A self-paced course for practicing physicians

Medical training taught you to care for everyone else. Now learn to care for yourself.

A structured, evidence-based course for physicians who want to rebuild a career they can sustain — and the workbook to write it down in their own handwriting.

Enroll in the course — $475 See how it works

Worksheets, one per lesson

Validated assessments included

~12 hrs

Of structured coaching content

∞

Lifetime access & return visits

The Reality

Most physicians can't point to a single moment.
They point to the morning they didn't recognize themselves in the mirror.

You stayed late on a Tuesday and missed dinner again. You answered an inbox message during your kid's recital. You sat through a meeting where someone called you a high performer and cut your pay in the same sentence — and walked out unsure which part was the lie.

The story has different shapes. You were just promoted, and the promotion looks a lot like a third job. Or you asked to move two patients so you could pick up your kids one night a month, and people who have never met you said no. Or you got paged about a scheduling question during a real emergency, snapped, and sent the message you swore you'd never send.

None of it is a personal failure. You keep saying yes because you mean it — and that is not the part that needs fixing. You are still the doctor people are lucky to get. What is missing is the structure that lets you stay that way for the next twenty years, without shrinking the rest of your life to do it.

You don't have a productivity problem. You have a life that has been measured by RVUs and gotten smaller.

Medicine is still worth doing. The trick is doing it without disappearing.

Who this is for

Built for physicians making a decision they don't want to get wrong.

This is for you if…

You are being asked to produce more, take more call, lead more, publish more — and you suspect another decade of pure grind isn't going to land you somewhere you want to be.
You want to be the physician who says yes to one more patient — and the parent who is home for bedtime. You believe both are part of being a good doctor, and you are tired of being told they are in conflict.
You snapped at a colleague, sent a message you regret, said something out loud the version of you who started medical school wouldn't recognize. You'd like to understand it and not repeat it.
You are weighing a real change — a job, a leadership role, a step back, a step out — and you know it's the kind of decision that deserves more than a tired Tuesday night to make.
You want to do this work quietly. Privately. Without explaining yourself to a group, a chair, or the badge.

This is probably not for you if…

You want a productivity hack, a time-blocking system, or a way to feel better about your schedule without changing anything underneath it.
You want someone to tell you whether to leave medicine. This course will not. It will help you see clearly enough to make that decision — or any other — on purpose.
You're already in a structured group with peer support, weekly accountability, and a clear next step. The cohort may suit you better.
You're not ready to put anything in writing about your own life. The work here is concrete and reflective. It asks for honest words, not slogans.

By the end of the course, you'll have built a thirty-page personal document — not a worksheet, not notes from a video, but a blueprint for the next chapter of your career. You'll write it section by section as you move through the modules. You'll come back to it quarterly. You'll keep it for the rest of your career.

The moment or pattern that brought you here, written clearly enough that you can come back to it
An honest audit of what your training over-developed and what it under-developed
Your top five values, ranked, with one decision you're currently making that conflicts with them
Your VIA signature strengths and the work that energizes versus drains you, even when you do it well
Your DISC communication style and two specific conversations you're going to handle differently in the next thirty days
The career direction you're choosing — forward, backward, lateral, or outside — and why
Three SMART goals and three intentions for the next twelve months
A one-sentence commitment, signed and dated, that you carry forward

Inside the workbook

What the work looks like.

The workbook isn't a list of journaling prompts. It's a sequence of structured instruments — one per lesson — each designed to be printed, completed in pen, and carried into the next one. A few pages, from across the modules.

The Four Drivers leverage map — worksheet 1.2 preview

Module 1 · Worksheet 1.2

Plot the four drivers of your current depletion against cost and personal leverage. The top-right quadrant is where the work starts.

Your Top Five at Work — worksheet 2.2 preview

Module 2 · Worksheet 2.2

Your VIA strengths in two columns. The first you can fill in your sleep. The second is the column most physicians have never been asked to write.

Identifying Your Core Values — worksheet 3.1 preview

Module 3 · Worksheet 3.1

Five to ten values, defined in your own words. The word is the easy part. Your definition is the part that has to hold up.

Mapping Your Team — worksheet 4.3 preview

Module 4 · Worksheet 4.3

Four to six colleagues, mapped on the same axes as you. The asymmetry is where most of your communication friction comes from.

Defining Your Legacy — worksheet 6.2 preview

Module 6 · Worksheet 6.2

One question, asked four times through four different lenses. The retirement speech is the first.

