Capstan

The Coaching Exchange Pilot at Capstan

Rita Holland — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:42:08 +0000

Case Study · The Coaching Exchange · Round 1

Coaching healthcare, from both sides of the conversation

A pilot that trains emerging coaches who are healthcare professionals to coach their peers across the sector — giving both sides the space to think, grow, and lead differently.

"Coaching was a privilege — my interactions with my coach will stay with me for a long time." — Round 1 client

"I'm more confident to allow the sessions to flow, instead of worrying about the structure." — Round 1 coach

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND · JAN–JUN 2026 · 6 COACHES · 24 CLIENTS · 1 SPONSOR

68COACHING HOURS
GENERATED

92%OF CLIENTS COMPLETED
THE PROGRAM

100%OF COACHES WOULD RECOMMEND
IT TO HEALTHCARE STAFF

89%OF CLIENTS WOULD RECOMMEND
COACHING TO A COLLEAGUE

The problem

A workforce under strain, and a gap on both sides

Healthcare systems across Australia and New Zealand are stretched. Development time is scarce, and the space simply to think is often the first thing to disappear. Three gaps sit on either side of the same problem.

CoachesExperienced clinicians who want to coach often lack the structured practice, client access, and business support to build a sustainable coaching practice alongside clinical work.
ClientsHealthcare staff who would benefit from coaching frequently have never been coached, aren't sure how to access it, and struggle to protect the time.
OrganisationsEmployers want development that's evidence-based, sector-aware, and connected to their workforce priorities.

How it worked

Six coaches. Twenty-four clients. Four sessions each.

Each client was matched to a coach for a block of four sessions, including eight clients funded by a single sponsoring organisation. Around the coaching sat real scaffolding: structured matching with rematching where needed, two coach tiers, mentoring and reflective support, business onboarding, and surveys at three points to track every side of the experience.

What Round 1 delivered

Three perspectives, one consistent signal

For the coaches — confidence and appetite for more

Confidence rose on almost every measure, with the steepest gains exactly where coaches felt least prepared coming in.

Coach confidence	Before	After
Describing the purpose & value of coaching	4.5	5.0
Offering coaching across the healthcare sector	4.5	5.0
Offering coaching within their own organisation	3.8	4.4
Attracting coaching clients	3.5	4.0
Managing the finances of a coaching business	3.3	4.0
Overall average	4.0	4.4

Financial confidence made the biggest jump: before the pilot, only 1 in 3 coaches felt confident managing the money side of a coaching practice — afterward, 4 in 5 did.

For the clients — clearer thinking, real traction

Coaching was new ground for most clients. Roughly two in three had never been coached before, yet impact built steadily through the program.

Client impact	Mid-point	Program end
Thinking more clearly about my goals	4.2	4.4
Applying insights where I felt stuck	4.0	4.2
Feeling more confident because of coaching	4.0	4.1
Would recommend colleagues be coached	4.2	4.3

The clearest signal was behavioural: 3 clients asked to continue with their coach after the pilot, and 2 committed to a further paid block.

For the organisation — early behavioural change

The sponsoring organisation, which funded coaching for eight of its staff, reported positive behavioural shifts by the midpoint — new ideas, fresh perspectives, and staff sharing that learning with peers — and said it would recommend other organisations sponsor their workforce to be coached.

In the sponsor's own words, it was "a great experience for staff."

Voices from Round 1

The conversation, from both sides

"Coaching helped me acknowledge my own inner voice: 'I know you're trying to protect me, but I don't need you right now — I've got this.'"Client

"I'm more confident to allow the sessions to flow, instead of worrying about the structure."Coach

"It made me more comfortable in difficult scenarios at work — more confident, and able to draw on the sessions when making hard decisions."Client

"Coaching was a privilege — my interactions with my coach will stay with me for a long time."Client

What's next

A proven idea, and a clear path to scale

Round 1 validated the core premise — healthcare coaches, coaching healthcare, works for everyone involved.

Deeper

More coaching, more connection. Clients wanted more than four sessions, and coaches wanted a stronger peer community.

Wider

More coaches, more sponsors. With demand demonstrated, the model is ready to grow.

