Lean Out Podcast

Passions with Mary Wilde

• Dawn Baker • Season 2 • Episode 32

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In this episode, Dawn Baker talks with Mary Wilde, integrative pediatrician and champion for resilience and wellness. Mary is the owner of Imagine Pediatrics Behavioral Health and Wellness in St George, UT. She is the host of the Compassion Parenting Podcast, and she runs wellness retreats for both parents and physicians in the beautiful Utah desert.

Topics discussed include Mary's journey from the traditional medical model to a consultative practice, how to find balance when you have many passions, the power of simplicity, and an upcoming retreat for physicians.

Resources mentioned:

Lea Out Podcast - The Conflict of Being an Anti-Hustle Entrepreneur

Compassion Parenting Podcast - Finding Joy by Embracing the Ordinary

** Learn more about and register for the upcoming REVITALIZE: Physician Renewal Retreat (affiliate), March 20-22, 2025 **

Get in touch with Mary:

Get in touch with Dawn: 

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Welcome to the lean out podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Don baker. Are you looking for a new approach to finding authentic and sustainable work-life balance? You've come to the right. Place. For inspiration. information. and a community. community. of like-minded. Professionals. Let's get to the show. Hello? Hello. Thanks for being here. Our first snow storm of the season came this week and I am definitely not ready for it. At this time of year, I always grapple with resistance versus acceptance And nevertheless, it will soon be here all the time and I cannot control that. What I can control is my attitude about it. It's a work in progress, like many things. Today I have a special guest. Her name is Mary wild. Mary is an integrative pediatrician and the owner of imagined pediatrics, behavioral, health and wellness in St. George Utah, right near where I live. I met Mary through another Utah physician friend, and she is doing some awesome things. First, she's a mother to eight sons, which is a feat in itself. She's been in practice for well over a decade, but six years ago, she departed from the traditional pediatrician primary care role to start her own consultative practice specializing in behavioral health. She has created several online programs for kids, a book, a podcast, and a TEDx talk. We didn't even get into all these accomplishments in our conversation, which is fine because that's not what she's about. Instead, we talk about Mary's passions for her family and for helping other families. We also talk about how she runs retreats out of the beautiful Southern Utah desert for both parents and other physicians, including one that I will be attending this upcoming spring in March of 2025. So with that introduction, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mary.

MW-Dawn

mary Wilde, welcome to the Lean Out Podcast. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how your work life balance differs from other people in your profession?

MW-Mary

Sure, it's so nice to be here, Don. I am an integrative pediatrician, and I'm also the mom of eight, and I think that instantly

MW-Dawn

Wow.

MW-Mary

it kind of sets me apart in some ways. It was funny because I was being interviewed for something and, a person said, can I use this quote just anonymously? I'll just say you were, you're a pediatrician from Southern Utah with eight kids. And I, I said, I don't think that's very anonymous because,

MW-Dawn

unusual. It's unusual. It's unusual. It's unusual.

MW-Mary

So I think, the fact that I have a large family sets me apart and also I consider myself a multi passionate person. So there's a lot that I love to do, including music and reading and writing and working on my own business. And, it just adds to a very colorful palette of things Parts of my life and the equation of the balance.

MW-Dawn

And when you say integrative pediatrician, tell me about your niche in pediatrics. What kind of things are you seeing patients for?

MW-Mary

Sure. So I opened an integrative consultative practice about six years ago. After a move, we had been in a larger city where I had part time opportunities that matched my life balance. And then we moved to a smaller town and there really weren't those opportunities. And. I had always had an interest in behavioral health, and so I decided to create this practice focused on behavioral health, but in a more integrative or holistic way. So I typically see patients with anxiety, ADHD, Emotional regulation issues and different types of mood and behavioral struggles, but more through a natural lens, trying to find lifestyle adjustments or different things that can easily be adapted or applied into someone's life. To help them feel more well before we run to the prescription pad. So, that has been just a really delightful thing to be able to help families with.

MW-Dawn

Yeah, so you've been out of med school for a while, what made you want to change your practice to have this niche and to be more of a consultative type practice?

