The Wisdom He Can Teach (with Paul Coyne, DNP, MBA, MS, APRN, AGPCNP-BC)

Hosts Marion Leary, PhD, MPH, RN and Rebecca Love, RN, MSN, FIEL kick off the first Nurse Spotlight episode of the Love n' Leary Nursing Podcast with someone who has quietly reshaped how nursing sees itself: Paul Coyne.

Jump Ahead

• 00:58 — Welcome and introducing Paul Coyne, Love n' Leary's first Nurse Spotlight guest
• 01:55 — Paul's early years: heart disease, hospitalization, and paralysis at 15
• 03:00 — Suffering a stroke a week after college graduation
• 04:31 — The moment at Goldman Sachs that changed everything
• 05:50 — What his Wall Street colleagues said about him switching to nursing
• 06:49 — The challenges of being one of the only men in the room
• 08:27 — Six degrees in three and a half years
• 10:00 — Why the pace was less about ambition and more about proving his brain was back
• 12:18 — Choosing to pair the nursing degrees with an MBA and Master's in Finance
• 13:00 — What "manifesting" looked like before he knew the word for it
• 15:19 — Becoming one of the youngest chief nurse executives at HSS at 35
• 16:07 — Leading 2,000 people through the pandemic
• 17:30 — The 30-minute-a-day leadership practice
• 19:00 — Why nurses can spot fake care from a mile away
• 21:25 — Starting Augie and the philosophy of augmenting instead of replacing
• 25:00 — Random LinkedIn outreach and Rebecca's original 2017 message to Paul
• 26:18 — The text message and the story of the mother whose son has leukemia
• 29:25 — Why every nurse leader wants to help more people
• 29:45 — Paul's two books of poetry and how it started with a dream
• 32:00 — Writing 100 lessons for his son in case he wasn't there to teach them
• 34:00 — How his poems have connected with readers across every experience
• 36:23 — Final thoughts: possibility, framing your own story, and telling the world
• 38:32 — Closing thanks

Paul is a nurse, nurse practitioner, entrepreneur, healthcare executive, and poet. He was born with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, suffered a stroke at 22, moved to New York to work as an interest rate derivatives analyst at Goldman Sachs while relearning how to speak, and then walked away from Wall Street after seeing himself in scrubs during a corporate physical. What came next included six degrees in three and a half years, the co-founding of a computer vision company called Augie, and one of the youngest chief nurse executive appointments in U.S. hospital history at 35.

In this episode, Paul shares the moments that shaped his path, why he thinks empathy is a strategic asset in healthcare, how he built a leadership practice around one 30-minute conversation a day, why he writes poetry, and the text message that arrived one hour after he told his psychologist how much he missed being a chief nurse. Marion and Rebecca dig into what nurses can learn from Paul's story about possibility, purpose, and the power of showing up as themselves.

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