The Experienced Beginner:
How Healthcare Leaders Keep Learning in Something New

Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast, Episode 128: Experienced Beginner: Leadership, AI, and Continuous Learning for Healthcare Professionals. Hosted by Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP. Published September 28, 2026.

Lillian Liang Emlet: The greatest thing we need to do right now as a society is to really break down all these silos and walls and come together.

My whole career in medicine came with a syllabus, residency, fellowship, boards. Someone always told me what to learn next. Then I started building something outside of medicine, and for the first time in years, I didn't know what question to ask, and that's what today's episode is all about.

So it is crazy trying to build a business. And I would say that in this day and age with AI, there are tons of builders, tons of people learning, and all kinds of new entrepreneurship happening. And so it took me a moment to really sit and think and realize that I have learned so much in the last four years.

And I think about all the way back, everyone asks me when I meet them now at networking events about what it's been like to learn and just jump off the cliff and just lift off into the horizon and beyond, to find all the things you need when you need it, and at the same time know and trust yourself that you'll be able to do the next right thing. So what I wanted to talk with you about is a bit about what this learning journey has been like because I think a lot of people wonder.

People in healthcare can't imagine what it's like to move into another space and realize there isn't going to be the mentorship and the guidance that you are so accustomed to in training programs and in medicine in general. And that there are so many things that you are actually missing 'cause you don't realize what else is out there.

For example, in the last four or five years since embarking upon this entrepreneurship journey, I've had to shift my identity from just a side gig to solopreneur to entrepreneur to founder, and that's a continuum that I never expected to actually go through. I think sometimes it's really not really imaginable when you're sitting on the other side of seeing other people do things, and you wonder how people get there.

And there's a little bit of fear, there's a little bit of uncertainty, and there's also a little bit of wonder. Like, what was it that pushed that person over the edge to go ahead and try something different? And so I thought it might be helpful to think about, like, what a learning journey looks like for many of our clients and also for you and also how it's been going for me.

And so maybe you're somewhere like that right now. You're in a new role. You have a new team. You have a new venture, a new position, a new hospital, new healthcare system, a new pivot to potentially a part-time job, to case management, to informatics.

Today I wanna share three things that's helped me see the experience so that it gives you support for yourself along the way, how to ask for help that you need, and how to keep learning when nobody can show you the whole entire route. So I just wanna share with you that telling yourself that you can be capable and also completely new on the block, both are true. And so I'll tell you how this shows up for me.

In the last eight months, I've been learning vibe coding, AI, software development, and all kinds of things I never thought in a million years. And this frontier of AI for many of us, as we're trying to figure out in our workplace, in our home, in our business, in the clinical environment, in the education environment, what does it mean?

It's required us to throw away some of the preconditioned guardrails that we put on ourselves that really aren't true. And the first I would say is the fact that, oh, I'm not a tech person, oh, I didn't come from software development, or I never took coding when I was in high school, and therefore, I may or may not have the ability to be able to make it in a particular field and to make it in this new brave AI world.

When I listen to all the entrepreneurial and founder stories, neither do they, and some of them are exiting, some of them have already closed. Some of the businesses have shut down already. Different AI companies have eaten other AI companies. And I'm not talking about the big people. I'm talking about the little people who are building customized solutions for either small business owners, other healthcare systems. Some people are still in the competition, some are still in the game with venture capital funding, and some are being swallowed together and consolidating.

And both are fine because there's learning along the way. I think another thing to take into account the fact that you can enter those rooms without prior experience, and you can trust yourself that you are going to be able to figure it out. The reality is your expertise doesn't disappear just because you walk into a room of business people or engineers or computer scientists or public officials or policymakers.

I'll tell you that none of these places come with a map, and if anything, the greatest thing we need to do right now as a society is to really break down all these silos and walls and come together. AI is affecting every single industry, every single vertical, every single place. And to try to pretend that you don't want to be part of that solution in some way, shape, or form is some way of donating your expertise into that really beautiful place where we're going to make things better.

