After six consecutive nights of working in pediatrics at Wesley Medical Center, Rebecca Solomon, MBBS, should have been ready for deep sleep. Instead, the first-year resident found herself being kept awake by thoughts like, “Did I do this properly for my patients?”

“Residency is a big difference from medical school because now you’re taking care of people,” Solomon said. “You’ve got to manage your emotions, manage your time.”

Solomon found help in the person of Deborah Alliston, M.D., M.Ed., the KU School of Medicine-Wichita residency program’s first certified master physician coach. The two talked through Solomon’s concerns and Alliston gave her tips and exercises for working through challenges during a session that lasted about an hour. “She was really helpful in terms of trying to get my footing in residency,” Solomon said

While one image of a coach is someone pacing the sidelines at a sporting event, imploring his or her players to do something better, Alliston said that isn’t at all what she does as a physician coach.

“Coaching isn’t telling people what to do,” Alliston said. “It’s much more coming along somebody and saying, ‘You are an expert on yourself. What would be changes you can make that are going to help you improve?’”

Alliston is an associate professor for the Department of Pediatrics at KU School of Medicine-Wichita. She became certified by the Physician Coaching Institute earlier this year and is offering her coaching services to pediatric residents.

Alliston does recognize one similarity between her coaching and that of, say, Bill Self. “I think the resemblance I would see is that the goal is peak performance.”

Alliston earned her medical degree and completed her residency in Wichita, joining the faculty in 2010. She took a course on the foundations of coaching in 2016 without any specific objective except to learn more about the topic and followed that with another on coaching through changes a couple years ago.

Missy Jefferson, M.D., residency program director, then suggested that Alliston train to become a master certified physician development coach, using grant funds available for mental health training. Alliston credits Jefferson with realizing the potential benefits to the residency program.

“Residency is three to four years of just intense stress and pressure,” Jefferson said. “It’s really not a matter of if you’re going to struggle but when you’re going to struggle and what that will look like. We need physicians who have gone through that themselves and can mentor the generation through the challenges they’re facing.”

In addition to meeting all those clinical demands, Jefferson said, “The resident is having to make big decisions about their career path. It’s good to have somebody help them sort out which pathway would be most in line with their personality and long-term goals and skill set.”

The Physician Coaching Institute was founded in 2005 by Francine Gaillour, M.D., a former internist and author of “Physician, Reinvent Thyself.” The training includes a two-day kickoff, six months of weekly live webinars and a two-day capstone, currently all being conducted via Zoom. “There’s pre-work, post-work,” Alliston said. “Honestly, it was pretty intense.”

Alliston supervises four pediatric residents in the clinic, but her coaching is available to all residents and faculty in the program. Residents can email her to set up a time. The one-on-one sessions generally last about 30 to 60 minutes. She’s also offering coaching once a month to a group of first-year medical students for whom she leads a problem-based learning session. She’s open to coaching faculty and residents outside pediatrics as time permits.

Alliston said her coaching often involves helping a resident work through an issue that is preventing them from performing at their best. The issues that residents ask her to help with “can be anything,” she said, from difficulty sleeping at night to worrying about what patients think about them to a conflict with peers.

The first step, she said, is to discover “what’s behind it. What are the underlying themes? What is keeping you up at night? What are the challenges?”

She described the coaching as a “thought-provoking process” that works best when the person being coached “is being really humble and open with themselves, so that they will be open to truly evaluating the deeper beliefs or thoughts that are impacting their performance.”

The next steps are exploring the person’s values and goals, raising their self-awareness and arriving at some concrete objective(s). Only then is it possible to make productive changes, she said.

“It’s very personalized,” she said.

Solomon, the first-year resident, had only arrived in Wichita this summer after completing medical school in her native Nigeria. She was happy to tap into Alliston’s “wealth of experience” when it came to balancing the demands of residency and the rest of life.

Their session included “a lot of introspection” and Alliston recommending several coping mechanisms for the emotional part of the work.

Solomon summed it up as “knowing that you’re a good doctor and understanding that you’ve done your best.”

“The job we do is hard, taking care of these young patients on what sometimes can be the worst days of their lives. It’s a privilege.”

Alliston is now working toward certification through the International Coach Federation, which requires 100 hours of coaching.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Alliston found out a lot about herself while training to help others do the same about themselves.

“Oh, so many things,” she said. “One comment that somebody made was that things become clear when they pass through your lips or your fingertips. We gain self-awareness through talking and also through self-reflection.”