Sharper

Coaching tied to strategy — anchored to each sponsor's workforce-development goals from the outset.

Bring coaching like this into your organisation

Round 1 showed what happens when healthcare professionals coach their peers. We're building Round 2 with a small number of sponsoring organisations — get in touch to be one of them.

GET IN TOUCH →

Fully Prepared, Still Underperforming: What Exam Candidates Get Wrong

Rita Holland — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:27:27 +0000

Fully Prepared, Still Underperforming: What Exam Candidates Get Wrong

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with being fully prepared and still not performing at your best. For exam candidates in medicine, it's more common than anyone admits.

The knowledge is there. The years of training are there. And yet in the exam room, or the Viva, or the long case, something doesn't translate.

Here's the truth most candidates never hear: this is not a failure of preparation. It is a failure of performance under physiological and psychological pressure. And it is usually open to improvement.

The Paradox of the Over-Prepared Candidate

Talk to enough registrars, and a pattern emerges. The candidates who struggle most are rarely under-prepared. If anything, they over-prepare, accumulating knowledge well past the point of diminishing returns, hoping more study will quiet the anxiety about the exam itself.

But knowledge at your desk and knowledge under pressure are two different skills. A candidate can know an answer perfectly on Tuesday night and lose access to it entirely the moment an examiner leans forward with a follow-up question.

What Pressure Does to a Trained Mind

Under acute stress, the body releases cortisol and adrenaline — useful for physical danger, unhelpful for complex reasoning. Working memory, the exact function needed to structure a clinical answer in real time, is one of the first things compromised. That's why candidates describe "blanking." The material was there. The retrieval system was temporarily offline.

Three patterns show up again and again, and none of them are knowledge gaps:

Over-explaining out of anxiety instead of answering the question asked
Losing structure — "brain fog" after one small stumble, and compounding it
Reading normal stress signals (racing heart, dry mouth, a sudden blank) as proof of failure, which intensifies the very response causing the problem

More textbook study fixes none of this. Training your response to pressure does.

What Performance Coaching Actually Addresses

This is the specific gap Capstan's 1:1 Performance Coaching was built to close. Prepare with confidence. Achieve your goals. In practice, that means finding your pathway to:

Structured techniques for regulating the stress response in real time
Frameworks for holding your answer structure even after a stumble
Deliberate practice under pressure, so the exam room feels less foreign when it counts

Delivered virtually by coach-trained clinicians and professional coaches who understand clinical life from the inside. It was designed for medicine.

And a note on timing: most candidates wait until weeks before the exam, if they seek support at all. The ones who benefit most start months out, while there's still time to build new responses to pressure rather than cramming a new skill on top of an imminent exam date.

For Supervisors and Educators

If you support trainees through exams, this is worth raising early in candidacy — as a standard part of preparing well, not a last resort when someone is visibly struggling.

Capstan Partners is now an official RACP partner. RACP members receive a 10% discount on Performance Coaching and all Capstan programs, with CPD-eligible options and a Certificate of Attendance.

This is not a failure of preparation. It is performance under pressure, and it can be trained.

RACP Members

Register your interest or book an obligation-free appointment via the RACP Member Benefits portal: capstan.com.au/landing-racp

Author: Rita Holland, Founder & Director, Capstan Partners

Ask, Don’t Tell: Why the Best Clinical Leaders Are Learning to Coach

Rita Holland — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:49:20 +0000

Ask, Don't Tell: Why the Best Clinical Leaders Are Learning to Coach

A registrar knocks on your door. There's a problem — a deteriorating patient, a rostering clash, a difficult conversation they don't know how to start.

You have the answer in about eight seconds. You give it. They leave. Problem solved.

Efficient? Yes. Effective leadership? Not quite.

That eight-second answer is a habit medicine trains into you early, and for good reason. But outside the emergency — in supervision, in team meetings, in the quiet moments where people are actually learning how to lead — that same instinct has a ceiling.

The Telling Trap

Medicine trains you to diagnose and direct: assess the situation, reach a conclusion, act. It's essential clinically. It's what keeps patients safe.

But lead a team the same way, and something quietly starts to break down.

