March 4, 2025 • 37 mins
Ep. 49 As we enter Women's History month, Dr. Lendra and Ann Konkoly discuss the transformative journey of nurse practitioners transitioning into entrepreneurship. Ann shares her personal experiences and insights on leveraging nursing skills to create successful private practices, particularly in women's health and menopause care. They explore the importance of self-advocacy, mentorship, and the need for nurses to recognize their value in the healthcare system. The discussion emphasizes the potential for nurses to create fulfilling careers that align with their passions while also addressing the challenges of burnout and the need for sustainable practices.
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Takeaways
Ann Konkoly transitioned from a traditional nursing role to entrepreneurship.
Nurses can leverage their skills to create successful businesses.
Teaching and mentorship are effective ways for nurses to share knowledge.
Self-advocacy is crucial for patients navigating healthcare systems.
Nurses often lack training in menopause care, leading to gaps in patient support.
Creating a sustainable practice requires understanding personal strengths and weaknesses.
Entrepreneurship can provide flexibility and autonomy for nurse practitioners.
Nurses should focus on both doing good work and achieving personal fulfillment.
Building a business can help combat burnout in nursing careers.
The journey to entrepreneurship can be empowering and fulfilling for nurses.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Entrepreneurship in Nursing
01:00 The Leap into Private Practice
04:08 Building a Private Practice
07:21 Repurposing Nursing Skills
10:17 Creating Mentorship Opportunities
13:28 Strategies for Sustainable Practices
17:43 Hiring for Strengths and Avoiding Burnout
19:14 Navigating Menopause Care
22:10 The Importance of Specialized Training in Menopause
27:51 Advocating for Yourself in Healthcare
30:16 Creating a Meaningful Career in Nursing
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of Nurses with Voices. I'm your host, Dr.
Lyndra, and today I have Ann Conkley here. Ann
is a nurse practitioner and certified life and business
coach. She runs a private practice helping women navigate
perimenopause and also teaches nurse practitioners how to
make more money in their practice. She is the host of
(00:22):
Nurse Living the Good Life podcast and speaks across the country
on life and business topics relevant to being a nurse
practitioner. Welcome, Ann. Thank you so much for joining us
today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Absolutely. I was a guest on Ann's podcast
and had to invite her over here to Nurses with Voices. So I'm
(00:43):
happy to really have you here today. And I want to start
off by just asking you your work.
Supporting nurse practitioners in private practice is really
impactful. Can you share what first inspired you
to meet, take the leap into entrepreneurship
and start helping others do the same? Especially when
(01:05):
many nurses might feel apprehensive about
leaving the traditional world? Well, you might not like it, but
I'm gonna tell you. So the. So, all
right. So I got to a point in my career and I
felt like I, I really enjoyed what I did as a
midwife. I was a medical director. And I just knew, though, that there
(01:27):
was a certain path in the hospital. And I just, you know, it was like
the CNO route and just didn't quite feel like
something I wanted to invest in long term. And so
I went and got an mba and I was sitting in this class. It was
called Living a Good Life. And it was a class about
entrepreneurship. And had it been called entrepreneurship, I never would have taken it because
(01:48):
I just didn't. I really had no understanding of that word,
what it even meant. And it wasn't, people in my family
aren't entrepreneurs. And so I was
sitting in that class and our professor would bring in people who would come in
and talk about different kinds of businesses and they would just talk about how they
built their business. It was like npr, how I built my business with Guy Raz.
(02:10):
It was like he did that every week. And I really enjoyed it and I
liked it. And this one time a life coach came in and she was like,
I run a million dollar business as a life coach. And I was
like, what? What is going on? And so,
and I just furiously took notes that day. I was
list. And, you know, she talked about how she kind of had a, you know,
(02:32):
she had had a long HR experience and
in her kind of professional career. And I just thought, oh, my gosh,
I. I could actually build a business that didn't involve the
board of nursing. Like, it. You could be a coach and you could get certified,
and then you could just build an online business and you could help people all
over the country. And you didn't have to stay in your state, all this stuff,
right? You didn't have to have a doctor, a collaborating doctor, who had to pay,
(02:56):
you know, a ton of money to just do the work that I'm licensed to
do. And so I just decided,
I'm out. Like, I am out. I'll never forget. I went home, I told my
husband, I was like, I'm out. I'm done. Like, I calculated my
120 days notice that I had to give. I was like, I'm going to give
it on this day, and then I'm going to be done by, you know, June.
(03:16):
This is, you know, six, seven months down the road. I'm going to finish
my MBA and then, you know, build a business. And so I,
I left the nursing profession
not really intending to go back. And what happened
over then, the next, you know, essentially five years since then is that I
just. I don't know, I felt like.
(03:39):
I felt a little bit like there was just like a missing piece, you know,
like, wanted to do a private practice. I'm going through perimenopause.
I've had to figure out a lot of things about my health and.
And I figured I could, if I wanted,
I could do it my own way and I could kind of figure out, you
know, this. Like, I could figure something out if I
(04:00):
really wanted and wouldn't have to be the way that it was when I was
back in clinical practice. I wouldn't be working through the night, I wouldn't be taking
call, I wouldn't have to answer to people who didn't get it, who didn't. You
know, I wouldn't have to go into a system where I didn't have flexibility. I
just, I could do it differently. And so that's what I did. And
I built the private practice and now I run both businesses. And
(04:21):
so I guess, to answer your question,
I saw that there were opportunities for me as
a outside of the nursing profession, and I decided to go for
that. And so that taught me that there were a lot of opportunities in general
for us nurses who wanted to stay in the profession, who didn't.
And then once I got into private practice, I realized again, oh,
(04:45):
there is actually a lot that you can still do within the profession
in a clinical role where you can create more Autonomy for yourself.
And entrepreneurship's a really good vehicle to do that. And so it took
me, you know, five. I mean, it's a little bit of a roundabout way to
get there. But now I work primarily with
NPs, who, they want to diversify their revenue streams. They want to work
(05:07):
smarter, not harder. They want to have some flexibility because they've
got, you know, pressing concerns on both ends. Maybe they've got aging
parents and they've got young kids, and yeah, they just, they want to live a
good life. And so that's the work I do now. And I.
I love it. I mean, it's fun for you. Good
for you. I mean, you said so much and that,
(05:29):
that's so resonating. Even the part about, like you said, in the
traditional setting, most people aspire to be a
cno, right? And you,
like me, you get to the point where you realize, like, that's really
not what I want to do. And for me, being introduced to
entrepreneurship was probably one of the best things that
(05:51):
could have happened to me because it does make you start
to think about life differently.
Right? Like, life is not just about working the bedside.
Life is just not working inside the hospital. In the traditional
setting. There's so many other things that we can do, and I don't
think we give ourselves enough credit for that as nurses like,
(06:13):
that. We can really actually, like you said, run a practice and
run a whole business because the skills and everything that we learn in nursing, they're
so transferable. Yeah, they really are.
