92. Carve Your Own Journey with Sports Medicine Physician Phatho Zondi

Madam Athlete podcast episode 92 cover image of sports medicine physician Phatho Zondi

Introducing Phatho Zondi

Today I’m talking to Dr. Phatho Zondi, a sports medicine physician, about how you must carve your own journey in order to best serve your mission.

Her Career Journey

Phatho knew she wanted to be a sports medicine physician since she was 16 and first learned she could combine her love of sports with the opportunity to serve people as a doctor. She completed her medical training earning her MBChB at the University of Cape Town. As soon as she could begin specializing, she started her postgraduate master’s qualification in sports medicine at the University of Pretoria.

She served athletes as a team physician before taking time away from clinical medicine to earn her MBA. After that she spent four years as the CEO of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, utilizing all of the skills she had built up to innovate and strengthen the organization.

Phatho currently works as an independent consultant with her own company, PCZ Consulting, consulting in clinical sports medicine, diversity and inclusion, and sport sciences. She has additionally served as the team doctor for south African teams competing internationally including at Tokyo Olympic Games, Rio Paralympic Games, London Olympic Games.

Carve Your Own Journey

Phatho describes her experiences as a young, Black physician as “character-defining.” She learned that, in order to serve athletes successfully, she needed to show up as herself. Because of this, Phatho shares that you need to carve your own journey because you’ll never be able to emulate someone else’s journey and have the exact same outcomes.

Inside this episode:

  • Phatho talks about the impatience she felt early on in her career and training that stemmed from knowing that she wanted to be a sports medicine physician and serve athletes from the time she was 16. 
  • She faced racism and bias as a young, Black female physician in South Africa working with rugby, a predominantly white male Afrikaans sport. She realized that she could only be herself and couldn’t pretend to be someone she wasn’t. 
  • Following years of specialized medical training and practice, Phatho was aware of her gaps in knowledge in other fields like business and organizational structure. She decided the fasted way to correct this was by earning an MBA.
  • Her unique combination of training allows her to tie different disciplines together and spark innovation. This made her the best person to lead the Sports Science Institute of South Africa. 
  • Life as a CEO meant both constant change and long periods of waiting to determine effectiveness. Phatho adjusted to this new and different feedback schedule to successfully build up an organization that would flourish even after she left.
  • After taking some time off and selectively choosing which projects to participate in, she let her consultancy business build up organically while still serving her mission.
  • Phatho feels lucky to have served her mission for sports for social change from the one-on-one level as a physician to the institutional level as CEO. 
  • Phatho takes the advice that was given to her and asks herself if she’s aligning to the expectations of others or authoring her own authentic story.

Resources

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