Give the answer every time, and your junior colleagues learn the answer, not the thinking behind it. The next problem lands back on your desk too, because they were never invited to work it out themselves. And their trust in their own judgement grows more slowly than it could — one deferred decision at a time.

None of this is anyone's fault. It's what the system trains for. But it's usually open to improvement, and that's where coaching comes in.

What Coaching Actually Is

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with someone in a thought-provoking, creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.

In plain terms: coaching isn't about having the answer. It's about asking the question that helps someone find their own.

It helps to be clear about what coaching isn't, too — it gets confused with a few neighbouring skills more often than you'd expect.

Coaching vs. Mentoring vs. Teaching vs. Counselling vs. Performance Management

Approach	Focus	Who Holds the Answer
Coaching	Unlocking someone's own thinking	The person being coached
Mentoring	Sharing your experience and guidance	The mentor
Teaching	Transferring knowledge or skill	The teacher
Counselling	Processing emotional wellbeing	Shared, therapeutically held
Performance Management	Meeting a defined standard	The organisation

Each has its place. Coaching is simply the one clinical leaders tend to reach for least — often because nobody ever taught it to them.

The Evidence Behind Coaching in Healthcare

This isn't just a nicer way to have a conversation. Coaching creates a safe, supportive environment for exploring ideas and developing professional skills, and clinicians who receive coaching consistently report improved psychological wellbeing.

That matters on two levels. It helps the person doing the coaching lead with more capacity and less depletion. And it helps the person being coached build judgement they'll carry into every future decision, not just the one in front of them today.

What Coach-Like Behaviour Looks Like in Healthcare

You don't need a coaching qualification to start shifting the pattern. A few small, deliberate changes are usually enough to feel the difference:

In handover: Listen to understand before you listen to respond. Reflect back what you've heard before moving to the next point.
In supervision: Before you offer your view, try one powerful question — "What have you already considered?" You'll often find they're closer to the answer than you assumed.
Before you advise: Summarise. A short, accurate reflection of what someone has just told you does more for their thinking than most advice does.

Small shifts. Consistently applied, they change how a team learns to solve problems — and how much you're carrying alone.

Finding Your Pathway to Coaching

If this is a skillset you've been meaning to build, SWITCH: Learning to Ask, Not Tell is a good place to start.

It's a live virtual, one-day workshop designed from the ground up for clinical life, coaching, and clinical leadership skills — not generic facilitation training. You'll learn the coaching mindset, the core skills, and a simple process you can use in your very next conversation.

SWITCH: Learning to Ask, Not Tell

Saturday, 22 August — one live virtual day
6 hours CPD
One unit towards an ICF Diploma of Coaching
24 places, open to healthcare professionals across Australia and New Zealand
Trainees: register with a trainee colleague for a limited number of 2-for-1 offers

You’re surrounded by colleagues. So Why Does Medicine Feel So Isolating?

Rita Holland — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 09:05:43 +0000

You’re surrounded by colleagues. So Why Does Medicine Feel So Isolating?

Medicine is full of people. Wards, clinics, meetings, handovers. And yet ask almost any physician, at almost any career stage, and they’ll tell you the same thing: it can be a profoundly isolating profession.

You’re surrounded by colleagues and still carrying things alone.

The conversation about physician burnout has been running for years now. Awareness is no longer the problem. Most doctors can name the signs. What’s missing is the next step, what actually helps. Not at the system level alone, where change is slow and complex, but for the individual physician sitting in the car park at 7 pm, wondering if this is sustainable.

Why the usual answers fall short

The long-term solution to physician well-being lies in improving the systems doctors work within. But changing healthcare systems is complex, incremental, and measured in years, not months nor weeks. While that work continues, physicians still need support designed for the realities of clinical life: the weight of clinical responsibility, the culture of stoicism, the genuine scarcity of time, the pressure of exams, training requirements, and life layered on top of patient care.

The challenges physicians face deserve more than adapted solutions. They deserve support designed from the ground up for medicine.