The Sustainable Practice — quarterly review preview

After the course · The Sustainable Practice

One value out of alignment. One strength to lean into. One conversation to have. Forty-five minutes every three months for the rest of your career.

The Curriculum

Four phases. Eight modules. One coherent arc.

The eight modules are grouped into the four phases of the career architecture method. You move through them in order. Each lesson is under ten minutes. Each module ends with a section of the workbook you'll have written by the time you're done.

Phase I

Identify

See what is true about where you are.

Module 0 · The Problem

Stop blaming yourself for thinking like a doctor.

Name the four specific reflexes your training built into you on purpose — perfectionism, working through anything, hiding flaws, suppressing emotion — and learn three concrete techniques for interrupting the inner voice that's been running you since med school. By the end you'll have stopped reading your own exhaustion as a personal failure.

Module 1 · Burnout vs. Job Satisfaction

Tell the difference between a hard week and the slow leak you've been ignoring.

Pinpoint which specific drivers of physician burnout are operating in your life right now — not generally, specifically. Walk away with concrete practices for refilling the physical, emotional, and spiritual reserves the work has been quietly draining, plus a thirty-second between-patient reset you can start using tomorrow.

Phase II

Align

Connect what is true to how you are uniquely built.

Module 2 · Work to Your Strengths

Find the part of your work that energizes you — and lean into it on purpose.

Identify your top five character strengths and see exactly how they show up in your practice today. Figure out which signature strength you've been underusing — the one that goes flat under stress — and walk away with one specific way to use it differently this month.

Module 3 · Values

Stop making decisions that feel wrong even when they look right on paper.

Name the five values that guide your best decisions — including the ones nobody told you to value. Identify the one decision you're making right now that conflicts with them. Write a mission statement you'll come back to the next time something hard needs deciding.

Module 4 · Communication Skills

Walk into the conversation you've been dreading without rehearsing it for a week first.

Understand why certain colleagues feel impossible to talk to — not because they're difficult, but because they're wired differently — and learn how to flex without giving up your spine. Pick two specific relationships in your life that need handling differently. Leave with a concrete plan for both.

Module 5 · Building Community

Lead the team through the hardest day instead of being the person they manage around.

Build the four capacities that separate physicians people follow in a code from physicians people work around: self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, relationship management. Includes a self-debrief framework you'll use after the next high-pressure case to learn from it instead of replaying it at 2am.

Phase III

Develop

Build the plan that turns clarity into action.

Module 6 · Doing Work That Matters

Name what you want — not what you've been told to want — and put it in writing.

Define the one word you want people to remember you for. Turn it into a five-year intention statement — short enough to say out loud when someone asks what you're working toward. Translate it into three goals you'll keep — specific enough to measure, small enough to start tomorrow. End with the practice that lets you stay on the path when a hard week tries to pull you off it.

Bonus Module · Career Paths

Stop letting your career happen to you.

Walk through every direction a physician career can move — clinical on your terms, hybrid, non-clinical, or fully outside medicine — without anyone telling you which one to pick. Leave with a clear sense of which direction is calling, and what the real trade-offs of that choice would look like in practice.

Phase IV

Sustain

Build the practices that keep this alive.

After the course · The Sustainable Practice

The companion you keep using long after the last lesson.

The course produces a thirty-page document. The Sustainable Practice is what keeps you returning to it. Three quick-reference cards for the clinic drawer — DISC at a glance, the four EIQ pillars and their repair moves, your top five strengths. Five "When X Happens" situation sheets for the conversations medicine produces on schedule: the difficult one, the team meeting gone sideways, the case you can't stop replaying, work coming home, the snap moment. A two-page quarterly review you'll actually finish. And a twenty-four-prompt self-coaching deck, organized around the same four phases as the course, for the quarter when you're stuck.

How the course works

Designed for the schedule you have. Not the one you wish you had.

01 · Format

Video lessons under ten minutes each

Thirty-six recorded lessons, deliberately short. Watch one between patients, on a commute, or in the half-hour after the kids go to bed. Every lesson finishes a thought.

02 · Workbook

The Career Architecture Document, downloaded once

A printable, fillable PDF. Build it section by section as you move through the modules. By the end, you have a thirty-page personal document you keep for the rest of your career.

03 · Pace and Privacy

Self-paced, private, no enrollment windows

No cohort dates, no group threads, no shared screens, no announcements anyone else can see. Start the day you enroll. Finish in a weekend or stretch it across six months. Lifetime access means you come back when something changes — a promotion, a hard quarter, a question you didn't have when you started.

