The Influential Practitioner
Episode 1: Great Practitioners Stay Invisible All the Time. Not Anymore.
Transcript
Episode number one of The Influential Practitioner. I remember opening my email in the early days of my practice and laughing out loud. Not because anything was funny. Because it was empty. Crickets. And I actually said out loud, “I wonder what it's going to take to make this busier.” Today I'm overwhelmed with emails. I've reached thousands of people, I've collaborated with people I used to read and admire from a distance, and I've gotten endorsements from bestselling authors. And I didn't get there by becoming someone else. I got there by being myself and spreading my message. If you're excellent at what you do and still feel invisible, this episode is for you.
INTRO
Welcome to The Influential Practitioner. I'm Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, podcaster, and founder of The Wholesome Lotus. I built this show around one truth I had to learn the hard way: if you want to heal more people, you have to reach more people. This is where practitioners learn to market from alignment, move through doubt, and become more influential in their communities. If this is you, you're in the right place. So let's get started.
EPISODE
Welcome to the very first episode of The Influential Practitioner. I'm Michelle Oravitz, and I'm so glad you're here. I want to use this first episode to do something a little different from what the rest of the show will be. I want to tell you the whole story. Where I started, what went wrong, what I was afraid of, what actually worked, and why I believe so strongly in the message this show is built on. Because if you're going to spend time with me every week, you deserve to know who's talking to you and why I care about this so much.
Let me start with the version of me you'd see if you looked me up today. I'm a fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus, a clinic in South Florida. I host The Wholesome Fertility Podcast, which is now over four hundred episodes. I wrote a book called The Way of Fertility. I've built programs, I've run summits, and I've had the privilege of working with thousands of women on their path to motherhood. I'm telling you that up front not to impress you, but because I need you to hold it next to everything I'm about to say. None of that existed when I started. Not one piece of it. And for a long time, I didn't believe any of it was possible for someone like me.
Here's what did exist. I was a kid whose first language was art. I felt more at home making images than using words. And when it came time to choose a career, I was told, with love and good intentions, that art was too risky, that you can't make a living that way. So I did what a lot of creative people do. I found the responsible version of my dream. I went into architecture. I spent years telling myself I loved it, but I didn't. I felt like a bird in a cage. I was using a fraction of what I had, and I knew it, and I didn't know what to do about it. How do you go to your parents, who paid for your degree, and say, I want to start over? So I stayed for years.
And then one day, living in San Francisco, a friend suggested I try acupuncture at the student clinic of an Oriental medicine school, because it was affordable. I walked in, and the whole place hit me all at once. The smell of the herbs, the students moving through the halls, the quiet. I sat down with the student practitioner, and I remember looking at her and feeling something I'd never felt about my own work before. Not “I want that job.” It was “I want to be her.” That was the first time in my life I ever felt a calling, rather than just focusing on a career.
It still took me years to act on it. Years. I want you to hear that, because a lot of you are sitting on a calling right now, and you're beating yourself up for not moving faster. The gap between knowing and doing is very normal. It doesn't mean you're not meant for it. It means you're human. Eventually my husband said out loud what I'd been avoiding. He said, “You don't love this. You never loved this.” And hearing it from someone who loves me made it really real. I went back to school for Ayurveda, and then I got my master's in Oriental medicine. And shortly after I graduated, I knew with total clarity that I was meant to help women get pregnant.
I had found my calling, and I assumed, like most people do, that if I just got really good at it, people would naturally find me. They didn't. At first, I started the way a lot of practitioners start. Word of mouth. I sublet a room from a chiropractor. A patient here, a referral there. It was slow, but it was something. And then life did what it does. My father got sick, and I put everything on hold to take care of him. I don't regret one minute of it, but it meant that whatever small momentum I had, I let go of, because he mattered more.
After he passed, I walked into my brand new office space that I'd just leased. I remember standing in that room. My appointment book was at zero. Not slow. Zero. Nobody on the books. And I had over two thousand dollars a month in rent to pay for an office that no one was walking into. I was about a year out of school, I was grieving my father, and I was starting from scratch.
