111 | When a solo clinical practice isn't for you

0:00 Hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I'm an herbalist and nutritionist, and in this podcast, I share tips, tidbits, and resources that might be helpful for other practitioners. I wanted to talk to you today about a situation that I think happens more often than we know, which is that folks go through the extensive training to become clinical herbalists or nutritionists. They come out the other end of the program and start dipping their toe into becoming a practitioner, supporting themselves after the training, and realize, I don't know if this is for me. I'm not sure if this is something that I want to do or something that is available to me to do right now.

0:41 And I think the reason that this is so common is because we often think abstractly before we sign up for a program, oh, it would be so amazing to be a practitioner. I would love to be a nutritionist. I would love to be an herbalist. So you go to school and then you're like, OK, great, then I can be a practitioner. And it is true, but there's also a big gap there between I went to school, I did the training, and then actually making a living, sustaining yourself, doing the thing. There's a lot more in that little gap than a lot of people know. We aren't really told this necessarily before we go to school. It just feels like the kind of thing that happens. The same as somebody goes to school to become a nurse practitioner, and then they are a nurse practitioner, or whatever it is, a massage therapist, and then they make their way as a massage therapist.

1:24 However, if you want to go into solo clinical practice, there's a lot to it. You need to have the time and the interest, the willingness to do a lot of the marketing, the business associated tasks. And it's not for everybody. Not everybody needs to or wants to do those things. And it could be an unfortunate situation. Discovery at the end of what is sometimes a years-long training process to realize that while you love the work of supporting people and doing the clinical work or other aspects of becoming an herbalist or a nutritionist, you don't love and don't feel that you want to do everything else that goes along with it. This is something that I see a fair amount in folks who come through my Monday Mentoring Program or who I talk to out and about in the wild, whatever it is.

2:11 I talk to people and they're like, yeah, I don't, you know, I love, I love doing this work, but I also, right at this moment in my life, I don't think I want to be running a practice. I don't want to be doing the business components of this. I don't know if I have the time or the interest in doing it. So I wanted to just address that here. We'll, you know, in another time we can talk more about the logistics and what it looks like money-wise and all that kind of stuff. For right now, let's just. Speak to folks who are in that situation, where you're like, wow, okay, I've done all this, and then I'm not sure it's for me. And something that I want to say to people is that I think there is a lot of beauty and a lot of need for people who are out here doing this work as a profession, sustaining themselves.

3:00 You know, making, making things work, figuring it out. There are folks who are cut out for this. There are folks who, for various reasons, some of them which are in their control and some of which are not, are able to do this work and can sustain themselves in this way. And it's also completely okay, and there's plenty of room in this field for folks who have the training and aren't interested in or able to do the full work that's involved in running a, you know, self-sustaining clinical practice. I feel that that's something people don't get told. You don't, they don't hear that. It feels like, oh, I'm kind of a failure because I went to school and I wanted to do this, but I can't make it work right now or I'm not going to make it work right now.

3:46 I'm not going to do this. Put in this time or the money or the figuring out how to do all the bits and pieces that go on behind the scenes. I think most people who go through school and training, if they were in a situation where the next day they could show up at an office and have five clients booked for them and see the clients and then go home. And the following day, five clients booked for them, see the clients go home. I think most people would be into that, at least part-time or some iteration of that. But that is not the way that the world works for most of us in this field. And if you are in this situation where, wow, you've done the training, you know how to be a clinical herbalist or a clinical nutritionist, you think that you are very good at this work, you have a lot to offer the field, I just wanted to tell you that.

4:32 You can still be a clinical herbalist or a clinical nutritionist, even if you are not doing this work with the intention of supporting yourself doing it. There are ways to stay involved in doing this work beyond this. So maybe you can volunteer. Maybe there's ways that you can set this work aside for right now with the option to come back to it later. Maybe you are moving into more of a community role where you're doing education, you're doing occasional visits if somebody's referred to you, but it's not really your primary source of income or even a major source of income for you. All of those things, I think, are amazing. We don't all have to do this work in the same way.

5:13 And there's not one way of doing it that's better than the other. So I guess I just wanted to put this message out there for people who might be feeling like this where you look around and it seems like you see lots of people who are successfully doing this work as a big part of their finances and their income earning and and whatever else and you're feeling like oh wow I must not have done something right or what have you and my point here is just like no there's many many many ways that you can use your clinical education or choose not to use it for right now. Who knows when it might come in handy later on or in other ways that it may manifest as ways you can show up for your community and the people that you want to work with.

5:55 So I encourage you to just notice if you have any assumptions, any stories that you're telling yourself in your head about what this should or should not look like and your. Need to fully be supporting yourself doing this. Sometimes you'll look around and you'll see the people who are supporting themselves have a partner who's paying most of the bills. They had a long runway to build this up that a lot of people don't have. Sometimes people worked two or three jobs and did that until their clinical practice could support them long enough. We don't all have that luxury. Sometimes we're having our own health situation. Sometimes we're caregiving, whatever else. So there's lots of different reasons that some folks can manage to make this work in other folks it's just not realistic and there's plenty of people who go back to school do this training and then they're like you know what it's not for me and that it's still expansive it still grows you as a human to have done the training it's still part of you whether you're using it right now or not and I think that understanding the way that food and herbs and health collide together the way that they weave together and how that shows up in yourself and other people. I think that's valuable in and of itself.

7:03 So anyway, just sharing some thoughts on how you might approach it if you find yourself in this situation. Are there ways that you can power through, that you can get support to make this work? Of course. I'm not saying we just say it's hard and give up, but I am saying it's a perfectly fine choice for you to take a look with new information and say, hey, I'm now becoming more clear on what's involved in this work. If I want to do it the way that I had sort of thought I wanted to do it. And right now, that's not a choice for me. It's okay to make that decision, too. And sometimes we need to re-evaluate, and you never know where life's going to take you later.

7:45 So even if it's not the right choice for you right now, maybe it will be later on. Okay, so there you go. My point of this podcast is not to be defeatist and to say, give up. Hopefully that's not what you heard. But it is to say there's lots of ways to show up and do this work and be a practitioner where your training and your education and your experience counts. It's still important. It's still part of how we heal at a community level, one by one, in groups, and so forth. And I'm glad that you did your training. I'm glad you're here. whether you choose to do all the work that goes into the very, sometimes very slow process of building a sustaining clinical practice, or whether you decide right now, that's not for me, and I'm going to look at other ways to use this education that I have, or set it aside for right now and come back to it later.

8:33 These are all valid choices, and you are still, you're still a clinician, you're still a practitioner, you still have your training, no matter what you decide to do. Okay, hope that was helpful. Have an amazing day. Thank you so much for the work that you do, and I will talk to you really soon.