04 · CME

CME-eligible — claim credit for the same hours

Pursuing accreditation through a joint providership. Once approved, the course will be eligible for AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™, claimable against most employer CME budgets.

If you're choosing between this and the cohort

The course and the cohort do the same work. They do it differently.

Same workbook. Same four-phase method. Same founder. The difference is whether you do it alone, on your own time, or in a small group of physicians with weekly live sessions and personal feedback. Both paths arrive at the same place. Choose the one that matches where you are right now.

Self-Paced Course

Cohort

Investment

Self-Paced Course $475 One-time payment

Cohort From $997 One-time payment

Best for the physician who wants…

Self-Paced Course …to do the work privately, on their own time, before deciding whether to share any of it.

Cohort …guided structure, peer accountability, and real-time feedback from Ben.

Format

Self-Paced Course Recorded video lessons + workbook

Cohort Live small-group sessions + workbook

Pace

Self-Paced Course Yours. Start anytime, finish whenever, return whenever.

Cohort Six weeks, structured cadence.

Privacy

Self-Paced Course Complete. Your work stays in your handwriting.

Cohort Shared with a hand-selected group of seven to eleven peers.

Personal feedback

Self-Paced Course Self-directed reflection.

Cohort Yes — weekly, from Dr. Reinking.

Lifetime access

Self-Paced Course Yes. Return to the workbook every quarter for the rest of your career.

Cohort Cohort runs six weeks. Materials accessible afterward.

You can always start with the course and join a cohort later. Many physicians do exactly that — they want to see the work first, in their own handwriting, before sitting down at a table with seven others.

I'm Dr. Ben Reinking. I built this course because I needed it.

I'm a board-certified pediatrician and pediatric cardiologist. I run a clinical division inside an academic medical center. I sit on faculty at the University of Iowa. I trained the way you trained.

And the message I got from day one of medical school was the one you got too — that being a good doctor and being a whole person were two things you had to choose between. The first time I called in sick during residency, covered in hives, the chief resident asked if I knew how busy clinic was. That sentence shaped me. I suspect a version of it shaped you.

I tried meditation, medication, therapy, time blocking, taking weekends off. None of it touched the underlying problem. What finally did was coaching — a method, a framework, and a written document I built with someone else's help. That document is the same one you'll build here. I rebuilt it into a course for physicians who want to do this work quietly, in the hours they can find, before deciding whether to do anything else with it.

I'm still in clinic. I still lead a division. I do this work because it's the work I needed and couldn't find.

— Ben

The Credentials

The reason this work has weight is who's teaching it.

A practicing physician with active leadership and faculty appointments — who also holds a specialized coaching credential. Not a coach who left medicine. A doctor who stayed and learned the second discipline because the first one wasn't enough.

Lead credential

MCPDC· Master Certified Physician Development Coach

A specialized credential earned by physician-coaches who complete advanced training in physician-specific development work. Distinct from generic life or executive coaching.

Clinical

Board Certified Pediatrician and Pediatric Cardiologist · Active practice

Leadership

Division Director · Active leadership inside an academic medical center

Faculty

Faculty, University of Iowa · Former member, Faculty Promotions Advisory Committee

Assessments

DISC Certified · EIQ Certified · ICF Member

Enrollment

One enrollment. Lifetime access.

No subscriptions. No upsells inside the course. You buy it once, you have it for as long as the platform exists, and you come back to it whenever the document needs revising.

Self-Paced Course

$475

One-time payment · Lifetime access

All eight modules — thirty-six recorded video lessons in total
The Career Architecture Document — a thirty-page workbook of thirty-six structured worksheets, one per lesson, that builds into your personal blueprint as you move through the course
NewThe Sustainable Practice — Field Tools — the durable companion you keep after the last lesson, including three quick-reference cards, five situation sheets, a quarterly review, and a twenty-four-prompt self-coaching deck
Your VIA Character Strengths, DISC, and EIQ assessments — included with enrollment, no separate purchase required
Every supporting worksheet and exercise referenced in the lessons
Lifetime access, including any future updates or added lessons
CME credit at no additional cost if you're enrolled when accreditation finalizes — currently in review with a joint provider
A 14-day refund window — if the work isn't for you, write us, full refund, no questions

Enroll now — $475

The cost of getting your life back. Once.

