Episode 161 - Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson - Leaders On Leadership
"I see this abandonment as something more pleasurable. It is connecting with your true voice and figuring the things that are important to me." - Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson.
Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson, an Amazon bestselling author, shares her thoughts about leaders on leadership and the price you have to pay for it. She shares how she lost many friends after she became a life coach because people think that change is contagious, and they're afraid that in a way that if you make a change in your lives that makes you happier and better, you are challenging them. Dr. Diely adds that when we are finally ready to start listening to our voice and not to the world, we already finish our milestones. Tune in to this episode and listen more about the price you must pay for leadership.
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Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson - Leaders On Leadership
In this episode, I am extremely excited to connect you with our guest. Her name is Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson. She is a former Hematologist-Oncologist. She's a life coach. She's also an Amazon bestselling author, but she prefers to describe herself as an oncologist who, after becoming a cancer survivor, decided that, “Life is too short. I don't want and make a living fighting death anymore. I'd rather make a living celebrating life.” She now specializes in helping professional women make romantic career transitions so that they can live the life they want. Diely, thank you so much for being our guest on the show.
Thank you for having me. You’ve said my name very well.
Thank you so much. A shout-out to our readers. For those of you that have read Dr. Madeline Frank before, she's the one that introduced me to Diely. I like to tee it up and let people know how our paths crossed. It's all about the people you meet and the books you read. Thank you again, Diely. I'm going to get started because I want to hear your perspective on The Price of Leadership.
Our readers know that my father talked about the four key tenets that you are going to have to be paying to truly call yourself a leader. The first to them is loneliness. We've all heard the saying, “It's lonely at the top. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” Could you unpack what loneliness as a leader looks like for you and share with us a time when you went through it in your life?
As a life coach, I love a saying that says that people would rather be unhappy than lose their identity. For me to become a leader as a life coach, and one of the populations I help also are physicians, I had to leave medicine behind. I had to decide I had enough. I want a better quality of life. I don't want to make a living fighting death. That made me lose many friends in a similar way as when I decided to be a happier person many years ago in divorce, someone who was making me very unhappy, I lost many friends.
People think that change is contagious, and they're afraid in a way that if you make a change in your lives that makes you happier and better, you are challenging them. They may want to pull you back. They may want to disappear and not be near you because you remind them of the unhappy life they have now. That has been my face with loneliness. When I left medicine and became a life coach, I started meeting wonderful people. I started making great connections and lost a huge amount of my former friends and colleagues.
I love that you said people fear that change is contagious because, in the world that we're in, even in your medical career before, if they're there seeing you, there's an issue. Typically, it means something has to change, either a medical issue or a lifestyle issue. It is interesting when people will look at you and say, “You've changed.” You're so right. That means that they don't want to, and they're afraid it will somehow leap on them.
I never realized that could be the spur of the sense of loneliness. It’s also good to hear that there's always somebody on the other side there to fill that gap with what you're looking for. Thank you for that, Diely. Now, weariness. How do you combat weariness? It must have been very exhausting in the medical profession, but how do you deal with weariness in your role?
We should normalize weariness in a way. We will have good days and bad days. We'll have phases when everything goes our way and see the fruit of our work. We will have phases where we are going to feel despair. The difference between the weariness that practically cost me career burnout and had me leave oncology and the weariness that you feel in a leadership role that you are committed to is, “Am I in the place where I want to be? Maybe things are not going my way right now. Maybe I'm second-guessing myself, but right at this moment, am I exactly where I want to be?” That is the way I've been combating weariness. If you can answer that question one day at a time, “Yes, I believe in this message. Yes, I still believe that what I am working for is worthy and is in alignment with my values,” then that's how you overcome the recurrent weariness of the leadership role.
I appreciate you saying we should normalize weariness because if you are in your purpose and you're pouring out into people, there is going to be an element of that. I love that you said that. If you're in the place, it's a good weary versus an exhausted, frustrated type of weary where you realize there's a difference when you're run down because you know you're in the wrong place and there's not a value congruence. As you said, there's a good weariness where you at least know you're in place, but there's a lot of work to do.
For people who work out, I compare it to when you are tired after a good workout at the gym. You feel tired and sore, but you feel good. It’s different from having spent your whole day working in a coal mine doing work that is exhausting and hurting your back lifting heavy things. That is a pain in a bad way.
He talked about loneliness and weariness. He talked about abandonment. When he talked about abandonment in The Price of Leadership, he referred to it as, “Stop doing the things that you shouldn't do.” It’s almost hyper-focus. You need to abandon all the things that aren't truly getting you to the place that you say you want to be in.
This is a tough one for us, especially as women because we like to be all things to all people. Can you share with us how you hone your sense of abandonment, especially since you abandoned past careers and past relationships and moved on to the next? Can you walk us through that or give us some advice on that?
Remember when you and I had the first talk, that's where I say, “I have a little objection to that,” but I see what you mean. In my case, change came from abandoning things that the world was telling me I was supposed to want but were not in connection with what I felt my mission in life was and what I wanted to do. I see this abandonment as something more pleasurable perhaps and is connecting with your true voice and figuring out, “What are the things that are important to me?”
You can prioritize and learn to say no. That is going to include recharging your batteries. That was the other tweak I have to that. It’s doing things that bring you happiness and expressing your creativity. Having a hobby that recharges you that is not connected with your cause of leadership is also very important because you cannot give what you don't have. In my case, I'm teaching people to be happier, to live life with passion, to love, to reinvent themselves, and find what they love. I have to be an example of that day by day.
Isn't it wonderful when you're working with people too? You talked about true voice. When you're listening to so much and for so much of our lives, we pretend. We pick up other masks, we drift, or we're not our authentic selves, but then when you truly abandon it, it's almost this huge relief because it's there all along. We only have to peel off all the other things that we have somehow put on ourselves and unfold that true voice that you said.
That difference between what I want versus what the world is telling me I'm supposed to want makes a big difference.
That's a secret to your unique purpose for being on this planet. The last point he talked about was the vision. For vision, he said that vision is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done, but then also going out and doing it and having a very practical, tactical aspect to it. Can you share with us how you craft your vision and how that drives you forward?
That is probably my favorite because the biggest transition I had to make from physician to life coach was to understand that I'm not here to prescribe. I'd come to the client-coach relationship with a vision of what I think would make this person happy and is worthless if it's not what they envision would make them happy. My biggest role as a leader and as a life coach is to help people find their own definition of their vision and what they want.
Sometimes, I help them raise the bar. Maybe they have a very low bar, and I remind them that there are other things. I help them elevate their mindset so they can see options that were previously invisible to their eyes and help them reconnect with that through voice and separating it from the noise. Ultimately, my leadership as a life coach is to help people figure out what their own vision is.
Do you have somebody help you figure out your vision too?
I have had coaches. Now, I have a coach that is helping me with my business vision. She's challenging me in many ways.
Can you unpack that for us? Tell us about what's next for what you're doing. It's great that you're pouring into other people, but we have to always realize we have to have somebody pouring into us too. Can you tell me some of your thoughts about what that looks like for what's next for you?
Precisely because I refuse to repeat the story of burnout in medicine, I have been until now very limited to a very exclusive one-on-one practice and refusing to visit. This coach is helping me break to the next level. Not only to see one-on-one clients but also to have groups and courses and expand my message. If I want to touch more people and grow regarding my income, I need to break that glass ceiling and start speaking to a larger audience.
Tell me, Diely. Where do you speak? Do you have anything coming up? Do you get out and speak?
Yes. I've spoken in the community a few times. The next time, a support group for female physicians is inviting me to speak in April 2023. The last time was a group of breast cancer survivors. I'm a breast cancer survivor. I have been exploring keynote speaking, but little by little. It is mostly a way to give back to the community.
We talked about loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. I appreciate your input on that. Is there anything else regarding The Price of Leadership that we haven't touched on that you would like to share with the audience?
