Eldest Daughters

You know how sometimes things you know and have heard a million times just hit differently on certain days? 

I did my coach training through a program at the Life Coach School, which was led by Brooke Castillo.  She has a podcast, and I was listening to an episode of that podcast today.

She was talking in this podcast about how we have default thought patterns that are just ingrained in us – thoughts that we think and just believe to be true without questioning them. 

One of the things coaching teaches us is not to believe everything we think.  To examine our thoughts with an eye toward how they are generating our feelings, actions, and results. 

See, the thought is the thing we have control over.  Not the reality or circumstance that creates the thought – we don’t control our circumstances always, but we always control our thoughts.  If we want to experience change in our feelings, actions, and results, we have to choose different thoughts.  (We can go more into that in a coaching session if you want – it sounds woo-woo and simplistic, but its real and is the way we maintain our power when we are living in an unpreferred reality).

There are a lot of social media reels out there right now about the Taylor Swift song “Eldest Daughter”.  So many female physicians (myself included) are eldest daughters.  In family dynamics, we typically take on a lot of responsibility in our families of origin.  We tend to people please.  Our default stress reaction is “fawn” – don’t make waves.  Be the “good girl”.  Focus more on everyone else’s happiness than our own.  This is a survival mechanism in a lot of families as well, when we feel we must walk on eggshells to deal with / avoid the wrath of an unpredictable parent. 

Even those of us who are absolute badasses in our workplaces, if we have developed this default stress response to “fawn”, will find ourselves replaying that response in stressful work situations. 

That doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong.  It’s just our primitive brain telling us to go back into the cave where it’s safe and trying to protect us from the saber-toothed tiger.  It’s absolutely normal. Of course we would do that!

How has this played out for me in my work life?  Feeling guilty about saying no to a partner who asks for call coverage in the evenings or on weekends and overextending myself in the process of trying to make everyone happy.  Not setting boundaries about taking extra shifts or working when others want to be off.  Having a hard time saying no to unpaid work or committees or leadership opportunities (“I should be grateful they asked me”, right?).  Having no boundaries about add-on patients, or double bookings on my office schedule.  Hell, even this week I found myself asked to work a few extra hours after the end of my 24 hour hospitalist shift because we had a coverage gap, even though my in-laws are having health challenges and we’re spending a lot of time during the day on the phone with them and their doctors right now and I need that space to do that.   I had a conversation with my husband about it, and he reminded me to stick to my boundaries - which was what I wanted to do in the first place, but I was falling back into the default pattern of saying yes when I wanted to say no, because it’s my stress response. 

And I think it’s the stress response of a lot of us as women physicians, whether we’re really the eldest daughter, or even if we just were treated that way. I see it play out so often in coaching clients. 

Coaching can help us get to the bottom of that, and learn to examine our thoughts – the neuroscience name for that is “metacognition” – and look at how those thoughts may or may not be serving us.  And I hope my story above helps you to see that nobody has it all together.  I’ve trained as a coach, but I still fall into old thought patterns and have to self-coach my way out of them. 

If any of this resonates with you and you’d like to reach out about starting a coaching journey with me, I’d be happy to talk to you. I love talking to people and holding space for them to help them examine their thought patterns and improve their lives.

I’m also really excited about my upcoming group coaching program.  One of the parts of my coach training was having access to watching other coaches be coached – we literally coached each other and recorded the sessions so we could see the techniques being practiced.  But we also got to see other people’s thought patterns and could relate a lot of times to what they were struggling with.  When you see it playing out by watching someone else get coached, sometimes it makes your own patterns so clear without the emotional layer we paint over our own issues. That’s where the magic is in group coaching.  And I’m looking forward to offering that starting early next year.  If that sounds intriguing, sign up for my group program waitlist here.

I’d love to hear how this resonates with you.  Drop me a note here and let me know what you think.