Nobody Grows Alone: Why Every Leap in My Practice Started With a Person

When I look back at every meaningful jump in my business, there is a person standing on the other side of it.

A friend who suggested I try the student clinic at an Oriental Medicine school because it was affordable. That suggestion is the reason I found my calling. A networking group I joined out of desperation when I opened a new office with zero appointments. A speaker in that group whose offhand comment about her business coach led me to a retreat, where the coach asked one question that changed my direction. Podcast guests who became collaborators. Authors who put their names next to mine.

Not one of those came from an ad. Every one came from a relationship.

The room that rebuilt my practice

I know how the word networking lands for a lot of practitioners. It sounds like business cards and forced small talk. For a long time it was an ordeal for me too. When I walked into that empty office, I did not have a marketing plan. I had a rent bill and a fear of public speaking so strong it took me years to get past it. And the first thing I did was join a networking group, where every week for about a year I stood up in front of a room of business owners and talked about what I did.

I was treating everything back then. Back pain, stress, whatever walked through the door. The people in that room did not necessarily need acupuncture themselves, but they had spouses, coworkers, friends. Once they had seen me every week for months, once they trusted me, I became the acupuncturist they thought of when someone in their life needed one.

That is what a relationship does. It turns one person into a doorway to everyone they know. There is no ad that makes a stranger vouch for you to their sister.

The chain I could never have planned

The most important thing that came out of that group was not a patient. There was a woman in the group who was a speaker, and I admired her. One day she mentioned how much she had learned from a business coach. I paid attention, and I ended up at that coach's retreat. She looked at me and asked, "Why aren't you headlining fertility on your website? What are you waiting for?"

I did not have a good answer. The truth was I was scared to commit. If I put fertility front and center, what about everyone else? But I did it, and that is when my business took off.

A networking group, a speaker I happened to admire, a coach she happened to mention, a retreat I happened to attend, one question. I did not plan any of it. I kept showing up and staying open, and the right person asked the right thing at the right time.

What a podcast really is

Most people think a podcast is a content strategy. For me it was something else. It was a reason to reach out to people I would never otherwise have been able to talk to.

If I had emailed an author I admired and asked for an hour of her time, the answer would have been no, or silence. But when I wrote and said, "I host a podcast for women trying to conceive. Would you come on and share your work with my audience?" that was an offer, not a favor. And they said yes.

Suddenly I was sitting across from people whose books were on my shelf. Being around greatness awakens your greatness. When you talk with someone for an hour, you realize they started somewhere, they were scared once, and that does something to your sense of what is possible for you.

A year or two in, I started asking those guests for endorsements. Dr. Christiane Northrup. Dr. Lisa Miller. Aimee Raupp. Jessica Ortner. My heart pounded every time. Most I asked at the end of the interview, a few by email, and yes, some of those emails never got a reply. But the ones who said yes changed my career, and the ones who did not answer cost me nothing. If you try, you have a fifty percent chance. If you don't, you have zero.

Give first, with an open heart

If there is one principle underneath every relationship that grew my business, it is this. Give first, and give with an open heart and no expectation.

I do not share someone's work so they will owe me something. I do not interview someone as a setup for a favor. I give because their work moved me or because my audience needs to hear them. Then, when the time comes to ask, I am not a stranger, and the ask feels like the next natural step in something that already exists. If you give with a scorecard in your hand, people feel it.

For the ones who would rather not

I am not a natural at this. I am somewhere in the middle, not the person who works a room and not the person who hides from one. Most of the relationships that changed my business started as one conversation, one email, one interview. You do not have to be good at rooms. You have to be good at people, one at a time.

And if you would rather write than talk, write. Send the thoughtful email. Comment meaningfully on someone's work. Quiet people are often better at this, because they listen, they follow up, and they mean it.

Three things to do this week

Make a list of five people you would like to know. Not celebrities. People a few steps ahead of you or beside you. Give something to one of them, with no ask attached. Then make one ask you have been avoiding. Draft it, make it easy to say yes to, and send it. Fifty or zero.

The people who will change your business are already out there. Some of them are waiting for you to say hello.

If you want the full picture of how I rebuilt from an empty office, including the networking group, the podcast, and the asks, it is all in my free guide, You Built It. They Didn't Come.