On Getting to the Point

some advice for acupuncture students (and small business people)

Photo by Connor Toth of first year students practicing point location

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about how acupuncturists need to align themselves at work. It’s a good idea to literally line up your needles behind your heart when you’re treating patients, as well as to line your heart up behind all the small business tasks that go into making a practice. A subscriber, Emily, sent me a nice email about it:

This was fascinating to read. I once took archery lessons from a teacher who specialized in “intuitive archery,” also called “instinctive archery,” and it got very “woo” because there are metaphysical aspects to understand if you want to aim the arrows correctly. People who practice this style of archery say that it comes “from the heart,” not just because of the straight line formed by the arm and shoulder and torso, but because of the intention. I never knew that acupuncturists were so particular about their needling posture. The tools, techniques, and intentions are totally different, but in a weird way, it’s kind of similar.

This made me think of some other ways, besides alignment, that archery and acupuncture are similar: aim and impact. And then I went on a rant about communication during one of my classes with first year POCA Tech students (sorry about that, Cohort 12) and it occurred to me that maybe all of it belongs in a post. So here goes:

In acupuncture and business, your aim — meaning your ability to be direct — matters. Making an impact matters. You can’t be vague, even though vagueness might be tempting for a variety of reasons. Vagueness comes from the Latin word for “wandering” and an acupuncturist shouldn’t wander; an acupuncturist needs to get right to the point.¹

Photo credit: Connor Toth

We don’t know exactly how acupuncture works in the body. You can be a very effective acupuncturist without ever trying to solve that particular mystery. You can also be honest with patients that you don’t know (in fact we strongly recommend it!). I think the majority of patients don’t really care about the mechanism; they might have a casual interest, but mostly they’re coming to you because they have a problem they’re hoping to solve.

At POCA Tech, we teach a template for new patient intakes that’s intended to help students get to the point as quickly as possible. And the point of the first treatment is not for the acupuncturist to learn everything about the patient; the point is, does the patient like acupuncture enough to want to give it a try for their specific problem? Don’t ask them a litany of invasive questions, don’t give them a rambling lecture on acupuncture theory — keep it simple and treat them so that they can find out, through experience, whether acupuncture is their cup of tea.

Along the same lines, a good treatment has a quality of directness. You know you’ve given a good treatment when you can feel it land, energetically speaking. I wish I had better language to describe what this feels like, but I bet most experienced acupuncturists know what I mean. You put the needles in and you just know that you connected. The patient feels it too. If it were a sound, it would be a bass reverberation: a thump and a deep echo. You can almost feel it coming up through the floor; I bet a dog could hear it. It’s not about being heavy-handed; you can make a treatment land with a gentle needling technique and very few needles.

It’s about having good aim.

Your words can do something similar. For example, when I’m talking with students about how to give treatment plans to patients, I tell them not to say, “it’d be good if you could come back in a week” because that’s too vague, energetically; it doesn’t land. Instead, say “I’d love to see you again this time next week — can I make you an appointment?” You’re offering acupuncture as a resource, if they want to use it. The goal is to make enough of a connection that your patient can feel that you’re there on the other end of the offer. An “I” statement — I’d love to see you — requires you to put yourself out there, in a way that’s important if you want to make a connection. It also requires some vulnerability.

The issue of being direct came up in class because I gave the students an assignment (more about that in a minute). The goal of the assignment is for students to flex some particular muscles — entrepreneurship muscles — and it’s almost always uncomfortable. The assignment requires them to get right to the point, to be direct and unequivocal and also put themselves out there. The exercise is a way to build tolerance, while in school, for the demands that come after graduation.

Students come to our school not just to learn acupuncture, but to learn how to set up and run a community acupuncture clinic. We believe that acupuncturists need small business skills. And particularly for community acupuncturists, there’s significant overlap between running a community acupuncture clinic and doing community organizing. This also requires alignment, aim and impact.

Which gets us to my rant. I said to the first year students: I’ve seen a lot of people struggle to make things happen for themselves, both in small business and in other kinds of organizing, and a theme that comes up over and over is that they’re not being direct enough with their communication. Particularly, they’re not being direct enough in asking for what they want. They’re asking vaguely.

