In this episode, I speak with two leading experts in communication, Dr. Evonne Kaplan-Liss, and Val Lantz-Gefroh, at the Center for Compassionate Communication at UC San Diego. We discuss how slowing down, storytelling, the “curse of knowledge,” improvisation, creativity, authenticity, self-awareness, and self-compassion directly lead to pathways of building agency and communication in our journey through burnout.
The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook. Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff.
The Resilient Practitioner: Burnout and Compassion Fatigue Prevention and Self-care Strategies For the Helping Professions. Thomas M. Skovholt and Michelle Trotter-Mathison.
The Center for Compassionate Communication at the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion at UC San Diego Health continues its fellowship twice a year; at the end of 2025 will have over 100 graduates.
They also have a shorter version of this curriculum delivered in a 2-day conference called Lead with Compassion that is open to UCSD and external doctors and nurses. And plenty of free! trainings, including a monthly Zoom series that begins in September 2025 and two courses on Coursera.
For medical educators, they offer their facilitation guides for their online courses and a full facilitation manual of most of their curriculum, including videos to show the content in action.
Recently published work: Improving Compassionate Communication Through a Train-the-Trainer Model: Outcomes and Mechanisms for Transformation in Academic Medicine.
Click on the QR code below to take you to a landing page where you can learn about each of these opportunities:
Evonne Kaplan-Liss, MD MPH is the Director of The Center for Compassionate Communication at UC San Diego’s Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of artists and medical professionals to teach compassionate communication. She began her career in journalism, after graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and landing her first position as a researcher for Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline. She then left journalism to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a physician, earning her medical degree from The Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NYC and her master’s degree in Public Health from Columbia University in NYC, before completing residencies in preventive medicine and pediatrics. Before joining UCSD, she held the first dean-level position focused solely on training healthcare professionals to communicate with compassion and clarity at the Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University in Forth Worth, Texas. In 2009, Dr. Kaplan-Liss was the founding medical director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York where she trained thousands of clinicians and medical students in empathic communication.
Val Lantz-Gefroh is a nationally recognized expert in using the arts to transform communication in healthcare. As the Director of Communication Education at the Center for Compassionate Communication at UC San Diego and founding faculty at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, she has trained countless clinicians and researchers to connect with empathy and authenticity. With a background in professional theater, she designs and leads workshops that draw on improvisation, narrative, and performance to build trust and presence in medical settings. Val’s work bridges the worlds of storytelling and science to foster more humane, effective communication in healthcare.
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