Sure, we all do. I’ve talked about various business topics on Deepest Health. I’ve made some recommendations about books, websites and even courses that might get you closer to your goal of having a vital, abundant Chinese medicine practice. I’ve consumed at least twenty times more content than I’ve recommended – putting only the best and brightest out there for you all to see. I like to think some of these recommendations have been helpful!
One thing I’ve always wanted to do is take what I’ve learned so far about business and feed it into some kind of natural medicine specific business course. I like specialists – I like people who have experience in the particular field I find myself in. I’ve even got some pretty detailed outlines about what I’d like to see in a course like that. It’s just all about finding the time to build the infrastructure and polish the content, not to mention promote it, maintain it, and so on. Just thinking about all that work makes me a little tired, I must admit. :)
Fortunately, I can relax a bit. Someone has beat me to the punch, creating pretty much the same course I would like to have created! My friend Brooke Thomas is about to open enrollment on a practice building course that I believe will be well worth your time and money. I’ve read Brooke’s work and had numerous conversations with her about her experience and her strategies.
I think what she has to offer will be of great benefit to many of you – I’d say particularly to those of you in your final year of practice and those who are just getting their practices together. However, more education is always helpful – and I find that I always learn something from my conversations with Brooke – regardless of where I’ve been in my process. I really enjoyed her free ebook, for example – which is still available by following this link.
I want to offer her own words, first posted on her blog, about what drove her to create this course.
“I recently received an email from an acupuncturist where she told me about how her school constantly repeated the mantra, “In 5 years, 50% of you won’t be working as acupuncturists anymore” to the students. That is all. They never followed that sentence with one that started, “so here’s how you can avoid being a part of that 50%…” Gee thanks guys, the future’s feeling pretty bright now! Here’s my tuition check- or shall I just flush it down the toilet!? To the schools I would like to respectfully say: Don’t take our money, put us through your schools, tell us how we’ll likely fail, and then send us out into the world with no attention paid at all to how we might avoid becoming the aforementioned statistic.
What is wrong with this picture? Why are they such defeatists? What do they think the awful statistics are about? That people who studied acupuncture don’t actually care about acupuncture? That acupuncture doesn’t actually have much to offer people? That they tend to have lazy or flaky graduates? Or could it maybe, just possibly, be because people who love what they do and are committed to sharing it with the world enter that whole private practice thing with little to no idea of how to do that successfully? Maybe? Ya think? Ok, rant over.
AND SO…
In general I find that complaining about what other people should be doing is an ineffective strategy for creating positive change. I can’t really think of many times that straight up complaining got anyone very far. Imagine if Rosa Parks only complained loudly and ceaselessly amongst her friends about how unjust sitting in the back of the bus was, without ever plopping herself in the front of that bus and thereby claiming her own power to make a change? The former strategy wasn’t likely to change history. The latter? Pretty effective.
Ok, so I’m no Rosa Parks. I think that’s fairly obvious. However, because of my own experience of struggling through my first three years in practice and then falling in love with practice building (no one is more surprised than me…) there does happen to be one thing I can do to make some change. I figure if I can pass on the tools and create a place for a supportive community of complementary and alternative medicine providers to gather, then maybe we’ve got a shot at changing the lame statistics. And if we change the lame statistics, then we’ll have a lot more practitioners around and a lot more people getting the help they need.
And so I built Practice Abundance. It’s the result of nearly ten years in practice, starting three practices from scratch, one ebook, one mega manuscript for a printed book, a year and a half blogging about practice building, and lots of conversations with practitioners who felt just as helpless and hopeless as I did when I was starting out. I designed it to be the FULL course that our schools left out, coupled with community warmth and support.”
It seems like Brooke has done all the work necessary to provide that basic, focused business (and marketing!) course that all of our schools should provide – but often don’t.
If any of this speaks to you, I suggest you head over to the early notification list sign-up page. This won’t obligate you to any purchase, but just get you on the list so you can be informed when the course opens for enrollment (March 17-20th). It will also allow you the chance to learn more about the course over the coming days. The “sneak peek” page, linked to on that sign-up page, will show you the information she’s already sent out on the list. Lots of helpful information, including the complete course outline.
** The links to the sign up page are affiliate links – if you end up joining the course, I’ll get a little kick-back. I hope this won’t dissuade you from signing up if you are interested. These little drips of money help me keep Deepest Health running and I still don’t recommend anything I wouldn’t use myself. Seriously.
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