Member since May 2026
COL (ret) Jess Bunin, MD, MHPE is a speaker, executive coach, physician leader, and author who has spent her career running toward the moments most people avoid, whether in a combat zone, an ICU, or a difficult conversation. Today, she is the Co-Founder and Chief Architect of All Levels Leadership, a Professor of Medicine and Health Professions Education, and a Certified Executive Coach who is passionate about developing future leaders through faculty development, coaching, and mentorship. Her forthcoming book, From the Inside Out: How Self-Aware Leaders Build Trust and Transform Healthcare, distills decades of hard-won leadership lessons into a guide for leaders ready to do the inner work. She has delivered more than 50 workshops at national and international conferences, speaking on communication, civil discourse, trust, and moral courage, and she loves it every time. She recently received the 2025 #IStandWithHer Resilience Award from the Power of Women in Medicine Summit Awards Committee and completed the American Association of Medical Colleges' Healthcare Executive Diversity and Inclusion Certificate Program.
Dr. Bunin retired from the Army in 2023 after 23 years of service that took her to Iraq as a Psychiatrist and Afghanistan as an Intensivist, caring for patients and leading teams under the most demanding conditions medicine can offer. From 2019 to 2023, she served as the Assistant Dean for Faculty Development at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where she delivered nearly 100 workshops annually, while simultaneously serving as Program Director for the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Before that, she served at Tripler Army Medical Center as Chief of Critical Care and Associate Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency, and at Walter Reed as Medical Director of the ICU, Chief of the Critical Care Medicine Service, and Associate Program Director of the Critical Care Medicine Fellowship following her Critical Care Medicine Fellowship there. Earlier in her career, she returned to her alma mater, the United States Military Academy at West Point, to serve as a Psychiatrist for the Corps of Cadets. She completed her internship and residency in Internal Medicine and Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, earned her medical degree from Tulane University School of Medicine, and graduated from West Point, where her commitment to leading and caring for others first took root.
I love the moment when a room gets honest. After more than two decades as an Army critical care physician, I learned that the hardest part of medicine is rarely the medicine. It is the conversation no one wants to have. I believe healthcare improves when dialogue is practiced, not improvised, and I have built my work around teaching leaders how to practice it. I love helping early-career healthcare leaders, the new chiefs, program directors, and medical directors who were promoted for clinical excellence and then handed responsibilities no one trained them for. Through keynotes, workshops, and executive coaching, I give them frameworks they can actually use, so that courageous conversations become a skill they own rather than a personality trait they wish they had. Leadership is the disciplined practice of creating clarity, safety, and shared understanding in moments when it would be easier to stay silent, and I speak because I want more leaders to choose those moments well.
In this deeply personal and inspiring talk, Dr. Jess Bunin shares her extraordinary journey through three cancer diagnoses, two combat deployments, profound personal loss, and some of the most challenging moments of her professional and personal life. From serving as a physician in Iraq and Afghanistan to navigating serious illness, identity, grief, and career-defining crossroads, Jess explores what it means to keep moving forward when life repeatedly forces you to begin again. Rather than a story about surviving adversity, this is a story about choosing purpose, connection, and growth in the face of it. Through honesty, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, she offers powerful lessons on resilience, self-compassion, moral courage, and leading authentically when the path ahead is uncertain. Audiences leave with practical strategies for navigating change, finding meaning after setbacks, and building a life that is not merely impressive, but deeply fulfilling.
I trained for years to be the most competent clinician and critical care educator I could be. From West Point through medical school and into the ICU, I mastered the protocols, the physiology, and the procedures. Then I stepped into a leadership position and discovered that none of it had prepared me to lead. I knew how to run a code, but I did not know how to run a difficult conversation. That gap changed the course of my career. I went looking for the skills no one had taught me, and what I found was the relational side of leadership. I studied trust, feedback, and civil discourse, trained as an executive coach, and served as a Dean of Faculty Development, teaching other physicians the skills I had to learn the hard way. Along the way, I also sat on the other side of the bedrail as a patient, an experience that taught me how much trust and communication shape care in ways no checklist can capture. I retired from the Army as a Colonel after more than two decades of service, and I now bring all of those identities into every room I speak in. That combination is why I founded All Levels Leadership and why I wrote my forthcoming book, From the Inside Out: How Self-Aware Leaders Build Trust and Transform Healthcare. Everything I do rests on one conviction. Clinical excellence requires conversational competence, and healthcare improves when dialogue is practiced, not improvised.
