Tea Nguyen, DPM (00:53)

In order to get something new, you're going to have to shed the old stuff that no longer serves you. Here's a symbolic representation of what I mean. 2025 is considered the year of the snake in the Chinese calendar. I'm Vietnamese American, so we call it the Asian lunar New Year calendar. And when this recording comes out, we will have about two weeks and a few more days left of the year of the snake. So what's important about the year of the snake?

It represents the shedding of things that no longer serve you. And I myself had to let go of some relationships that were no longer serving me in order for me to grow. And even though the shedding of this was not convenient, it was necessary. And I'm wondering if you're going through some growth yourself. The good news is that in 2026, February 17, to be exact, which is that for us is going to be a new year and it's represented by the horse. And this is the momentum of moving forward. So whatever it is that you've been doing and it has felt slow, or maybe you think nothing is really working, this will be the year it will materialize. As long as you are in alignment with what you want. When you're not in alignment with what you want, there's a lot of conflict in the choices you make.

It might seem inconsistent or you don't feel like your heart is fully in it. And when that happens, it makes it really hard to gain momentum to see that explosive growth. But once you start to refine and get rid of the old stuff that no longer serves you, that might be actually holding you back or trapping you from your full potential, your growth cannot be explosive because you're psychologically tied down. Something is weighing you down here.

So in today's episode, you're going to understand the things that you have to lose if you go into a direct care practice and why it's important to see this as an essential loss for growth. Nothing new comes until you let go of something old. And in business, that might be your identity. An example of an identity I had to shed was having to become a doctor who works full-time in clinic. I thought that was…

what the goal was. I thought you got the degree, you get the fellowship, you get a good paying job, you work full time until you retire, right? I'm sure a lot of us heard that story. But now we have a lot of options in how we leverage our medical degree to make money. And I love being able to see that and share that. And the identities you have to see for yourself and decide which ones you want to shed is really important in direct care.

So it might be how you relate to time. You think more effort, more time, more money or more self-worth. Direct care is not just a business model shift. It truly is an energetic one. So when you do things that align with your deepest desires, that is how you get explosive growth to where you want to be. Because now the direction is so much more clear. There's no distractions for you.

So today I want to talk about things that you have to lose when you go into a direct care practice. You cannot swim with one foot in the water. You got to go all in and that's where your freedom lies. And I know for a lot of you who are listening, you are going to have to let go of the identity of being an employee in order for you to become a business owner. So let's talk a little bit about the law of polarity. In life, there's always a balance. The yin, and the yin and the good and the bad. You give and you take. We need this contrast to understand value. You can't know what ease feels like if you've never known chaos. When you want something new, you have to pay it by letting go of the old way. That's the payment you make. That is not punishment. This is just energy. This is just how things work. You don't add direct care on top of an already maxed out system, you have to make room for this new thing. Now, some people mistaken staying busy as productive and here's a tangible example. So if your schedule is packed with 30 plus insurance payers and you're already at capacity, you literally don't have any more room to take on a cash patient, even if they're standing right in front of you. Or if you do, they're booked out months ahead, right? Far out.

And by that time, that momentum in which they were excited to see you has lost. They've moved on to something else. A doctor once told me she spent extra time with a patient on her already full schedule with an insurance plan that she knew didn't pay very well. But you know, we're here to take care of patients. That's what we do is spend our time with them. And ultimately that return on investment was a hundred dollars for the visit. In that same day, in that same moment, she double booked a patient who was a cash patient.

It was a surgical consult, which could have been a $5,000 case, but because she didn't have time or the mental space to walk them through the decision, she kind of rushed through it because again, her schedule was full. She wanted to be on time. She lost that opportunity and she shared this with me regretfully. And I feel that I feel it all the time.

And once you start to realize that you really are on a better path. So now the question becomes, what is the current path you're on? Where is it really taking you? And what does it really cost you in the long run? Not just emotionally, not just spiritually, but economically. If you don't make room for that new thing, it passes you by. Now here's another reality that I've seen a lot of us deal with is the addiction to chaos, which is something no one's ever prepared us for, right?

Some of us are secretly addicted to chaos because it's familiar, it's how we were trained, maybe part of our upbringing as well. It's not that we like to suffer, it's just what we know. And when we know that thing, it becomes kind of comfort for us. It's just what we know, it's just what it is. And I know that sounds contradictory and it might even look dysfunctional to somebody on the outside. But for many of us, that strangeness, especially in the healthcare landscape, that chaos, that confusion.

That's comfortable for a lot of us and that's why many of us end up staying stuck in a system that burns us out. So what does that look like? We've got busy schedules. We have these constant interruptions. It feels like we're putting out a fire every five minutes or so all day long. And then at the end of the day, we're totally wiped out. There's no time for anything fun or anything left. And sometimes we lean into the chaos because again, it's familiar because we are not ready to confront the things that we need to address because we don't have the

bandwidth to do that, things like handling boundaries, making sure our pricing is correct, or even having self-worth to even price appropriately. And so there's the comfort trap where we're conditioned to believe that busy means valuable. The busier your schedule is, the more valuable your work is. It's kind of strange once you step back and look at it. But then when things slow down, even in a good way, it feels uncertain.

So that uncertainty feels unsafe. And in the early phases of this transition into direct care, doctors create this space, but then it feels unusual. It feels like, no, something is wrong with me or something is wrong with the way I'm running business. And then they suddenly fill that space back up with more busy work just to be busy. And so we really want to be able to snap out of that. There is a nervous system connection with

what we know as baseline and we have to realize that we are in this comfort trap and running a direct care practice makes you confront it. It makes you do the work that you might have been avoiding this whole time. So what is it that you actually lose when you choose a direct care practice? If you're going to do something different, you have to lose a few things, right? You're going to lose the stress of routine billing audits. You're going to lose being underpaid and overworked.

You're going to lose that chronic burnout that you're so used to, and you're going to lose having your time wasted by systems that don't care about you as a person or the patients who pay for that. And here's the trade that maybe you did not expect. You will also lose the comfort of that busyness because you're trading that for calm. And yes, sometimes transition requires therapy for you to kind of understand what it is.

that you're experiencing and while you keep falling back into the trap of chaos, of busyness, even though you want something else, you have to trade it. You have to trade what you know for something else. And then you have to get used to that something else and realize that something else actually gets to you towards your long-term goal. So I say therapy, but that can also come in the form of professional coaching or maybe both. And I've done both myself and there's no shame to...

raising your hand and saying, I need help. Calm can feel terrifying for us high achieving individuals, especially if you've never lived there before. And I like to say direct care has a way of exposing your most vulnerable parts. And that is scary for a lot of people. So here's an example. If your medical assistant pops their head in to your doors, your office, every five minutes to ask permission, ask a quick question, ask something that they could have easily looked up.

That's not just an operational issue. This is a training gap. It could be a boundary issue. Maybe you weren't clear as to when it's appropriate to interrupt you. Maybe they're just unsure and they're looking for validation because they were never empowered to know when they should ask and when they shouldn't. Or maybe there was no SOP to start with, standard operating procedure for them to go through and find the answers themselves. Or maybe they were just simply never empowered to be wrong from time to time.

Whatever it is, business will keep showing you the same patterns until you address it head on. And the lesson doesn't go away once you solve it. These types of lessons don't go away by ignoring it or letting time go on. It just ends up repeating itself until you lose your mind. And for me, I have done exactly that. I lost my mind and I let go of my employee long time ago as I was transitioning into direct care.

in a really dramatic fashion and it pains me to think about it, to talk about it. And I realized I was not in a good place at that time. And so I want to save you some of that heartache. Take what you're experiencing as feedback and realizing you've got to learn a few more skills and you've got to give yourself grace, be patient with yourself and be okay with the peace and the calm that comes in between your business.

Stop filling it with busyness. You gotta deal with it. So I hope you see by now, this is a reframe of the losses you need to have in order to have this direct care practice. So yeah, you lose some things, right? You lose the stuff that wasn't serving you anyway. You're losing the systems, the habits, the identities that kept you playing small, but you're not losing stability. You're losing dysfunction. And that's the whole point. You're going to lose dysfunction in order to get calm. If this episode stirred something in you,

If part of you knows you're ready for a different way, but you're not sure how to let go of the old one, or you're in transition and you feel scared, uncertain, that's exactly what I do in my coaching program. You don't need another strategy, another certification, another how-to book. I mean, this day and age, we have chat chibiti to give us some answers as to how to navigate this.

But the reality is you still need a human. You need space, you need clarity, you need proof of others who have gone through what you're going through, who understands both medicine and business. If that resonates with you, I'd love to support you. You can learn more about working together. Hop onto my newsletter, download the Direct Care Guide to get started in your direct care journey. In the emails are where I make the announcement as to when the doors are open for the next Direct Care Society Launch Lab.

which is an eight week accelerated path to opening your direct specialty care practice. We do weekly coaching sessions and then you get year long access with me and the cohort that you're in so that you can continue to get the support, to gain the momentum and to get to where you wanna be a lot faster. So keep an eye on your inbox for the next webinar where I share more about this and I hope to see you there. Take care for now.