I Did Things Backwards… and it bit me in the end.
As many of you know, for the past year+ I have been focusing on educating clinicians in the Chinese Medicine field about personal and business finances. I have shared my story about taking the steps toward getting my money mindset in order, paying off my debt, staying out of debt, and the importance of having an emergency fund. Basic financial literacy is extremely important for everyone. And I believed that having the money mindset and financial literacy piece down was the key to creating the life and practice one desires.
Turns out, I had it completely backwards.
For years I thought the secret sauce toward my ideal life was to expand and generate enough income so that I could eventually do whatever I wanted. So I took a ton of practice management and business courses and trained with mentors who had high-revenue clinics. I decided on a specialty, adjusted my clinic fees, offered treatment plans, ran four treatment rooms, automated my clinic systems, and hired staff. The patient numbers and outcomes were great and the revenue was better than ever. And combined with my husband’s income we were bringing home well over $200k a year. I was a bad-ass boss lady.
So why was I still feeling burned out, unsatisfied, with episodic depression? I had the money coming in and no debt. Why didn’t I feel free? I now know it’s because the money isn’t the secret sauce. Money isn’t the destination. Money is the gas for the car that brings you to your destination. And if you don’t know what that destination is you’re just going to drive around in circles searching for happiness and satisfaction. And that’s where I was. The more I expanded in order to make my life easier, the newly freed up time I created got filled in with something else in order to support that expansion. As perfectly summarized in the song Right Now by Van Halen: “Working so hard to make it easier…”
Don’t get me wrong… having a healthy money mindset, making a good living, having a profitable clinic, and being out of consumer and student loan debt are all necessary to bring you toward your ideal life, and I love teaching about how to do this, but they are just one pillar when structuring the life you want. Before you have your money in order, you first have to do some serious thought-work to recognize and understand why you are unsatisfied in the first place, why you want to build your practice a certain way, and the narratives you have created that are causing you to show up in life the way you do. If you don’t have this piece down first, you’ll keep ending up in the same unsatisfied and unhappy place even if your clinic and income are rocking.
After a family emergency shook me in to an existential crisis I realized that my ideal life had nothing to do with a high volume, high-earning clinic. That was someone else’s ideal life and marker of success. MY ideal life revolved around the abundance of time to do what I want when I want and not have to wait until the arbitrary retirement age of 60-ish to have it.
After a lot of thought-work I now know that:
I don’t grind like Gary V, and that’s ok.
A big lifestyle only brought on more responsibilities to attend to and maintain, and less freedom.
I do love practicing medicine, but not as my sole source of income, and that’s completely ok!
Each level of “growth” of my practice was one arrival fallacy after another.
Everything I was building was toward the antithesis of what I really wanted out of life and as a result I burned myself out of practicing.
I’m now building the life and practice that I want and I want to help others avoid what I went through.
If any of this resonates with you, stay tuned. I’m working on a new coaching initiative to guide clinicians away from burnout and toward the work-life balance that they desire and deserve. This will NOT be business coaching. This is the stuff you need to do before you hire a business coach. Because if you don’t do the personal work first, you’ll end up building your practice on a house of cards.