So many times, people will send out a mass email or put a post on social media to try to organize something, and when they get no response they give up — but the ask never should’ve been a mass email or a post in the first place. It should have been a text or a message or a phone call (I know, I’m old) to a handful of people, or maybe only one person at a time. Not “I need help with X” but “Hi Barnaby, I was hoping you could help me with X? Can you let me know ASAP if you’re available?” Direct and specific, so that you know your communication landed — even if the person says no. (If they say no, you try again with somebody else.) Don’t halfheartedly launch your communications to unknown recipients and then let them drift into the void; don’t say, “it would be great if somebody could do X”. Nothing will come of that except discouragement.²

This sounds obvious, but it’s so often a missed element in making things happen. So many times, in small business, the best way to get past an obstacle is to reach out and ask an individual directly for a specific kind of help. “Hi, I’m struggling with X task, I don’t even know where to start, can you give me some guidance on that?” “Hi, can you explain to me how X process works, I’ve never done it before?” “Hi, someone just told me there’s an promising-looking recliner with a “free” sign on it sitting at the corner of NE Prescott and 63rd, any chance that your truck is available this afternoon?” (Seriously, that’s how WCA acquired any number of recliners, back in the day.)

If I’ve learned anything as an acupuncturist in small business, it’s that you have to aim your communications and they have to land. You have to make contact and feel it.

Photo credit: Connor Toth

Which gets us to — ta-da! —fundraising! Definitely NOT everyone’s favorite activity, but also a prime opportunity to practice these skills.

We’re doing the 1000 X 25 exercise again.

Here’s the background: POCA Tech doesn’t exist without fundraising. We can’t keep our tuition under $25K for students without receiving donations (both financial and in-kind) of about $100K per year. That’s a quarter of our income, and we’re blessed with hundreds of donors, most of them small. No other acupuncture school does anything like this — and back when we started the school, nobody thought it was possible. What made it possible was asking, over and over and over.

So once a year, we do it as a group. Between now and the end of the year, we collectively ask 1000 people for $25 each. Since we have about 40 students in the school, the assignment is for each student to ask 25 individuals to donate $25 each and then record the results of those asks on a shared Google spreadsheet (and then write a short reflection paper about it). Sonya and I do it too.³ Sometimes people say yes, sometimes they say no; sometimes they give less (which is fine! all donations are greatly appreciated!), sometimes they give more. Last year we raised over $16,000 this way — and it turned out to be an amazing simulation of certain small-business realities that it’s otherwise really hard to convey. Specifically, putting yourself out there and being direct in a way that’s potentially uncomfortable.

Every year, some students ask if there isn’t a better, less uncomfortable, more normal way for our school to fundraise. Can’t we hold a gala? Can’t we sell candy bars? The answer is always no, in part because we don’t have enough humans to do any extra work. We run on a shoestring so we do shoestring fundraising. We just ask. It’s such good practice!

So here goes, this is me asking you: if you’ve benefited from POCA Tech’s existence — if you’re getting anything out of reading these newsletters about what we teach, if you’ve been treated by a student or a graduate, or if you just value a different template for acupuncture education, will you donate $25 to our year end fundraiser? Donations of any amount are meaningful to us; every dollar goes a long way in our shoestring budget.

Thanks to a generous donation from acupunk (and clinic owner) Steve Kingsbury, plus a grant from an Advised Fund of Oregon Community Foundation, plus another generous donation from WCA supporter Kathryne Nadal, we’re starting this year’s fundraising with $2050 already. We’re aiming to cover our school’s accreditation costs (more about that in a future newsletter).

Here’s the link to donate and the QR Code:

Thank you in advance for supporting the future of community acupuncture — including by giving our students the opportunity to practice asking.

1. Vagueness is a big part of the acupocalypse. Schools are closing because the acupuncture profession has been vague about acupuncturists’ job descriptions, business models, and above all the value of our credentials in the marketplace, aka the return on investment from an acupuncture education. We’ve had way too much rhapsodizing about personal transformation and way too little number-crunching.

2. More about direct communication in this post by Jemila Hart, L.Ac. about creating a pop-up clinic with a partner organization:

I learned that getting a pop-up to happen with a community organization requires a lot of pro-active communication and attention to detail. Lots of things could have derailed this project from happening. In order to keep things moving forward, I had to be pro-active about communicating with my friend, with residents and staff in various roles at Tukwila Springs, with staff and students in various roles at POCA Tech.

3. I actually started last Friday — and the first person I asked said no. It’s good to practice accepting someone’s “no”.