boat and I think what you sort of described it, whether you're sort of in that conflict or victim sort of energy.
Vicki Landers: Yeah. There are fires to put out. That's part of the... that's one thing that I really like people to be aware of, that "Yeah, we have fires and they need to be put out." And when we just stop for that moment and accept that things are chaotic, things are demanding. That awareness in and of itself that just says, yes, there's gonna be a lot that I need to do today, allows us to accept what is. And when we get into a space of being like, "Yes, we're gonna have chaos today," we are so much better able to just stop and be like, "Oh look! Oh look! Chaos." Just take that step in a moment and be like, "Ah! Yes! Chaos! Look at this." And when you can kind of laugh about the chaos, it actually puts you in a space to be able to, manage who you are and manage how you're showing up for the people around you.
Lillian Liang Emlet: I love that.
Vicki Landers: chaos is. When And when we can let go, it makes such a difference in actually our own exhaustion level and in the people around us.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Funny, you mentioned that because I was just thinking, you know, how many times... and you talked about this quite a bit, when with, um. As a a professional speaker about how do you see things? Are you looking at it through like this color lens or this other color lens? So I was just thinking like what you were talking about, like, "Okay, is this shift gonna be a chaos shift?" And do you embrace it as like it's exciting and it's fun and it's like rosy colored pink, or is this gonna be a chaos shift and I'm complaining and grumbling and being really negative and distracted about it. And so it was sort of the attitude by which you even approach like that day. Especially when you own it, it's even the attitude about how you see that day.
Vicki Landers: Yeah, the attitude is very interesting. Attitudes were very interesting to me because, you know, so I have an example from when I was teaching people how to use software. So we're doing EMR training and I could say one thing and one clinician would be like, "Oh, great. Got it." And another clinician you would think I had just ruined their life. Like I had taken their firstborn child. this was so interesting to me. This is part of why I've like taken this pathway of my career is that why is it that two people respond to totally different ways, to the same set of situation, same set of information. And you know, it's because of life experience up to that point. But if you can start to recognize that other people might have a different perspective on a situation that tells us that you can too. So you can change that lens you're wearing from the "Okay, got it." And, or, well, from the, "Oh my gosh. My role is ending " To, I think it's really interesting when we start to be aware, that I have a choice and how I react and respond. Now we can have thoughts or we can absolutely have thoughts that are going through our head about a situation. They don't necessarily need to come out of our mouth, But if we can think about them, we can be like, these are the thoughts that I'm having, "Ooh, this is the emotion that it's causing in me." And then take that space to decide what do I wanna do with that in this moment? Instead of just being like, thoughts, feelings, actions, without like, taking that moment. And when I say moment, I mean like moment it doesn't take but a second or two to say, "Oh, heart rate went up. Oh, my breathing got tight." You can do that in two seconds and it will make a huge difference in how you interact with your team and how you lead your team.
Lillian Liang Emlet: I think this is why we're really focusing on self-awareness so much in this month on the podcast, you know, so when you help one of your clients, a leader see their stress pass pattern for the very first time, either through a debrief or even just in the coaching conversation. What's that moment like for them? What do they say? What do they feel? Take us sort of through that moment with your client.
Vicki Landers: There's sometimes there's a little self-judgment and there's like, "Oh my God, I cannot believe I do that." Which is completely normal. It makes sense when you add an awareness that is something that you didn't expect. But then it's usually followed by this empowerment, "Oh, I can do something different." And When we recognize that we do have the power within ourselves to do something different, all sudden you start getting ideas and they're like, "Okay, when I'm walking into this meeting where I am anticipating people being contentious, well, first of all, I'm anticipating that, so that's creating issues inside of me." So let's go of the anticipation. And so you can start to see them problem solve. I have this one person that, this coworker that I work with, that there's always some sort of friction. Maybe I can do something different to make the friction a little bit less. It just starts to give people this empowered, and when you're empowered, you can start to generate ideas and you start to go to that energy level of curiosity and creation and creativity.