MW-Mary

I think one turning point was when I was in med school. And I remember looking at a picture. Pediatrics in Review article about ADHD and it was talking about the other alternatives to stimulant medication. And there were these tables with lists and lists of medications and the one alternative that listed was sticker charts for other things to do for ADHD. That was the only thing suggested and I thought. This cannot be true. And so that was one of the first times that I was really faced with the fact that I didn't completely align with the traditional medical model in certain cases. And I chose specifically to have a consultative practice because it fit better with my life. So in order to have my own practice and keep my life balanced, I felt like I needed to I really wasn't able to provide the 24 7 coverage that being somebody's primary care doctor requires, and so as a consultant, I can have my patients have their own primary care doctor and still be Covering a piece of that primary care, but on a consultative basis,

MW-Dawn

Do you ever miss doing the more primary care medical, um, not just behavioral type treatments?

MW-Mary

I do, I do miss that. And I remember people saying to me, how, how do you do pediatrics? Isn't it just one running nose after another, but I actually really love meeting the families and doing the physical exam. Looking at the whole child, looking at just the typical pediatric diagnoses. So I have missed that and sometimes I worry, you know, have I forgotten? Have I forgotten some of these things that I don't do? To some degree, any of us, when we niche down, We get really good at one thing and sometimes it is at the expense of some general, um, knowledge or general familiarity with being up to date on everything.

MW-Dawn

Yeah, absolutely. I feel that way in my practice, just going part time and cutting out certain areas of anesthesiology. When I apply for jobs now for locum tenens and they're like, oh, you don't do OB? And it's like, well, you know, I like it. It's not that I don't like it. It's just that sometimes you have to narrow what you're doing and make things a little bit more simple if you want. to have a better balance, and there's a trade off to all that.

MW-Mary

Yes. Yes,

MW-Dawn

of weekly schedule you keep with this consultative practice. I know you have side interests in businesses and running retreats and running workshops and things that are separate from that, which we will get into, but what kind of, clinical schedule are you following?

MW-Mary

I usually see patients on Friday afternoons, or sometimes Friday all through the day. And that is where I try to contain my practice within my practice. A full day or a half day in a week, and I feel like for me, that is a wonderful balance. know, one of the things that led me also to do my own practice is this idea of needing to rush through patient visits. I really like to take time, and I think a big question is, can compassion be efficient? Can we deliver really personalized, customized care in a really efficient manner? And I think that The traditional model rushes us. And I would consider myself an empath. So, it does take emotional energy to be working with families who are waiting through really difficult circumstances. So, I find myself, if I've seen four to six patients in a day, That is about as many as I feel like it can show up freshly and with full energy for.

MW-Dawn

It's great that you have figured this out over time and that you've been able to question the traditional model and say, does this fit with my values? Is this aligned with what gives me energy and what depletes my energy? Because I definitely see a lot of people through coaching that have a dysregulation there. So that sounds like a very good balance for you. And then I know you're doing some of these entrepreneurial things. So talk about some of the other side of what you do.

MW-Mary

Sure. I think it's interesting how a lot of us are really searching for this balance and we're, we sometimes find ourselves on an entrepreneurial path because In entrepreneurial life, you can create your own schedule and you can seek after your own passions and niches, but the entrepreneurial hustle train is a real thing. And I think that it's really easy to trade one kind of hustle for another. And I, I myself found found myself doing this. Where I was wanting so much to preserve, the time I have with my kids and, and I thought, yeah, I'm going to just create online courses and online programs, but the personality traits that I have that I think many of us share things like wanting to strive for excellence, some perfectionism, ability for heavy endurance and dedication. These kinds of things can kind of create a sinkhole for us when we're charting our own path because we can have a hard time letting go of unfinished projects or things that don't work out like we want and just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. So. I basically could spend like 18 hours of every day working on my other businesses. And so I have to practice a lot of restraint to put it aside, to close my computer, to, leave my undone to do list for the next day, but I still. Much prefer the flexibility and freedom that I have in this, in these creative pursuits, than having a really rigid structure that is dictated by somebody else.