I want to pause here, because if you're in a season like that now, I don't want you to hear this as a story about how strong I was. I wasn't feeling strong. I was scared, and I was afraid of being judged. I had no idea how to get people through the door. What I had was one thing, and I want you to really hear it, because it might be the most important thing I say in this whole episode. I had seen other practitioners do it. I knew it could be done. I'd watched people build full practices, and they weren't magic. They were people. And once you know something can be done, the question inside you changes. It stops being “can I?” and becomes “how?” That's a completely different question. “Can I” keeps you frozen. “How” gets you moving.
So I joined a networking group. Now, if you've ever been in one of these, here's what it means. Every single week, you stand up in front of a room full of business owners and you talk about what you do, out loud, to strangers, every week. I was terrified of public speaking. I mean genuinely afraid. And I signed up for the one thing that would make me do it fifty-two times a year. Not because I'd conquered the fear, but because the alternative was an empty office and a rent bill. I threw myself into it. I did it shaking. And slowly the room stopped being so scary. Slowly people started to know what I did. And slowly the books started to fill.
That season taught me the one thing I keep coming back to, and the thing this whole show is built around. I'm going to say it a lot on the show, so you might as well hear it now. If you want to heal more people, you have to reach more people.
I know how that may sound to a lot of you. It sounds like marketing. It sounds like the thing you went into this work to avoid. You became a healer, not a salesperson. You want to be in the treatment room, not on camera. I get it. I felt exactly the same way. I thought putting myself out there was somehow beneath the work, or a distraction from it. But here's what I came to understand, standing in the middle of that empty office. Reaching people isn't separate from healing people. It's the front door to it. Every person who doesn't know you exist is a person you can't help. Your skill, no matter how deep it is, doesn't reach anyone on its own. You have to carry it to them.
Think about it from the other side. Think about the woman who's been trying to conceive for two years, crying in her car after another appointment where nobody looked at the whole picture. She's searching for you right now. And if you're hiding, she finds someone else, or she finds no one. Your silence isn't humility. It's a closed door.
So being excellent at your craft is where it starts, but it's not where it ends. You have to become more than a great healer. You have to learn to market yourself in a way that feels like service. You have to build relationships. And you have to stand in your voice about what you believe and what actually works, even when it's not what everyone else is saying. That is the whole show in a nutshell. Everything we do here leads back to that.
Now I want to name the thing that actually holds most of us back, because in my experience, it usually isn't skill. It isn't strategy. It isn't even time or money, though we like to say it is. It's the quiet voice that says, who am I to do this? I had classic imposter syndrome. Textbook. Let me tell you where it showed up, because I think you'll recognize yourself.
It showed up when I decided to specialize in fertility. Fertility is one of the most complex, multifactorial specialties there is. Hormones, nervous system, digestion, sleep, stress, relationships, medical history, all of it woven together. Every week I bumped into something I didn't know yet, and every time, that voice said, see, you're not qualified. Real experts don't have gaps. It showed up every time I stood up in that networking group. Who are you to be there talking about health to these people? What if someone asks a question you can't answer? And it showed up the loudest when I started my podcast. Who was I to interview experts? Who was I to put my voice into people's ears every week? I wasn't a broadcaster. I wasn't famous. I was an acupuncturist from South Florida with a microphone I barely knew how to use.
And underneath all of it was a belief I think a lot of you share. Maybe you've never said it out loud, but it's there. The belief that only special people grow in this field. That there's a certain kind of person who gets to be visible and successful, and you're not it. They're more charismatic. They had a head start. They're just built for it. I want to tell you plainly: that belief is false. I know it's false because I believed it completely, and I'm sitting here anyway.
Here's what I learned about imposter syndrome, and it's not what the inspirational quotes say. It doesn't leave before you act. It leaves because you act. You don't wait until you feel ready. You don't wait until the voice goes quiet. You get uncomfortable on purpose, over and over, and somewhere in the middle of doing the thing, you look up and realize the voice got quieter without you even noticing. The networking group didn't cure my fear of speaking. Speaking cured my fear of speaking. Slowly, imperfectly, but it did. And I'll be honest with you, the voice still visits me. It shows up before a big interview. It shows up when I launch something new. The difference is, now I know it's a visitor, not a verdict. It doesn't get to decide what I do.
So what actually took me from a local practitioner with a slowly filling schedule to reaching thousands of people? The podcast, hands down. Nothing else even comes close. And I want to be honest about why, because it's not what people assume. It wasn't that the podcast was some brilliant marketing strategy I mapped out. It was that the podcast forced me to become the person I needed to be. Let me break that down, because I think there are a few lessons in it for you, whether or not you ever start a podcast.