Lillian Liang Emlet: It is really funny. Just even hearing you talk about that story makes me realize, it's not that different from when we teach. It's like that light bulb goes off. You almost can see the light bulb, but it's not light bulb about knowing a new fact or knowing a new action. It's a light bulb in terms of, "Oh, I can notice myself." Because we often don't notice ourselves. We don't really recognize and give ourselves the praise and kudos that we need, you know? And so as you talked about that, it made me realize like in a group business coaching program that I'm in. The coach pointed out that all of us, this is why coaches need coaches. This is why everybody needs coaches because when you're inside the glass container, like on display, you know, you're sort of like, in a fishbowl, you can't talk about yourself 'cause you're already inside the water being on display. And so the only way to understand how you are perceived by others or where you need to go is going to be all of the people around you so they can shine that mirror so that you can become more aware about how it looks and to try on something different to see how's that work instead?
Vicki Landers: I love this fishbowl idea, because we are on display, and we actually don't have a whole lot of perception about how other people perceive us. We can guess. We can think, but you know, which is why I tend to like the 360 reviews because you do get an idea of whether your self perception and the perception of those around you is the same or different. I've also seen people walk through a 360 where they have very different perceptions, and that created a great awareness for the team leader to understand that things that they thought that they were doing really well, we're not having the impact on the team that they had hoped. So again, they start to started to have awareness and choices that they could make when they, when they got some feedback from the external, from the external people.
Lillian Liang Emlet: 360 are always very nerve wracking, I think for most people. And at the same time, it's also really good because just like you said, having the opportunity to realize "I can make this better."
Vicki Landers: Right. And as healthcare providers. That's kind of why we went into this business in the first place. You know, most people who are who've gone into healthcare. Do it because they want to help. It's not because they wanna be burned out. It's not because they wanna be exhausted and and frustrated. It's because they wanna make a difference. So one of the things that I talk to people who work in healthcare about is this, "You're not just making a difference for the patients, that's why you went into it. But you also have the capacity to make a difference for everybody you work with. They're not your enemy. They are your army." And that's the first time I've said that, and I really like that. Your coworkers are not your enemy. They're your army to help the patients.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Yeah, we are all much more together than we realize, and yet so much of it, we create these conflicts for, for no reason.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Let's get practical. Let's change the course a little bit in terms of, "Okay, so fine, I wanna be more aware. I can't afford like an external coach to do all this mirroring that you're talking about." So what if you're a normal clinician out there in the front lines, you don't have access to coaching or a 360, but how can you find that moment to pause to see something different for yourself, to become more aware. What do you, what can you even do?
Vicki Landers: So I have an activity that I do with my coaching clients, and it's called the "Thinking, being, doing activity."
Lillian Liang Emlet: Okay.
Vicki Landers: And it's just you... And I have them practice this in low stress environments. So the first thing that you do is you don't do this when you're in the middle of chaos. You do this when you're driving home, but you ask yourself, "What am I thinking? How is that making me feel? And what am I doing as a result of that? And that's just starting, just and literally start it. I have people set a timer. And it goes off throughout the day that says, oh, what am I thinking? How am I feeling? And what am I doing? Because when we get practice at doing that in low stress environments, then when we end up in a high stress environment, like we're about to walk into that meeting. We've already practiced that neural pathway of, "What am I thinking? How am I feeling? What am I doing?" And you can start to make a choice about what you're doing. So it, it literally can take you 30 seconds to run through this process. And when you practice it, then it's a nice one that you can then start to make choices about what you're doing. So I call it, it's a terrible name. It's the thi, it's the thinking, feeling doing exercise, but it works.
Lillian Liang Emlet: I like that and it's, you know, it's really surprising to me actually, so many people in healthcare are very cognitive centered and there's a lot of rumination and self-flagellation thoughts. I personally probably have a feel first, so I always tell people there's three options in life. One is gonna be you're a thinker first. You're gonna have all these thoughts first. You might have a gut reaction, like you'll have an emotion and you're actually pretty good at labeling emotions. That's a minority of us but the empaths out there, feel it first. And then the question is, can they name it and label it with that motion wheel? And we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And then the last group of people are the embodied, where they notice it, how they show up in the body. So it's the constriction in the throat, is the tightness in the chest is that weird feeling in your stomach.
