Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction Most professions reward expertise and this generally plays as exactly what you’d expect for the profession to be effective. Patients deserve physicians who recognize subtle diagnoses. Aircraft deserve engineers who understand failure modes. Organizations benefit when accountants know the subtleties of tax law, software developers understand minute...
Category Archives: Self Awareness
Imprecision in Thought: Capstone “I Didn’t Make This Up, Kid”
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction There’s something about the calendar turning toward July 4th that makes this feel a little less abstract. Maybe it’s being a bicentennial baby. Maybe it’s twenty years in uniform. Maybe it’s just the cumulative effect of watching the quality of our public conversations degrade while the volume...
Imprecision in Thought Part 4 Comfort, Complexity, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In the last post, we walked through how thinking breaks—how overusing shortcuts, collapsing distinctions, and grabbing onto explanations that are a little too clean pulls us away from reality while giving us the comforting sense that we’ve finally made sense of it. None of that is particularly...
Imprecision in Thought Part 3 Not the Same Thing: Where Thinking Actually Breaks
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In part 2 of this series, we talked about the discipline required to avoid becoming the problem you’re trying to fix—slowing down, defining terms, showing your work, and resisting the very natural urge to react before you actually understand what you’re reacting to. All of that matters....
Imprecision in Thought — Part 2 The Discipline of Not Being Part of the Problem
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In the last post, we talked about that moment when something sounds wrong—the face scrunch, the irritation, the immediate certainty that what you’re reading or hearing doesn’t hold up. The problem doesn’t stop with what you’re reacting to. It includes what you’re about to become if you...
Imprecision in Thought Part 1 When Something Sounds Wrong—But You Can’t Explain Why
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction Don’t ya just love those moments where you start out certain you know what to do, and then a quick pause to check that all systems are “go” gives you some unexpected clarity—and you realize you’re about to make a colossal blunder? Picture this—I’m wiling away a...
When Burnout Stops Being a Private Problem
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction In the last installment, I argued that burnout matters to individuals in ways that are intuitively obvious, but that its broader significance is organizational. It changes what professionals contribute, and it changes how they influence, motivate, and inspire others. Left unnamed and unexamined, it erodes judgment, mentoring,...
And Now For Something Completely Different…
Christopher J. Colombo MD, CEC, CMC, CPP Introduction From time to time on this blog I will exercise “author’s prerogative” and deviate from what would otherwise be the expected/scheduled post topic. This post was planned to be the 3rd installment of the burnout series and for a variety of reasons, I didn’t particularly feel like...
The fundamental attribution error and the antidote
Paul M. Michaud MD, CPE Too often, we attribute other people’s poor behavior to their character, while attributing our poor behavior to external/situational factors. Reference previous link language here. Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ______.” While it is possible that the behavior you are observing is, in fact,...
“Your emotions are logical… you’re just bad at logic.”
When you experience an emotion, you have a thought about that emotion. That thought often determines the action you take. You likely blame the emotion for the action you take without considering the thought that led to the action. Next time you feel a strong emotion it may be useful to remember… your emotions are...