First, it forced me to get over my fear of speaking. Not overnight. It took years. Actually, I still feel a flutter sometimes. But every episode was a repetition. You can't record hundreds of conversations and stay afraid of your own voice. The fear doesn't survive that much practice.
Second, it forced me to do research and create current, relevant content every week. I had to know what I was talking about. I had to read the studies, understand the new protocols, be able to explain things clearly. And here's what nobody tells you: that made me a dramatically better practitioner. Not just a more visible one. A better one. My patients got the benefit of everything I learned preparing to teach it.
Third, and this is a big one. Think about what a podcast actually is. It's a reason to reach out to someone you admire and say, would you spend an hour with me? And they say yes, because you're offering them a platform, an audience, and a conversation. Suddenly you're in conversation with an incredibly successful, brilliant expert in your field, having a real exchange. Not reading their book. Talking to them. I'll say this, and I want you to write it down: being around greatness awakens your greatness. It's not that people handed me their success. It's that seeing them up close made it real. When you see someone on stage or on a book cover, they feel like a different species. When you talk to them for an hour, you realize they're a person. A person who was scared once. A person who started somewhere. And that does something to you. It makes your own growth feel possible in a way it never did before.
A year or two into the podcast, I did something that terrified me. I started asking those people for endorsements. I want to describe what that felt like, because some of you are avoiding an ask right now. My heart was pounding. Every version of “who am I” was screaming. These were people whose books were on my shelf. And I asked anyway. Dr. Christiane Northrup, who to me is the queen of women's health. Dr. Lisa Miller. Aimee Raupp. Jessica Ortner. And they said yes. I got to have Dr. Bruce Lipton on as a guest, which still feels a little surreal when I say it out loud.
None of that happened because I was special. It happened because I asked. Here's the math I live by now, and I want you to take it with you. If you try, you have a fifty percent chance of getting what you want. And if you don't try, you have zero. Those are the only two options. Fifty or zero. There's no third door where you stay comfortable and still get the thing. So getting uncomfortable, stepping into the thing I avoided, became the path to everything I wanted. Discomfort is the path to my goals. Every good thing in my business is on the other side of something I didn't want to do.
I said at the top that I got here by being myself and spreading my message. I want to spend a minute on that, because “just be yourself” is the kind of advice that sounds nice and helps nobody unless you get specific. When I first started, I thought being visible meant sounding like the people who were already visible. Polished, certain, a little bit generic. I thought I had to sand off the parts of me that didn't fit the mold. The art. The spirituality. The way I see the body as intelligent rather than broken. The fact that I care as much about a woman's nervous system as her hormone panel.
What I found is that the parts I was tempted to hide were exactly the parts people came for. Nobody needs another practitioner saying the same safe things. What they need is someone who sees the problem differently and is willing to say so. When I started speaking from what I actually believed, about the mind-body connection, about the nervous system, about the whole woman rather than the diagnosis, that's when people started leaning in. That's when the audience grew. Not because I got louder. Because I got clear. So when I say “find your voice” on this show, I don't mean invent a persona. I mean stop editing yourself. The thing that makes you a little different from every other practitioner in your field isn't a liability. It's your signal. It's how the right people find you in the noise.
There's one more thing I have to say before I talk about failure, because if I skipped it, I'd be leaving out the actual engine of everything I built. Relationships. When I look back at every meaningful jump in my growth, there's a person on the other side of it. The friend who suggested the student clinic. The networking group full of business owners who started sending me their wives, their sisters, their coworkers. The guests on my podcast who became collaborators, who shared my work with their audiences, who invited me onto their platforms. The authors who gave me advice. None of that came from an ad. All of it came from a relationship.
And here's what I want you to understand, especially if you're an introvert or hate the idea of networking. Relationships in this field aren't transactional. You're not collecting contacts. You're finding your people. The practitioners who see the body the way you do. The experts whose work lights you up. The referral partners who trust you with the people they care about. When you build from that place, growth doesn't feel like hustling. It feels like being welcomed into a community that was waiting for you.
The practitioner down the street who does exactly what you do? She's not your competition. She's your future collaborator, your referral partner, your co-host. There is more than enough to go around, and I promise you, there are more people trying to heal than there are practitioners who can truly help them. Scarcity is a story. Collaboration is a strategy. So when I talk about reaching more people, I'm not just talking about content and platforms. I'm talking about picking up the phone, sending the email, saying yes to coffee, asking someone you admire to talk with you for an hour. That's where influence actually comes from. Not from an algorithm. From people.