What the evidence shows

Coaching, structured, professional, delivered by people who understand clinical contexts, is one of the few individual-level supports with published evidence behind it. Capstan’s research, published in Occupational Medicine (2025), examined a brief virtual coaching program for senior hospital doctors. Participants reported reduced psychological distress and improved well-being and flourishing. Every single participant said they would recommend the program to colleagues.

One distinction matters here. Coaching is not therapy, clinical supervision, or medical advice. It is professional development, a structured way to build self-awareness, emotional regulation under pressure, and practical strategies for the real challenges of clinical and leadership life. For many physicians, that’s precisely the kind of support they’ve never been offered.

Connection is part of the answer

Isolation compounds everything else. That’s why peer-based group-coaching formats matter. Capstan’s PEER Program (Peer Engagement, Exploration, and Reflection) brings clinicians together in structured, facilitated conversations, in cohorts for clinical leaders, rural, regional & remote clinics, supervisors of training, trainees, and nurses. Delivered virtually. Facilitated by coach-trained clinicians. A psychologically safe space to think, reflect, and grow with peers who genuinely understand.

Because no two physicians carry the same load. But you don’t have to carry it alone.

A practical first step

Capstan Partners is now an official partner of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, listed on the RACP Member Benefits platform. RACP members receive a 10% discount across all Capstan coaching and programs – 1:1 virtual coaching, the PEER and the SWITCH Programs: – all evidence-based, all CPD-eligible.

The hardest part is usually just beginning. If you’ve been wondering whether now is the right time to invest in yourself, perhaps it is.

RACP members: explore the partnership and register your interest via the RACP Member Benefits portal

Performing under pressure – at its very best

Rita Holland — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 03:36:00 +0000

Coaching is derived from the corporate world. To be offered a coaching program means that you are being targeted as a potential leader. This is the same in healthcare. However, coaching in healthcare has taken some time to catch up to the corporate world.

Capstan medical advisor, Sarah Dalton, joins Liverpool Medicine Ground Rounds to discuss coaching in healthcare. Sarah is joined by colleagues Yasmin Ashraff and Tara Brown to explain what coaching is, why it’s important, and it’s role in supporting people during COVID-19. They also discuss the positive results that came from a coaching program at Liverpool Hospital, Sydney, for what they called the CATCH program. Click here to view the full presentation.

Coaching is a conversation that allows individuals to identify and meet the goals that are important to them.

Sarah Dalton, Capstan Medical Advisor and Paediatric Emergency Physician

What is coaching?

Coaching relies on development support, rather than experience or expertise. It is about exploring the solutions that the coachee develops through their facilitated discussions with their coach. Coaching involves performance improvement and finding ways to achieve it through self-empowered solutions. This works by the coach motivating the coachee towards achieving goals, learning and growing; allowing them to unlock their potential and maximise performance. The coachee is at the centre of all of these topics and the purpose is to address these issues and find ways to overcome them.

Why be coached?

The underlying benefit of being coached is to support your professional development. Its purpose is to address the issues a coachee is facing and then find solutions for them. Issues may include professional barriers such as developing leadership skills, improving work efficiency or seeking understanding with career development decisions. The concerns can also be more personal to the coachee including managing wellbeing, optimising meaning at work, and integrating personal life with professional life.

Coaching in healthcare

Professional coaching in healthcare has proven very beneficial. A study by JAMA Internal Medicine showed that coaching can positively affect wellbeing and distress. Specifically, the study found that coaching could reduce emotional exhaustion and overall symptoms of burnout. Additionally, those who received coaching had an improved overall quality of life and resilience.

Capstan Partners has also done similar research in relation to COVID-19. We have partnered with The Black Dog Institute to discover the effectiveness of coaching to improve psychological outcomes in hospital-based senior doctors. The study aim is to reduce psychological distress and improve positive psychological outcomes in senior doctors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results from this study will be available soon. Click here for more background information on the study.

Finding the right coach

Rita Holland — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 23:14:41 +0000

Deciding how and when to engage a professional coach may not feel straight forward. Your readiness to invest the time and effort to a coaching program might be triggered by one of several work or career crossroads.

