Building a successful practice is rewarding, but it's rarely a smooth ride. It's a path that takes us beyond our healing work and into the depths of business practices—from marketing to managing finances. Amid the multitude of details that go into running a small practice, it's easy to feel overwhelmed—which is why clarity of purpose is so helpful.
Navigating the ebb and flow of a small practice demands some self-scrutiny of our most intimate selves. What are your strengths? What are your values? Do we know what we're here for, and do have the courage to grasp it? And do we know what is not for us, and let it go?
In this conversation with Sydney Malawer, we talk about monitoring the pulse of your business—whether that's paying attention to your overhead or being authentically you. We explore some intuitive approaches to running a thriving Chinese medicine practice. Including building a practice that reflects who we genuinely are. What works for you? What are your strengths? What is not working, and when should you pivot?
Listen into this discussion on what it takes to start and build a small successful practice by tapping into the magic of the authentic vision within you.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- Demystifying the notion of acupuncture as a labor of love
- The power of not experiencing scarcity
- Being genuine with your patients and comfortable with yourself
- What are some of the skill sets or talents you might already have latent that you would want to bring up and out in running your own practice?
- The nuts and bolts of running a successful practice—from honing clinical expertise to building a structure for your practice.
- Health is when we are not conscious of the body. “When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten.”—Zhuang Zi
- Thriving in a saturated market.
- Knowing what you're here for – using StrengthsFinder and the Human Design system
- Connecting with people and being ‘you' as powerful marketing strategies
- Chinese medicine vs. Western medicine; treating the body as a garden vs. a machine.
- Building on your ‘luck' to succeed and not dismissing other people's success
- Peeling back the layers of insurance in practice
Your goal with every treatment is to make sure your patient feels better leaving than they do coming in – whether that be through needles, moxa, herbs, words, or time. You can’t always solve their problem, but you can help them feel more capable and confident that the problem can be solved.
Sydney Malawer, L.Ac. runs a private practice in Berkeley, CA that specializes in the treatment of chronic, complex conditions, in particular autoimmune dermatology, digestive issues, and joint pain. She came to East-Asian medicine through her own struggle with psoriasis and seeks to bring the same comfort, relief, and advocacy to her patients that she has received throughout her struggle.
Her style of practice is Japanese Meridian Therapy as per the teachings of Ikeda Masakazu under the guidance of her mentor, Dr. Barbara Martello. She holds a B.S. from Cornell University, graduated summa cum laude from the Master’s in East-Asian Medicine program at the Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College (AIMC) at Berkeley, and is currently pursuing her doctorate through AIMC Berkeley.
She currently is a guest lecturer at AIMC Berkeley and volunteers at the Charlotte Maxwell Integrative Cancer Care Center providing acupuncture to low-income women with cancer.
Links and Resources
Visit Sydney on her website, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
In the conversation Sydney talked about using the StrengthFinders and Meyers-Briggs personality systems.
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