When you're ready for the room

The cohort exists for the same work, with seven others at the table.

Some physicians want to do this alone first. Some want to do it with peers from the start. Some do the course, sit with it for a quarter, and then join a cohort to take it further. The Physician Career Architect cohort runs twice a year. Hand-selected. Eight to twelve physicians. Six weeks of live sessions and personal feedback from Ben.

See the cohort

Questions

Things physicians ask before enrolling.

How much time does the course take?

Plan on about twelve hours of work, total — combining the video lessons and the workbook reflection. Lessons are deliberately short, most under ten minutes, so you can finish one between patients or after the kids are down. The workbook is where the real work happens — written reflection, the assessments, the document you'll keep. Most physicians spread the twelve hours across four to eight weeks. Some compress it into a long weekend. The work doesn't expire, so the speed is yours to set.

What's included when I enroll?

Thirty-six recorded video lessons across eight modules. Thirty-six structured worksheets — one per lesson — that together form the Career Architecture Document, the thirty-page personal blueprint you'll write as you move through the course. Three validated assessments: the VIA Inventory of Strengths, DISC, and EIQ, included in your enrollment with no separate purchase. And The Sustainable Practice — Field Tools, the durable companion you keep using long after the last lesson. Lifetime access to all of it.

Is there a refund policy?

Fourteen days. If you've started the course and decided it isn't the right fit for you, write to us within fourteen days of enrollment for a full refund. No questions, no friction. We'd rather you do work that helps you than feel stuck in something that doesn't.

What about CME credit?

The course is currently going through accreditation review with a joint provider. CME credit cannot be advertised or claimed until that process is complete, and we won't promise hours we can't yet deliver. Physicians who enroll now get access to all course content at the current price; if you're enrolled when accreditation finalizes, you'll receive the credit at no additional cost. We'll notify you the moment formal designation comes through.

What happens after I finish the course?

You're handed The Sustainable Practice — Field Tools, a separate companion designed to be used for years, not weeks. Three quick-reference cards for the clinic drawer. Five "When X Happens" situation sheets for the conversations medicine produces on schedule — the difficult one, the team meeting gone sideways, the case you can't stop replaying, work coming home, the snap moment. A two-page quarterly review you'll actually finish. And a twenty-four-prompt self-coaching deck for the quarter when you're stuck. Most physicians who complete the course return to the Career Architecture Document every three months. The Sustainable Practice is what makes that return easy.

What's the difference between this and the cohort?

The course is self-paced, solo, and $475. The cohort is six weeks of live small-group sessions with weekly personal feedback from Dr. Reinking, capped at eight to twelve physicians, and starts at $997. Both produce the same Career Architecture Document. The cohort produces it faster, with peers, and with more accountability. The course produces it on your time, alone, and at a fraction of the cost. See the comparison table above.

Can I really do this work without a coach or a group?

Yes — most of it. The reflective work, the assessments, the workbook, the goal-setting, the framework: all of it is designed to be done alone. What a coach or cohort adds is real-time pushback, the experience of saying things out loud to people who understand the practice, and the accountability of a calendar. If those are essential for you, choose the cohort. If you want to do the work first and decide later, this is the right starting point.

What if I'm not currently burned out?

Good. The course is most useful done preventively — before the accumulation gets to a point where leaving feels like the only option. Physicians who do this work early treat it as career maintenance: a quarterly return to the document, the way you'd return to your retirement plan or your physical exam. The earlier you start, the more useful it is.

What if I'm thinking about leaving medicine?

The course doesn't tell you whether to leave. It helps you see clearly enough that whatever you decide is a decision you made on purpose, not a decision that medicine made for you. The bonus module covers the four directions a physician career can move — including outside — without prescribing any one of them.

Will I have access to Dr. Reinking?

Not directly within the self-paced course. Personal feedback and live access to Ben are part of what the cohort and the 1:1 program provide. If you want that access, the cohort is the right place — see the comparison above. The course provides Ben's voice through the lessons and the workbook design, but not real-time interaction.

Who built this?

Dr. Ben Reinking — a practicing pediatric cardiologist, division director, and Master Certified Physician Development Coach. The course is built from the same coaching method Ben uses with private clients and cohorts. The full credentials are in the Founder section above.

You don't have to choose between being a great doctor and being a whole person.

But you do have to make the choice. This course is what you do before the next big decision — the job, the leadership role, the step back, the step out, the conversation you've been rehearsing for a month.