1. Civil Discourse and Team Power: Transforming Healthcare From the Inside Out, Heartline: Changemaking in Healthcare with Andrea Austin, June 2026.
2. Showing Up: LGBTQ+ Physicians on Identity, Care, and Community, Women in Medicine, June 2026.
3. Trust- What Builds Trust Between Doctors and the People They Lead, Kevin MD, June 2026
4. Leading with Compassion - She faced cancer, war, and loss, and chose to lead with compassion. Med Story Podcast, Nov 2025
5. Civil Discourse - Civil Discourse as a Survival Skill in Healthcare, The Podcast by KevinMD. 23Aug2025
6. Moral Courage - Moral Courage in Medicine: The BOSS (Business of Surgery Series) with Amy Vertrees 3Nov2025
"This session was both inspiring and impactful, bringing clarity, humility, and purpose to a critical conversation."
"Dr. Bunin delivered an engaging and highly impactful presentation on civil discourse in academic medicine."
"Her warm, relatable style drew the audience in, and the interactive breakout discussions kept participants actively engaged throughout."
"skillfully advancing a meaningful dialogue on restorative justice and civil discourse"
Teams do not break from conflict. They break from unspoken conflict. In healthcare and academic medicine, the conversations we avoid cost us more than the ones we have, showing up as preventable safety events, eroded trust, turnover, and silent disengagement. Yet while incivility is well documented in the medical literature, civil discourse itself is barely studied and almost never taught.
In this engaging and evidence-based session, Dr. Jessica Bunin makes the case that civil discourse is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. Drawing on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach, she walks audiences through five practical pillars: creating psychological safety, listening actively, establishing common ground, adjusting thinking, and responding skillfully. Along the way, she dismantles common myths, including the idea that decorum equals civility and that psychological safety means comfort, and offers concrete tools such as yes/and reframing, calling in versus calling out, and Ouch and Oops conversations.
Attendees leave with the confidence to apply Dr. Bunin's CLEAR framework for trusting communication. They can apply this framework their next difficult conversation, whether with a colleague, a learner, or a leader. Audiences who have experienced this work report measurable results, including 92% feeling confident conducting civil discourse and 86% reporting an increased sense of belonging in their workplace.
Learning objectives:
Trust is not a soft skill. It is a biological state, and it is the foundation of every high-performing team. When trust is present, collaboration rises, energy increases, and the costs of working together drop. When it breaks, organizations default to fear, chronic stress, and self-preservation, and the damage shows up in turnover, burnout, and silence.
In this evidence-based session, Dr. Jessica Bunin draws on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to show leaders how trust actually works, how it breaks, and how it can be deliberately rebuilt. Using the Japanese art of kintsugi as a guiding metaphor, she walks through the anatomy of a trust breakdown with her FRACTURE model, which traces the predictable pattern from fog of uncertainty to collapsed engagement. She then introduces the three foundational drivers of trust, authenticity, logic, and empathy, and helps participants identify their own leadership wobble, the driver most likely to shake under pressure. Each wobble comes with a practical fix, from radical responsibility to inverting communication to releasing the curated professional persona.
The session closes with her TRUSTED model, seven concrete behaviors for repairing broken trust, and the evidence that high-trust environments generate measurable clinical and operational improvements, including greater job satisfaction, stronger sense of purpose, and lower burnout.
Learning objectives:
We treat mentorship as if it comes naturally to anyone who is good at their job. The myth goes like this: good doctors make good mentors, mentoring is fun and easy, and mentors succeed with every mentee. The reality is messier. Most mentors have lived through a failed mentoring relationship, and almost none of them were ever taught how to do this work.
In this interactive, evidence-based workshop, Dr. Jessica Bunin draws on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to take an honest look at why mentoring relationships struggle and what to do about it. She examines five categories of mentor challenges: those rooted in the mentor, those rooted in the mentee, interpersonal mismatches and breaches, systemic barriers like time, recognition, and the minority tax, and ethical dilemmas around boundaries and equal access. Each challenge comes with a practical solution, from returning to your why, to staying empathic without becoming enmeshed, to becoming a change agent within your institution.