As a physician especially, as a clinician, as a nurse practitioner, as a pharmacist, your brains and your ability to synthesize material, organize teams, work to care for people, and come from a place of giving, I would say that every single healthcare professional is who I would want sitting on those boards making decisions with policymakers like politicians, state officials, venture capital funders, private equity.

Believe it or not, I do think that people in healthcare are made of something very special, and that is the ability to take really advanced concepts, add on caring and the art of communication and empathy to be able to deliver both highly technical skills, scientific advancement just at the right time for the people that you're taking care of in the right way for you, whether that be a radiologist, a cardiologist, an emergency physician. Whether you're a nurse practitioner, whether you're a PA, all of us have different strengths, and we all fall in love with different things at different times.

And so you have so many strengths that you have coming from medicine and practicing in healthcare that can be translated to new places. And I think what really stood out for me is that I could hold my own in many of these spaces that were very diverse. And so everyone's new to artificial intelligence.

Everyone is new to coding and trying to build something differently and using and harnessing these tools. And so using your thinking brain and contributing to how we think through things and design things is really important. And so I've really enjoyed going into these learning environments. I have paid this year for several different courses, and whenever you get to the lab and to see whether you could keep up with other people's thinking has been really gratifying.

And these are people who are other engineers or computer scientists, and these are people who are business owners of million-dollar companies, and there's me, right? I don't have a million-dollar coaching company. I'll just put it out there right now. I'm primarily still a physician. I still practice primarily, and I'm here to begin to slowly change the narrative for healthcare professionals through our coaching services and to begin to build something differently one step at a time.

And so I know, and I've known for years now, that I need more skills, and so I've expanded my horizons. Went back to coaching school back in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic, started the business in 2022, quickly pivoted in 2023 to gain the team that we have here at Transforming Healthcare Coaching.

And when we think about what it takes to keep just doing the next right step, it's all about where we think about how our expert knowledge is organized and whether we're able to release things like cognitive entrenchment. And so what in the world is that? The reality is, as we become experts, our mental models become more stable.

We could become faster, we recognize things more accurately, and we're slower to flex in new ones. And I'll argue that trying to release that, notice when you are just being an expert, and instead seeking out actively places where you're uncomfortable. You're a newbie. You don't know anything. Being curious.

Those new settings are really where the learning and the growth happen. Experts really, if you think about it, just means that your certain brain pathways in your brain are a little bit faster than others. And there's all kinds of things that you potentially can miss as an expert. I think my greatest fear always with expertise is getting lazy and also missing things.

So in the leadership space, the way we see this is a lot of times when we have mergers, we have different people join our team, everyone comes with a lot of experience, and some of us carry that experience like it's a pretty pin or a beautiful thing on your lapel and all these decorations if you're in the military.

But your credentials don't teach you how you need to behave in this new team, this new environment, and this new world, especially since the pandemic, everything has been changing. I think if anyone said that everything has been stable, either from a fiscal, economic, political, geopolitical way since 2020, I think we'd all laugh and say that was crazy.

Things have never been stable for years, and part of the challenge has been trying to find steady footing, and part of finding steady footing is having a beginner's mind. The reality is when someone new joins your team, let's say you're a leader of this group, you have to explain how things work, show an example, and recommend other people to help support and ask and get help in order to gain knowledge as quickly as possible, in other words, orientation, right? All of us have been there where thank goodness for certain people orienting to us to the clinical environment so we can get up to speed as fast as possible. And at the same time, the reality is people also then have an opportunity to think about the fact that as we're orienting somebody, there might be a different way forward when we ask our questions and we have new learners.

I think that's why many of us stay in academia. We love having new people around because we love the fact that students question and ask and are curious and are eager to change things for the better. And so creating conditions for learning is very much the leader's job. And I'll argue that we often don't talk about learning organizations and organizations that want to be curious to how they can innovate beyond what the next generation needs, and that there are stakeholders that may not be in the room that you don't often think about.

