Workshop Topics

Many physicians are disturbed by the dramatic changes they see in health care, changes that have increased work loads and risks while reducing the rewards of practicing medicine. Increasing demands on physicians’ time and insufficient attention to self-care often create a chaotic lifestyle. Lost dreams of service and satisfaction may leave physicians feeling stuck, missing the passion that once gave meaning to work, relationships, and life itself. Physician Renewal provides a supportive, confidential environment in which you can take charge of your destiny by getting the personal attention you need as you work on the things that really matter in life: your values and goals, how you invest your time, and planning the next  chapter of your career and personal life. Working in small groups, you will talk with fellow physicians confronting these same issues and explore options with Dr. Moskowitz as the facilitator. The program emphasizes experiential learning techniques. You will get new ideas, decide what you really want now, and build a plan for living – detailed strategies to align your life with your goals, visions, and dreams. If your spouse or partner attends the seminar, which is highly recommended, you will plan together as well as individually. At the completion of the seminar each participant will be able to:

• Understand the Cycle of Renewal as a paradigm for managing life and career change. Define personal and professional values.
• Manage time and money in relationship to values.
• Investigate his/her range of career options, using medicine as a platform to meet their needs.
• Develop ways to manage the stress inherent in practicing medicine today and better balance life with work.
• Design a specific life plan for the next stage of life, involving specific action steps, timelines, and support systems.

This is the most popular of the CPPR Physician workshops. It is available in half-day, full-day, and two-day versions, depending upon the time availability, level of interest of participating physicians and spouses, and your budget. The program utilizes experiential learning and a high level of audience participation and interaction with the facilitator to guide physicians to greater personal and professional satisfaction. For a more detailed listing of topics discussed, please contact us.

The chaos that characterizes the healthcare environment today is the source of increasing personal and professional stress for physicians and their families. Besieged by managed care, workload pressures, income reduction, and loss of control, increasing numbers of physicians across the nation are reaching professional burnout. Balancing Life and Work is a seminar for physicians and their spouses or partners which provides a supportive, confidential environment with personal guidance to better understand and identify your personal stressors, understand the stress pathways that lead to burnout, appreciate the six domains of life balance, and develop a personal life plan, based upon your own unique values, which will lead to improved career-life balance, improved stress management, and greater personal and professional satisfaction. Utilizing experiential learning exercises, small group discussion, and didactic teaching, Dr. Moskowitz will guide participants through a process leading to a personal life balance plan. A unique and individualized balance-monitoring system, The Personal Craziness Index, will be provided to each participant. At the conclusion of this program, each participant will be able to:

• Understand the Cycle of Renewal as a paradigm for personal and career change.
• Understand the internal and external factors which lead to physician career dissatisfaction.
• Identify their own unique stressors at work and at home.
• Understand the stress cycle and how it progressively leads to burnout.
• Have a personal strategy for improved stress management.
• Understand the Six Domains of Life Balance and how to implement them in daily living.
• Design a personal plan to achieve and monitor their own work – life balance.

This seminar is available in both half day and full day formats, depending upon the time availability of the participants, their level of interest in the topic, and the budget.

Certain signs or events – difficulty collecting bills, long-standing disagreements among your partners, the demands of the call schedule, or promising new techniques – have stimulated your desire for change. It may be that the original goals and aspirations that drew you and your colleagues together in a practice no longer animate that practice. You may want to explore options and try a new practice setting. Maybe moving to another region of the country appeals you. You may be considering changing to an entirely new area of clinical medicine, or even a new career outside of clinical medicine. Perhaps a non-medical career is your dream! Successful career transitions require thoughtful planning. To make a sound decision, you will need a great deal of information about how to plan a career change, what legal options and restrictions to consider in closing or leaving your current practice and starting anew, and how to assess your financial situation both to plan for reduced income during the transition and new funding during the next start-up phase. This full-day seminar is presented by Dr. Moskowitz and his co-authors Joel Blau, CFP, and Ronald Paprocki, JD, CFP, of Mediqus Asset Advisors in Chicago. The seminar is based upon the authors’ best-selling book, “Medical Practice Divorce: Successfully Managing a Medical Business Breakup” published by the American Medical Association Press. The speakers use a combination of lectures, small group discussion, and experiential written exercises to lead participants through the career planning, legal planning, and financial planning issues associated with implementing a medical career transition. At the conclusion of this program, each participant will be able to:

