Do that meditation for yourself because as you practice that, what you'll find is having that compassion for yourself increases your ability to do it to those around you with those around you. The amazing thing, it creates the bubble that you can transform into to your next self. Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you. By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD. Hey y'all, welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I am your host. Dr. Susan Crockett. I am coming at you from San Antonio, Texas from Ollywood Studios. So I wanted to talk with you guys today. I wanted to show you something special. The audio is not the greatest, and I really didn't even intend to film this. It was a speech that I did last week at Northeast Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas for the Women Leading Women Leadership group, and it was an incredible C-suite of women, like women leaderships within the hospital where I work. They had been reading this book by Brené Brown called The Gifts of Imperfection. We will leave affiliate links for Amazon for you in the notes below. So if you want to order it, I love Brené Brown. She's awesome. So I did this speech for them about the secret to accelerating life transformation. We just thought we would you know video it for kicks on the side. So I didn't really have like really great audio hooked up. It turned out that I was so deeply moved by the content and how the speech came out that I thought I really wanted to share it with you guys. So I apologize for the audio not being that great. The video is definitely different than what we've done before, but I hope you get a lot out of the content because I really, it was meaningful to me, and I wanted to share it with you. So enjoy. Okay, y’all. Welcome to Women Leading Women. I am so excited to be your first speaker for this. Most of you know me, but I'm Dr. Crockett, Susan Crockett. I'm the owner of Virtuosa GYN, and I'm a minimally invasive GYN surgeon here. I work with you guys, and I am just so blessed to be here today for y'all. One thing you might not know about me is that I also work very closely with Intuitive Surgical, the robot manufacturing company. In fact, I wore this shirt for you. It's got a little logo on it. I wore my good bra today. About five years ago, I went to the Women in Da Vinci Surgery meeting, and this shirt ss from last year's. But I went to that meeting about five years ago and help found, not help I did found, their Facebook group, which is now reaches 1.3 thousand, 1.3 thousand women worldwide. Robotic surgeons are part of that Facebook group. It's a support group for women. So that's super cool. I'm involved with that. The other thing that most of you probably don't know about me is that I am also a transformation expert. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. Brené Brown, we go way back. She and I, we go back to 2010 with her first TED Talk on vulnerability. When Kate told me we were talking about her book today, The Gifts of Imperfection, I was like oh, yeah. I'm wholeheartedly in on that. I could do that. So we're going to start with Brené and kind of move through a couple other things that I have to discuss with you today, and thank you so much for bringing me in with their beautiful, lovely leadership group. I'm honored. It is impossible to go from one iteration of ourselves to the next to the next Without having a considerable amount of self-love and compassion for ourselves. Because otherwise what gets in our heads is all that mean negative talk, especially when you get into I'm going to call it the middle of the road, and you're going to see why in a minute. You get halfway across the road into your growth and then all those mean thoughts keep flooding in. So in Brené’s book, she says, she has this part where she talks about worthiness and wholeheartedness. I've been practicing living wholeheartedly, going after being a wholehearted surgeon, friend, administrator, boss for over 10 years now. So this really struck me though. How many of us say I'll be worthy when I lose 20 pounds? I'll be able to do that when I lose 20 pounds, or I'll be worthy if I can get pregnant, or if I get or stay sober, or if everybody thinks I'm a good person or a great person at work or a good friend, or I can make a living. My personal one is I don't feel worthy of going back to my dermatologist and getting better care for my skin because I haven't done what she told me to do the last time I was there five years ago. You know, and it’s just like okay. So I want to do a little exercise here. We all have these voices that get in our head about worthiness. I want you to think of a woman in your life, maybe somebody at this table, maybe your mother, your sister, just somebody that you really love and respect but somebody you really care a whole lot about. I want you to pick that person in your head, and I want you to think if that person was coming to me and really having one of those days where she is beating herself up about her weight and not being able to stick with her exercise program. I'm not looking at anybody. Think about your best compassionate answer just in your head, just silently. Think about what you would say to her and your sweetest most kindest encouraging friend voice. Just take a little bit imagine yourself. Just wrapping your arms around her and hugging her and being there for her and being really sweet and kind and encouraging and lifting her up so that she could be in a better space. Okay, now I want you to turn that into yourself. I want you to think of your own mean voice, and I want you to do that exercise for yourself. This is a little mini meditation okay. So what we're going