Oftentimes, many leaders are just thinking about what reports they have to give, what next thing they have to do for the next quarter, and they rarely ever take a moment to take a step back and say, "We actually have a bigger thing looming on the horizon." That's either loss of market share or people are all moving out of the city and this clinic is going to close. I mean, some of these things are predictable if you watch other sectors' trends: city planning, school districts. But do we really think like that when we're in one sector or another? And so the reality is going to the unfamiliar is really important, and the more diverse your group is willing to share those diverse perspectives and the things that they're noticing, the greater chance you'll be able to lift that signal up into a place where things can be better.

And so by having a beginner's mind, even as an expert, especially as an expert, it's really important. And so the reality is I can easily name that much of what I've been doing is very unfamiliar, to go from starting a podcast, learning how to do YouTube, editing all these videos here that you're seeing on software that I had never used before.

It was so fun and exciting in the beginning, and as I seek new challenges, I'm asking different questions, questions that continue to push me, which is why I've moved to solo, some solo episodes to continue to push myself into the next horizon of what needs to happen. And so I challenge you, are you asking and stepping out of your normal comfort zone, your normal expertise, and looking for other things in your life right now?

So the next thing is we really underestimate yeses. And what I mean by that is has anyone ever been super afraid to ask for help? I'll tell you as a woman physician and as a woman in general, we often don't ask for help. And yet we also are given the advice time and time again by many of our aunties, many of our other women physician colleagues, is that you need a village.

And what does that mean? A village comes around. There's social norming. There's supports. There's I got your back kind of attitude. And yet if you ask any woman physician or many people in healthcare, and I would say probably most people in healthcare, the desire or the willingness and the fear and the intrinsic unwillingness to ask for help is quite rampant, and that's male, female, whatever gender.

And I understand this partly because at our best we are the givers of care. We feel like we are the one to give. And so it's really awkward and weird. It's almost like in our DNA we don't know how to ask for help. And yet we underestimate the yes. I'll give you a challenge. I challenge you to just ask anyone to help you with anything in the next twenty-four hours, and that could be anything as big or as small as, "Could you help me carry these groceries up the stairs?" To "Can you help me beta test this particular product that I'm developing?" To, "Could you introduce me to somebody that I've been really meaning to meet?" So these are all very different in stakes, right? And so we often don't practice our ability to offer people the opportunity to help us. Now, I just want to say that as a healthcare professional you often get to have your cup filled when you're helping others, and that can be anything as small as, you know, redressing a wound to helping with surgery to directing a patient to the right location to making sure the check-in was great to having successful CPR.

We help people in many, many different ways in healthcare, and we have the privilege and the honor to be able to get that little endorphin high, that little dopamine high because we love to help people. And I think the greatest thing that we don't do as society and humans and also especially as healthcare professionals is to role model what that's like for other people.

So other people don't really learn what it's like to ask for help and then be given the opportunity to help. It is really somewhat sad to think that other professions aside from-- I mean, most business people, good business people, they're there to help. They help to find a problem, find a solution, and get that activity, and they feel really good when they're able to be the business that you went to be able to solve that problem.

Same thing with healthcare. We're really happy when you chose us to come to this hospital rather than a different hospital for your care or a clinic or a practitioner. Talk to any primary care practice doctor, they're really happy with the patients that chose them, and all of us know that we all have choice.

And so when we think about what makes it so hard to ask the reality is we need to flip that narrative and think about how wonderful it is to allow someone to do the same that we give for others. And we underestimate it. So there was a study that came out many years ago where social scientists asked people to predict how many strangers they would need to approach before enough of them agreed to help with some kind of task.

And people guessed pretty large numbers, and the reality is it only took a few people. Because if you just ask, so almost everybody loves to help, especially when you give them a chance to be able to contribute and feel proud of the fact they were able to do that. I think also people love being asked for advice, right?

I think we often forget that this is one of the greatest things that we can do for each other, with each other, is to ask for advice on what do you think. And it's not just because it's market research or we want to sort of know what people are thinking just because we're curious for the sake of being curious.