• Understand what factors are driving their career dissatisfaction.
• Understand the Cycle of Renewal as a paradigm for career change.
• Define their values, purpose, and passions.
• Manage the three phases of Career Transition.
• Know and plan for the personal and professional tasks to be mastered in the new career setting.
• Expect and strategize around income reduction during transition.
• Have a long-term strategy for effective financial planning of the the new career venture. Anticipate and plan to meet legal and insurance issues in leaving an existing medical practice.
• How best to set up a new medical partnership, including organizational, financial, and legal perspectives.

Coincident with the dramatic rise in professional burnout among physicians, there has been a parallel and equally dramatic increase in the number of physicians reported to and disciplined by both local and state medical agencies because of disruptive behavior in the workplace. The leaders of medical staff organizations are typically the first to deal with these difficult problems, often with very little training or preparation. The Disruptive Physician is a half day program designed to assist hospital medical staff committee members and physician leaders address how to effectively yet sensitively confront and manage the behavior of the physician with disruptive behavior. Using a combination of lectures, experiential learning, and small group discussions, Dr. Moskowitz guides the participants through a series of modules which facilitate a better understanding of what drives the behavior and how to confront and deal with it effectively. A definition of effective physician behavior is provided and contrasted with disruptive behavior. Guidelines are provided to help establish a Professional Standards committee of the medical staff and how this committee can establish the boundaries of appropriate physician behavior. Effective methods to confront and begin the healing process of physicians who violate those boundaries are discussed as well as when to refer unresolved problems to external resources. Case examples facilitate this process. The end result of this seminar is a time-proven, integrated, and holistic approach to dealing with disruptive physician behavior. At the conclusion of this program, each participant will be able to:

• Define the healthy behaviors which characterize effective physicians.
• Understand the physician personality traits, coping skills, workplace triggers, and family history traits which often accompany disruptive behavior.
• Understand what additional emotional-psychiatric disorders are commonly present but undiagnosed.
• Implement effective solutions with which to make the working environment safe for all healthcare professionals.
• Establish effective peer review by which to confront the behavior while treating the physician with sensitivity and caring.
• Distinguish those cases in which external referral are likely to be necessary.

Long a bastion of career satisfaction and intellectual stimulation, medical schools and their affiliated teaching centers in the United States are witnessing a growing trend of faculty disaffection, losses of large numbers of full-time faculty to jobs in the private sector, increasing faculty stress and burnout, and premature retirement. Coupled with the increasing difficulty of recruiting new faculty to academic centers, administrators, department chairs, and deans fear that academic life as we have known it is dying. Prolonging Your Academic Career is a one-day career renewal workshop for physicians in academic medicine. Utilizing a combination of didactic lectures, experiential learning exercises, and small group discussion, Dr. Moskowitz leads participants through a process which identifies and clarifies the issues which are unique to academic careers in healthcare. Among the topics discussed are reassesing your academic purpose, aligning your purpose and values with those of your institution, facing academic promotion and transitions to leadership, self coaching for leaders and managers, balancing career and family life, and managing your critical resources of time and money. At the end of the program, participants will:

• Be able to define their current academic purpose.
• Understand how to better align their purpose with those of the institution in which they work.
• Have a strategy to better balance their career with their private life.
• Understand how to optimize the use of their critical resources: time and money.
• Have their own unique academic career plan including specific action steps, timelines, and a support system with which to move their careers forward.