And too, like the career alternatives for nurses,
there's so many things that you could do that are that where you
repurpose and repackage, you know what you've learned and, you know, your
(06:34):
skills of dotting I's and crossing T's and managing patients
and being an effective communicator enough to get the job done, where you've got a
patient who needs something in a, you know, care team who may or may not
be responsive, you know, it's. It's a lot of work. And those are really good
skills to have. And there's tons of ways to repurpose them, which is
great. They really are just. Just for some
(06:55):
listeners who, like, I know I created like a guide,
right? Like 25 nurse consulting businesses that, you know, someone can
start. What do you, when you talk about how you think about nurses, can
repurpose their skills? What is some advice or
what are a few that you would mention? So I think
the one I talk about a lot in my. I have a Course
(07:18):
that's called side Hustles for mps. And if
there's one thing that I think we can very easily do, it's this
idea of teaching somebody else how to do something. So
for if you have no business experience or you don't, you
know, have no interest in running, you know, some sort of a business, I mean,
like, you can very easily get a mentorship group together. And I
(07:40):
see a lot of NPS who think
they need to do online courses, plus they need to have a blog,
plus they need to have, you know, funnels and all this stuff. And
one of the easiest side hustles to really get going is that if you have
a skill that you've honed and you're good at it and people come to
you and they ask your advice or they ask you questions, you have a complete
(08:03):
opportunity in front of you to take that and turn it into some sort of
a mentorship. And the easiest way to tell people is like, you know, it's
like, I see a lot of MPs who are in private practice, right? They kind
of develop these specialty or niche practices and then they, you know, and what
happens over time is that people come along and say, well, how did you do
that? And, and it's like, it's like saying somebody, you know, 10
(08:24):
years in a business, how did you build your business? And like somebody wants a
one or two sentence answer which will never, you know, it's just like,
it's hard to recapitulate that all in such a short time. But
with a, with a mentorship course, it's interesting because then you
can set it up and say you could record a couple of videos so
that they have some maybe content or maybe you just say to them, we're just
(08:46):
going to get on Zoom for 90 minutes over the next six weeks, every
Wednesday night from 7, 8:30. This is the cost. Show
up on Zoom. I will record them, throw them in a Google Drive,
and you know, you charge them, you know, you charge them a
fee for coming to the mentorship. I mean, it's a great way to be
able to make money. It doesn't include, it doesn't involve a ton
(09:09):
of overhead or really a need to understand, you know, a lot about
business or again, digital marketing, all that advanced stuff. And
I think that's one of the best things we're so many of us are
really, really skilled at teaching sometimes because, not necessarily because
we want to be, but because the profession has demanded that we, when we show
up in the role we do, we either Teach the stud students, we teach the
(09:31):
residents, we teach the patients, we teach. Sometimes
managers, we teach the attendings, right? Like,
this is a skill that you can easily, I think, translate into something
that can make you some money and then do your mentorship a couple of
times and then get good at it and record the whole thing and throw it
into an online course. Build a marketing scheme around it. And
(09:52):
you've got a beautiful evergreen, you know, you've got a beautiful
funnel that can result in some passive income while you're
sipping a margarita on the beach. I mean, like, that's the best part, right?
Like, I love when I wake up and I love when I wake up and
I get an email that somebody bought my course overnight. Like, I just think that's,
like the craziest thing ever, you
(10:15):
know, and that's. And so teaching is a
component of it. I think it's a very easy one for us to go
to. And then, you know, I
think the second one is that there's a segment of people where
not everybody's designed to go into a private practice setting, but
I think some of us are. It's been probably the missing piece all along
(10:37):
where we just need the autonomy and the independence to be able to
do it the way that we really think that we can do it, right? Like,
in a way that really serves the patients and serves the end game.
And so, you know, to stay in a traditional
setting when you're a person like that, it's just. I mean, it's like soul
crushing. And so to realize if you to kind of look at it and be
(10:59):
like, where do I want to invest my time if I'm going to do something,
something to make some money. If you are the person who's like, God
bless America. I can't stand if somebody else tells me I have to
do something and it's stupid, right? Like, if it makes no
damn sense, then you are a person who should probably consider
setting up your own, you know, shop and hanging up your own shingle. Because
(11:20):
in whatever capacity that is consulting private practice, like,
get on that road now. Save yourself 10 more years
of thinking about it and, you know, being frustrated by how the system
is so old and it's outdated and, you know, they're never going to catch up.
Like, get on your path. Just go, you know,
do nothing. And I think a lot of people are kind of like what
(11:43):
you mentioned when you, by the mere mention
of entrepreneurship, they're thinking like, no, I
don't want to. I'm not looking to be a Business owner. But I love how
you beautifully put how your mentorship can
easily become a course, it can easily become a business without
getting all involved in with the red tape right. Of it
(12:05):
all. And I think we don't give our, again, we don't give ourselves enough
credit to consider we've been teaching our entire career
all the time, right? We've been teaching our entire career. And to
your point, it is, I remember I'll be saying
like, what did stripe sending me for this amount of money? Like what?
And then I'll look, oh, something for my course.
(12:28):
And then before you know it, you know, you see like these multiple, you know,
purchases from people buying like what you said, something that you
package together and it's really that simple. And, and I, and
people get, I think people get too caught up into like the funnels, into the
CRM systems, into all of the other business stuff that they don't know,
not realizing that it comes along with it. Like, you could do things like you
(12:50):
said right on. In a Slack channel, you could do things right on Zoom,
Google Meet. Like there's so, it's so you really can put
together something educational because we're smart, we're really
smart clinicians and there's always someone who wants.
Just like when I started my, my wellness business, one of the first
things, like you mentioned, one of the first things I started getting was DMs people
(13:12):
asking me, how did you start your business? Like, how did you start your, you
know, your IV hydration business? This is something that I wanted to do. And like,
who knew, right? Who knew that I would be able to guide other people? But
because I have been guiding throughout my care career, I knew how to
guide through, guide them through the steps that I took. So I mean,
it's such an appreciation for everything that you're saying. It really is.
(13:33):
And you know, and many of our listeners are
battling burnout, right, and feeling undervalued in
their careers. And it's like you said, why stay in that role for so
long and feel that way? What strategies do you
teach nurse practitioners to build sustainable,
fulfilling private practices that can help them
(13:55):
overcome these challenges?
Well, we use what we call a coach approach
in my kind of area or my community. And
it's just got three pieces and it's. The first one is leverage your strengths,
right? You got to know your superpowers so that you can leverage
them. The second is, you know, understand why you get
(14:17):
stuck and, and so that you can
see from an objective view kind of what's going on in your brain and what's
contributing to your overwhelm or your fear, anxiety, or whatever it is,
your stuckness. And then the third piece is to upgrade your
operating system and, you know, to do different.
Right? Learn, you know, know better, do better kind of a thing.
(14:39):
And. And that's. That's a strategy we can use in private
practice, right? We can use it for a CEO who's. I just got off
a client call earlier. You know, one of my
mps, like, she's growing like crazy and she's busy,
and they're moving offices,
they're updating their electronic medical record. You know, they're feeling a
(15:00):
lot of the growing pains, and they're doing a lot of impressive things right
there. She's really building the business. And as you know, when
you commit to going in and building a business and scaling it,
it is, you know, very often fraught with hairiness.