Are you looking to expand your leadership capabilities, improve your performance under pressure, or reassess your career direction? Do you want to be ‘that’ leader with the courage to build coaching culture within your team, or perhaps address the well-being outcomes you need yet have neglected for too long? If you said yes to any of these questions, you might be ready to take the next step. Whichever of these circumstances you may find yourself in, a professional coach may help you change what you find hard to do on your own. A professional coach may bring your vision to reality in a way that may not otherwise happen or may accelerate your journey with more confidence and less stress than you may otherwise endure.

Coaching credentials and capabilities

Assessing the credentials and capabilities of a professional coach, especially to the uninitiated, may be extra confusing as the ‘community of practice’ is technically unregulated.

Finding a professional coach that is right for you, like engaging most professional services, is not always straightforward. Word of mouth and referrals from colleagues goes a long way in starting your search.

Questions to ask a potential coach or a coaching services provider include the following if you don’t already know:

What credentials do you have in professional coaching?
How much experience do you have in professional coaching?
What sort of coaching programs are available and how programs are structured?
What if I don’t gel with my coach? Can I change my coach?
Can I reschedule an appointment?
Are sessions offered virtually/in-person?
How can I get more information about the fees?

Other things to consider

Like the fees of other professional services, the cost of engaging a professional coach varies due to numerous factors. Variation in fees may relate to the coach’s experience and credentials, the types of certifications they hold, and the demand for their services. Typically, a coaching program offers a recommended number of coaching hours. However, there is flexibility regarding frequency and length of sessions, and the inclusion of psychometric assessments or your manager’s involvement as optional considerations designed to suit your need and for discussion during a general enquiry call.

There are core competencies to look for when you are considering whether a coach is right for you. The International Coaching Federation, the leading global organisation for coaches and coaching, includes the following:

Can they provide clear agreements about the coaching relationship, the process, the plans, and the costs?
Did you feel they were fully present to what you were saying and responsive to your needs?
Were you comfortable and willing to share your thoughts and feelings freely without feeling judged?

The next steps

Spend some time on an obligation free call. Explain your interests in coaching, explore if and how a coaching program can meet your development needs, and how it may be offered.

Book now for an obligation free chat

Goal setting kept simple

Rita Holland — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 01:00:00 +0000

We continuously choose our priorities, what we focus our time and energy on and what we want to achieve. We may be conscious of the direction and magnitude of our priorities, our choices, the effort, and the opportunity costs. Or we may not. The invitation to be more intentional about where and how you direct your energy is about goal setting. Your personalised definition of success and clarity about what you value means you are more likely to set goals, make choices and engage in behaviours that align with what you have decided is important to you right now. When you become energised by creating thoughts and feelings about the goal’s purpose, your commitment to the outcome is likely to increase. Reflecting on goal success means understanding your values.

Ready for more?

As soon as you write down your goal, and you are one small actionable step, your pathway to progress often feels more realistic and you are more likely to become energised to take more action.

SMART goals

And keeping it SMART, an acronym and framework that provides motivation and a clear call to action, helps. SMART simply stands for: specific, measurable, attractive, realistic, and time-framed.

S – what is your specific goal?

M – how will you measure your progress?

A – how attractive is your goal to you?

R – is this goal a realistic outcome?

T – what time frames have you set to hold yourself accountable?

One short-term SMART goal at a time will lead you to the next short-term SMART goal. Each step in the right direction means you are more likely to keep self-directing your behaviour in meaningful ways.

Chunking down your goal into small steps help you understand the tasks that contribute to your bigger goal and helps creates a timeline to get you there. Creating a series of realistic sub-goals, helps you feel a constant and growing sense of achievement, which in turn focuses your efforts even ‘SMARTer’.

Your turn to get started

A small goal setting exercise to help you start.

Here’s three simple tasks:

1. Decide what is important to you right now and ask yourself ‘why is this important’?

2. Write it down – type it up – keep it clear and obvious, and

3. Chunk the goal down i.e. define one small step you can do and decide when you will do it!

After you complete these steps, do it again. Then do it again, and again. Small steps make big differences. So, what are you waiting for? What do you want to achieve?

Let’s have a chat if you decide you don’t want to go on the journey alone.

Coaching in healthcare – Why should you give it a try?

Rita Holland — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 03:39:00 +0000

To be offered a professional coaching program in the corporate sector is to be valued and targeted as a potential or already high-performing individual contributor or leader. The potential for the same level of professional development investment in professional coaching, to further support and enable clinicians and other health care professionals, is slowly being realised.

Capstan Partners Medical Advisor, Dr Sarah Dalton, joined Liverpool Hospital Medical Ground Rounds to discuss coaching in healthcare. Sarah was joined by colleagues Drs Yasmin Ashraff and Tara Brown to explain; what coaching is, why it’s important, and its role in supporting clinicians during COVID-19. They also discuss positive outcomes derived from the in-hospital coaching program at Liverpool Hospital, Sydney, the CATCH program. Click here to view the full presentation.

Coaching is a conversation that allows individuals to identify and meet the goals that are important to them.
Dr Sarah Dalton, Capstan Medical Advisor

What is coaching?

Coaching relies on exploring the solutions that the coachee develops through their facilitated discussions with their coach. Coaching involves performance improvement and finding ways to achieve it through self-empowered solutions. The role of the coach is to facilitate discussion to allow the coachee to realise what they want to achieve and what they can do to achieve their goals.

This intervention style is the alternative of advice giving, as coaching draws answers from the coachee knowing and understanding themselves. The coach is there to motivate the coachee towards achieving goals, learning, and growing; allowing them to unlock their potential and maximise performance. The coachee is at the centre of all these topics, to address these issues and discover ways to overcome them.

Why be coached?

The underlying benefit of being coached is to accelerate professional development. Its purpose is to identify and address important issues a coachee is facing and for them to create solutions. What is an important issue for one clinician may or may not be an important issue for another. Coaching session goals may be related to self-limiting barriers such as discomfort with difficult conversations, managing workloads, or seeking clarity with career choices or directions. The challenges can also be more personal to the coachee including managing wellbeing, optimising meaning at work, and integrating personal life with professional life. Whether the desired development involves professional or personal goals, professional coaching is likely to help you achieve them.

Coaching in healthcare

Academic research has shown professional coaching programs can contribute to a range of positive outcomes. As reported in one key study by JAMA Internal Medicine, professional coaching reduced reported levels of emotional exhaustion. It also found that coaching improved overall quality of life, and resilience. Capstan Partner clients have also reported that their professional coaching program helped improve numerous other factors that affect quality of work and personal lives.

I feel that my leadership and personal skills have significantly improved since the beginning of the coaching. I will be recommending Capstan Partners to others.”
Director of Medical Services, Sydney

Capstan Partners have conducted a study, ‘Coaching for COVID-19: A Pilot Study Investigating the Effectiveness of Coaching to Improve Psychological Outcomes in Hospital-Based Senior Doctors’. South West Sydney Local Health District sponsored this study and partnered with the Black Dog Institute as independent researchers. Preliminary results from our research will be available soon. Click here for more background information on the study.

Professional coaching and the Australian healthcare sector

Rita Holland — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Professional coaching in the medical and healthcare industry in Australia is still relatively new. This means that not many clinicians and healthcare professionals are aware of professional coaching, nor really understand what it is. Similarly, the list of potential benefits that come from being coached may not be well understood.

When most people hear the word ‘coaching’ it often draws associations with health and fitness. Like a health and fitness coach is there to improve different aspects of people’s physical performance, a professional coach can help medical and healthcare professionals develop various aspects of their professional practice.

Academic research into the impact of coaching has demonstrated that professional coaching cam contribute to a range of positive benefits to those who undertake a professional coaching program. Studies such as one by JAMA Internal Medicine have found that coaching reduces emotional exhaustion, improves overall quality of life, and builds resilience. Professional coaching also has the potential to improve workplace skillsets, mindsets, leadership qualities, and many other factors that affect out work and personal lives.

Capstan Partners is dedicated to growing professional coaching in the healthcare industry because we recognise the importance of enabling you to be at your best. Additionally, we know that by assisting medical professionals and others in the healthcare industry, there is an opportunity to not only improve your performance and wellbeing, but also the health of our patients and the broader community.