Risk & Entrepreneurship & Acupuncture, Part Two
a guest post by Noni Vaitekunas of Cohort 8
You may have heard, POCA Tech is taking on a big risk. (Part One is here.)
As my cohort sat on the polished concrete floors under the beautiful exposed ceiling of our new space, we could feel the gravity it held. POCA Tech has never hidden from us the amount of effort it takes to have what we have as a school, just like they’ve never hidden the level of risk it takes to become an acupuncturist. We listened with rapt attention as Lisa explained the process it took to get to the point of us sitting there in that space.
Thanks to our education and experience with POCA Tech we can see the risk, but we also have a foundational understanding of what we can do when we take those risks. In a previous class that same weekend a POCA Tech graduate stood in front of my cohort explaining the step-by-step process she went through opening her clinic after graduating. When navigating big decisions and risks she invited us to “listen to when there’s flow and when there’s resistance.”
Her advice felt especially poignant because just as my cohort sat at the start of a new school building, we as a cohort are on the precipice of graduating and beginning new risks ourselves. Taking boards and changing our careers is intimidating and scary, but the reminder of how moving in the right direction can allow flow caused me to consider the way we’ve naturally encountered risks all along.
I learned about POCA Tech about a month before I applied, and about three months before I signed a lease and moved to Portland having never stepped foot in Oregon. I can still remember arriving in Oregon for orientation in the middle of September to find Oregon dry and brown.
I immediately panicked, already feeling misled by my stereotypical understanding of the Pacific Northwest, and then sat through a weekend where everyone explained how difficult it was to be an acupuncturist and how it was even harder to be an entrepreneur. I watched some classmates ultimately decide the risk or effort wasn’t for them, but I also watched what unfolded for those of us who stayed in the program.
We continued to take on more risks. First the financial risk of tuition and the risk that our lives would allow us the time and ability to show up for the program over the next three years. (POCA Tech doesn’t offer student loans, so almost everyone works their way through the program.) Then we actually sat in the classroom and had to trust that all these new words and concepts would actually end up meaning something to us and be worth the effort it took to memorize them. We had to risk whether or not we’d even enjoy being acupuncturists — since we weren’t exactly able to try out treating patients ourselves before we enrolled.
At some point the risks we took became more involved. As we built on our knowledge of acupuncture as well as our practitioner, leadership, and clinical skills, we began to gather an understanding of what we could do and found ourselves in an environment willing to foster the risks it took for us to continue to grow. Looking back at our clinical case studies, the effort it took to memorize new treatment methods feels negligible to the effort it took to trust the risk of trying something new and having it not pay off. We all want our patients to feel better, so watching a patient walk in with their chief complaint at a crisis level and trusting that you’re going to give a treatment that helps feels like a leap of faith when you’re first starting out — exponentially so when you’re limited to four or less needles using a method you’ve only had a week of clinical experience with. That method came down to a lot of risks: did I actually know the theory, was I making an accurate diagnosis, did I select the correct points accordingly? But what I remember most about my weeks of practicing Korean Four Point in the student clinic is the amount of people who would sleep peacefully for hours in the clinic or exclaim in delight at how much better they felt after getting a treatment.
The “flow” from taking risks resulted in more than just panic and studying. Saying yes to that cross-country move led to me agreeing to trust that the acupuncture treatments my classmates and I gave could make a difference, and ultimately, I got to watch it happen.
My cohort has been around to nurture the era of pop up clinics for POCA Tech. I’ve watched classmates build partnerships with a nursing school, community organizations, and nonprofits and spread the word about how impactful acupuncture can be. My first bitter taste of fire season evolved into the opportunity to bring cancer patients relief despite a language barrier. One day the risk of not feeling ready for student clinic turned into treating ten patients on my own within an hour. And during one class my cohort decided we were up for taking on the risk of changing the law in Oregon.
I can guarantee it’s not a typical experience that a small class of students decide they can manage the risk of taking on the state capitol as their capstone project. But I can also guarantee that POCA Tech isn’t a typical school. We were built on risk and we know better than anyone what can be built from it. The decision making and effort involved isn’t just modeled, it’s experienced. And while we can’t provide certainties, we can provide passion.
And passion, more palpable than the cold concrete or the fear of risk, is what I felt in that new classroom. Everyone had already said yes to so many risks and decisions before we could end up sitting in that very spot. So that moment, even in a brand new space, rang with a clear sense of familiarity.