The session then flips the lens to the mentee experience, offering concrete tools for clarifying needs, setting goals, building a mentor constellation, and standing up for yourself within the relationship. Participants leave with a stepwise plan for redirecting a struggling mentorship, including how to end one well when it is time.
Learning objectives:
We tell physicians and leaders that feedback is a gift. Then we hand them comments that sting, confuse, or contradict everything they believe about themselves, and we expect them to grow from it. The truth is that receiving feedback well is a skill, and almost no one teaches it.
In this interactive workshop, I draw from my experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to help participants process even the most painful feedback for genuine insight. The session walks through a practical cycle for receiving feedback: solicit, listen, assess, and integrate. Participants explore why negativity bias makes critical comments louder than praise, how identity, truth, and relationship triggers distort what we hear, and why rethinking our own assumptions is so difficult.
At the heart of the workshop is my Feedback Filter Framework (F3), a simple tool for sorting feedback into what is essential, what is a necessary evil, what is valid but not yet useful, and what is irrelevant and safe to release. Participants practice applying the framework to realistic cases, from the offhand comment after a presentation to the anonymous evaluation that ruins a week, and leave with a plan for building feedback partnerships that make hard input easier to use.
Learning objectives:
COL(ret) Jess Bunin, MD is an ICF-certified executive leadership coach. She helps leaders build self-awareness, navigate difficult conversations, manage conflict, and lead with greater clarity, confidence, and authenticity.
Send QueryIn this deeply personal and inspiring talk, Dr. Jess Bunin shares her extraordinary journey through three cancer diagnoses, two combat deployments, profound personal loss, and some of the most challenging moments of her professional and personal life. From serving as a physician in Iraq and Afghanistan to navigating serious illness, identity, grief, and career-defining crossroads, Jess explores what it means to keep moving forward when life repeatedly forces you to begin again. Rather than a story about surviving adversity, this is a story about choosing purpose, connection, and growth in the face of it. Through honesty, humor, and hard-earned wisdom, she offers powerful lessons on resilience, self-compassion, moral courage, and leading authentically when the path ahead is uncertain. Audiences leave with practical strategies for navigating change, finding meaning after setbacks, and building a life that is not merely impressive, but deeply fulfilling.
I trained for years to be the most competent clinician and critical care educator I could be. From West Point through medical school and into the ICU, I mastered the protocols, the physiology, and the procedures. Then I stepped into a leadership position and discovered that none of it had prepared me to lead. I knew how to run a code, but I did not know how to run a difficult conversation. That gap changed the course of my career. I went looking for the skills no one had taught me, and what I found was the relational side of leadership. I studied trust, feedback, and civil discourse, trained as an executive coach, and served as a Dean of Faculty Development, teaching other physicians the skills I had to learn the hard way. Along the way, I also sat on the other side of the bedrail as a patient, an experience that taught me how much trust and communication shape care in ways no checklist can capture. I retired from the Army as a Colonel after more than two decades of service, and I now bring all of those identities into every room I speak in. That combination is why I founded All Levels Leadership and why I wrote my forthcoming book, From the Inside Out: How Self-Aware Leaders Build Trust and Transform Healthcare. Everything I do rests on one conviction. Clinical excellence requires conversational competence, and healthcare improves when dialogue is practiced, not improvised.
1. Civil Discourse and Team Power: Transforming Healthcare From the Inside Out, Heartline: Changemaking in Healthcare with Andrea Austin, June 2026.
2. Showing Up: LGBTQ+ Physicians on Identity, Care, and Community, Women in Medicine, June 2026.
3. Trust- What Builds Trust Between Doctors and the People They Lead, Kevin MD, June 2026
4. Leading with Compassion - She faced cancer, war, and loss, and chose to lead with compassion. Med Story Podcast, Nov 2025
5. Civil Discourse - Civil Discourse as a Survival Skill in Healthcare, The Podcast by KevinMD. 23Aug2025
6. Moral Courage - Moral Courage in Medicine: The BOSS (Business of Surgery Series) with Amy Vertrees 3Nov2025
"This session was both inspiring and impactful, bringing clarity, humility, and purpose to a critical conversation."
"Dr. Bunin delivered an engaging and highly impactful presentation on civil discourse in academic medicine."
"Her warm, relatable style drew the audience in, and the interactive breakout discussions kept participants actively engaged throughout."
