Chief Change Officer
#319 Resa Lewiss MD: Micro Skills for Moments That Actually Matter – Part One
Thu, 24 Apr 2025
In Part 1, Dr. Resa Lewiss shares how growing up in Rhode Island, challenging gendered assumptions at home, and studying the liberal arts all shaped her path to medicine. She opens up about the moment emergency medicine clicked for her, and how her love for procedures and working with her hands helped her find her place in a specialty that sees everything, all at once.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Why She Chose Medicine“It was always in me. Nobody in my family was a doctor, but medicine was the path.”Breaking Gender Roles Early“When my dad asked the girls to clear the table, I said, ‘Why not the boys?’ I wanted to take out the garbage.”When Emergency Medicine Clicked“I did a rotation and thought—where have I been? This is what I was looking for.”Studying Outside the Sciences“Literature, religion, sociology—those made me a better doctor. They helped me understand my patients.”Teaching Ultrasound Globally“I practiced and prepared so I could show up and teach people in different parts of the world—nurses, midwives, physicians.”_____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Resa Lewiss MD --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.15 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>150,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Resa Lewiss and what is her background?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Dr. Risa Lewis, emergency medicine physician, educator, and co-author of the book titled Micro Skills. She's also our first guest in medicine.
Dr. Lewis knew early on she didn't want to be boxed in by gender roles. she chose a specialty where she could think fast, move freely, and lead in real time. Over the past 25 years, she's worked in trauma base, taught ultrasound across the world, and trained others to stay calm when the room is anything but. In this two-part series,
We talk about what drew her to emergency medicine, how confidence is built through prepping and preparation, and how small practiced behaviors, i.e. micro skills, can shift how we show up under pressure in life and in career. Let's get into it. Good morning, Dr. Lewis. Welcome to my show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer. You are the first medical doctor I host on my show. Thanks for joining me.
Good morning. It is wonderful to be with you. And what an honor that I am the first medical doctor to join the show.
I told you before, becoming a doctor was my childhood dream. I didn't pursue it in the end. But I've always had deep respect for medical professionals. Growing up, I had health issues and spent time in a hospital. So doctors really made a difference in my life. That's why it's such an honor to have you here today. And a big thank you to Chris Hare for connecting us.
Now you've got this fantastic book called Microskills, which I know isn't written just for doctors. We'll get into that soon, but first let's start with your personal story. Give us an overview of your journey, and then I'll dive into some key turning points in your life and career.
why medicine what drew you to that path in the first place thanks for this question and i've thought about this like how do we put together our narrative like how do we become we become and I believe I'm one of those people that it's always been in me. It's a calling. Medicine has been a calling.
And the reason I share that is some people, they're told you should become a doctor or they have a parent who's a doctor. And in my case, nobody in my family is a physician. And I grew up in a small town in the smallest state in the United States, so in Rhode Island. And
I went to the public high school and I would say that my parents, when they decided their parenting style with my brother, my sister and myself, they had very traditional values and roles and expectations. They definitely had this line of boys do this and boys are expected to do that when they grow up. And in contrast, girls do this. Girls look like this.
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Chapter 2: How did gender roles influence Dr. Lewiss's childhood and career choices?
And my co-author and I flipped it and actually wrote an article about why we are actually the best people to write our own letter of recommendation. Unless the rules say you cannot and it's illegal. We know ourselves. We remember our relationship to this person. Often these supervisors don't remember when they met us or how we're related.
And also, if we're applying for a position, we know the details of the position, and we're best able to say why we're good for that position. And we very much emphasized in this article that it's a draft. You hand it to the supervisor. They make it their own. They can add superlatives like, she's the most competent, most da-da-da. But basically... It really makes sense.
And in terms of helping them help you, you've actually lightened their load because you've created a draft for them.
Clearly, you love learning. And writing seems to be your way of learning out loud, not just for yourself, but for others too. Now, when I first skimmed through the book, my immediate reaction was ambitious. And I mean that in a good way. This show is all about making change ambitiously. I've been dying to ask you this. Why combine so many different scenarios and skills into one book?
You covered communication, networking, managing of everything and anything. each of those could easily be his own short book. But you decided to go comprehensive. What was your thinking behind it?
The true motivation behind not only those articles, but then what became the book was to make it easier for other people, to give them a copy of what I call like the workplace playbook. If we were to make a sports reference, teams will get a playbook. And I certainly felt along the way that I did not get a copy of that playbook.
And I thought, all these, what I just, the example I just gave about letters of reference, if someone had just told me that, I would have, it would have made, it would have saved me a few years of learning and being less efficient. and allow me to be more efficient because I was less efficient until I learned that pearl, that lesson, that this is the way the workplace works.
And so the motivation was to create a book that would help people in their careers and not just doctors and not just women, but truly everybody. And You have highlighted that we started the book with three truths. Number one, we want the reader to think of time as a currency. Time can only be spent. You can't put it in a savings account for later and you cannot get a refund.
And that even ties back to the story I shared about the patient that died right at the beginning of the shift in front of me. Time was going. I had seven more hours. I had to keep going. And in the emergency department, we do a lot of task switching. When one thing's done, one patient gets discharged, one cut is sewn, next, next, next. We're always pivoting. And so time is always being spent.
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