to do is we're going to think and the meanest things that we talk to ourselves and say, because we all talk to ourselves like worse than anybody else could ever, right, and you would never let them talk to your friend like you just talk to yourself. So I want you to just take, I'm going to quit talking for a second. Just take a minute and take a big breath. You can close your eyes or not and just practice loving yourself, your heart, and talking to yourself like you would that woman that you love and wrapping her arms around her. Just breathe for like five seconds. So that is my mini meditation exercise. Whenever I find myself in a place where I'm really getting anxious, and I'm going through the middle of the road, that I'm beating myself up for being late to the OR or whatever it is, just take five minutes. Take that breath, do that meditation for yourself. Because as you practice that, what you'll find is having that compassion for yourself increases your ability to do it to those around you, with those around you. The amazing thing it creates the bubble that you can transform into to your next self. It's a really powerful tool. That was the first thing I wanted to share with you. The second thing I'm going to share with you is a quote that was from the very beginning of me getting to know Brené. Y'all have heard it before, but I'm going to read it, and I didn't give it to you because I want you to listen to it. So this is the quote from Theodore Roosevelt that she opened, was it Brave? I can't remember which one, but she talks about it is not the critic who counts. It's not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. Y'all, I'm getting choked up. I don't ever get choked up doing this stuff. The credit belongs to the man, the woman, who's actually in their arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Sounds like my OR. Who strives valiantly, who errors, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming. But who does eventually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends herself in a worthy cause who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly. That's the book it was from, Daring Greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither do victory nor defeat. Okay, so the reason this is so important to me is I used to really hate speaking in public. I'm really good one-on-one. I'm quite introverted. I was having all these conversations with my patients in the office about their well-being, going where the scalpel doesn't reach, all the stuff that helps us heal and be well. I had a really strong calling to do that on a larger scale, but I was not a good speaker, and I did not enjoy being in front of an audience. So I made a decision in 2020 to start a podcast. The backstory of that has a lot to do with my history of hardship. So in the last 14 years, I've gone through two divorces, a failed business. I almost bankrupt business. Three moves, empty nesting, menopause, an unexpected death of my first husband. That was almost seven years ago. I have four children who now are in their 20s, and the process of dealing with all of that over this last decade has built me into somebody with an incredible strength and capacity. A lot of people might just look at me and go oh, she's got all this going on, and I wanted you to see the underbelly of it. I wanted you to see what I have been through. Because I've applied what I've been through with these techniques to grow and transform, it's made me into somebody that now I could stand in front of you and speak and have a broader platform. So part of what I did when I was going through the grief for the loss of my ex is I didn't want to go to a psychiatrist and get on antidepressants, not that there's anything wrong with that. But I wanted to keep working. I was like I don't have time for this. I knew it was grief. It was a devastating grief that took me off of my feet. He and I had not had a great divorce, and we had a conflicted co-parenting arrangement. I thought the best thing in the world would be for him to just go away and never come back again. Then when he passed away, we've been together 25 years, married 22 years. It was the deepest, most profound grief I ever had. By 2019, I turned to an online life coaching program to start working through my grief with a life coach online like watching videos kind of thing and learning about how to manage my mind, which is what life coaching is. I guess that was 2018 that I started that I found it because I was dealing with the grief then. Then by 2019, I liked it so much that I decided to get certified as a life coach. So I went through the life coach training program, and I tried and failed at an online coaching program. It's called Virtuosa Coaching. I was going to have coaches doing that as part of my practice, and it didn't work. But you're going to see that on some of our things that we're going to pass out at the end. I've got some goodies for you, some tools. So Virtuosa Coaching was the name of my coaching that's now a failure that turned into something good. Okay, where was I going with this? Okay, so I became a life coach. As part of that, I had this fantastic group of life coach women around me. I decided I was going to do a podcast because the one-on-one coaching I really, I suck at that. I'm terrible at it. Y'all know why? Can you tell? Because I'm a surgeon. I just want to get in there and fix it. I'm a terrible life coach. These woman, they have the patience to sit there and listen and talk and like let people unwind and develop, and I love my life coach very much. She's my sanity, but I'm terrible at it. So I thought oh, let me just start podcasting, and I started interviewing my life coach friends