Dr. Denise Brown was thriving. In just 18 months as CEO, she had jumpstarted a stagnating company and negotiated its sale to the largest telemedicine network in the country. To everyone else, it was monumental. For her, “it was ugly. I didn’t follow my own rules, and I suffered for it.”
That apparent triumph and its consequences – severe back pain and an ulcer – reawakened her to the principles she’d lost by mistaking linear progress for holistic growth. “If you’re doing it because you’re supposed to be doing it,” she declares, “you’re going to be miserable.”
Her new book, The Fairy God Doctor Will See You Now: A Working Woman’s Manual for Living Life on Her Own Terms, details Brown’s journey through trying to “have it all” and shows how other women can learn from her mistakes.
Take the Wrong Path
When she was 24, Dr. Denise lost her mom to complications from a serious autoimmune disease. Although devastated, that loss gave her the jolt she needed to change her life. “We get sucked into this belief that there’s only one path to stay on,” she relates, “and don’t interrogate that to make sure it’s the path you want to be on. My mom’s death cemented my belief that today’s the day to jump off.”
Her subsequent decision to transfer from Stanford to Vanderbilt as a second-year resident was the first time she left that path. “People don’t transfer out of residencies, but I wanted to be with my husband, so I envisioned a way where I could make that happen,” she explains. “Asking seemed so scary, but it all worked out great.”
This was proof that the best choices are often nonlinear ones. They fit your definition of happiness and success, not someone else’s. “You realize it wasn’t that hard. Being bold once gives you this positive feedback loop to go and do bolder and more interesting things,” she says.
Lose Your Balance
As her career progressed and she became a mother, Dr. Denise realized that even though she had it all, she couldn’t do it all. “Young women in particular have this sense that they’re supposed to do and control everything,” she notes. “That pressure is not sustainable. You have to ask for help.”
Not only should you ask for help from your friends and family, you should ask for it from your job. “I’ve counseled so many women who are stressed out of their minds trying to, for example, get to an early morning staff meeting because they’ve got to take their kids to school. If you say, ‘I would deeply appreciate if we could push this meeting back by 30 minutes’, people will be empathetic. But you have to be brave enough to ask,” she advises.
That’s why Dr. Denise believes deprioritizing work-life balance is the best form of self-care. “If you have a shitty day at work you bring it home, whether you want to or not, and vice versa,” she says. A fight at home or a discouraging result at work will affect you whether you like it or not. “Bring your whole self to the party,” Dr. Denise declares. “Be focused and do what you’re supposed to do, but at the same time take action to be true to yourself and steadfast in what that truth is.”
Be Wrong to Get Right
A critical component of that self-care is honesty. “The only way a bold choice can go wrong is if you’re dishonest with yourself and don’t really know what you’re looking for,” she warns. That applies to professional decisions as well as personal ones. “In my training as a physician, I developed a decision-making rubric that works anywhere. You listen, you think, you come up with a plan and you enact that plan. But I also let myself change my mind,” she adds.
In other words, if you don’t possess curiosity and a willingness to be wrong, you’re going to make mistakes. “A lot of people have thought about an issue from a particular perspective for so long that they feel they can’t change their minds,” Dr. Denise explains. “Sometimes, you just have to put down your established opinion and start over.”
She applies that knowledge to her current work as a VC mentor. “These founders and CEOs make a calculated set of assumptions, but now that we’re farther down the line, what else have you learned? And how does that change your initial assumption?” she queries. She believes that successful leaders are always prepared to pivot. “Think of drivers on a mountain road. Good drivers notice slight curves and get ready to turn. Bad drivers either make drastic, last-minute corrections or plunge off the ledge altogether.”
To learn more about Dr. Denise’s perspective and her upcoming book, The Fairy God Doctor’s Guide to a Good Life: A Prescription for the Working Woman, visit her website or connect with Denise on LinkedIn.