It's, you know, some of it's pretty, by and large, a lot of
it isn't right, because that's just the nature of the beast when you get into
(15:23):
these things. And if you are in a, you know, a
smaller practice where it's you and maybe one or two other people and
you've got somebody who's really detail oriented and somebody who's skilled at
project management and who can really break down a big process into these tiny
doable steps and give you Gantt charts and, you know, provide you
with a. Essentially a row roadmap of how to get from point A to point
(15:45):
B. You know, unless you have that, most of us are just.
We're scrapping it together. We're figuring it out as we go. We're building the plane
as we fly it. And. And so, you know, I
think you can use a system like that, a coach, you can
use it in the setting of being CEO of a business, you can use
it kind of from the standpoint of, again, if I'm in
(16:08):
a traditional model and I'm at the bedside, and I know that
I love to teach and my interactions with patients are very short because
maybe I'm in an outpatient setting and it's just boom, boom, boom, and I'm doing
vitals and getting people in and reconciling meds and making
sure allergies are updated, and there's really no
time for me to build relationships for them. And if you can look at that
(16:29):
and say, oh, this is a job that it pays, it
does the job, but it doesn't necessarily allow me to leverage my strength.
And. And if you are the person who gets frustrated by that because you're like,
well, but I really, you know, I really do want to have a conversation
with them. And I want, you know, people to feel seen and listened and heard
and, you know, and to have a nice experience when they come to this office.
(16:51):
And. But then your boss is like, you're on the clock. Like, we got
to turn these patients around 2, 3 minutes. You got to get in, get out,
get going, and so that you can get on to the next room, you know,
clean down the room and keep the flow coming, right? Because you got a
provider on the back end who's like, you know, 30 patients or 35
patients a day. And I think you, at some point, it's like,
(17:12):
you just got to look at it and say, number one, am I leveraging my
superpowers? Number two, am I aware of kind of how my brain,
sometimes it becomes a little tricky and I feel really
stuck? And then three,
how do I upgrade my operating system so that I either function
really well in the role that I'm in, or I opt out and I go
(17:34):
find something or build something that's better suited for me? And that's,
I think. Or I hire on the people. If I'm in the CEO
role, how do I hire on the people who can come in backfill where
I'm, you know, don't have the strengths? And they, you know, they clearly do. And
so that's the strategy. It's. It's,
you know, not the only way to do it, but in my community, that just.
(17:56):
That's what I've. That's what's worked for me. And I use it as a strategy
to help other nurses, because otherwise, if you don't, you just end up burnt
out. And you. You can end up, you know, I. I get a lot of
people where, you know, they'll come to me and say, well, I want to
get into private practice. And, you know, and I'm sure you've heard this, you know,
time and time again, which is, I want to get into, you know, building a
business and consulting. Okay, great. I'm really burnt out. Okay. You
(18:20):
know, and so we go and build the business or the private practice, and, you
know, you just fly from flying frying pan to frying pan, and you are
burnt out again. Right? You're overworking. You're under delegating.
You're frustrated by how slow things are going because you have an
expectation they should be going faster, you know, and. And
that's. I think those are the Things where you,
(18:42):
you just gotta be onto your brain and kind of how you operate and you
gotta have some of that object objectivity built in and the awareness built in to
be like, wait a minute, I could switch the setting, but
I still do the same thing. And you know, even if the setting is different,
like what's going on here? Common denominator must be me.
So, so we use coach approach really to help, you know, people
(19:05):
either, you know, as a strategy to help you become a better CEO of
your business or just a better CEO of your life, you know, because both are,
both are important. You've dedicated part
of your practice to supporting women through
menopause, a stage that is often
overlooked in healthcare. And what unique
(19:27):
insights have you gained from this
work? And how can nurse practitioners
learn to better advocate
for their patients going through similar
experiences? I know recently I think Halle Berry was
on, it was Good Morning America and
(19:49):
talking about her experience with, with
perimenopause. And she's now an ambassador for that. I
think, you know, the very
easy view is just to say, well, I
do something great in the rest of the medical system. They're just
crap, you know, and that's actually not true, right. That the current medical
(20:11):
system, you know, most of these healthcare systems that are around us, they're
not terribly well built. You know, they've got high costs and they've
got, you know,
they've got their own issues. Right. Generally speaking, they tend to do, try to do
good by their patients. I do believe that. Right. And then
you have a lot of women's health providers, and I say women's health
(20:35):
in particular because, you know, if you're obgyn,
urologist, women's health, NP midwife, you know,
we just didn't get training on menopause care in school. I
mean, most people in my discipline get anywhere from one to
four hours on average over a two year program,
you know, And I mean, and I remember
(20:56):
being probably a newer midwife when
I was first in practice and we used to run a continuity
clinic that, where we as midwives saw,
you know, a good amount of the patients. And then we had residents come in
and they did continuity clinic in there. And I'll never forget sitting there the one
day and the attending was like trying to teach one of the residents about
(21:17):
menopause. And I remember listening because I was really
curious how she knew what she knew because I
hadn't really gotten that training. The resident clearly hadn't gotten that training
in terms of their education. And I said to her, after
like, how did you do that? And she's like, well, I ran my own, I
used to run my own private practice before I came here. And she said that
(21:38):
was a good, you know, part of my care. But I had to go
and learn, you know, a lot. I did courses and I studied.
And so I think one of the biggest
insights is that if you don't get what you need
from the current system, I think you can either
spend time being frustrated by that as a patient or you can just
(22:01):
look elsewhere and find a place that's going to, it's got some
people who understand and who have the additional training in order to be able to
provide the service. Right? Like, like my, my practice isn't
special in that it's, it's a, I love it, right? It's, I mean it's work
that I really enjoy doing, but it's not, you know,
the only difference between me is that I've got an additional couple
(22:23):
hundred hours of training and then several thousand patient
hours working with women doing prescriptions,
hormone stacking, understanding labs,
you know, one at a time, hormone replacement, you know, to
customizing doses, you know, like
it's a, it's a whole thing. Do you know what I mean? So if you
(22:44):
go to somebody in a traditional system, you're feeling frustrated about that. I
think, you know, my, my old stance on that was like, well,
they don't know what they're doing and you know, and of course they want to
tell you that, you know, your labs are normal and just get on with
it. And now I, I just look at it and say, of course they do
that because number one, most of them haven't been trained in how to work with
(23:06):
women in midlife. Like it's just an undergraduate, it's an under
resourced portion of our training. And so
again then the question becomes, okay, so that really is the case where you have
very few people in a traditional model who know what they're doing in terms
of hormones and who can give you evidence based data
and give you up to date research so that you
(23:29):
have good informed consent to make decisions that are best for you
regarding your care and your symptoms. Then don't
stop expecting them to switch and just, you gotta go and find
somebody that you can, you know, they can trust. And I always point people to
the Menopause society. They have a list of, you know, practitioners that are
on there, I'm on there. There are many people in our area but like, you
(23:50):
gotta find people, right, who are going to be able to provide the service.