on Zoom calls. During 2020, we developed this podcast called Becoming Virtuosa. It was about becoming the best version of yourself. The very first episode of that show is called Let the Becoming Begin. We published it. It's still available on like Google and all of the things, Apple podcasts and Spotify and all that. But I started with this Brené quote because I was stepping into the arena in a way that I never had before, like publicly laying it out there open for social media ridicule and all that. I was very, very, very uncomfortable with that. So I started that then. Then now it's evolved into the video show, and we stripped the video show out and The Dr. Crockett Show video becomes the Becoming Virtuosa audio. So now we're up to almost 100 episodes. We're about to celebrate 100 episodes of Becoming Virtuosa. It’s really fun. So I wanted to share that with you. Then I wanted to share with you what I'm talking about when I talk about being in the middle. Okay, this hard part of being in the middle now that you've heard a little bit of mine. So this is a song called The Chicken by Bo Burnham who's somebody who just uses his music to make a statement. So when I say I'm in the middle right now, again, that's what I mean. I'm that little chicken in the middle of the road, and I'm looking at headlights. In a very real fashion, and I wanted to share this with you. So about five years ago, I had an idea that I needed to expand my capacity as a surgeon to be able to make surgery easier for more women, and I can only do so many myself. So I thought what if I had an office that was in the same center as my OR. So instead of having 45 minutes in time turnaround that was wasted between cases, I could go to visit patients and increase the number of cases that I would do, and I would also be an on-site mentor so that other surgeons could come, and I could help them do a better job also with surgery. So they could bring their harder cases and have somebody teach them. It's taken five years for the center to get built, and it's taken us hours and hours and hours and finances and worry and stress, and I'm right in the middle of the hard part, which is when you go from where you were taking the big step up into the next step that you are. Whenever you're in that middle, in that gap, there are expenses that you don't normally have because you're paying double rent. I had financial plans that didn't come through. So I'm having to figure out other financial pieces to keep the business going and to get it to the next level. I'm literally in that gap where we moved into the new office last week. I'm selling my house and moving my kids at the same time. The center for the surgery doesn't open until September, and my two new docs don't start until September and October. So I'm in this three-month gap starting now, which is like Lord just get me through this couple of months. In the past, I've been in much harder middles. I was in a middle one time when there weren't patients coming in the door, and I had all this anxiety, and it was a business that I couldn't keep going. It was a practice that I had at Lavernia that said a long time ago. This is a different kind of middle. This is a middle where I'm looking at it going. I know this is going to work. I know I can figure it out. I know I can get to the other side, and I know why I want to get to the other side. The plan is good, and it's going to get there. That's a whole different capacity, that's a whole different level of having compassion and care for yourself then when I was in that smaller level of capacity where all I could see was all of the failure and everything's going to go bankrupt, and I'm a terrible person and all of that. So I'm sharing this story with you because this is such an important part of all of you, but you also need to see what it's like for somebody that's stepping up into leadership and growing. I want you to see the compassion that I've practiced on myself for the last five years and the compassion and wholeheartedness that I approach each of you with is what I want to encourage you to do with each other. I want to encourage you on your own growth journey. Because I think we can do incredible things together. I'm not going to exclude the men, but it's been a huge honor for me to be able to have this conversation with you guys today. So, thank you very much. I have one more tool, one more thing that I'm going to pass out for you. So this is a tool that we call the seven step transformation tool, and this is something I developed during that Becoming Virtuosa podcast. It just takes you through the steps of like where you are in the dream that you have for getting to the next thing. That can be something small like me trying to lose 10 pounds and being the person who weighs 10 pounds less than I am now, or it could be something big, like the five-year dream with a multi-million dollar business and center that's reaching, it’s going to reach thousands and thousands of people by the time we turn it into this big teaching center. But whatever it is for you, this is a tool you can use again and again. The instructions are on the second page, the last two pages. So I'm going to pass these out to you as my little gift to you and just encourage you in your own growth journeys and transformation journeys. Thank you so much for listening to me today and coming. Okay. Well, thanks for listening this week. We will see you next week on The Dr. Crockett Show. Have a wonderful week. For those of you in the U.S., I hope you had a happy 4th of July. I'm actually filming this on the day before. So happy Independence Day and God bless America. See you next week. Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.