Practicing Emotional Self-awareness to Build Surgeon Resilience

As surgeons, we work in a high-stress, high-stakes environment to take care of our patients. In this setting, it is not uncommon for us to experience microaggressions-subtle or indirect actions or statements that communicate a demeaning or exclusionary message, often unintentionally. Microaggressions can bring us down, taking away from the fulfillment that attracted many of us to this profession. In this article, we introduce the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching energy leadership framework as a tool to understand and address microaggressions. We then apply it to real-life scenarios surgeons may encounter, demonstrating how this framework can help us to build resilience and recover our joy for our profession.