Meet Alice Sullivan

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alice Sullivan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alice, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

This was a phenomenon that took a lot of hard work and burning of the ego. I felt this way for years after graduating residency, and it really flared during a dream job. For 2 years, patients would come from all over the country, even the world, with their difficult cases to this clinic. They all would really have liked to see the three much older, more experienced physicians that I was still learning from— but they could make an appointment with me sooner. After 2 years, I realized that all of my mentors were tackling these cases differently, they had different priorities and decision trees. For example, one of my mentors was mostly concerned to not overwhelm a sensitive patient, while another was concerned that undertreatment would be too slow and waste time inefficiently, and the third would use homeopathic with blood cell response under the microscope to determine next best steps. These varied approaches all achieved positive effects in many patients, and watching this gave me a lot more data to learn from, as well as permission to go forward with my best effort, and use what I could from everything I learned, to help patients. Over time, despite my self-doubt, I had many successes and knew the formula for myself is to just keep learning. Listen to the patient; not just their symptoms, but their willingness and priorities, and this helps you balance your attention. Never assume you know all of the case, all the ways to look at it, or all of the paths to treatment. Own the parts you do know, and do your best.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Helping patients through a difficult health challenge, to recover their health after a long and life-changing infirmity, is a very satisfying journey to take with them. This often takes a lot of patience, and a lot of listening, as well as a wide lens of testing and therapeutics, which they haven’t received in other healthcare venues. My chosen field of practice has many opportunities for learning, since there are many systems of healing that can be applied, and there are so many new areas of research that are relevant.

My husband is a naturopathic physician; he and I are launching a new private practice together in Columbia, Maryland. We have a complementary approach to patient care, as we have focuses in different therapeutics although we often test similarly.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

One area of knowledge that was impactful was medical anthropology. This field helped me understand that people have different frames for understanding their illness and symptoms. This is true even within American culture, although my undergraduate course was about varied aboriginal cultures; individuals will have stories and beliefs around their illness which may need to be addressed or questioned during the healing process.

Another area was my own meditation practice. I have been meditating since 1986, and although I have sometimes changed the form of my meditation, the mantras or systems, I understand that much of my health and my balance requires that I surrender regularly to the light of Spirit that I feel during meditation.

Another area is critical thinking skills. As I grew as a clinician, at a point I started to see patterns more clearly, and use critical thinking to apply to compare these patterns and offer support to the patient by supporting their weak points.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?

Of course, this is the easiest question on the list: don’t choose one over the other! You will always benefit from trying to improve in weak areas, but give yourself enough room and forgiveness to go the pace you need to go. And, if you have strengths, then go for it and do the best you can with those. There are many examples of people who have strained to overachieve in one area and have therefore failed due to the microfocusing, or the burnout, or the lack of rest. Perhaps the most important thing is to find a supportive network for what you’re working on, so you know when you’re overdoing it, or not cutting yourself enough slack.

Image Credits

None necessary