WORKSHOP OVERVIEW: A successful marriage is the ultimate spiritual challenge.  This is particularly true for physicians and their spouses due to the unique demands of their relationship.  This 1.5 hour workshop should be attended by medical couples who would like to spend time thinking critically and openly with each other about their relationship, their challenges, the things they argue about, and finding effective solutions.  Written exercises will lead each couple to an individualized plan to improve their marriage. SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

1. Discuss the common features of the medical marriage.
2. Discuss the marriage challenges of spouses and physicians.
3. Present solutions to the challenges.
4. Create a safe forum for discussion between spouses

Physicians who enter leadership roles within clinical practices, large multi-specialty clinics, academic departments, or multi-institutional healthcare systems are faced with many unique challenges.  They are typically poorly prepared to face those challenges.  MAXIMIZING YOUR LEADERSHIP EFFECTIVENESS is a 4-hour highly interactive workshop for physician leaders.  Using a combination of learning approaches including lecture, small group discussion, written exercises, journaling, and large group discussion, Dr. Moskowitz will lead participants through the key steps and introduce tools necessary to achieve both personal leadership and organizational leadership.  Participants will receive a bound workbook containing all of the Powerpoint slides, all written exercises, and detailed references.  Each registrant will leave the workshop with an individualized action plan for improving both their personal and organizational leadership.

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP
1. Understand the changing medical milieu.
2. Clarify your personal purpose.
3. Use your values to manage personal time.
4. Have a thoughtful prescription for health and balance.

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP.
1. Develop a vision for the future and communicate it well.
2. Manage your work office and work flow strategically.
3. Understand and coach others in the cyclical pattern of careers.
4. The importance and tasks of the career mentoring of staff.
5. How to handle bad actors.
6 .The intangibles of leading other physicians.

This 75-minute mini-workshop will present the fundamental concepts underlying the effective and efficient use of your two precious resources, your time and your money.  It will focus on the practical applications of values-based time and money management.   Dr. Moskowitz will lead participants through the process of how to create a personalized plan.  Each participant will receive a workbook with written exercises, and will leave the session with a personalized time and money management plan.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:
1. Determine your current and your preferred weekly time allocation.
2. Consider how to move towards your preferred allocation plan for improved balance.
3. Make some critical decisions about the state of your financial planning.
4. Create a Personal Plan to Improve your time & money management.

As more and more “boomer” physicians enter their 50’s and 60’s, planning for retirement from practice becomes an important priority.  For many, the increasing demands of clinical practice, the downward pressure on reimbursement, and other factors negatively impacting their satisfaction are creating an even greater exodus to retirement.  At the same time, traditional concepts of retirement are rapidly changing.  The improved longevity and physical health of mid and late career physicians are creating entirely new retirement opportunities.

Unlike most workshops devoted to financial planning for retirement, presented by certified financial planners, this workshop will focus on the non-financial, life planning considerations in retirement planning and post-retirement planning, facilitated by a national leader in physician life and career planning, who was a practicing radiologist for 41 years.

RETIREMENT FROM CLINICAL MEDICINE is a 4-hour workshop suitable for practicing physicians, residents and fellows.  The content will encourage audience participation, and emphasize experiential learning including lecture, small and large group discussion, and written exercises.   The approach is designed to clarify personal values, provide physicians with practical tools and strategies to help them make the important decisions necessary for a successful retirement, and help them plan for a new satisfying and meaningful life chapter after retirement. This workshop, based upon Dr. Moskowitz’s over two decades of life and career coaching experience with physicians, as well as his own retirement from practice. Will result in an individualized retirement plan for each participant.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES:

1. Learn how retirement attitudes and strategies are rapidly changing.
2. Consider “protirement,” rather than “retirement.”
3. Consider WHY retirement soon may or may not make sense for you.
4. Learn WHO should retire from the practice of medicine.
5. Learn WHEN is the appropriate time for you to retire.
6. Learn HOW to plan a successful retirement:
   1. Create a personal income stream that meets your needs.
   2. Clinical practice considerations.
   3. When to start planning.
   4. Working with your spouse/partner.
   5. Working with a certified financial planner.
7. Consider WHAT NEXT? (Golf every day may not cut it for everyone.)
   1. Developing a post-retirement plan for happiness, contribution, and meaning.
   2. Learn from the experience of physicians already retired.