It really is about making sure that we're learning from each other, and that giving advice makes you feel more confident, and getting the advice expands your knowledge. And so there's like a two-for-one win there by asking for help in that relationship. And so I think the reality is we need to think about the fact that we need not to be so afraid to ask for support.

The people do want to try to help, and the more people you can get, like cavalry around you, which is why there's that whole phrase of it takes a village. The more people we can get around us, they may not be able to contribute the entire solution. I mean, people don't, can't just open their pocketbook and give you millions of dollars to be able to help your solution.

But with lots of little people, that's why there's grassroots, some bootstrapping, fundraising, and that's why there's all kinds of polls and committees and volunteers. It takes a lot of people to be able to lift something up, but the power of a lot of people is quite strong. And so never underestimate the power of yes.

And what I also wanna talk with you about is thinking about what it takes to get to your goal. I started this coaching company a couple years ago, and I think the hardest thing for me is to sit with this feeling that everything I do is never enough. And now as I'm building products and software in the tech space and trying to really get into AI and contribute my brain to education and to where we must think about cognition and human development and learning for the future is, what am I going to do?

And when we think about what our goals are, we often have these lofty goals. They're either financially tied with some kind of outcome. And at the same time, it's hard to realize a big, lofty goal without breaking it down to smaller steps. And it's really hard to understand what you don't know. You don't understand the gaps yet.

And so how that gets translated is to ask for the very next right step. And what needs to happen is to ask for, "Can you just walk me through blank? Walk me through a recent example. Could you tell me about a case study? What happened with your experience? What did you try?" So when we think about we have big, lofty goals, we know there's so many things that are in that gap, like how does this seem unimaginable to kinda get there?

The reality is the skill that you need is, "I'm trying to get somewhere. I need help understanding all these steps. Could you help me with blank?" And trying to find the smallest common denominator. Now, we see this all the time in the healthcare space. Baby nurses or baby doctors, we all wanna be an attending someday, but it takes years.

And when we think about, like, the weight of years and milestones, and even we step back in the competencies and annual exams and knowledge, it seems really hard to figure out what is the right next thing to do. What I always tell my trainees and mentees is, "Just one small thing. If you are putting many marbles of knowledge or learning or reading or doing into your learning journal every single day, you're gonna get there because you are quickly self-reflective.

You can identify what you're missing, and you understand that I'm trying to become an XYZ physician, and I need help understanding concepts of mechanical ventilation. Could you explain to me this particular mode only and how it works only for one step?" Right? 'Cause if you just conquer one small thing, you'll be able to get to the next step. And the reality is we often get overwhelmed emotionally from the bigger goal, and instead we forget to focus on one small thing, keep track, just like a water journal, right?

Sometimes people, on people's phones, we do a little mark, like, "Yes, I moved my body today," or, "Yes, I drank water today." I guess I'll challenge all of you that what's the right little learning question you're going to ask yourself so that you can move to the next right step? And I'll also suggest that when you're learning it's a small, tiny task that you need to conquer by deliberately practicing it again and again.

And so for us, even starting this podcast back in the day was really thinking about editing and figuring out, like, how to do the artistic portion of things, just how to mechanically get things done. And then once one was done, the bigger thing is to deliberately practice, meaning to look back and reflect and figure out what needs to be improved.

And if we don't take time to do the reflection and figure out, well, is anything changing? Is this any good? What could be done differently? What can be done better? And it's a continuous process all the time. It'll be never-ending. Then you just sink into the process. The reality is when we think about the outcome rather than just focusing on the process, the very next step, the right question, the wondering who could you bring into your universe to help you. There are so many people who you can ask. There are national leadership groups. There are national clinical groups. There are people in your locality, in your hospital, in the other hospitals, in state medical and city medical societies, professional societies. There are so many places to diversify your network so that you can get a bigger and broader perspective for what really is in healthcare, what's really driving things, and what's it like to operate with this crazy ecosystem of the healthcare sector in general.

