Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
Physician Burnout & Life Coaching for Healthcare Professionals
Compassionate coaching for physicians and healthcare professionals navigating burnout, stress, and life transitions.
Healthcare professionals are trained to push through exhaustion, minimize symptoms, and meet impossibly high expectations. Over time, this can lead to burnout—emotional depletion, loss of joy, and a sense of lost agency.
Your body and mind are communicating important information.
Coaching can help you interrupt the burnout cycle and reconnect with your values, energy, and sense of purpose.
As a physician and certified physician development coach, I help healthcare professionals slow down, listen inward, and create sustainable change using well-established, evidence-based coaching techniques.
I am a family medicine physician who has practiced in Rhode Island for 25 years, working across various settings, including FQHCs, urgent care, hospitals, primary care, and academic medicine. I have taught Brown medical students, interns, and residents throughout my career.
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
Are you experiencing burnout?
You may recognize yourself here:
-
Feeling emotionally drained, disconnected, or chronically fatigued
-
Increased frustration or stress related to your job
-
Decreased patience with patients, staff, or colleagues
-
Irritability at work or at home
-
Work feels draining rather than meaningful
-
A sense of lost autonomy or agency
You don’t have to navigate this alone.
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
Who I Work With
I coach healthcare professionals at all stages of training and practice, supporting both professional and personal growth, including:
-
Career change, transition, or advancement
-
Leadership coaching
-
Physician burnout recovery and prevention
-
Work–life integration
-
Relationship challenges, including divorce
-
Reconnecting with joy, meaning, and fulfillment
-
Learning to listen to and trust your inner wisdom
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
About Dawn Borschel, MD
I am a family medicine physician who practiced in Rhode Island for 25 years.
In 2022, I experienced burnout firsthand. On a June morning, I found myself unable to leave my home and face the looming demands of work as a physician. A convergence of personal stress, increasing professional demands, and the pandemic left me depleted—mentally, emotionally, and physically. Like many physicians, my training had taught me to push through.
The cost was profound.
I feared my career in medicine was over.
Through a period of leave, therapy, and exposure to coaching, I rediscovered my sense of agency. I returned to medicine in a way that honored both my professional competence and my humanity.
Inspired by this transformation, I completed a six-month training program with the Physician Coaching Institute and became a Certified Physician Development Coach.
Today, I am passionate about supporting physicians and healthcare professionals who want to remain in medicine—but not at the expense of their well-being.
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
My Coaching Philosophy
Healthcare systems often prioritize productivity and metrics over self-connection and authenticity. This disconnect can lead to frustration, loss of control, and diminished fulfillment.
Coaching creates space to:
-
Reconnect with your core values
-
Align your professional life with your authentic self
-
Make small, meaningful changes that lead to transformation
You already hold the wisdom of your best and wisest self.
Coaching helps you access it.
Guiding Principles
-
You choose the direction of each session
-
I guide the process—not the content
-
You remain accountable for your actions
-
Sessions are safe, supportive, and confidential
I walk alongside you as a thoughtful witness—reflecting patterns, narratives, and emotions to deepen self-awareness and alignment.
Being part of this journey—toward freedom, lightness, and fulfillment—brings me profound joy.
I look forward to meeting you.
—Dawn
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
Client Stories
"Dawn is a skillful and compassionate listener. Her experience with people shines through in her approach to offering insights that create shifts in thought and energy."
Amy Ornstein, MD
"Dawn is an insightful coach who creates a safe space in which her clients feel comfortable. Her calm curiosity helped me uncover my limiting beliefs and obstacles, while opening my eyes to solutions and possibilities. I am grateful."
Deepti Ghandi, MD
“Dawn Borschel MD's coaching has provided me with a renewed sense of purpose and direction in my medical practice. I highly recommend her services for physicians seeking personal and professional growth.”
Dr. L. Garcia
Coaching Services
Coaching can play a powerful role in physician wellness by creating a confidential space to reflect, reset, and reconnect with purpose. Through structured conversation, physicians gain clarity on values, workload, and boundaries, helping reduce burnout and decision fatigue. Coaching strengthens self-awareness, communication, and leadership skills while supporting realistic goal setting and sustainable habits. It also normalizes challenges, decreasing isolation and fostering resilience. Rather than adding another obligation, coaching helps physicians work and live with greater intention, energy, and alignment. The result is not only improved personal wellbeing, but also better patient relationships, team dynamics, and long-term professional satisfaction, overall outcomes.
Dawn Borschel MD Coaching
Frequently Asked Questions
What coaching services do you offer?
My business provides a range of coaching services tailored to physicians' individual needs, including professional development coaching, leadership coaching, and work-life balance coaching. Each session is personalized to address specific concerns and promote overall well-being in your medical career and personal life.
What can I expect during a coaching session?
Our coaching sessions provide a confidential, supportive environment where you can openly explore your professional priorities and personal goals. I bring focused engagement, strategic guidance, and a collaborative process designed to help you gain clarity, identify solutions, and move forward with purpose in your medical career.
Unlock Your Potential Today
Evidence for Physician Coaching
Over the past decade, randomized trials and institutional studies increasingly support coaching as an evidence-based intervention for physician well-being. Studies show coaching significantly reduces burnout and interpersonal disengagement while improving resilience, professional fulfillment, engagement, and quality of life. Effects have been demonstrated in practicing physicians and trainees, across individual, peer-coaching, and group formats. Although few trials measure turnover directly, the literature consistently shows coaching improves the psychological and professional drivers most strongly associated with retention, suggesting it is a promising workforce-stabilization strategy.
-
Dyrbye LN, Shanafelt TD, Gill PR, Satele DV, West CP. Effect of a Professional Coaching Intervention on the Well-being and Distress of Physicians: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Intern Med. . 2019;179(10):1406-1414. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2425
-
Gazelle G, Liebschutz JM, Riess H. Physician burnout: coaching a way out. J Gen Intern Med. . 2015;30(4):508-13. doi:10.1007/s11606-014-3144-y
-
Boet S, Etherington C, Dion PM, et al. Impact of coaching on physician wellness: A systematic review. PLoS ONE. . 2023;18(2):e0281406. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0281406
-
Kiser, S. B., Sterns, J. D., Lai, P. Y., Horick, N. K., & Palamara, K. (2024). Physician coaching by professionally trained peers for burnout and well-being: a randomized clinical trial. JAMA Network Open, 7(4), e245645-e245645.
-
Fainstad T, Mann A, Suresh K, et al. Effect of a Novel Online Group-Coaching Program to Reduce Burnout in Female Resident Physicians: A Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA netw. open. . 2022;5(5):e2210752. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.10752