A couple of things come to mind, but I think the most important would be to be intentional. Every moment when you are going to speak to someone or take a step, know what your intention is and why you are doing it. In my case, that is very important for me to differentiate. “Am I here to help this person or to be liked? They may not like something I need to tell them, but I am not here to be liked right now.”
Leaders On Leadership: Every moment when you are going to speak to someone or take a step, know what your intention is and why you are doing it.
Usually, I'm a very loving coach who's very soft, but sometimes I have to push a little bit in that direction. Sometimes, “Am I connecting with this person? Do I have a message for this person, or do they have a message for me? Is my intention to learn from this person right now or to give to them and have them learn from me?” At every step, you ask the question, “What's my intention now?”
Tell me about your ideal client and if our readers are thinking about this. Also, I noticed in some of the books on Amazon that you talk about the romance aspect of it. Can you unpack that for our readers?
When I first started being a life coach, I was a little on strike against medicine. I did not want to call myself a life coach for physicians. Most of my clients were women transitioning after divorce and heartbreak. I have a very interesting story myself. I was a divorced mother of four kids, including a kid with special needs. I had never dated in my life and nobody thought I was ever going to find a husband.
I ended up finding my soulmate. We're happily married. We've been together now for many years. He's become a stepfather for my four children despite the fact that he never had biological kids himself. That success story was inspiring women that you can find love after divorce. Divorce could be something good that happens to you and not the end of your life. That's where my initial interest was and where my first clients came from.
Divorce could be something good that happens to you and not the end of your life.
However, because I'm a physician and they knew me that way, I started having more and more physician clients, and I now specialized also in helping physicians make either career transitions, job transitions, or to be happy where they are when it’s time to retire or to change. In summary, my ideal client is usually a woman. I call her a fully grown-up woman.
At that moment when we are finally ready to start listening to our voice and not to the world, we already finished our milestones. Maybe we already decided whether to have children or not. We finished our careers, but now it's time to listen to our true voice. That varies, but it usually starts as early as the mid to late '30s and as late as the mid to late '50s.
According to Jung, depending on whether your parents are alive for longer or not, our midlife decisions and changes can be anywhere in that age range. My ideal client is a woman in this age range. They are usually very smart and highly educated and are now, because of a life transition, divorced, burned out, has a breast cancer diagnosis, or empty nesting for the first time in a while asking, “What do I want? How do I want my life to look like?”
It is listening to her voice and not the voice of the world. Diely, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. What is the best way to connect with you? Is it LinkedIn, is it social media, or your website? How do you prefer to be contacted?
Nothing beats booking an appointment. My calendar link is there, face-to-face. There's so much more that can happen especially checking for feed, chemistry, common ideas, and common values. There's so much that is better done in a quick talk than trying to engage, but if there is someone who wants to check and exchange ideas before getting there, email is always better.
Diely, thank you so much for sharing your story on what it takes to pay the price of leadership, for your courage to find your true calling, for sharing all the things that you've gone through, and now for your desire to help other women walk along the way and give back to your community.
Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to share some ideas here.
To our tremendous readers out there, thank you so much for being a part of our tremendous tribe. Remember, if you like what you read, please be sure and hit the subscribe button, share this, and we'd be honored if you would leave us a five-star review. Be sure and reach out to Diely too. You're going to want to stay in touch with her. For our readers out there, have a tremendous rest of your day. Thank you so much for paying the price of leadership.
Important Links
Dr. Madeline Frank – Past Episode
https://JoyfullySuccessful.com/seven-steps-to-freedom-and-passion/
https://www.Amazon.com/Bouncing-Back-How-Minimal-Expenditure-ebook/dp/B094LJMG7K
https://www.Amazon.com/stores/D-Pichardo-Johansson/author/B071G6VF64
About Dr. Diely Pichardo-Johansson
Dr. Pichardo-Johansson is a former Hematologist-Oncologist, a Life Coach, and Amazon bestselling author. But she prefers to describe herself as an oncologist who, after becoming a cancer survivor decided "Life it's too short. I don't want to make a living fighting death anymore, I'd rather make a living celebrating life." She specializes in helping professional women make romantic and career transitions so they can live the life they really want."