Some things are easier to ask than others, and I think I will also say that when people say your network is your net worth, it really does reward those who have a bigger network. I do think it's really important that you continue to find people outside of your comfort zone and to go look for opportunities to, hey, get to know somebody, have great conversations, and from conversations, the next step happens.

So I just want to also comment that a lot of times these conversations can be challenging, especially when there's places that you've never been before and you need to get to the next step. And I just wanna put a plug in for the fact that we're building something called the Leadership Learning Lab, which is a cohort-based three-month learning environment where leaders in transition in healthcare can find a safe place to reflect and also practice and role play the challenges that they're having as physician leaders.

Leaders really have it hard because a lot of times there's communication things that can accidentally happen without meta reflection or awareness. And it's hard to find people who really love to talk about both leadership, wellbeing, and communication, and that's really what we're building.

So the next thing I want to really comment on is the fact that you don't need the whole map. You just need a next step that you can learn from. And so when I first started in this journey of starting the coaching business, I had no idea what really to do. I had so many things to go learn and experience.

I went to the Center for Women's Entrepreneurship, went to some of their webinars, looked at all of their resources, did some evaluations of how do you set up an LLC? How do you actually start a business? Start looking at education and training for free on YouTube to figure out, well, how do you start a channel?

Where do you find the best podcast RSS feed sources? How do you choose one platform over the other? Different cost, different features. And so somewhere along the way, you just one by one piece together what's necessary, and at the same time stepping back and getting expert consultants to help you along the way.

So for example, LinkedIn, I was never on any kind of professional social media to this degree until I started the coaching business. And I realized that LinkedIn is a really wonderful place, but I had no idea where to go. And so what did I do? I got a LinkedIn coach. I did some one-on-ones. I got the profile started.

I still recall all the advice she has given me, and she's a wonderful sales coach. But I really wasn't able to implement everything, and yet when I think back, I've iterated upon that same initial advice that she gave years ago. I then subsequently had a different LinkedIn coach with more on the video side of things because I think we would all agree right now video is the greatest currency, and obviously I'm real video.

I'm not AI video, as much as I love AI. The reality is we are always iterating, and that you don't need the whole map. But you do need to get back into the practice again and again, and you need a next right step that you can learn from. So I've learned from multiple different business coaches and group coaching containers, and I still belong to these communities so that I can get the support I need.

Coaching communities, communities for networking, and private one-on-one, and educational curriculum and courses all fulfill different things in the learning journey, and the reality is we need all of these things. At the same time, we also need in-person, real friends and colleagues who are going alongside the journey as well because it can feel really lonely.

And I'm really also grateful for the people who can see it whenever you're venting. They can see it, and they know exactly what needs to happen in terms of how your friends and colleagues who are entrepreneurs can challenge you to get back into the right mindset. And so what I'm talking about here is the fact that there are many different modalities to be able to learn new skills.

Sometimes they're courses, sometimes it's deliberate practice with true action-oriented labs. Sometimes it's a peer network of just support. Sometimes it's a group coaching program. Sometimes it's an individual coaching program. And I would say all of the things together in addition to potentially sponsors, introductions, and mentors along the way. One skill you can use all along the way is something called metacognition.

And so metacognition, we talk about medical education, is really about noticing your own understanding, checking in, and readjusting it. We do this oftentimes in the simulation world, where we debrief after a simulated encounter, like a cardiac arrest, and we talk with the team, and we talk with the team leader to see whether they can notice their own performance and notice their own thought processes in the moment once they're in the time-out.

In life, how are we being metacognitive? So I would say in our business world as a founder, and in our own learning journey, because often we were trying to learn all kinds of things, like learn how to lift weights, learn how to knit and crochet, learn how to make some kind of other new type of cooking recipe, learn how to carpentry and do home renovations.

Stepping back every now and then and noticing your own understanding week to week and month to month is really helpful to adjust and get there faster. Fortunately, a lot of people keep things like learning journals, either scribble notebooks to kind of along the way. People are doing what they call build in public to be able to express and help people learn alongside you and learn with you.

