about the author
Linda L.M. Worley, MD
Linda L.M. Worley, MD, is the author of Smooth Sailing Life and a physician wellness pioneer who has spent decades helping individuals understand themselves more clearly, navigate life’s challenges with greater wisdom, and reconnect with what matters most.
Her path to this work was never purely professional. Early in her academic career, while raising two young children, supporting a spouse in training, and carrying the weight of overwhelming clinical responsibilities, she found herself struggling to stay afloat, feeling trapped and helpless to change her circumstances. She drew great wisdom from the books of leading voices in self-help and personal development, but she was still searching for a guide she could reach for in the heat of the moment to show her how to manage it all. No such guide existed, so she created one.
That guide became the Smooth Sailing Life® framework.
Born as a lifeline
Born as her personal lifeline, it grew into one of the most memorable and enduring teaching tools of her career. Physicians she has taught, mentored, or met along the way, as medical students, residents, and colleagues, still seek her out, sometimes decades later, to say they remember the sailboat metaphor, still use it, and that it has helped them keep loving both medicine and life. Over time, she has watched it quietly reduce stigma, helping people see that there is no shame in getting a leaky boat repaired and that their emotions carry messages worth hearing.
“I want to leave a legacy of tools that when utilized, will offer insights, relief from suffering and will empower others to embrace their greatest talents and to launch them in this world.”
Linda L.M. Worley, MD
Three decades of building
In an academic career spanning more than three decades, Dr. Worley served in numerous clinical, leadership, and educational roles. She built programs where none had existed before: a medical student mental health program that grew into a campus-wide Student Wellness Program, a Faculty Wellness Program, and the women’s mental health component of Arkansas’s ANGELS perinatal program, including a telemedicine consultation service supporting obstetric providers throughout rural Arkansas long before telemedicine or perinatal psychiatry became widely established.
She served as Medical Director of Arkansas CARES (a nationally recognized residential treatment program for pregnant and parenting women with co-occurring disorders) and, later, as Regional Associate Dean of the UAMS Northwest College of Medicine, where she led its expansion to a full four-year program, and finally as the inaugural Chief Wellness Officer for the UAMS College of Medicine. She is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Her work extended well beyond any single institution. For nearly fourteen years, she served as core faculty for the Distressed Physicians Course at the Vanderbilt Center for Professional Health. Her commitment to supporting physicians also led her to SVMIC, a nonprofit, physician-owned medical malpractice company, where as an educator she created films to help physicians of every specialty navigate challenging situations. Within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), she provided psychiatric care in the women’s primary care clinic and in the general outpatient clinic, and as Chief Physician Consultant to the Chief Medical Officer of the South Central VA Health Care Network (VISN 16), she developed the Be a Hero, Save a Hero suicide prevention program.
Nationally, she served as President of both the Association for Academic Psychiatry (AAP) and the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry (ACLP) and chaired the scientific program for the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting. Her honors include the AAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the ACLP’s prestigious Hackett Award, and numerous awards for teaching and mentorship.
She is also a Master Certified Physician Development Coach and someone who takes genuine delight in watching others discover their gifts and step into the lives they’re capable of building.
At home
Linda and her husband, Mark, live on the Worley farm in Northwest Arkansas, surrounded by the mutual adoration of their four-legged critters: Kizzy, Linda’s dream horse; Peppermint Patti and Lady Blue Eyes, two miniature horses; Gwennie the Pooh Bear, a lovable morkie; and Ellie, short for Eleanor Roosevelt, a tuxedo rescue kitty who is, by all accounts, a force to be reckoned with. They return regularly to the Pacific Northwest, where they both grew up and met back in college, and they remain a little in awe of the two remarkable adults they somehow managed to raise.
Let’s connect
Whether you’re planning an event, hosting a podcast, gathering a book club, or simply have something on your mind, I’d love to hear from you.