Listen to the Podcast here: Overcoming Fears in DPC
Summary: This podcast episode from DPC Pediatricians, featuring Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr. Marina Capella, focuses on the various fears physicians face when starting or growing a Direct Primary Care (DPC) practice, especially in pediatrics.
Welcome to DPC Pediatrician. We’re Dr. Phil Boucher and Dr. Marina Capella, two DPC pediatricians who are on a mission to share our love of direct primary care with you.
Welcome everyone to another episode of DPC Pediatricians. Today, Phil and I are excited to talk about a topic that comes up a lot in the direct pediatric care community, and that is just like fears and overcoming fears. And so we’re going to share some of the things,
some of the themes that we commonly see when it comes to fears getting in the way, whether it’s getting in the way of launching a practice or really attaining the growth that you desire or expanding your practice into something that you’d like to expand into like integrative medicine or lifestyle medicine or obesity medicine or ADHD and
Behavioral management or things like that. So, yeah, we’ve been in this now for about four years. We ourselves have experienced a lot of the fears personally. Most of them, I feel like we’ve come up with ways to overcome for ourselves. But fear is also just kind of part of life.
And I don’t think that you can ever live a life free of fear. It’s really more about learning how to manage those fears and how to experience the fear and do something anyway, because you care about it or you think it’s something worth doing. So Phil, I’m curious, start us off.
What is one of the biggest fears that you either experienced or you see commonly experienced in DPC?
I mean, I think the number one fear by and large that we hear about and that I’m sure you experienced as did I is the financial fear. Like I’m gonna jump in and do something. And there’s lots of things that are tied to that, right?
The financial fear of what if this doesn’t work out and it was really expensive and then I can’t go back, I think is probably the root because a lot of people that are starting a DPC, it is kind of like burning the boats. Like it’s hard to go back, especially if you are established in the community.
And you’re saying, I’m leaving what I’m doing now, whether it’s being employed by a hospital, being in private practice, being in a large group setting or a small group setting, it’s hard to go back. And so there’s a financial fear that goes along with that of what if it doesn’t
work out financially and all of a sudden my loans are due or my mortgage I can’t pay or we’re dwindling down our retirement or our savings or those sorts of things as a part of it. episodes is that there’s a lot of different ways that you can buffer yourself against the financial risk of starting a DPC practice.
In general, when physicians are thinking about starting a regular fee-for-service practice in primary care or in a specialty, there’s a lot of expense that goes into it in terms of the facility and the equipment and all of those sorts of things. And in DPC,
there’s a lot of ways to minimize those costs so that you’re starting up on a very small, reasonable budget. And it’s easy to say, okay, here’s what my monthly budget is. And here’s how many patients I need in order to cover those expenses and then start paying myself.
I think that is a very reasonable step-by-step ladder that practice owners and those that are thinking of making the leap is that can work through. But I think that, that by and large to me is numero uno, when it comes to the concerns of the vast majority of people that are considering jumping into pediatric direct care.
Is that what you would say?
Oh yeah. I think that was definitely the biggest fear for me. It was like, I’m the primary, I was the primary breadwinner at the time that I opened and same for you. Right. And that’s a common thing, right? Like in pediatrics, It’s dominated by women, but and women historically have not been the primary breadwinners,
but they are in many, many cases. And so I definitely had that fear. I kind of buffered that fear by continuing to work on a PRN basis at my urgent care gig. which I was transitioning from. And that I think was a really good position to be in because I knew that failure is always a possibility.
I think any of us entering this world, we have to acknowledge the fact that it is possible to fail. Now, do Phil and I think it’s likely? We think that if you really are smart about the way you approach it and the way that you open your business and the way you market yourself,
We think there’s a high, high possibility for success, but that doesn’t mean the risk is zero. COVID happened a couple of years ago. Nobody expected that to happen and unexpected things happen in life, right? Can I guarantee anybody that they’re going to succeed? No. So you have to go into it recognizing that there is a possibility,
but also being optimistic because that optimism will fuel the things that you do from day to day in order to realize the success of your practice. Right. And I just remember feeling really afraid and knowing that failure was a possibility and thinking I had a neighbor who
used to help help her family member run a business and she kept on telling me she was like give it at least three to five years at least three to five years you can’t say that you failed if you don’t give it three to five years and so her voice
was always in the back of my mind saying okay this is not just a short-term goal where i expect success to happen immediately i have the longer game in mind and i’m willing to stick it out And it took me about a year to really pick up. And it was slower.
That first year was really a lot slower for me than I wanted to. And part of it is because I wasn’t putting myself out there as much as I could have. And I still had the security blanket of my urgent care gig. So that was also something that was taking time away,
but also making me not feel the urgency of like, I have to bring in money. right now, this week, this month, etc. But there’s a lot of fear for a lot of people around money. It’s not just about bringing in an income. It’s also about benefits.
So I knew that once I switched from, I think it was 80% FTA to full to per diem, I lost my health insurance, which I was carrying for me and my husband. And so all of a sudden I had to pay out of pocket for that and also no retirement fund. And it was all these financial ramifications.
Right. And also dipping into savings. And when I’m when am I going to be able to recover those savings? All of those things. So they’re very legitimate fears. And only you can decide for yourself whether you are willing to take the financial risks, whether you have a buffer,
whether you have enough of a security blanket in order to make the leap into DPC. And it may not happen tomorrow. Maybe you tell yourself, hey, I need two or three years in order to gain the buffer, the financial buffer that I need in order to make the leap. Right. It’s every every person’s situation is different.
I still had student loans also when I started my practice and it took me, actually, I just paid them off finally last year. It took me three years into practice to finally pay them off. And that was another thought. It’s like, I’m not just paying for my living expenses. I’m also still paying back my student loans.
So how is that going to work? A lot of people are in that boat. Many DPC physicians who are still paying off loans and that’s not uncommon. So Don’t feel like, oh, I can’t do this because I’m still paying off student loans. Of course, how much your monthly payment is, is a different thing to factor in. Right.
Yeah. Anything else around like finances, Phil, that you remember feeling?
I think that’s the biggest thing. I think speaking to the broader issue that you had brought up about failure, I think we’ve been trained for 10 plus years to not fail and that fail must be avoided at all costs. In medical school, in undergrad, in residency, all of those things,
it’s like hammered into you that failure is not an option and failure is the ultimate sign of weakness and that you can’t do it. And we were right about you all along and we shouldn’t have given you a chance. Physicians are very averse to failure.
And when you can develop more comfort with failure and not just like completely failing and having to move or lose your home or something along those lines, but the failure of like, this didn’t quite work out and I need to pivot this way.
There can be a lot of more comfort if you get used to having little micro failures that then you’re able to learn from and to grow from. We’ve had tons. We’ve talked about it on previous episodes. All the many projects that I’ve started in my practice that didn’t take off or didn’t go as expected.
There’s so many examples of those little failures and you build up that muscle of, okay, that didn’t work out. Okay, that didn’t work out.
Yeah.
And then you learn how to work through those in the big picture that financial is probably the number one thing that keeps people from making that leap. So I think we’ve talked through that and tried to minimize that. One other last point that I’ll make along the financial is I think most physicians
have never considered the idea of, hey, maybe a bank will lend me money for my startup. And every other business out there takes out startup loans for starting a new business. That is just a standard feature of starting a business. And banks need to talk through. They will love
giving you a loan because you are a very known commodity and respected and reliable person in the community that is not going to default on their loan. And so if that gives you the peace of mind to say, oh, I just need a little bit of a buffer or I’ve got these equipment expenses or those
sorts of things, do the math and talk with a local banker because they will happily give you a loan or a line of credit or something along those lines that makes it more palatable to you to say, okay, I’m not going to have to worry about how am I going to pay our bills this next
month or two, because I’ve got this loan in the back pocket that I can turn to if need be.
Yeah, absolutely. through DPC Pediatrician, we have some courses available. And one of those courses is all about the finances of DPC. So if you have a lot of questions about the finances, about budgeting, about how to set prices, about how to get startup funds,
one of my friends and the person who helped me get a loan for my building purchase last year, he did a great session on the options for startup funds because not everyone is going to have funds to dip into for their startup costs. Even if you really… Keep those costs minimal. It costs money.
It costs money to make money. That’s one of the basic principles of business, right? So that’s a great course if you want to take a deeper dive into that. But going on to some other fears, Phil, what would you say is another fear that we commonly see in the direct pediatric
care community or just DPC community in general?
Managing a business. Most doctors, I feel like I’m ragging on the medical education system, which maybe it deserves to run a business whatsoever. And that is a feature of the medical education system that keeps a lot of doctors employed by academics or large hospitals because we’re told it’s too complicated. It’s too messy. It’s a bunch of numbers.
It feels icky to talk about money. Why don’t we just practice medicine bills and those sorts of things? Now you don’t need to know that. And so what happens then is people feel really uncomfortable with managing a business, knowing how they actually get paid because they’ve always been paid by a hospital
and it’s just been like direct deposited. And they’ve been cool with that. Knowing how to run payroll or to hire staff, all of these businesses. business things that we feel really uncomfortable as physicians because we’ve just never been exposed to. And so what I always tell people that that’s their main concern is number one,
like there are a million small businesses that are started in the U S every year. And the 99% of those people starting businesses don’t have the training, education, ability to pivot and learn and the financial pivotability that you have as a physician. And so you, despite not knowing how to use QuickBooks just yet,
have a lot more skills than you realize when it comes to figuring out how to manage a business. And also a lot of it is on YouTube. or podcasts or the DPC Pediatrician Academy, all those other resources. There’s so many resources out there for starting a business that it doesn’t have to
feel like you’re doing it from scratch, that you can get the help and support that you need and you have the skills to do that. But I think that’s a common thing is the managing a business side of things.
Yeah, exactly. And I remember as I was kind of contemplating startup and in the planning stages of startup, That was kind of a terrifying thing because you’re right. We don’t get any business education in medical school. I think maybe 50 years ago when a lot more doctors were practice owners,
that kind of organically happened because you would go and do your rotations with these doctors who were also practice owners and you would kind of learn from them and see what they were doing on the business end as well as the clinical end. Nowadays, it’s really shifted to a vast majority of physicians being employees instead of
physician entrepreneurs. And I think my prediction is that that pendulum is going to start swinging the other way. And that’s part of movement. But I remember listening to Dr. Una’s podcast. She has a couple of podcasts, but she’s great. She’s really a proponent of physicians kind of taking back their power and their
autonomy and their joy in medicine by becoming physician entrepreneurs. And one of the things she always says is all business skills are learnable. And I think she’s quoting someone else who said that, but she always repeats all business skills are learnable. Just like all of the knowledge and the skills that we gained to become physicians were learnable.
We learned them at some point. There’s no magic secret that you don’t know, that you cannot know, right? The information is out there. And nowadays, we have more than ever tools at our disposal that can help us filter through that information, like AI tools that can help us to find reliable resources.
And I have worked a lot to put together this DPC Pediatrician community at dpcpediatrician.com. where we have courses and we have other resources available, we have a free startup guide, all this stuff to make it doable for you, right? There’s nothing that you don’t know that you cannot learn. Now, does that mean that you’re always
in perpetuity going to be managing every detail of your business? No, not necessarily. You can always hire help. There’s a place for your accountant and your bookkeeper and your tax advisor and your clinic manager and all those things if you want them, right?
And so it’s just like some of the knowledge that you have to gain in order to open your doors. And then once you start making money, you have money to hire help and offload a lot of those responsibilities. Now, ultimately, you are going to be the owner, you are going to be in charge,
and that comes with a certain degree of responsibility. If your accountant does your taxes wrong, unfortunately, that lies on you. There’s some responsibility there, right? But My, I completely agree with what Dr. Una always says that all business skills are learnable. Just remember that if Joe down the street can own a bike shop and Pablo down the
street can own a taco shop and so-and-so can own a hair salon, you can own a business too. You are smarter than the average person in the population. You can do it. Right. So that’s the, I had to remind myself of that constantly because there was a lot of fear definitely in the beginning.
And a lot of it was just like taking deep breaths and taking one step at a time. Today, I’m going to learn this thing. And next week, I’m going to learn this thing. Don’t look at the top of the mountain. Just look at the next steps in front of you so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
Well, and I think there’s something to be said too for that physicians are often perfectionists. And a lot of it, I saw a great, just little like cartoon meme yesterday of like somebody that had built a very substandard ladder, but it was a ladder. And some of the slats weren’t perfectly straight,
but you could climb up it versus just sitting at the ground and wanting it to be perfect. And then waiting and waiting and waiting and never getting over that wall that you were hoping to climb over with the ladder that you were building. And it really reminded me that it doesn’t have to be perfect and you’re probably
going to mess things up and you won’t be as tax advantaged in year one because you didn’t realize that you could write off this specific thing or there was this specific way. Those are things that you will learn over time. Yeah. And that’s okay.
You don’t have to be an expert at whatever it is to start and get a business up and rolling, learning as you go. And I think one thing that people that are going into direct care don’t often realize is as you get started, you actually have a lot more time on your hands than you’ve ever had before.
because you’re going from seeing 40 patients a day and being constantly go, go, go, go, go to a much smaller patient panel, which then you can slot some time in there to do your QuickBooks or to learn how to do such and such, or to watch some marketing material to figure out how to market your practice.
Like you have more pockets of time as you transition into direct care and as you grow your practice, you have time to take on those things so it doesn’t feel like you’re just adding to your plate. You’re removing a lot from your plate so that you have more time and that gives you
the time then to learn and grow.
Absolutely. Yeah. Another fear that I’ll add into this mix of fears we’re talking about today is just the fear of being alone. I think a lot of us have worked, obviously we’ve trained and we’ve been educated around a lot of peers, a lot of colleagues.
We’ve been in other jobs where we have other colleagues to talk to at lunch or to discuss difficult cases with. And so suddenly kind of going solo and opening our doors just by ourselves. They can lonely. And I actually remember feeling kind of lonely in the beginning.
I was also really happy because of the freedom that I suddenly had to practice in the way that I wanted to practice and the way that I thought was better for my patients. But it definitely felt lonely. In the beginning, I had no employees. And so it was just me going into this like office space,
like doing the front desk, financial stuff and then rooming the patient and doing everything myself. I took about a year to then hire an employee. But I remember feeling that loneliness. It depends on where you are. If you’re in a bigger city, the likelihood is that you’re going to have colleagues and maybe you can
set up a time to meet with them once a month, or you can have some sort of arrangements so that you help cover for each other or things like that. You can get creative in terms of how you start building community. DPC pediatrician, we help with the yearly mastermind and we help with,
we’re doing this virtual summit in the next month in September. And so we’re trying to find ways of building also a national community of DPC pediatricians. But of course, we all need that in-person connection as well. And I wish I had a perfect solution for everyone about that.
It really depends on what part of the country you’re in and whether you can find other people in your community. It doesn’t have to be a pediatrician either. You can find a DPC physician who is local to you to connect with and to get ideas from, to get help from. There were no DPC pediatricians in Australia.
Utah at the time that I opened. So the only people that I could go to were the DPC physicians who were in family medicine or internal medicine. And they were lovely and they were helpful and they were encouraging. And it was wonderful to have those connections. Is there anything you can think of, Phil,
in terms of like how to address this fear of being solo or being alone?
I think for me, one of the big things is like having people that get it, what you’re going through, and that won’t be your former colleagues that you left behind, but it could be the community of other DPC pediatricians out there that are very active, whether it’s on Facebook, whether it’s at the Mastermind or the Virtual Summit,
or Michael Hobbs has the DPC Pediatrician Slack community. There’s so many different places that you can connect with others that are going through it to talk about all the business fears and things that you’re facing, to get ideas, to bounce clinical questions off of. I think that was one big thing for me was, well,
who will I ask if I have a rash that I’m not sure of? Well, frankly, I worked with 10 other pediatricians and several of them were so like snarky and unkind that I would have never like bothered them anyways. And So let me ask some friends that I know and trust and value their opinion,
just because they’re not in close vicinity to me. I don’t necessarily have to have that be a barrier to reaching out clinically. I mean, I, Marina knows I tend to multitask and I’ve got my text messages here on the side of my screen and, you At least 50%,
the ones that aren’t my wife or my kids are like group chats of my kids, fellow pediatricians that are doing direct primary care, that we bounce questions off of each other or we talk about difficult cases or business questions and all those sorts of things. Like that is certainly a place to find that community.
And you might find business owners that are going through the same of you that are not physicians locally that you could meet with. Like there’s all sorts of meetup sort of groups of business owners, mostly not made up of physicians because physicians are not typically business
owners or as interested or in need of like the networking component of it. But there’s a lot of business networking groups out there. that you could find locally that could help you to make more connections in the community and fill that bucket of I need other people that have started businesses too.
And here’s the challenges that they’re facing. And here’s what I’m facing and to learn and grow from each other. So there’s a lot of different ways that just because you’re going out on solo doesn’t mean you’re alone, both clinically or as a business owner.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And I have some business classes in my city. that were really helpful in terms of making connections, including making connections with some doulas and some midwives in my community, which turned out to be wonderful. So definitely there are other options, not just physicians.
I would say if you do want to develop relationships with other physicians, dpc pediatricians in the community across the united states come to the mastermind the one that’s in person i think that’s a wonderful wonderful opportunity to connect with other people and there’s nothing like connecting in person right
having lunch or breakfast next to someone sitting next to someone listening to a speaker and then chatting about it afterwards i think i was able to make a lot of connections include with people who i still keep in contact with from those masterminds and it’s been
wonderful to feel not so alone in the broader landscape of healthcare today another fear that just came to mind that i wanted to bring up is just the fear of asking for money like the fear we’ve never had to do that before in our careers we’ve never had to be the one
To say, hey, this is how much it’s going to be. And just feeling okay about that number and not feeling like, oh, I have to discount this or I have to do free care for your sibling because I don’t want to be mean or I don’t know. What do you think, Phil?
Like, how do we overcome that fear or just get comfortable asking for money?
Yeah, I think that’s another thing that we’ve been trained and beaten into us is we don’t understand the finances and we don’t talk about the monies. When it comes to that, that’s something that billing can do or the hospital can do or, yeah,
I’m not really sure how much this visit is going to ring up at the end of the day. Yeah. It is something where you have to just develop that comfort of this is what it costs. And this is why I’ve decided on this pricing structure. And if you’re not okay with that, I totally get it.
And here’s some resources for you, or here’s where I would send you if you don’t feel like you can swing that or it doesn’t make sense for your family right now. I think that most DPC practice owners get comfortable with that pretty quickly
because they realize that that is really important skill to have is to be able to talk about it. And that it’s something that you get more comfort with, especially as people be like, oh yeah, that makes total sense. And when you have those that sign up, you’re like, okay,
somebody just told me that they saw how much it costs and they signed up, which means that it makes sense to them. And I bet there’s people that are like them out there that it also makes sense for. So it’s something that gets easier as you go to be like, yeah, this is how much it costs.
And I get it that it’s a cost for your family, but here’s the value that’s provided. And I stand behind the value of, of what we offer and so this is how we came up with that price and we understand that it’s not for everybody but this is what it costs for us to run the business
and provide the value that we do i think it’s something that physicians hem and haw over and if you look at all the other businesses they don’t really give it much of a second thought as to yeah it costs money to come in and get your car detailed or
to get your hair cut or whatever it might be like We’re providing value and it costs money. The weird thing with insurance in the United States is really the only thing that makes it feel unusual that we charge for care and we have to come up with and talk
about the price of care and all of those sorts of things.
Yeah. I mean, there is no medical care in the United States that is free. It is free maybe to the patient, but it is not free to the system. Everything costs money. And I think for me, the way that I’ve gotten over that fear and that discomfort is really just by doing it. It’s one of those things.
It’s like riding a bike. The more you do it, the more comfortable you’re going to get with it. and just telling yourself, okay, I’m going to feel uncomfortable the first 10 or the first hundred times that I do this, but like, I’m just going to do it anyway. And I’m just going to practice.
And each time it’s going to get a little easier, a little easier, a little easier. And some people are not going to understand your value proposition. And they’re not going to like, they’re not going to feel comfortable with the price and that’s okay. So like prepare yourself for that discomfort by saying, Hey, once in a while,
I’m going to have a parent. This is, Oh, Like that’s too much money. Like that’s not worth it. Like I don’t see the value in that. And just tell yourself, okay, this is not your person, right? This is not a good match. There are other fish in the sea and that’s okay.
Totally.
And I think that practice, practice, practice.
And it’s not anything that you can predict who’s going to be down for the pricing model either, because we have very well-to-do families that hem and haw over every little tiny charge, or they see this thing and like, wait, how much does this cost? Maybe that’s why they’re well-to-do.
But then we have families that are absolutely on Medicaid and living paycheck to paycheck. And I tell them the price and they’re like, that’s it?
No.
That’s great for all that, like for all the appointments that we need and we can text those sorts of things. It will not make sense to you who finds it valuable from the start. And so I never try and predict who is going to be like, oh yeah, like I know what car they showed up in.
There’ll be an easy fish to reel in. Nope, it’s not what you think. Because money is so complicated for people and people have such different ideas of value that I just say, I’m not sure if I’m for, I’m definitely not for everybody and I’m not sure if I’m going to be for you.
but I’m gonna tell you how it works and I’m gonna tell you how much it costs and then let you decide. And there isn’t gonna be a bunch of like urgency or scarcity or making you feel like pressured to join our practice or to book an appointment or anything like that. But I’m gonna tell you,
here’s what we offer and here’s why I think it might be valuable to you based on what you’ve told me. Here we are.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. One more quick fear that I wanted to bring up and that because I’ve heard it a lot in different contexts and I definitely experienced it myself is the fear of not being an expert. So when I first opened my practice, I knew that I wanted to be more than just a general pediatrician.
I wanted to lean more into like the holistic side of things, the integrated side of And at that time, I did not have any training. I didn’t have any fellowship under my belt. I didn’t have special courses under my belt. I didn’t have other than just an interest that I had developed over time.
Like I had always delved more into the space of nutrition and some supplements and a couple of herbs, but not that much. And so I knew that that’s what I wanted to. That’s the style I wanted to practice is I wanted to be an integrative pediatrician. And so there was that mental doubt of like,
can I truly market myself as more holistic if I don’t have that? Then I decided I was just gonna jump in. I was just gonna say, well, I know more than the average parent does and I know how to look things up, right? And little by little, I can build my skillset. And then, of course,
it paved the way for me to take courses and to get my fellowship in integrative medicine and board certification and take a bunch of other trainings. And I eventually learned hypnosis and I’ve taken herbalism courses and things like that. But that’s taken four years to kind of like amass that. Extra experience.
And I still don’t feel like an expert, by the way. Like I, I know a lot, but I still don’t know everything there is to know. And most of us in medicine, we know a lot because of our years and years of education and training.
And so there’s this phenomenon of the more, you know, the more, you know, you don’t know. right and so we are kind of at that point where we know so much and therefore we also know how much we don’t know for sure and i can just kind of like augment that
fear of like wait a minute can i truly practice as a behavioral specialist or can i truly market myself as great at adhd management or integrative medicine lifestyle medicine obesity medicine functional medicine, whatever it is, right? Well, guess what? Just like you learn the business skills and just like you learn anything in life,
it’s going to happen a little bit at a time. And you’re never going to get to the level of being an expert if you don’t just put yourself out there and try and use the knowledge that you do have and build on it and build on it and build on it and build on it.
You’re not going to be perfect. There were definitely there still are times that parents bring something to me and they’re like, have you heard of this or my child? Is this medication safe? And I’m never going to know every medication on the market or every supplement on the market, every herb.
But I know how to look things up and I know how to then give them guidance after I do a little bit of research. Right. And you are an expert is my point, though. You are an expert relative to the parents that are coming to you. That doesn’t mean you need to. I mean,
there might be some parents that come to you with crazy expectations and crazy questions. And that might be a conversation of like, hey, maybe I’m not a good fit for you. Right. Right. But but don’t be afraid to like start building to keep building on your skills in order to get to that expert level,
because all of us learn one step, one patient, one case at a time.
Well, I think that every pediatrician has experienced that too. Like you, when you were first year out of residency, did things a lot differently than you do four years or 10 years out of residency. You’ve honed your skills. And yet back when you were in their first year out of residency,
like the patients that you had with ADHD all did okay. Now maybe you’ve gotten some more nuances and you’ve added to your tool belt and you’ve added things on and they can be even better now, but it wasn’t like you were doing things drastically wrong.
You’ve just incrementally improved your skills as you go for whatever it is that you’re learning and growing. And the patients just get to keep benefiting from that. Hey, I approach things differently than I did five years ago. Well, I would hope so because medicine has changed and you’ve changed and you haven’t been doing things just
since intern year when you’re a third year med student, the exact same you’ve grown. And so you can take that approach when it comes to I’m not the world leading expert, but I am more expert than my patients and they can get some special benefit for me. And I bet in three more years,
I’ll be even better at taking care of this specific patient type or whatever it is that I’m doing. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get started now and offer what I have to offer and keep growing.
Yeah, definitely. So I guess our overall message today would be, hey, fear is normal. If you are human, you are going to experience fear. If you have an amygdala, you’re going to experience fear, right? Now, you’re the one who gets to decide whether you’re going to let that fear block you
from doing the things that you want to do in DPC or just in your professional life in general, right? And so many of us, including Phil and I, as we’ve shared, have experienced these fears around money, these fears around the business management, fears around being solo, around not being experts, et cetera.
And we’ve learned, right, step by step. And we continue evolving. We continue learning. We continue growing. And you can do that, too. Yeah. That’s our message to you today is you are fully capable of learning and growing and evolving just like we continue to do. Anything else?
Amen to all of that. And I think if you want to make all of these fears a little less scary, do not forget to sign up for the virtual summit that is September 17th through 19th. And you can get your ticket at summit.dpcpediatrician.com or check the show notes and just click through.
You can do it right from your phone. We’re gonna have over a dozen speakers talking about all the different facets of DPC. You’ll have all of those uncertainties lessened so that you can make the decision or continue to grow your practice as you like with the help of the rest of the DPC community.
So take a moment and sign up if you haven’t.
Absolutely. And if you happen to miss it, maybe you’re listening to this episode after it’s happened. We will have the recordings available for purchase as well at dpcpediatrician.com under courses. So thanks for listening. We hope this was helpful.