Lillian Liang Emlet: And so it's usually. It shows up somewhere in that axial location. And so there's three options, so you'll identify with one. But I do agree with you. I do like the thinking, feeling, doing, because majority of healthcare professionals I've noticed are the thinking first.
Vicki Landers: Yeah. And what's fun about what you just talked about is that we can change that, or not change it, but we can access it. So if I'm a thinker first. I can always ask myself the question, 'how am I actually feeling?' And I did an activity last year. It was one of my individual goals was I have the emotions wheel, I was, because I am a thinker, I'm like, "I'm gonna start naming these emotions so I can do a better job of actually picking a word that matches." But you can, if you're an emotional person, but you wanna tap into all three of those because when you tap into all three of that, that intuition, that embodiment. And your feelings and your thinking, it actually makes you more connected people that are around you and you can start to understand them a little bit better. You can understand the people who feel first or who embody or have intuition first. And it actually
Lillian Liang Emlet: makes
Vicki Landers: you more empathetic to those around you, which makes you a better leader.
Lillian Liang Emlet: And I think another tip will be is in the show notes we'll have the motions wheel. But just like you mentioned, it can be really overwhelming 'cause there are a lot of some emotions and layered emotions. Another tip and trick would be just to go watch the movie "Inside Out and Inside Out 2". It gives you with a simple color palette, actually some neuronal cartoon demonstration of how our neural circuitry is with long-term and short-term memory and how we, embed these and those emotions are interwoven. And so it actually is scientifically accurate. The movies are both scientifically very accurate and if to keep it simple, simple is always great. Just know which of those characters that you're sort of embodying, and we'll give you another challenge. See, when you are in a next meeting, or you're in a moment, or you're in interprofessional conflict in the hallway of your hospital, see what character is coming out in each person in that moment because you can actually see it once, you can't unsee what you already have begun to see. So when you try start to practice, you'll give yourself a good laugh because you have to see the characters inside your colleagues.
Vicki Landers: Oh, I love that I'm picturing them kind of either on somebody's shoulder or standing behind them.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Yeah. So, that's one thing is our own self-awareness.
Lillian Liang Emlet: And so moving on to, what if we have to read the room, right? We often, like my friend often tells her son all the time, "Read the room." He's a teenager. So, but how do we teach that to our kids, to our colleagues?.
Vicki Landers: You know, I think it's interesting because we instinctively feel the energy in a space. We may not acknowledge it, but we feel it. And so there are visual clues. There's this, there's this, there's know, look see what the clues are. Now they're not a hundred percent accurate. This could also mean I'm cold. But it could also mean that I'm closed off and I'm angry and I don't wanna be here. Just... use your natural intuition, that embodiment thing that we talked about a few minutes ago to feel the room. I kind of make a comparison between the contentious meeting, the one where nobody's talking or, and if they are, they're blaming and they're complaining versus the last concert that you went to, the one where the vibe is fun and exciting and everything is designed to give you this great experience. Both of those are energy. But if you can start to recognize, "Okay, when I'm having fun, this is what the room feels like when I'm not having so much this fun, this is what the room feels like." And then you can start to tailor your activities and actions in the way that you phrase things to to help support the people in the room. Like the person who thought I had taken their first child I taught them about the new, the new processes in the EMR.
Lillian Liang Emlet: It's really funny in the virtual space, I think many groups, did this really well with being able to read the, I mean, 'cause what you're describing is in person. In some ways it's a little bit easier because we have so many nonverbals, both with facial expression, body posture, and sort of attention like where their eyes are, and whether they're distracted 'cause they are doing something else simultaneously. But in the virtual space, you have to co-create and cultivate that. And so I got to see certain communities do that very poorly and certain communities do that very well and and certain communities that did that very well because it was a national group of educators coming together. You know, they would do a check-in at the beginning, acknowledge there is residue from the last meeting you just came to release it. And to ask everyone, "What's one word on how you're arriving? What is the weather today?" Tell me how you know... if you were a weather forecast, "What's the forecast?" And people will put in, you know, "I am a thunderstorm." "I'm a rain cloud." "I'm snow." You know, so people actually would describe sort of what's happening with them just so that it sort of gets it off the chest, right. It names the feeling. And then once you named it sort of like goes away. It's like a sort, a weird phenomenon.
Vicki Landers: Yeah, I've done that with individuals, but I've also done that with groups. It's the what do you need to let go of in order to be present here? I have this... I had this practice when I was having regular meetings with a group of people that either first thing or last thing, we would do a bit of a gratitude exercise and I would just ask, "what's one thing you're grateful for?" And we did that for two years. And, it was really nice because when I left that organization, that was, some of the feedback I got was like, "We really liked doing that. That made a difference in how we perceived the meeting and how we perceived our days after the meeting." Just taking that moment to recognize that there's always something to be grateful for and maybe that thing is that you have shoes on that are comfortable.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Right. It does set the tone quite a bit, and it's one of those things where you begin to notice because you're in these different spaces and different types of people, it really means the leader has an opportunity to intentionally cultivate and create what you want those relations ships to look like. And once you've entered into one room that is cultivated, you go into another and you actually, don't engage as much, right? The energy goes down automatically because you haven't been cultivated. And so I think these are tips that we often don't share as leaders about how do we intentionally lead our meetings and think about it because we're too nervous. We've never seen a role model. We don't talk about it mentor or a mentee or to other friend and colleagues. So I'm glad that we're talking about it frankly today on the podcast about little things you can do that take five minutes or less depending how large your team for the huddles. We know that data shows that. Leadership huddles walking through physically through the entire space of your clinic or your hospital does improve. Engagement does have a increased perception of listening, and listening is really important as a leader. But when you're having these meetings, just creating the environment that "I'm gonna be able to hold space for you" and to ask you how you're doing. Listening. That's, I mean, five minutes is all you need on those virtual meetings across a very large, you know, hybrid. There's many hybrid organizations now at this point. So, I'm glad you shared your questions because I think that's part of the problem. People don't know what do you ask? How do you do this?
Vicki Landers: I love the idea of walking around. Walking around and doing it and being, being visible and being present at the same time. I think that does a lot towards improving staff morale. But I was also thinking about the presence and there's some research out there that speaks about context of, you know, the contextual situation of where patients are getting care and what they're seeing and what they're experiencing. And that context matters for us too, that when we're in a situation where we feel supported and is comfortable, we're actually much better able to be effective. So when a leader creates that, that kind of huddle, that walking around, I think it creates a level of safety or it can create a level of safety for everybody as well as for the people who see them. If we're doing a walk around.
Lillian Liang Emlet: Right.
Lillian Liang Emlet: I guess I'm also wanting to close out, we've covered quite a bit in terms of internal barometer, external barometer, and so I'd like to close out with, if you could share a story. A lot of times people in healthcare learn via seeing a case study or thinking through this is what the clinical, you know, situation should look like whenever we, we think through like, this is what the course should look like. When in some of your experiences with coaching leaders in healthcare, as they work through this awareness piece and that being the light bulb to turn them into new action. Could you just give any kind of example of story obviously de-identified.
Vicki Landers: So actually the one that comes to mind is somebody who actually changed organizations as a result of this leadership concept because she didn't feel like she was actually getting to be the leader that she wanted to be. She was showing up and she was doing the things that she thought were, that would work and was not having the choices that she wanted to. And when she realized that's what was really the challenge, she actually changed organizations and she's thriving. But it was understanding what she could control and what she couldn't control. And now she's in another location and she is thriving as a leader. She's getting to be that role model. She's working directly with the people who are above her. they're having like this amazing experience, because recognized that she wasn't showing up like she wanted to in the other space. And was being influenced by other people's energy, but it was just, it was this beautiful moment of I can do this. And now she's actually creating this, this wonderful space in a clinic for the patients, for herself, for her coworkers, and for the upper management. been kind of fun to watch,
Lillian Liang Emlet: What I'm hearing you say is that it was through her own awareness of how the things we've talked about, awareness of how her energy, other people's energy and this relationship. Wasn't getting any better despite the things that you try. And at some point that's the only solution she had, but I'm sure she tried for some time before.
Vicki Landers: She tried for years. This was not a new thing. She had tried for years and there was just a mismatch and she recognized what was happening to her energy and how it was draining her, and that it was this. I mean, I remember the moment when I asked the question about what would it be like if you thought about what was possible? And all of a sudden she comes up with all of these beautiful ideas about what could be possible, which opened up her mind to other possible thoughts. And she had a lot of them. She was like, "I could stay here, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this." And then like started investigating all of them and landed on the one that worked for her. And that may be that internally with your team, you make different choices. It may be that you start to show up with more curiosity, more empathy, more compassion. It May be that you recognize other people's energy and you're like, "Oh, look at them. They're showing up as a victim today. Okay? I don't have to buy into their energy. I don't have to go there. They can be there. That's great. I'm just not gonna be there."
Lillian Liang Emlet: Funny you say that because I think when you are coming from a different lens. and You're in that same room. It's so easy to get sucked down into the negativity of change because change is inherently threatening for all of us. I mean, so let me get this real. People would argue that I'm pretty positive, and at the same time, it's a conscious choice to— I could buy into but this is like doomsday. I could buy into that. And at the same time, I wanna be the voice in the room to at least not let us sink into that quagmire. So I will ask a question about where can we find the opportunities in this really terrible policy decision which we can't control. And so once we like think about the glass being half full, how can we leverage it? And then just like you said, the room suddenly is like, "Oh, all these ideas come out."
Vicki Landers: Yeah, it's idea generation when we let go of some of the judgment of the problem at hand. We don't like the policy, we don't like the change and there's always opportunities to maybe understand the spirit of the intent so that we can embrace something about the change. And because there's always gonna be things that we don't like, there's always gonna be things that are outside of our control. It's always going to rain in most places. And it's how we choose to see the rain matters.
Lillian Liang Emlet: It's funny, my daughter, I think, always reminds me 'cause like whenever it rains, I don't love rain 'cause it's soaking wet. But she's like, I love rain and she's 12. She's always said this, even when she's little. And it's like, "Oh yeah." And I have pictures of her when she's little, just splashing around, right? So that I actually have a slide like this during some of my talks. Can we almost always begin to look for that? It's like, what it's like to be splashing around. It's fun. Same thing with snow, you know, lots of people grumble about it, especially 'cause right now it's still winter and many parts of where we live and there's ice storm coming and at the same time. It's really great to have a snow day. So it's all depends on how you choose to see it and lengthen that time so you can become more aware about the possibilities.
Vicki Landers: Your question how, asking yourself that question, how do I see this?
Lillian Liang Emlet: love that.
Vicki Landers: just getting, getting a little outside of yourself and looking, taking that kind of meta view of yourself. How am I seeing this? How am I showing up?
Lillian Liang Emlet: Well, thank you so much, Vicki, for coming on and taking a deep dive together on Awareness for Leaders and our main takeaways about how do we notice first. Think, feel, do, and then shift and becoming more aware allows you to be able to lengthen that gap between stimulus awareness and then you choose what you wanna do with it. And sometimes you just don't have to do anything. And then the reality is too, your awareness really can— go much beyond yourself. It affects your team and you have opportunities many more than you realize because now that we've told you about these things, you're probably gonna see it all the time now.
Vicki Landers: I hope everybody is seeing the characters behind or on people's shoulders and recognizing their own characters as well. I loved that analogy from inside out. That's great.
Lillian Liang Emlet: So thanks so much for listening and we will catch you on the next episode. And we're hoping that you'll stay along with us as we take this journey from becoming more aware and then moving into action for the next several episodes. We'll see you next time.
Your Host
Dr. Lillian Liang Emlet
Physician · Executive Coach · Founder, Transforming Healthcare Coaching®
Lillian is a practicing physician, certified executive coach, and the voice behind the Transforming Healthcare Coaching® podcast. She works with clinicians, clinical leaders, and healthcare executives leading through role transitions, seasons at capacity, and culture change — helping them lead with clarity, intention, and sustainability.
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