MW-Dawn

Now, you have eight kids, so they must run the gamut of ages, what are the ages of your kids right now?

MW-Mary

So right now the youngest is nine and the oldest is 25. And it's true that as soon as my youngest son got into full time school, after about a year, I was realizing, I actually could do more. I could. I have space for more. And that's when I really started more on my entrepreneurial endeavors of trying to create programs and, and online courses and retreats and things like that. But I also then found myself having to pull back because not only does it just take time to help run a household and take people where they need to go. And, be available at the crossroads and just for extemporaneous conversation, you think you have a certain block of time, but when you have some kids in school, now I have adult kids who are not in school or in college and, and having much more flexible schedule. So it's not like I actually even have any guaranteed time, even though I thought I would. So I still have to create some containers for myself. Of time trying to say when my kids are in front of me, my computer will be closed, sometimes it's a little hard when I have college age kids wandering in and out during what I thought was my work time.

MW-Dawn

I, love the terminology containers of time, um, but occasionally those containers get upset, I'm sure, and you can't always predict your schedule perfectly.

MW-Mary

for sure. And I really value responsiveness as a parent. I recognize that we do need to have some structure to our time. And in a parenting book that I wrote a few years ago, I talked about how we have, um, Protected time, which maybe would be like one of these containers, things that we really can't bring a child along to do, like go on hospital rounds or something like that. And then there's also shared time where we bring our kids in, you know, like, when I was creating my podcast, I was having my youngest son kind of help me play around with the microphones and test them. So I was able to involve him a little bit in that process. And then there's edge time. Which is just like these little pieces of time that a lot of us, they're like little scraps of time that often get discarded, but they're really, really precious. And, and in edge time, that's the space where I wrote my parenting book, um, just in pieces of time, like before my kids woke up after they went to bed. But. Even that can be a trap because we think that we can claim all that time and that we don't need to sleep or rest. And that also needs to be protected as well.

MW-Dawn

Yes, I wrote an entire book using edge time and, I am now writing a course using edge time as well. So I know exactly what you mean. And the importance of rest and being able to look at the clock myself and say, all right, it's 930. I need to close this computer lid and go to bed. So you have courses, workshops, and you also have retreats specifically for parents and families. And I know that you have a new thing that you've ventured into, which is retreats for physicians. Tell me why you decided to do a wellness retreat for physicians.

MW-Mary

I was working a lot in the resilient space for kids with anxiety and creating materials, sharing mind, body, spirit strategies for building resilience and I was also working with parents about parental burnout and I thought all of this translates my colleagues need this content too. Recently I was giving a lecture on medical ethics and I was realizing these four pillars of medical ethics. The, beneficence, non maleficence, autonomy, justice. We often as physicians don't include ourselves in the circle of medical ethics. We forget to do good to ourselves and to not do harm to ourselves, to be fair with ourselves and to give ourselves. A chance to be autonomous to have our own will to create our own experience so this last year. the first physician wellness retreat that I did and it was so amazing just to bring physicians together from around the country to hike at Zion National Park, to write poetry together, to do yoga together, to have really deep conversations about what our intentions were in our lives and were so grateful. It was just magical. And so after the conclusion of that retreat, we all concluded that we wanted to do it again. And so that's being offered again next spring.

MW-Dawn

Yes, well, I will be there, and it's in a beautiful, yeah, me too, it's in a beautiful location, near to us both, we're going to be hiking in Zion National Park, and doing yoga in the beautiful Red Rocks of Snow Canyon, and you have so many different workshops at the retreat and talks that are very inspiring. Has it been difficult to do all of these entrepreneurial things from a financial standpoint? How has that affected you and your family?

