The greatest misconception among health care professionals is that your training is enough to make you successful.

It isn’t. It’s not anyone’s fault, but the challenge, whether you’re in your first year or tenth, remains the same:

The skills that got you to graduation aren’t the
same ones you need to successfully grow your practice.

School taught you how to help your clients. But it probably didn’t teach you that much about how to find them. It didn’t teach you how to market yourself, manage your cash flow, deal with staff or provide amazing customer service.

So what now?

The good news is that those are all learn-able skills, and the one thing you’ve proven you can do is learn.

The trick, though, is that you can’t learn the missing stuff the same way you learned the other stuff. You can’t learn business the way you learned how to rub, poke, adjust, supplement and coach. Sure you should read books and take classes–there are great people doing great things out there. But you’re going to need something else, too: a little trial and error.

What makes us uncomfortable about learning the new skills we need isn’t the trial and error, though. It’s that we don’t get to learn them in the same context. You don’t get to do it all from the safety of a classroom or textbook. You don’t get to practice marketing on pretend clients and classmates. You have to do it all without a net. You have to get out there.

You can’t change the fact that you need to keep learning. But you can change how you look at the new context. Is working without a net scary? Squishy? Unethical? Dumb? Not for you?

Or is it the last piece of the puzzle that finally lets you do what you’ve wanted to all along?

I like the last way better.