And I just, I guess that's, you know, it's, it's a long winded
response, but like it. I think at some point you just gotta,
you know, take a, you know, call a spade a spade and say they just
don't have the understanding and the training and they're scared to do it,
which is fine, send them out. And the patients need to
(24:12):
just advocate for themselves and really find the people who are doing this work and
who do it day out and day out. This is my bread and butter, right?
Like I'm good at it because I do it all the time.
And that's who you need when you are going through midlife care. Like you
need somebody who is skilled in that. And the
typical OB gyn, the typical np, the
(24:34):
typical midwife is just not trained in that way.
It's not, you know, not to their, it's not to their fault, their fault.
It's just, that's just how it is. Right? No,
you're right. Because I actually, I have a, I mean,
I see a physician who works with an NP whenever the physician is an
N, see the mp and I actually, I actually
(24:56):
work with this np. Right before she was an np, we worked together
as, you know, bedside nurses. And, and I'm very
comfortable seeing her. So there was a point where I wanted to get my
hormone levels checked and you know, so I
have, you know, I have a wellness business and.
But before I got into hormone therapy and everything, and
(25:18):
not that I, I offer that service right now, but one of my nurse
practitioners does. And I say all this to say,
long story short, when she, you know, when I said, let me check my hormone
levels because at the time, you know, I knew something wasn't going on.
Something, something I knew I was going through, you know, like
between the hot and cold flashes and everything. M I
(25:40):
G, Y N to your point, you know,
he, you would hope that they know more than what they
do. However, he wasn't really too helpful,
let's just say that. And again, I, he, he's another one.
I can completely trust his judgment. You know, he
has, yeah, I listen, I've been going to him for years.
(26:01):
However, your specialty is your specialty and your expertise is your expertise. And the same
thing, when it came down to my mp, when she ordered, you know, blood,
she ordered like my luteinizing hormone and she ordered like something
else. And so my mp, who, you know, works within the wellness
business from, she's like, why did she order that? Like, why didn't you order your,
you know, the Estrogen and progesterone. And I was just like, oh.
(26:23):
I was like, you know what? I guess I should have told her. So I
guess I should have talked to you first. So I should have told her what
to order. But I mean, I still is to say, if it's
not your area of expertise, she's great in for internal medicine, but
not necessarily hormone. And I think people, the average person,
like myself included, you know, the average person doesn't necessarily
(26:43):
think about that. You know, they think, you're a doctor, you can fix it. You're
a nurse practitioner, you can fix it. Not realizing, no, they have
specialists for these areas, and we really should be seeing a
specialist to treat the symptom or the
treat the disease process that we're going through, whatever that element looks
like. So, yeah, yeah. And I think you. I think you, you
(27:05):
know, you're a good example, which is that, you know, you just keep kind of
going, right? If you don't get. I mean, the people who come to me, they're.
On average. I think that the. In perimenopause, it's like, on average, women
will see five different providers before somebody puts the
dots together and is like, oh, it's perimenopause. Like, let's get you on
some hormone replacement, or let's consider, you know, that this could be
(27:26):
an option and. And talk through it. And
so I think our job as
a patient in any of these settings is when you are.
When you know there's something that's not right, and you have to be an
advocate for yourself at the end of the day, and you have to keep pushing
and you have to keep asking. You have to keep unfortunately, going
(27:48):
and finding the resources that work.
You know, it's in our nature to be trusting of. Right. We're the most
trusted profession as nurses, which is good, right? It is really good. But
sometimes we can put too much trust in our nurses, right, and
our NPS and stuff. And so you have to be equipped as the patient to
(28:08):
really do your due diligence and advocate for yourself. And if
that means that you end up going to a couple people until you find
somebody who helps you and can under. Can, you know, walk you through
it, you know, that that's part of our role.
And it's. It's not always easy, but that's. That's just what we had to do
at this. That's always what we had to do. Those women, for the most part,
(28:29):
I. Think, right, Because I thought I was too young. I'm like, I
Can't be going through, you know, fall. Like. What do you mean? Like,
no. Yeah, like. No. But, you know,
listen. But when you start to learn and doing the research, you learn,
like, this can. Really early ages,
but I don't think people think about that. So. No, I mean, mid, late 30s,
(28:51):
you gotta, you know, I mean, everybody comes in, they're like. I mean, I think
it's very. I'm like, you know.
Right. It's like. Because I think most of us are like. But
that's not a. Like, I'm only. I hear this all the time. But I'm only
42, and I'm like, well, I know. I mean, I'm already 43. But
also, I also recognize that my symptoms started
(29:13):
at probably 39 or 40. And so, you know, I.
I mean, you know, it's. It's. We. We know the
data says roughly, you know, women in their mid-30s may
be starting to go through some perimenopausal symptoms. And so we
need to be better about, you know, surveying them and treating them and supporting them
through that. And it just isn't. Again, it's
(29:36):
under resourced, underfunded area of expertise, which
is menopause care and midlife care. It's just. It's always
been that we went and got our, you know, for pregnancies and, you know, and
then there's this gap after pregnancy. It's like no man's
land in terms of care. Right. But that couldn't be further from the
truth in terms of what our bodies go through right after we have
(29:59):
gone through our trial barriers. And so it's an
entire discipline in and of itself. And so I think the key is you just
got to find somebody. And there's so many telehealth practices that exist
out there, and so got to find somebody where you're like, I think they can
help me and. And, you know, and do it and invest
in it and know that, you know, it might take you a couple to get
(30:22):
a couple of different people to get there, but you're at least on your way,
which is good. As we wrap up, I
want to just ask you about your podcast. On your podcast, Nurses Living
the Good Life, you talk about creating a meaningful
career that also brings personal fulfillment
for our listeners. What advice would you give to
(30:44):
nurse entrepreneurs or those considering entrepreneurship
to align their work with their
passions and lives? For the good life,
I think we use a philosophy.
It's called do good and do well. And I
(31:04):
learned about sustainable development goals from
one of the classes that I did in my. My MBA program. And. And
I think there's this concept, right? Like, I go out into the world and
I want to do good work in the world, and I want to do
well for myself. And it can be both, right? It doesn't have to be one
or the other. And so
(31:27):
I think the biggest piece of advice is not. Is. Is
to allow yourself to focus on the doing well piece, right? Like,
we've always done good work, I think, in our profession, you know, most of us
can attest it, you know, the fact that we've shown up and we've done
shifts and we've taken, you know, call from people if they called off. And
we've, you know, we've done the work, right? We've sat with the
(31:49):
patients. We've. We've done all that. We've done really good stuff.
And I get a little annoyed because, you know, I don't know that we've always
done well for ourselves in terms of the financial. The
transaction that happens in terms of the work provided, the value created, and
then, you know, the financial compensation on the other end. And
so I think my biggest piece of advice is
(32:12):
doing good is not. Is always. We've always done that.
Your focus is what does it look like for you to do
well? And that's where this concept of, I think, nurses living
a good life comes in. And it's so funny even when
we have a lot of swag, right? So, like, we've got sweatshirts, we got, you
know, you know, we've got, you know, water
(32:33):
bottles, all sorts of shit, right? Like, and I love. I just, I love it,
but it feels still very indulgent sometimes in my
brain to have this thing called nurses living a good life. Like, I
even wear the T shirt. And I live in a huge health care community. We
have three. We have the largest employer here in the city of Cleveland.
The largest employer in the state is Cleveland Clinic with
(32:54):
got something like 50 or 55,000 employees, right? And I
wear this logo, right, on my sweatshirt or on my T shirts or whatever. And
I'm like, people are find out, right? Like, it's this
bad thing to live the good life, right? My old brain is just like, nurses
don't live the good life, right? Like that. And. And so I wear it, I
make a point to wear it, and I make a point to talk about it
(33:15):
because I think and to, you know, con, you know, continue to do the
podcast and because I want us to think about it. I want it to
be first. Like, I want it To. For us to put it front and
center. I want it. I want us to prioritize it. And
it. Even. Even just saying that sounds terrible. It sounds
selfish almost. There's this piece of me that comes up and it feels still, you
(33:38):
know, a little bit selfish. And I. And that's my own work to do, right?
But it's part of the reason that I do this work because I want us
to think about, again, we've always done good work. Now I want us to
do well. I want us to. I don't want those things to be mutually
exclusive. And so I think for anybody
getting into this work, don't worry about the doing good
(33:58):
part. We've always done that. We will always continue to do that. It's just part
of who we are, I think. But I really recommend that you
focus on what does it mean to me to live a good life?
What does it mean to me to do well for myself and
how does that influence. What does
that mean to me in terms of, is it wealth creation? Is it
(34:21):
intergenerational wealth? Being able to pass something down to my kids? Is it investing
in real estate? Is it, you know, being knowledgeable, like,
having a passive income stream so that I, again, you know, I'm sitting on the
beach having a margarita, and I make some money, or I'm sleeping and I make
some money, right? Like, that idea of,
you know, focusing on something that I think could
(34:42):
otherwise feel selfish, or maybe we've been trained to think it's a little selfish or
indulgent, and then to really turn around and be like, what if?
Like, what could that mean if I wanted to live the good life, like, what
would my version be of it? I just think it's like such a juice. It's
like a good question, right? And. And
if you're the person who's been, you know, you've been doing shift work for
(35:04):
a million years and, you know, you kind of got your routine in and like,
you know, you run your practice and, you know, you make good money. You know,
sometimes we don't focus on that. That bigger
picture question, which is like, am I. Am I living a good life?
Like, if. And if I am not, then what would I need
to change? Like, what. What could I change in order to
(35:26):
create a good life for myself if I'm not there yet,
right? And just starting to poke around and ask those questions, I think they're
really helpful, you know, when you're trying to build a business
and get your brain thinking, you know, kind of out of this
mode of which has always just been, like, just focus on the work. Focus on
the work. Like, no, no, no. Let's focus on the. Like, how much do you
(35:47):
want to travel? You know, so
you like speaking my language and I love it. I so appreciate
you coming on today. I really, really, really do.
So until next time, thank you so much for coming on today. So
there you have it, everyone. Until next time. Make sure that you stay
educated, stay inspired, and stay empowered.
Welcome back to another episode of Nurses with Voices. I'm your host, Dr.
Lyndra, and today I have Ann Conkley here. Ann
is a nurse practitioner and certified life and business
coach. She runs a private practice helping women navigate
perimenopause and also teaches nurse practitioners how to
make more money in their practice. She is the host of
(00:22):
Nurse Living the Good Life podcast and speaks across the country
on life and business topics relevant to being a nurse
practitioner. Welcome, Ann. Thank you so much for joining us
today. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
Absolutely. I was a guest on Ann's podcast
and had to invite her over here to Nurses with Voices. So I'm
(00:43):
happy to really have you here today. And I want to start
off by just asking you your work.
Supporting nurse practitioners in private practice is really
impactful. Can you share what first inspired you
to meet, take the leap into entrepreneurship
and start helping others do the same? Especially when
(01:05):
many nurses might feel apprehensive about
leaving the traditional world? Well, you might not like it, but
I'm gonna tell you. So the. So, all
right. So I got to a point in my career and I
felt like I, I really enjoyed what I did as a
midwife. I was a medical director. And I just knew, though, that there
(01:27):
was a certain path in the hospital. And I just, you know, it was like
the CNO route and just didn't quite feel like
something I wanted to invest in long term. And so
I went and got an mba and I was sitting in this class. It was
called Living a Good Life. And it was a class about
entrepreneurship. And had it been called entrepreneurship, I never would have taken it because
(01:48):
I just didn't. I really had no understanding of that word,
what it even meant. And it wasn't, people in my family
aren't entrepreneurs. And so I was
sitting in that class and our professor would bring in people who would come in
and talk about different kinds of businesses and they would just talk about how they
built their business. It was like npr, how I built my business with Guy Raz.
(02:10):
It was like he did that every week. And I really enjoyed it and I
liked it. And this one time a life coach came in and she was like,
I run a million dollar business as a life coach. And I was
like, what? What is going on? And so,
and I just furiously took notes that day. I was
list. And, you know, she talked about how she kind of had a, you know,
(02:32):
she had had a long HR experience and
in her kind of professional career. And I just thought, oh, my gosh,
I. I could actually build a business that didn't involve the
board of nursing. Like, it. You could be a coach and you could get certified,
and then you could just build an online business and you could help people all
over the country. And you didn't have to stay in your state, all this stuff,
right? You didn't have to have a doctor, a collaborating doctor, who had to pay,
(02:56):
you know, a ton of money to just do the work that I'm licensed to
do. And so I just decided,
I'm out. Like, I am out. I'll never forget. I went home, I told my
husband, I was like, I'm out. I'm done. Like, I calculated my
120 days notice that I had to give. I was like, I'm going to give
it on this day, and then I'm going to be done by, you know, June.
(03:16):
This is, you know, six, seven months down the road. I'm going to finish
my MBA and then, you know, build a business. And so I,
I left the nursing profession
not really intending to go back. And what happened
over then, the next, you know, essentially five years since then is that I
just. I don't know, I felt like.
(03:39):
I felt a little bit like there was just like a missing piece, you know,
like, wanted to do a private practice. I'm going through perimenopause.
I've had to figure out a lot of things about my health and.
And I figured I could, if I wanted,
I could do it my own way and I could kind of figure out, you
know, this. Like, I could figure something out if I
(04:00):
really wanted and wouldn't have to be the way that it was when I was
back in clinical practice. I wouldn't be working through the night, I wouldn't be taking
call, I wouldn't have to answer to people who didn't get it, who didn't. You
know, I wouldn't have to go into a system where I didn't have flexibility. I
just, I could do it differently. And so that's what I did. And
I built the private practice and now I run both businesses. And
(04:21):
so I guess, to answer your question,
I saw that there were opportunities for me as
a outside of the nursing profession, and I decided to go for
that. And so that taught me that there were a lot of opportunities in general
for us nurses who wanted to stay in the profession, who didn't.
And then once I got into private practice, I realized again, oh,
(04:45):
there is actually a lot that you can still do within the profession
in a clinical role where you can create more Autonomy for yourself.
And entrepreneurship's a really good vehicle to do that. And so it took
me, you know, five. I mean, it's a little bit of a roundabout way to
get there. But now I work primarily with
NPs, who, they want to diversify their revenue streams. They want to work
(05:07):
smarter, not harder. They want to have some flexibility because they've
got, you know, pressing concerns on both ends. Maybe they've got aging
parents and they've got young kids, and yeah, they just, they want to live a
good life. And so that's the work I do now. And I.
I love it. I mean, it's fun for you. Good
for you. I mean, you said so much and that,
(05:29):
that's so resonating. Even the part about, like you said, in the
traditional setting, most people aspire to be a
cno, right? And you,
like me, you get to the point where you realize, like, that's really
not what I want to do. And for me, being introduced to
entrepreneurship was probably one of the best things that
(05:51):
could have happened to me because it does make you start
to think about life differently.
Right? Like, life is not just about working the bedside.
Life is just not working inside the hospital. In the traditional
setting. There's so many other things that we can do, and I don't
think we give ourselves enough credit for that as nurses like,
(06:13):
that. We can really actually, like you said, run a practice and
run a whole business because the skills and everything that we learn in nursing, they're
so transferable. Yeah, they really are.
And too, like the career alternatives for nurses,
there's so many things that you could do that are that where you
repurpose and repackage, you know what you've learned and, you know, your
(06:34):
skills of dotting I's and crossing T's and managing patients
and being an effective communicator enough to get the job done, where you've got a
patient who needs something in a, you know, care team who may or may not
be responsive, you know, it's. It's a lot of work. And those are really good
skills to have. And there's tons of ways to repurpose them, which is
great. They really are just. Just for some
(06:55):
listeners who, like, I know I created like a guide,
right? Like 25 nurse consulting businesses that, you know, someone can
start. What do you, when you talk about how you think about nurses, can
repurpose their skills? What is some advice or
what are a few that you would mention? So I think
the one I talk about a lot in my. I have a Course
(07:18):
that's called side Hustles for mps. And if
there's one thing that I think we can very easily do, it's this
idea of teaching somebody else how to do something. So
for if you have no business experience or you don't, you
know, have no interest in running, you know, some sort of a business, I mean,
like, you can very easily get a mentorship group together. And I
(07:40):
see a lot of NPS who think
they need to do online courses, plus they need to have a blog,
plus they need to have, you know, funnels and all this stuff. And
one of the easiest side hustles to really get going is that if you have
a skill that you've honed and you're good at it and people come to
you and they ask your advice or they ask you questions, you have a complete
(08:03):
opportunity in front of you to take that and turn it into some sort of
a mentorship. And the easiest way to tell people is like, you know, it's
like, I see a lot of MPs who are in private practice, right? They kind
of develop these specialty or niche practices and then they, you know, and what
happens over time is that people come along and say, well, how did you do
that? And, and it's like, it's like saying somebody, you know, 10
(08:24):
years in a business, how did you build your business? And like somebody wants a
one or two sentence answer which will never, you know, it's just like,
it's hard to recapitulate that all in such a short time. But
with a, with a mentorship course, it's interesting because then you
can set it up and say you could record a couple of videos so
that they have some maybe content or maybe you just say to them, we're just
(08:46):
going to get on Zoom for 90 minutes over the next six weeks, every
Wednesday night from 7, 8:30. This is the cost. Show
up on Zoom. I will record them, throw them in a Google Drive,
and you know, you charge them, you know, you charge them a
fee for coming to the mentorship. I mean, it's a great way to be
able to make money. It doesn't include, it doesn't involve a ton
(09:09):
of overhead or really a need to understand, you know, a lot about
business or again, digital marketing, all that advanced stuff. And
I think that's one of the best things we're so many of us are
really, really skilled at teaching sometimes because, not necessarily because
we want to be, but because the profession has demanded that we, when we show
up in the role we do, we either Teach the stud students, we teach the
(09:31):
residents, we teach the patients, we teach. Sometimes
managers, we teach the attendings, right? Like,
this is a skill that you can easily, I think, translate into something
that can make you some money and then do your mentorship a couple of
times and then get good at it and record the whole thing and throw it
into an online course. Build a marketing scheme around it. And
(09:52):
you've got a beautiful evergreen, you know, you've got a beautiful
funnel that can result in some passive income while you're
sipping a margarita on the beach. I mean, like, that's the best part, right?
Like, I love when I wake up and I love when I wake up and
I get an email that somebody bought my course overnight. Like, I just think that's,
like the craziest thing ever, you
(10:15):
know, and that's. And so teaching is a
component of it. I think it's a very easy one for us to go
to. And then, you know, I
think the second one is that there's a segment of people where
not everybody's designed to go into a private practice setting, but
I think some of us are. It's been probably the missing piece all along
(10:37):
where we just need the autonomy and the independence to be able to
do it the way that we really think that we can do it, right? Like,
in a way that really serves the patients and serves the end game.
And so, you know, to stay in a traditional
setting when you're a person like that, it's just. I mean, it's like soul
crushing. And so to realize if you to kind of look at it and be
(10:59):
like, where do I want to invest my time if I'm going to do something,
something to make some money. If you are the person who's like, God
bless America. I can't stand if somebody else tells me I have to
do something and it's stupid, right? Like, if it makes no
damn sense, then you are a person who should probably consider
setting up your own, you know, shop and hanging up your own shingle. Because
(11:20):
in whatever capacity that is consulting private practice, like,
get on that road now. Save yourself 10 more years
of thinking about it and, you know, being frustrated by how the system
is so old and it's outdated and, you know, they're never going to catch up.
Like, get on your path. Just go, you know,
do nothing. And I think a lot of people are kind of like what
(11:43):
you mentioned when you, by the mere mention
of entrepreneurship, they're thinking like, no, I
don't want to. I'm not looking to be a Business owner. But I love how
you beautifully put how your mentorship can
easily become a course, it can easily become a business without
getting all involved in with the red tape right. Of it
(12:05):
all. And I think we don't give our, again, we don't give ourselves enough
credit to consider we've been teaching our entire career
all the time, right? We've been teaching our entire career. And to
your point, it is, I remember I'll be saying
like, what did stripe sending me for this amount of money? Like what?
And then I'll look, oh, something for my course.
(12:28):
And then before you know it, you know, you see like these multiple, you know,
purchases from people buying like what you said, something that you
package together and it's really that simple. And, and I, and
people get, I think people get too caught up into like the funnels, into the
CRM systems, into all of the other business stuff that they don't know,
not realizing that it comes along with it. Like, you could do things like you
(12:50):
said right on. In a Slack channel, you could do things right on Zoom,
Google Meet. Like there's so, it's so you really can put
together something educational because we're smart, we're really
smart clinicians and there's always someone who wants.
Just like when I started my, my wellness business, one of the first
things, like you mentioned, one of the first things I started getting was DMs people
(13:12):
asking me, how did you start your business? Like, how did you start your, you
know, your IV hydration business? This is something that I wanted to do. And like,
who knew, right? Who knew that I would be able to guide other people? But
because I have been guiding throughout my care career, I knew how to
guide through, guide them through the steps that I took. So I mean,
it's such an appreciation for everything that you're saying. It really is.
(13:33):
And you know, and many of our listeners are
battling burnout, right, and feeling undervalued in
their careers. And it's like you said, why stay in that role for so
long and feel that way? What strategies do you
teach nurse practitioners to build sustainable,
fulfilling private practices that can help them
(13:55):
overcome these challenges?
Well, we use what we call a coach approach
in my kind of area or my community. And
it's just got three pieces and it's. The first one is leverage your strengths,
right? You got to know your superpowers so that you can leverage
them. The second is, you know, understand why you get
(14:17):
stuck and, and so that you can
see from an objective view kind of what's going on in your brain and what's
contributing to your overwhelm or your fear, anxiety, or whatever it is,
your stuckness. And then the third piece is to upgrade your
operating system and, you know, to do different.
Right? Learn, you know, know better, do better kind of a thing.
(14:39):
And. And that's. That's a strategy we can use in private
practice, right? We can use it for a CEO who's. I just got off
a client call earlier. You know, one of my
mps, like, she's growing like crazy and she's busy,
and they're moving offices,
they're updating their electronic medical record. You know, they're feeling a
(15:00):
lot of the growing pains, and they're doing a lot of impressive things right
there. She's really building the business. And as you know, when
you commit to going in and building a business and scaling it,
it is, you know, very often fraught with hairiness.
It's, you know, some of it's pretty, by and large, a lot of
it isn't right, because that's just the nature of the beast when you get into
(15:23):
these things. And if you are in a, you know, a
smaller practice where it's you and maybe one or two other people and
you've got somebody who's really detail oriented and somebody who's skilled at
project management and who can really break down a big process into these tiny
doable steps and give you Gantt charts and, you know, provide you
with a. Essentially a row roadmap of how to get from point A to point
(15:45):
B. You know, unless you have that, most of us are just.
We're scrapping it together. We're figuring it out as we go. We're building the plane
as we fly it. And. And so, you know, I
think you can use a system like that, a coach, you can
use it in the setting of being CEO of a business, you can use
it kind of from the standpoint of, again, if I'm in
(16:08):
a traditional model and I'm at the bedside, and I know that
I love to teach and my interactions with patients are very short because
maybe I'm in an outpatient setting and it's just boom, boom, boom, and I'm doing
vitals and getting people in and reconciling meds and making
sure allergies are updated, and there's really no
time for me to build relationships for them. And if you can look at that
(16:29):
and say, oh, this is a job that it pays, it
does the job, but it doesn't necessarily allow me to leverage my strength.
And. And if you are the person who gets frustrated by that because you're like,
well, but I really, you know, I really do want to have a conversation
with them. And I want, you know, people to feel seen and listened and heard
and, you know, and to have a nice experience when they come to this office.
(16:51):
And. But then your boss is like, you're on the clock. Like, we got
to turn these patients around 2, 3 minutes. You got to get in, get out,
get going, and so that you can get on to the next room, you know,
clean down the room and keep the flow coming, right? Because you got a
provider on the back end who's like, you know, 30 patients or 35
patients a day. And I think you, at some point, it's like,
(17:12):
you just got to look at it and say, number one, am I leveraging my
superpowers? Number two, am I aware of kind of how my brain,
sometimes it becomes a little tricky and I feel really
stuck? And then three,
how do I upgrade my operating system so that I either function
really well in the role that I'm in, or I opt out and I go
(17:34):
find something or build something that's better suited for me? And that's,
I think. Or I hire on the people. If I'm in the CEO
role, how do I hire on the people who can come in backfill where
I'm, you know, don't have the strengths? And they, you know, they clearly do. And
so that's the strategy. It's. It's,
you know, not the only way to do it, but in my community, that just.
(17:56):
That's what I've. That's what's worked for me. And I use it as a strategy
to help other nurses, because otherwise, if you don't, you just end up burnt
out. And you. You can end up, you know, I. I get a lot of
people where, you know, they'll come to me and say, well, I want to
get into private practice. And, you know, and I'm sure you've heard this, you know,
time and time again, which is, I want to get into, you know, building a
business and consulting. Okay, great. I'm really burnt out. Okay. You
(18:20):
know, and so we go and build the business or the private practice, and, you
know, you just fly from flying frying pan to frying pan, and you are
burnt out again. Right? You're overworking. You're under delegating.
You're frustrated by how slow things are going because you have an
expectation they should be going faster, you know, and. And
that's. I think those are the Things where you,
(18:42):
you just gotta be onto your brain and kind of how you operate and you
gotta have some of that object objectivity built in and the awareness built in to
be like, wait a minute, I could switch the setting, but
I still do the same thing. And you know, even if the setting is different,
like what's going on here? Common denominator must be me.
So, so we use coach approach really to help, you know, people
(19:05):
either, you know, as a strategy to help you become a better CEO of
your business or just a better CEO of your life, you know, because both are,
both are important. You've dedicated part
of your practice to supporting women through
menopause, a stage that is often
overlooked in healthcare. And what unique
(19:27):
insights have you gained from this
work? And how can nurse practitioners
learn to better advocate
for their patients going through similar
experiences? I know recently I think Halle Berry was
on, it was Good Morning America and
(19:49):
talking about her experience with, with
perimenopause. And she's now an ambassador for that. I
think, you know, the very
easy view is just to say, well, I
do something great in the rest of the medical system. They're just
crap, you know, and that's actually not true, right. That the current medical
(20:11):
system, you know, most of these healthcare systems that are around us, they're
not terribly well built. You know, they've got high costs and they've
got, you know,
they've got their own issues. Right. Generally speaking, they tend to do, try to do
good by their patients. I do believe that. Right. And then
you have a lot of women's health providers, and I say women's health
(20:35):
in particular because, you know, if you're obgyn,
urologist, women's health, NP midwife, you know,
we just didn't get training on menopause care in school. I
mean, most people in my discipline get anywhere from one to
four hours on average over a two year program,
you know, And I mean, and I remember
(20:56):
being probably a newer midwife when
I was first in practice and we used to run a continuity
clinic that, where we as midwives saw,
you know, a good amount of the patients. And then we had residents come in
and they did continuity clinic in there. And I'll never forget sitting there the one
day and the attending was like trying to teach one of the residents about
(21:17):
menopause. And I remember listening because I was really
curious how she knew what she knew because I
hadn't really gotten that training. The resident clearly hadn't gotten that training
in terms of their education. And I said to her, after
like, how did you do that? And she's like, well, I ran my own, I
used to run my own private practice before I came here. And she said that
(21:38):
was a good, you know, part of my care. But I had to go
and learn, you know, a lot. I did courses and I studied.