MW-Mary

I think with any Entrepreneurial endeavor, there's always risk and there's always an upfront investment, whether it be money or time, and sometimes we'd like it not to be so, but there always is. And sometimes I've donated. A lot of time to make something happen. And sometimes I've donated money to make things happen. And I think it's really important to make sure that the things we're trying to create are so aligned with us that even if we were giving it as a gift to the universe, we'd still do it because sometimes it turns out that way. You know, I have the blessing of having a spouse that is employed, and so that gives me a little bit of a cushion. Although, as a professor, it's not like it's a huge cushion, and with a large family. We also have just chosen to live simply, and, and that's been very intentional. To just try not to, feel like we need things that actually we just want and trying to just focus on people over things and it's really been a blessing to our family in that way, but I have really been very grateful to my husband, who is, uh, Very risk averse. He is. He is very logical and likes to plan everything out. He has been supportive of some of these entrepreneurial endeavors that I've done. And sometimes it has been funded by our family. I remember feeling. Sad and kind of alone one night because I was just feeling like nobody is holding up this dream and this vision with me and and then I read in a book about how really our dreams and our visions are our own and so we're the ones who do have to hold on to them and it's true that hopefully we put ourselves in a supportive environment, but our visions and our dreams You They originate in us for a reason because maybe we're the ones who need to bring them into action or fruition and so we can't always rely on everyone around us to be holding that vision or dream up.

MW-Dawn

So Mary, is there anything that you know now that you wish you knew before you changed your practice to this part time model when you were on the treadmill of achievement and following the traditional path.

MW-Mary

Well, I don't know if any of us ever get off that treadmill entirely because we're kind of wired to, to seek these little dopamine hits to kind of validate who we are, to validate All the efforts that we've put in and it's almost like they have a shelf life and then some time has passed and it's like we want to do something else and and add something else to our resume or a different credential to our name and a couple ideas that have helped me in this area. On my podcast, I interviewed Dr. Ron Siegel. He has a book called The Extraordinary Gift of Being Ordinary. And I think even the title is instructive because I think that we forget just these common powers, just the, the wonderfulness of just being alive of being able to have a conversation and and we're seeking for something external to us to validate us. And and it also creates the self focus that none of us really want. And so when we can just. It's, you know, have gratitude for just the simple things of the day and the simple things in us, like that we can breathe, that we can walk, that we can have a conversation. It's just a nice reminder that we don't need anything else to change. We don't need to be or do anything else to be a person of value. And just to rest in that is very, very important. Comforting. I also remember a quote from a friend. She had on the close of her email once sent to me the phrase, pause, the world can wait. And I've reminded myself of that several times, because so often we just think that the world is, is asking so much of us and that it can't wait, but really the world can wait and we can take our time to do what we need to do to be well.

MW-Dawn

I love that quote. I remember having something similar when I was working full time as a new attending on my wall that I would look at when I got dressed. And it said the world will keep going in your absence or you know, something to that nature. Same idea. The world keeps turning and it's okay if you pause. So, is there any last advice, Mary, that you would give to people listening to this podcast who are feeling burned out, overwhelmed, not having resilience, and feeling stuck?

MW-Mary

Yes, one of the most important things I would say is that we're, we're never stuck. We might feel stuck, but we never truly are stuck there are ways that we can engineer our lives to truly align with the With how we want them to be and I started this process even in medical school where I had my first baby right before my clinical years in medical school and began to realize that I felt like I was missing something. I felt like I was missing time to really see the milestones with my first baby and. So I asked, can I take a rotation off every few rotations and they allowed me to do that. And then I took a little time off because it was, I was delayed and graduated with my class, but had a little more, you know, I walked with my class, but I had a little more coursework to do. It put me to match with the next year. So I had eight months between medical school and residency. And again, it was this, this pause that was just so important. And then, I was able to get a job as a hospitalist and. Urgent care physician where I could choose my hours and at every step of the way, I felt like these opportunities in some ways fell into my lap. But as I look back, they didn't fall into my lap. I sought them out. I created them. I insisted upon them. And then when I moved to this new city where the part time opportunities weren't available, you know, I was offered a position at the main pediatric gig in town. But they wanted me to work full time. And so I declined it allowed me it gave me the space to create this consulting practice. That is a really wonderful match to my life. So I guess I just want to give. Hope that you can engineer your life and that you have power to do that, even if you think the system isn't allowing it, that there's not that, that room or that space for you, then you knock down walls and put on an addition or remodel or, you know, there's always a solution. Another thing was an interesting experience that happened to me. Just last week, so I have a friend who is a hospice chaplain, and she called me up and said, I'd like to bring you some flowers. I sometimes get people's flowers, and can I share some of them with you? And I said, sure, bring them over. And she had two bouquets. One was starting to wilt a little bit, and one looked beautiful. Bright and fresh, and as many of us would do, I thought, who can I give this really bright bouquet to, and so I did find somebody to give that to, but I kept the slightly wilted one for myself, but I started pulling out the wilted flowers, And throwing them away. And I was left with a smaller, simpler bouquet that was still beautiful. And it just made me think of how there's so many things I want to do in my life. And sometimes when I try to put too many things in part of my life starts to wilt. And I thought, I really want to simplify this bouquet that I'm holding and keeping. So it can just be the vibrant flowers. So that was just a nice reminder to, keep my life a little simpler and be willing to set a few things aside.

