In today's rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, coaching has emerged as a transformative tool to empower primary care professionals. Rather than serving merely as a remedy for burnout or wellness concerns, coaching is now recognized as an essential catalyst for professional growth, clinical performance, and effective leadership. This session will explore how integrating coaching into healthcare practice equips providers with the mindset and skills needed to excel in complex, team-based environments. A significant challenge in embedding coaching within integrated healthcare settings lies in the prevailing "clinical mindset" among behavioral and other health professionals. Becoming an effective coach requires a deliberate shift away from traditional clinical approaches—such as the "righting reflex," diagnostic reasoning, and prescriptive advice-giving—towards a facilitative, growth-oriented perspective. This evolution involves transitioning from a deficit-focused, pathology model to one that emphasizes human potential, conscious choice, and forward-looking solutions, thereby fostering resilience and adaptive capacity in both providers and patients. This session will review the growing body of evidence demonstrating the broad application and impact of coaching across diverse healthcare settings. While wellness benefits are well documented, research increasingly points to coaching as a driver of enhanced clinical performance, professional fulfillment, and organizational outcomes. For instance, institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic have reported significant improvements in retention attributed to coaching initiatives, saving an estimated $84 million in costs, and brief coaching interventions have been linked to a $17-19% reduction in absolute burnout rates among healthcare professionals. These findings highlight coaching as a strategic, evidence-based approach to supporting excellence and resilience in healthcare delivery.
To bridge theory and practice, the session will transition from empirical findings to "Coaching in Action" through the following experiential components:
Mindset Deconstruction: Analyzing the clinical habits and cognitive biases that healthcare providers must intentionally unlearn to cultivate an authentic coaching presence.
Live Role Play: Demonstrating a coaching intervention within a healthcare education or leadership scenario—such as addressing multidisciplinary team conflict or performance feedback—utilizing the GROW model as a structured framework.
Audience Practice: Facilitating an interactive exercise in which participants apply coaching techniques, practicing strategic questioning to foster collective agency and collaborative problem-solving within healthcare teams.

Analyze the specific "mindset shift" required for psychologists and physicians to transition from an advice-oriented clinical model to an inquiry-based professional coaching model.

Evaluate the evidence-based impacts of professional coaching on healthcare education performance metrics, leadership development, and organizational outcomes like clinician retention.

Execute a peer-coaching simulation using the GROW model framework to address a professional performance or leadership challenge in an integrated setting.