Retired Army Colonel, ICU Physician, and Executive Coach Jess Bunin Offers a Practice-Based Framework for Trust, Repair, and Values-Aligned Leadership in Healthcare

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) announces the publication of Self-Awareness and Trust: Leading Healthcare Teams from the Inside Out by Jess Bunin, MD, with Foreword by LTG (Ret.) Mark Hertling, DBA.

Written for physicians and clinicians stepping into their first significant leadership roles — and for mid-career and senior leaders grappling with the relational and ethical demands that formal training rarely addresses — this book offers a practice-based framework for building and sustaining effective leadership from the inside out.

Healthcare asks enormous things of its leaders. It asks them to navigate conflict, repair fractured relationships, lead teams through moral complexity, and hold their values intact under institutional pressure — often without preparation. Self-Awareness and Trust: Leading Healthcare Teams from the Inside Out addresses that gap directly. Dr. Bunin argues that the most consequential leadership challenges in healthcare are not operational or strategic. They are relational. And they require skills that neither medical school nor military training typically provide.

"The assumption that clinical excellence automatically produces effective leadership has cost us," said Bunin. "Physicians are handed authority and expected to lead people through some of the most demanding situations imaginable. This book is the one I wish someone had handed me before I first had to lead."

Self-Awareness and Trust: Leading Healthcare Teams from the Inside Out is organized in three phases that build deliberately on one another.

Part One develops the inner work that grounds everything else: self-awareness, values clarification, implicit bias, perfectionism, and the self-compassion that makes sustainable leadership possible.

Part Two turns outward into the relational disciplines of leadership: how trust is built, how it breaks in predictable ways, and how it is repaired — one conversation at a time.

Part Three equips leaders to build forward, creating cultures of psychological safety, civil discourse, and purpose that can sustain teams through polarization, institutional pressure, and change.

Dr. Bunin brings a distinctive combination of lived experience to this work. She is a retired Army colonel, critical care physician, psychiatrist, and certified executive coach with more than two decades of military service. She is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and Tulane University School of Medicine. She completed her medical training at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Over the course of her career, she directed ICUs, residencies, and fellowships, and served as an assistant dean for faculty development and professor of medicine. She deployed to Iraq as a psychiatrist and to Afghanistan as an intensivist. She now brings her background in psychiatry, critical care, and coaching to the work of developing healthcare leaders. She is also a three-time cancer survivor, a fact that has profoundly shaped her understanding of vulnerability, communication, and power across every dimension of the clinical relationship. She is currently co-founder and chief architect of All Levels Leadership, a leadership coaching and consulting firm.

Self-Awareness and Trust: Leading Healthcare Teams from the Inside Out fills a gap in the leadership literature: a book written specifically for the moment when leaders first assume responsibility for other people, grounded in real-world healthcare and military experience, and built around durable skills rather than inspiration alone. It is practical where other books are abstract, honest where others are reassuring, and designed to be returned to in the difficult middle of the work — not just at the beginning of a career.

About the American Association for Physician Leadership
The core philosophy of the American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) is that leadership is learned. AAPL is focused on the personal transformation of all physicians, and through them the organizations they serve. With the goal of improving patient outcomes, workforce wellness, and a refinement of all healthcare delivery, AAPL has remained the only association solely focused on providing professional development, leadership education, and management training exclusively for physicians. Since its founding in 1975, AAPL has empowered more than 300,000 physicians across 35 countries—including CEOs, chief medical officers, and physicians at all levels of healthcare. www.physicianleaders.org

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SOURCE American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL)