Dr. Gloria Wu Podcast: Our Inner Critics
Introduction:
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Gloria Wu, MD:
This is Dr. Gloria Wu about women in medicine and leadership. We’re going to talk today about what holds women leaders from really fulfilling their potential. We as women doctors have done a lot of education to become doctors. Our personality is kind of obsessive compulsive. We’ve lots of paying attention to detail. We memorize well, we think well, we think well on our feet, and we had to go through a lot of hoops in order to be a doctor. So we’re kind of built in with these inner critics. We have all these inner critics. You’re not good enough. You’re not trying hard enough, and why can’t you be perfect? And they maybe in the back of our head. So these inner critics, people talk about this. And there’s a psychologist that’s connected to Stanford School of Business. He’s a master’s and he’s about to finish his PhD.
But he went to business school and now he’s quite well known. His name is Shirzad Chamine. He talks about inner critics. He calls them saboteurs. Now we live with these saboteurs in our usual anxiety-filled age and also anxiety-filled day of stress at the hospital. We’re seeing gunshot wounds, COVID-19, people coughing in your face, people who don’t want to be vaccinated, they elicit a fight or flight response. That’s when our inner critics comes in and it saves the day. It makes us really ready to jump to conclusions and get everything back to order as soon as possible. But these same critics can be bad for you. They could sit on your little shoulder and say, “Oh, well, you’re not good enough. You’re not fast enough. You didn’t think hard enough, and you could have saved this person’s life.” Or “Why didn’t you do this differently? You could have saved him from COVID-19 faster.”
These saboteurs sit on our little shoulders. Some people call this the imposter syndrome, meaning that we feel we’re not good enough. But really, I think a better term is inner critics. For every time you do accomplish something, pat yourself on the back. You’ve done a good thing. These saboteurs who sit there and say, “Oh, I want to be even more perfect. I want to do more surgeries this month. I want to raise the bar. I want to do this.” Just pat yourself on the back. You did get so far today, and you did manage to improve one thing out of five today. Pat yourself on the back. Be grateful. Be happy. Now another thing to consider is that we sit around as doctors thinking about all the possibilities that could be and should be, especially when we are thinking post-op recovery.
Did we do the right thing? Should we have used tissue adhesive? Should we have used a staple gun? Should I have done an open abdomen? Should I have done just a da Vinci to open up and do microsurgery, etc.? When you think about that, these same things that drive us crazy, but make us better doctors in the broader scheme of things. If we look at our clinic, our organization, our department, you want to eliminate all the negatives. All these things that are sitting on your shoulder, the negatives. In a bigger picture, you want to eliminate them. In eliminating them, you’re going to really get rid of selfishness, nastiness, laziness, dishonesty, and fear. Sometimes we’re motivated by fear. We can’t do X, Y, Z because we are afraid that if we change, it’ll be even worse. Oe of the things, eliminating negativity is good.
It frees you up. Professor Rao from Stanford Business School talks a lot about this, that for some, people are afraid that bad is stronger than good. Meaning that we’re afraid to eliminate the negative. But think of it this way, if you don’t eliminate the negative, the bad outcomes outweighs all the good you’ve done in the world. The Facebook motto was, “Move fast and break things.” But sometimes in startups and organizations, that’s not necessarily good. You want to break the negativity, the fear and everything so that the whole team can go in a positive manner, like nip it in the bud. In 1982,criminologist George Kelling and a sociologist James Wilson talked about 1 broken window in a tenement. If that’s not fixed, unrepaired, more and more people will break more windows, and then the neighborhood becomes worse.
[Rudy] Giuliani, when he was his first term mayor in New York City in the 1980s, saw that there was all this graffiti. He took it upon himself to get rid of all that. Over time, he changed what Times Square looked like, and he changed the viewpoint of tourists in New York City. There’s no more graffiti. The other thing is plumbing before poetry. Fix the bad things before you start spouting the mission statement. I mean, of course, have a mission statement, spout the poetry, but fix the plumbing. Fix the basics. Number 3, adequacy before excellence. Bad customer service, you get more complaints than good customer service. If you do something bad, that unhappy customer will then go and complain to all the higher ups 10 more times than somebody where you save somebody’s life.
Remember, in a hospital setting, if we have 1 bad outcome and it gets in the newspaper, obviously that’s amplified for your hospital than all the many lives that you saved during the year. The other thing, number 4, use the cool kids and adults to lead, squelch bad behavior. If you’re leading a meeting and some people are always on their cell phone, they’re not listening, enlist them. Make them the leaders, and eventually the whole room will follow. If you like this podcast about women and leadership and how can we overcome certain of our own little biases that hold us back, tune back in. This is Dr. Gloria Wu. Thank you.