And this is what I mean when I talk about alignment versus force. Force is trying to make growth happen by pushing harder. Posting more, chasing every tactic, exhausting yourself. Alignment is building from who you actually are and who you're actually connected to, and letting that carry you. When I was forcing, I burned out and got very little. When I was aligned, doors opened that I could never have pushed open. Growth started to feel less like a fight and more like flow. That's not a mystical idea. It's just what happens when the way you grow matches who you are.
Now, I want to be clear that it hasn't been a straight line since the podcast took off. I don't want anyone leaving this episode thinking, well, she found her thing and then it was smooth. I once launched a cohort of my signature program. I built the whole thing. I'd done the emails, the promotion, the pages. I was so proud of it. And I got two sign-ups. That's it. After all that reach, after all those episodes, after all those endorsements. It stung. I'm not going to pretend it didn't.
But here's what was different. By then, I had a different relationship with failure. Because of that empty office, I had already lived the worst version of nobody's coming, with grief on top of it, and I had rebuilt from it. So a launch that flops isn't a verdict. It ended up serving as more information. It tells me something about the timing, or the offer, or the message, or the audience. I look at what happened, I adjust, and I go again.
And that's what I want to give you on this show. Not polished, generic marketing advice from someone who's never had a launch fall flat. Lived resilience. I keep going through the failure, and I'll show you exactly how I do it, because setbacks are part of the path. They're not a reason to leave it. And I'll tell you what got me through every one of them. The same thing that got me through the empty office. I had seen that it could be done, so I knew I had to figure out a way to make it happen somehow. And the word “somehow” has carried me further than any strategy.
So before I tell you what the show is going to be, I want to leave you with three things from this story that you can use this week. Not someday. This week.
One: get around people who have done what you want to do. Listen to them. Read them. Reach out to them. Interview them if you can. You cannot believe something is possible for you until you actually see it up close in someone else. Being around greatness awakens your greatness.
Number two: pick the uncomfortable thing and do it anyway. For me it was a networking group, and then a microphone. For you, it might be posting a video, a talk at a local event, an email to someone you admire. Don't wait to feel ready, because readiness is on the other side of doing it, not before.
And number three: run the math. Fifty percent if you try. Zero if you don't. Every time that voice says “who am I to,” answer it with the math. You're not arguing with a voice. You're just doing arithmetic.
So here's what you can expect from The Influential Practitioner. This show is for practitioners who are just starting out, or who are somewhat established and ready to finally be seen. Acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, coaches. People who are excellent at their craft but are struggling with visibility, with marketing, or with self-doubt. If you're great in the treatment room and invisible everywhere else, this is your show.
It's going to be a mix. Some episodes will be solo, like this one, where I walk you through what I've learned and how I think about growth. And some will be interviews with other practitioners and experts who've built real influence on their own, because I want you to hear it from more than just me. Different paths, different personalities, same truth underneath. We'll talk about marketing that feels like service instead of self-promotion. We'll talk about relationships and collaboration, because relationships are how I grew, and I believe they're how you'll grow. We'll talk about finding your voice and standing in it, even if it's not the popular take. We'll talk about building from a place of alignment, so that growth stops feeling like force and starts feeling like flow. And yes, we'll talk about the launches that flopped, the seasons when nothing worked, and how to keep moving when you'd rather quit.
My goal is that you leave every episode feeling four things at once: motivated, relieved, understood, and a little bit challenged. Because I believe in you, and I'm not going to let you hide.
Before I let you go, I want to leave you with one thing to do. Think of one uncomfortable action you've been avoiding, and this week, do it. Remember the math. Fifty percent if you try. Zero if you don't. And if you want a head start, I put together a free guide with the exact moves I made after walking into that empty office, step by step, and you can grab it at the link below. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will see you next time.
OUTRO
Thank you so much for spending this time with me on The Influential Practitioner. You've built something meaningful. Now it's time to let the right people find it, because when you reach more people, you get to help more people. For free resources and courses to grow your visibility, visit theinfluentialpractitioner.com. And if this episode helped you, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a practitioner friend. Until next time, keep showing up and sharing your gift.