"skillfully advancing a meaningful dialogue on restorative justice and civil discourse"
Teams do not break from conflict. They break from unspoken conflict. In healthcare and academic medicine, the conversations we avoid cost us more than the ones we have, showing up as preventable safety events, eroded trust, turnover, and silent disengagement. Yet while incivility is well documented in the medical literature, civil discourse itself is barely studied and almost never taught.
In this engaging and evidence-based session, Dr. Jessica Bunin makes the case that civil discourse is a learnable skill, not a personality trait. Drawing on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach, she walks audiences through five practical pillars: creating psychological safety, listening actively, establishing common ground, adjusting thinking, and responding skillfully. Along the way, she dismantles common myths, including the idea that decorum equals civility and that psychological safety means comfort, and offers concrete tools such as yes/and reframing, calling in versus calling out, and Ouch and Oops conversations.
Attendees leave with the confidence to apply Dr. Bunin's CLEAR framework for trusting communication. They can apply this framework their next difficult conversation, whether with a colleague, a learner, or a leader. Audiences who have experienced this work report measurable results, including 92% feeling confident conducting civil discourse and 86% reporting an increased sense of belonging in their workplace.
Learning objectives:
Trust is not a soft skill. It is a biological state, and it is the foundation of every high-performing team. When trust is present, collaboration rises, energy increases, and the costs of working together drop. When it breaks, organizations default to fear, chronic stress, and self-preservation, and the damage shows up in turnover, burnout, and silence.
In this evidence-based session, Dr. Jessica Bunin draws on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to show leaders how trust actually works, how it breaks, and how it can be deliberately rebuilt. Using the Japanese art of kintsugi as a guiding metaphor, she walks through the anatomy of a trust breakdown with her FRACTURE model, which traces the predictable pattern from fog of uncertainty to collapsed engagement. She then introduces the three foundational drivers of trust, authenticity, logic, and empathy, and helps participants identify their own leadership wobble, the driver most likely to shake under pressure. Each wobble comes with a practical fix, from radical responsibility to inverting communication to releasing the curated professional persona.
The session closes with her TRUSTED model, seven concrete behaviors for repairing broken trust, and the evidence that high-trust environments generate measurable clinical and operational improvements, including greater job satisfaction, stronger sense of purpose, and lower burnout.
Learning objectives:
We treat mentorship as if it comes naturally to anyone who is good at their job. The myth goes like this: good doctors make good mentors, mentoring is fun and easy, and mentors succeed with every mentee. The reality is messier. Most mentors have lived through a failed mentoring relationship, and almost none of them were ever taught how to do this work.
In this interactive, evidence-based workshop, Dr. Jessica Bunin draws on her experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to take an honest look at why mentoring relationships struggle and what to do about it. She examines five categories of mentor challenges: those rooted in the mentor, those rooted in the mentee, interpersonal mismatches and breaches, systemic barriers like time, recognition, and the minority tax, and ethical dilemmas around boundaries and equal access. Each challenge comes with a practical solution, from returning to your why, to staying empathic without becoming enmeshed, to becoming a change agent within your institution.
The session then flips the lens to the mentee experience, offering concrete tools for clarifying needs, setting goals, building a mentor constellation, and standing up for yourself within the relationship. Participants leave with a stepwise plan for redirecting a struggling mentorship, including how to end one well when it is time.
Learning objectives:
We tell physicians and leaders that feedback is a gift. Then we hand them comments that sting, confuse, or contradict everything they believe about themselves, and we expect them to grow from it. The truth is that receiving feedback well is a skill, and almost no one teaches it.
In this interactive workshop, I draw from my experience as a critical care physician, retired Army colonel, professor of medicine, and executive coach to help participants process even the most painful feedback for genuine insight. The session walks through a practical cycle for receiving feedback: solicit, listen, assess, and integrate. Participants explore why negativity bias makes critical comments louder than praise, how identity, truth, and relationship triggers distort what we hear, and why rethinking our own assumptions is so difficult.
At the heart of the workshop is my Feedback Filter Framework (F3), a simple tool for sorting feedback into what is essential, what is a necessary evil, what is valid but not yet useful, and what is irrelevant and safe to release. Participants practice applying the framework to realistic cases, from the offhand comment after a presentation to the anonymous evaluation that ruins a week, and leave with a plan for building feedback partnerships that make hard input easier to use.
Learning objectives: