Introduction
There have been a lot of new followers/members who have joined lately and I realize it has been a really long time since I have done an introduction. Also, today is my 44th birthday. So I suppose it’s as good a day to talk about myself as any!
My name is Rebecca Ong. I’m a Licensed Acupuncturist and Certified Professional Life Coach. I had a Chinese medicine clinic in Boston for 12 years, now seeing patients remotely. My practice over the past year+ has been gradually moving from patient-centered to helping clinicians with their money, mindset, and work-life balance.
Why the transition from patient care to clinician care? Full honesty, it’s because I burned myself out from practicing medicine. And it’s not because I was working too many hours or because I was struggling to keep the lights on. My clinic was doing great and the money was very good. In fact, I was debt-free, had an emergency fund, and had my finances under control with a combined household income of $200k+. Even still I struggled with episodic depression, but I thought that was just a normal struggle of entrepreneurship. Who isn’t stressed and wanting to quit from time to time? That’s why cocktails exist, right? So I struggled with that silently and kept pushing forward.
It wasn’t until a family emergency struck and shook something up in me that made me start seeing life through a new lens. And I came to realize everything I was striving for in my life and work was someone else’s definition of success and not authentically me. The depression was a response to the continued push toward this definition. And I was buffering the negative emotions with distractions and substances. My whole life as I knew it unraveled. And it came to a point where I was compelled to start it all over. Closed the practice, divorce, moved to a new state… all of it.
I have been observing people in our field feeling stuck, anxious, exhausted, unfulfilled, lonely, lacking confidence, and financially insecure. I see a familiar oscillation between “I love what I do” and “I want to quit”. And I have been watching them try to find the solutions to their dissatisfaction by investing in ways to make their clinics bigger and busier, only to end up dissatisfied again. I’m seeing variations of my story play out again and again.
The invisible hand of the universe has a way of leading you to where you should be, and I’m being led through a new door to help self-employed clinicians avoid the burnout that I went through. So that’s why I’m here and that’s why I started Living Practice. I hope you find my posts helpful. Thanks for being here!