It's really important to be able to find some way for yourself to be metacognitive. Coaches are a really important person along the way because sometimes when everything is new, you want someone to hold all of that for you along the way. And at the same time having an expert, someone who's already in the practice, who is already smarter than you, has already done it, has always helped to get their perspective as well, to have a teaching mentor or a peer mentor in that process.

And so experience alone doesn't teach us. It is the combination of the experience, active learning, along with reflecting on the experience. So I'll say that again. Experience alone is not a great teacher. It's your interaction with that experience as you reflect on it and take away what things you'll do, feel, think, and do differently for next time.

That is where the learning actually happens. So for all of you who are thinking about your transitions into a new leadership position and trying to figure out what to do next, try to go in, to summarize, with one little learning goal. So one thing to think about would be you have a learning goal for yourself as you're interacting with your team or your group, and how do you wanna run this meeting more efficiently?

Think about yourself as a great detective. Many of us came from a scientific sort of world, and so just be a great noticer, watcher, journaler. Observe. Watch to see what you see in your team and your colleagues and what's happening. And then check afterwards. Check in. "This is what I saw. Is this what you're seeing, and does that fit with your assessment of the situation?" You'd be surprised. And also, you allow everyone to share their expertise. You're keeping it safe for everyone just to be a great noticer. And then adjust. You're gonna be adjusting for seeing in your leadership journey what's working and what's one thing you might wanna try and do next time.

You can't become a master runner of meetings, a master project manager, a master person to be the go-to psychologically safe, elevated, visionary leader of your department overnight. But you can be there one small tweak at a time, one small actionable thing every week that you can then reflect upon, decompress, debrief, and figure out what's gone well, what you're gonna keep doing, and what are you gonna continue to iterate. So I just wanna come to a conclusion for the three main points for today.

Lots of things are unfamiliar right now in healthcare. Things seem always to be shifting, and you are capable in all of this newness. And so what do you wanna bring to this place? When you think about your goals and you can see the gaps, just ask yourself, what is the very next small one thing you need to understand, and who can you ask to help you get there?

Who can you ask to help fill in either a small gap or to learn? And then what's the next small step you can learn from this week, and what will you do to take just 10 minutes to reflect on it? What new thing are you gonna try this week, and how are you gonna just reflect at the end of the week, 10 minutes?

And so I just wanna come to a close with the fact that I'm in a constant place of doing all of this all the time, and sometimes it can feel tiring. But the reality is all of us are a work in progress, and I'm still figuring myself out here as a founder, podcaster, coach, academic physician, builder of software products.

The reality is all of us are doing our own version of becoming more aware, taking new action, and then deliberately practicing. So if you're curious about what we have here to offer at Transforming Healthcare Coaching, I'd love to begin a conversation with you. I think what's always helped me is interactive, active learning alongside other people, and that's why we're building the Leadership Learning Lab here at Transforming Healthcare Coaching.

These are going to be private small group containers where you bring your experience, real leadership challenges and communication challenges you're facing, and we're gonna be bringing the leadership ideas and concepts. You'll be getting two books every quarter, some facilitated learning, some little audio nuggets for inspiration every week, and monthly group coaching where you can sort of strategize where you wanna go with the next steps for your leadership journey.

So currently, the first cohort is starting in October, and so if you're a physician leader, please contact me for consideration. These are all going to be curated and requires an interview to get in to make sure you're gonna fit in well with this particular cohort. We have also already started our nurse practitioner and physician assistant wait list, and so if you're an NP or a PA and just got promoted to a leadership position, this is for you.

I know there's many challenges in the many different types of leadership positions that are out there as clinical leads and we do have an active wait list growing in the NP and the PA world. So we can't wait to bring that cohort to life as soon as possible. So thanks so much for listening.

Tell us what challenges you face so that we can just tackle them and knock them out here on the podcast. And so tell us what you want to listen to, and email us at podcast@transforminghealthcarecoaching.com, and we will see you on the next episode.