MW-Dawn

Yeah, that's a beautiful symbol wonderful. Well, Mary, I really appreciate you being on the podcast today. We're going to link to your retreat, which is March 20th to the 22nd, 2025, and it will be in Southern Utah. It's a beautiful time to be in Southern Utah. Where else can people find you?

MW-Mary

I hope to see many of you at the retreat, and you can also find me online at drmarywild. com or on Instagram at drmarywild.

MW-Dawn

Great. Thank you so much for being on today.

MW-Mary

Thank you.

I resonate with so many parts of Mary's story. She and I are kindred spirits and being anti hustle entrepreneurs. If you miss the episode where I talk about that, I will link it in the show notes. She has so many passions yet she intentionally works to try to make her life as simple as possible. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Mary. Number one, having multiple passions is what makes life rich and fulfilling. But at the same time, you must work to keep things simple. You cannot work on all of your passions with the same Gusto at the same time. As Mary puts it. You must try to keep your flower bouquet small. Number two, if you want something to start a new business to branch out, into holding retreats, starting a podcast or working clinically one day a week. You have to be the one to make it happen. You can look to others for support, but ultimately you are responsible. You have to ask the hard questions and sometimes you have to use your own time and money. But if it's aligned with your passions and values, it will be a worthwhile investment. Number three. Number three. Simple ordinary moments, Trump, the kind of grand externally validated Instagram worthy experiences. People think they need to be focusing on. In fact, ironically, I just saw an Instagram post when I was preparing this podcast and it said, quote, One of the greatest parenting mistakes of our generation is believing we can buy our children a magical childhood when the reality is a magical childhood comes from simply having the time and space to be a child. I think this is true too for adults. Take time and space to just be you. Sometimes we need to treat ourselves like kids and give ourselves time to rest and play and just be. I'm so excited to be attending. And co-facilitating a workshop at Mary's retreat, which is called revitalize physician renewal retreat. It's going to be held March 20th through 22nd, 2025. If you're listening to this and you are a physician I'd love to have you come and join us. Mimi in real life and spend some much needed time outdoors. Also connecting with like-minded physicians. The retreat is an intimate gathering with amazing looking lectures and workshops. Uh, located in the red rock desert of Southern Utah. And all you have to do is get yourself to the Las Vegas airport. And then it's a quick two hour drive or a shuttle ride to the red mountain resort. And Ivan's Utah. We'll be doing yoga and snow canyon and also taking a hike in Zion national park as part of the retreat. This is a really great opportunity and\ it's not super crazy expensive as retreats go either, which is nice. You can find details about the retreat and register through the link in the show notes. And I will also include that link in the blog post associated with this episode@practicebalance.com. My parting question to you is. How can you make your flower bouquet a little bit simpler today? Thanks for listening to the lean out podcast. If you find these conversations inspiring and useful, please forward them to a friend and also leave a review on iTunes or Spotify so that other people can find them easier. If you want to get in touch with me, you can find me at my website, practice balanced.com, where you can subscribe to my newsletter and get updates regularly about new podcast episodes, blog posts, speaking, engagements, and coaching services. You can also support my work by buying my book, lean out a professional woman's guide to finding authentic work-life balance for yourself, a friend, family member, or coworker. Have a great day and we'll see you next time