Social Entrepreneurship Part Two

on self-trust

Art by A. Cohen

This post is another report from the ragged edge of trying to teach entrepreneurship in an acupuncture school, another installment in POCA Tech’s ongoing saga of improvisation. The more time we spend with students unpacking what entrepreneurship is and why it matters, the more we recognize how crucial it is for acupuncturists.

So much of what makes somebody a good entrepreneur is so easy to overlook!

I was thinking about this last week, after I gave a student some feedback on the 25 X 1000 assignment. I wrote, “I hope you feel really good about how you did this exercise. You got right to it, you were organized, you reached out to lots of people, you had a quick turn around and affirming responses (which probably has a lot to do with how well you communicated). From my perspective this is a good indicator of how you’ll do with your practice. Some things that are really hard for other people seem natural for you (or at least very doable). So I hope you feel encouraged about your future prospects, because I think you’re going to do really really well as an entrepreneur.”

They wrote back, “Thank you. That made me cry. Also, this exercise definitely brought me some encouragement and confidence.”

This has come up before in classes about leadership — there are students who are doing leadership work who don’t recognize what they’re doing, even when they’re good at it. Their image of leadership doesn’t match their self-image, or their efforts, or their skills. Our culture fetishizes some aspects of leadership (the least important ones like status and authority) and ignores others, so it’s easy to have a skewed idea of what leadership is. I’m learning that there’s a similar dynamic going on with entrepreneurship: people who have the skills don’t always recognize them. Because successful entrepreneurship is largely about low-key good habits. (That’s my thesis anyway, bear with me here.)

That list starts with a willingness to try. That’s closely related to humility, because it also means being willing to fail and try again. Entrepreneurship is so fluid that you’re regularly confronted with new challenges and tasks you haven’t done before, which means you’re probably not going to be good at whatever it is the first time around — or maybe even the tenth.

Being willing to try leads directly to positive qualities like agency, engagement and initiative — a willingness to be active rather than passive.

Being active includes a willingness to take up space and be visible to the rest of the world. Entrepreneurship requires a disciplined effort to put yourself out there even when it’s uncomfortable, even when your environment is full of uncertainty. (Pro tip: for a small business, the environment is always full of uncertainty.)

In my experience, you develop real entrepreneurial self-confidence not because you have some inflated image of yourself as a business genius, but because you have a track record of plugging away at whatever your business needs you to do — a track record that you make for yourself in little, unglamorous increments of trying, showing up, and putting yourself out there. Again and again and again. That’s how you learn to trust yourself and your entrepreneurial capacities.

Art by A. Cohen

I wrote a post last week that’s behind a paywall because it’s about a controversial topic in the acupuncture industry: acupuncture students applying for Borrower’s Defense to repayment, on the grounds that their acupuncture schools misled them. During one of the many online conversations about Borrower’s Defense, a graduate of the same acupuncture school that I went to (OCOM) described how they felt like the school environment undermined their ability to succeed in business afterwards. They said “there was a constant feeling that we students didn’t know enough” that led to a lack of trust in themselves.

That was my experience too. All the entrepreneurial confidence I developed was in spite of my acupuncture school, not because of it. I really want POCA Tech students to have a different experience.

Part of the culture of my acupuncture training was a sense that Chinese medicine is so ancient, so beautiful and so demanding that I would never be good enough at it or for it — and my patients wouldn’t either. If I didn’t get my diagnoses and my treatments exactly right, I’d never help anybody; but I also wouldn’t be able to help anybody who wasn’t prepared to change their diet, quit their job, and adopt a rigorous qi gong or tai chi or meditation practice. The more arcane the knowledge, the more valuable it must be; the more time-consuming the intervention, the more effective it must be. Not that people like me deserved any of it, of course.

I think these attitudes are common in the acupuncture profession, and they hamstring acupuncturists both as clinicians and as entrepreneurs. Maybe they work out for a small percentage of acupuncture students with big egos who want to make themselves into gurus of the scholar/physician variety — but most acupuncture students just want to help people. Never feeling like you can know enough or be good enough can get you into a loop of endlessly trying harder — which serves the acupuncture education industry with its long expensive degrees but it doesn’t serve anybody else.

The truth is, acupuncture is flexible and forgiving.¹ It wants to help, and it doesn’t demand perfection or huge sacrifices in return. In my experience, acupuncture is a form of mercy.

My hope is that POCA Tech nurtures a radically different set of attitudes among students. That’s where Liberation Acupuncture comes in: a willingness to consider that maybe, just maybe, a rigid adherence to acupuncture theory isn’t the most important part of treating a patient, let alone a whole community. Maybe it’s okay to experiment with what works for you and for your patients. Maybe the medicine is for the patients and not the other way around.²

And maybe you can actually know enough and be good enough — both with acupuncture and with business — to help a lot of people. All of whom deserve it.

Art by A. Cohen

Thanks to everyone who has helped us with our 25 X 1000 exercise! As of December 14th, we’ve collectively asked 391 people to donate, and we’ve raised about $9500. We’re almost 40% of the way to our goal, and it’s amazing to me how closely the asking tracks with the fundraising. So I’ll ask again — if you haven’t donated already:

If you’re getting anything out of this newsletter, or you’re encouraged in any way by POCA Tech’s efforts to re-imagine acupuncture education, will you donate $25?

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

1. “Acupuncture is flexible and forgiving” is my friend Whitney Thorniley’s line, I keep stealing it because it’s so good.

2. I had a big internet fight with Peter Deadman about this. Yes, the Peter Deadman. It was back in 2012 and in hindsight it’s funny. I was younger and way more combative; I said things like “community acupuncturists are the troublemakers of the acupuncture world” ; meanwhile he suggested I’m the spiritual descendant of itinerant worm expellers. (That’s a compliment, right?) But the basic gist of that fight is still (depressingly) relevant. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, check out the two “Ming Vase” articles here.