EP180 How Long Should an Initial Exam Take?

Send us Fan MailYour initial exam can be shorter and still leave your patient feeling cared for. In this episode of Better Skills, Better Doctors, I share the 12-minute consult with my knee surgeon that never felt rushed, and the coaching call where a client realized she was equating time with care. You’ll hear how Parkinson’s law can help you set a shorter target for your intake, how to decide your targeted questions ahead of time, and how to notice the moment you already know what your patient needs. I also talk about what we can project onto patients as solo practitioners, and why a patient may be grateful for a focused visit. Then I connect the same belief to pricing: when you get a patient to her outcome faster, that work is worth more. If you’re ready to build a practice where your schedule and your prices reflect the value of your work, go to tcm-hub.com/fed and click “Let’s Work Together.”Links:Free Masterclass: The Markup Myth: Why Selling Herbs Like a Retail Product Keeps Your Practice Financially FragileHarmonizeIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors., I talk about what to look at when growing your acupuncture practice has stalled, even though your strategy, messaging, and website are all dialed in. When you’ve done the strategy and your results still aren’t moving, the only thing left is you. I explain how the survival mode that built your practice stops fitting as your business grows, and I introduce the unconscious thermostat: a limit on money, praise, or worth, set when you were young, that pulls you back down every time things start to get good. I share an old belief I recently uncovered in my own self-coaching, and you’ll learn how to spot the moment your thermostat kicks in and how mind management helps you stay at the new temperature until it feels normal. Links:HarmonizeDownload Outgrown for freeIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I talk about bringing creativity back into your acupuncture practice, and why the business side of your practice is where that creativity lives. I share how reading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks helped me see that my years as a clinician in Boston were spent in my zone of excellence, and how building TCM Hub, Harmonize, and this podcast is where I found my zone of genius.If your practice has been feeling flat, I walk through how stepping outside the standard services-for-a-fee model and creating an offer nobody else is doing can bring the spark back. I also name the “who am I” voice that keeps so many practitioners from building that offer, and I give you the questions I use to get past it. Your one assignment this week is to write down the offer you’d create if nobody had to buy it.Links:4-Month Fast Track to $15K MasterclassHarmonize TrainingIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I talk about the fear of success in growing an acupuncture practice: the fear of it actually working. I share a Blueprint Call where a Harmonize student told Michael and me he didn’t need to be rich. I also share a Fit Call with a practitioner who believed a busy clinic meant missing time with her kids, and a friend whose fear of not having enough turned into a fear of losing it all. You’ll hear how your survival brain attaches a cost to success, and why so many practitioners trade a big goal for a safer one when it starts to feel scary. Then I walk you through how to rewrite your goals so the identity you’re stepping into becomes the goal and the number becomes the target. That way, every goal you set builds the version of you who can handle the result. Check out Harmonize HereIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors., I share why lasting fulfillment in your acupuncture practice, and your life, starts with what you give yourself. I open with a scene from Yellowstone  and connect it to the way so many of us set goals, change our schedules, grow our revenue, and look to the people in our lives to finally make us feel relaxed, free, loved, or appreciated.I call this the “once I get” belief, also known as the arrival fallacy. I talk about why the good feeling fades and how mind management lets you create that feeling for yourself. You’ll hear how this showed up in my own Boston practice, a few simple ways to give yourself appreciation and rest today, and the one question I want you to sit with this week.If you want support building this skill in your practice and your business, go to tcm-hub.com/fed and click “Let’s Work Together.”If this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailChoosing your next acupuncture continuing education course is about more than the skill you'll walk away with. In this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I talk about why the people in the room shape your growth as much as the curriculum does. Entrepreneurship in Chinese medicine can be lonely, and seminars are often the one place where people understand what you do. When every room is full of colleagues at your level, you can only learn what you already know. I share the story of a $30,000 mentorship with a self-made billionaire, and why Michael and I saw it as a chance to leapfrog years of mistakes. You'll learn how to judge your next training, course, or coaching program by who will be there, how to pick a room where you're a little out of your depth, and how to stay curious around people who are ahead of you. When you're ready to grow your acupuncture practice to its next level, go to tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together."Apply to Harmonize: www.tcm-hub.com/harmonizeIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailClick here to watch this interview on YouTube.What does growing an acupuncture practice look like when you design it around the life you actually want? On this special episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I sit down with Dr. Eileen Li, acupuncturist, clinic owner, and creator with over a million followers. Eileen shares how becoming a mom reshaped the way she practices, why she raised her rates twice in one year and still kept a waitlist, and how defining her dream client led her to a simple realization: she is the niche.We talk about the book Big Enough by Lee LeFever and what it means to reverse engineer your business from your life values, including why niching creates time abundance, a smaller pharmacy, and fewer decisions at the end of a long clinic day. Eileen also gives her first move for any practitioner who feels boxed into one clinic model: run an internal audit of your brick and mortar, then get honest about what else lights you up, like teaching or hosting retreats. If you're ready to build a practice that's big enough for your life, click "let's work together" at tcm-hub.com/fed.Links: tcm-hub.com/harmonizeIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailA lot of us were taught to start as general practitioners and earn a niche once we had enough experience. In this episode, I ask what happens when you flip that order.I share how my first-year idealism shaped the way I believed a practice had to be built, why general practice is the hardest business model to start with, and what came into focus when I specialized in orthopedics. I also walk you through a recent coaching session where my client weighed neuropathy against postherpetic neuralgia for her signature offer, and why the less crowded niche became her wide blue ocean.In this episode:How training and scarcity keep practitioners in general practice longer than they wantThe difference between chasing patients and attracting patients who see themselves in your workHow starting with a niche cuts your decisions, keeps your pharmacy lean, and makes you the go-to for one thingWhy seasoned practitioners already have everything the old order was waiting forYour action step: write down the one condition or demographic you'd most want to be known for treatingResources:Signature Offer Bootcamp: an online workshop I'm offering very soon. Keep your eyes out for details.Free + Easy Doctor 1:1 coaching: go to tcm-hub.com/fed and click Let's Work TogetherIf this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I'm talking about a habit most practitioners don't know they have: answering the question "who are you" entirely from the past.Your history is a record of what happened. The moment you start letting it decide what's possible next, it becomes a ceiling.If this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Better Skills. Better Doctors. I'm talking about potential, and specifically why the gap between where you are and where you could be has very little to do with your capability.It starts at the gym, where I kept surprising myself lifting in kilograms, and only got nervous when I converted to pounds. The weight never changed. My thought about the number did.If this content and material resonates with you and you would like to pursue coaching with Rebecca, please visit:tcm-hub.com/fed and click "Let's Work Together"