And so I think one of the biggest
insights is that if you don't get what you need
from the current system, I think you can either
spend time being frustrated by that as a patient or you can just
(22:01):
look elsewhere and find a place that's going to, it's got some
people who understand and who have the additional training in order to be able to
provide the service. Right? Like, like my, my practice isn't
special in that it's, it's a, I love it, right? It's, I mean it's work
that I really enjoy doing, but it's not, you know,
the only difference between me is that I've got an additional couple
(22:23):
hundred hours of training and then several thousand patient
hours working with women doing prescriptions,
hormone stacking, understanding labs,
you know, one at a time, hormone replacement, you know, to
customizing doses, you know, like
it's a, it's a whole thing. Do you know what I mean? So if you
(22:44):
go to somebody in a traditional system, you're feeling frustrated about that. I
think, you know, my, my old stance on that was like, well,
they don't know what they're doing and you know, and of course they want to
tell you that, you know, your labs are normal and just get on with
it. And now I, I just look at it and say, of course they do
that because number one, most of them haven't been trained in how to work with
(23:06):
women in midlife. Like it's just an undergraduate, it's an under
resourced portion of our training. And so
again then the question becomes, okay, so that really is the case where you have
very few people in a traditional model who know what they're doing in terms
of hormones and who can give you evidence based data
and give you up to date research so that you
(23:29):
have good informed consent to make decisions that are best for you
regarding your care and your symptoms. Then don't
stop expecting them to switch and just, you gotta go and find
somebody that you can, you know, they can trust. And I always point people to
the Menopause society. They have a list of, you know, practitioners that are
on there, I'm on there. There are many people in our area but like, you
(23:50):
gotta find people, right, who are going to be able to provide the service.
And I just, I guess that's, you know, it's, it's a long winded
response, but like it. I think at some point you just gotta,
you know, take a, you know, call a spade a spade and say they just
don't have the understanding and the training and they're scared to do it,
which is fine, send them out. And the patients need to
(24:12):
just advocate for themselves and really find the people who are doing this work and
who do it day out and day out. This is my bread and butter, right?
Like I'm good at it because I do it all the time.
And that's who you need when you are going through midlife care. Like you
need somebody who is skilled in that. And the
typical OB gyn, the typical np, the
(24:34):
typical midwife is just not trained in that way.
It's not, you know, not to their, it's not to their fault, their fault.
It's just, that's just how it is. Right? No,
you're right. Because I actually, I have a, I mean,
I see a physician who works with an NP whenever the physician is an
N, see the mp and I actually, I actually
(24:56):
work with this np. Right before she was an np, we worked together
as, you know, bedside nurses. And, and I'm very
comfortable seeing her. So there was a point where I wanted to get my
hormone levels checked and you know, so I
have, you know, I have a wellness business and.
But before I got into hormone therapy and everything, and
(25:18):
not that I, I offer that service right now, but one of my nurse
practitioners does. And I say all this to say,
long story short, when she, you know, when I said, let me check my hormone
levels because at the time, you know, I knew something wasn't going on.
Something, something I knew I was going through, you know, like
between the hot and cold flashes and everything. M I
(25:40):
G, Y N to your point, you know,
he, you would hope that they know more than what they
do. However, he wasn't really too helpful,
let's just say that. And again, I, he, he's another one.
I can completely trust his judgment. You know, he
has, yeah, I listen, I've been going to him for years.
(26:01):
However, your specialty is your specialty and your expertise is your expertise. And the same
thing, when it came down to my mp, when she ordered, you know, blood,
she ordered like my luteinizing hormone and she ordered like something
else. And so my mp, who, you know, works within the wellness
business from, she's like, why did she order that? Like, why didn't you order your,
you know, the Estrogen and progesterone. And I was just like, oh.
(26:23):
I was like, you know what? I guess I should have told her. So I
guess I should have talked to you first. So I should have told her what
to order. But I mean, I still is to say, if it's
not your area of expertise, she's great in for internal medicine, but
not necessarily hormone. And I think people, the average person,
like myself included, you know, the average person doesn't necessarily
(26:43):
think about that. You know, they think, you're a doctor, you can fix it. You're
a nurse practitioner, you can fix it. Not realizing, no, they have
specialists for these areas, and we really should be seeing a
specialist to treat the symptom or the
treat the disease process that we're going through, whatever that element looks
like. So, yeah, yeah. And I think you. I think you, you
(27:05):
know, you're a good example, which is that, you know, you just keep kind of
going, right? If you don't get. I mean, the people who come to me, they're.
On average. I think that the. In perimenopause, it's like, on average, women
will see five different providers before somebody puts the
dots together and is like, oh, it's perimenopause. Like, let's get you on
some hormone replacement, or let's consider, you know, that this could be
(27:26):
an option and. And talk through it. And
so I think our job as
a patient in any of these settings is when you are.
When you know there's something that's not right, and you have to be an
advocate for yourself at the end of the day, and you have to keep pushing
and you have to keep asking. You have to keep unfortunately, going
(27:48):
and finding the resources that work.
You know, it's in our nature to be trusting of. Right. We're the most
trusted profession as nurses, which is good, right? It is really good. But
sometimes we can put too much trust in our nurses, right, and
our NPS and stuff. And so you have to be equipped as the patient to
(28:08):
really do your due diligence and advocate for yourself. And if
that means that you end up going to a couple people until you find
somebody who helps you and can under. Can, you know, walk you through
it, you know, that that's part of our role.
And it's. It's not always easy, but that's. That's just what we had to do
at this. That's always what we had to do. Those women, for the most part,
(28:29):
I. Think, right, Because I thought I was too young. I'm like, I
Can't be going through, you know, fall. Like. What do you mean? Like,
no. Yeah, like. No. But, you know,
listen. But when you start to learn and doing the research, you learn,
like, this can. Really early ages,
but I don't think people think about that. So. No, I mean, mid, late 30s,
(28:51):
you gotta, you know, I mean, everybody comes in, they're like. I mean, I think
it's very. I'm like, you know.
Right. It's like. Because I think most of us are like. But
that's not a. Like, I'm only. I hear this all the time. But I'm only
42, and I'm like, well, I know. I mean, I'm already 43. But
also, I also recognize that my symptoms started
(29:13):
at probably 39 or 40. And so, you know, I.
I mean, you know, it's. It's. We. We know the
data says roughly, you know, women in their mid-30s may
be starting to go through some perimenopausal symptoms. And so we
need to be better about, you know, surveying them and treating them and supporting them
through that. And it just isn't. Again, it's
(29:36):
under resourced, underfunded area of expertise, which
is menopause care and midlife care. It's just. It's always
been that we went and got our, you know, for pregnancies and, you know, and
then there's this gap after pregnancy. It's like no man's
land in terms of care. Right. But that couldn't be further from the
truth in terms of what our bodies go through right after we have
(29:59):
gone through our trial barriers. And so it's an
entire discipline in and of itself. And so I think the key is you just
got to find somebody. And there's so many telehealth practices that exist
out there, and so got to find somebody where you're like, I think they can
help me and. And, you know, and do it and invest
in it and know that, you know, it might take you a couple to get
(30:22):
a couple of different people to get there, but you're at least on your way,
which is good. As we wrap up, I
want to just ask you about your podcast. On your podcast, Nurses Living
the Good Life, you talk about creating a meaningful
career that also brings personal fulfillment
for our listeners. What advice would you give to
(30:44):
nurse entrepreneurs or those considering entrepreneurship
to align their work with their
passions and lives? For the good life,
I think we use a philosophy.
It's called do good and do well. And I
(31:04):
learned about sustainable development goals from
one of the classes that I did in my. My MBA program. And. And
I think there's this concept, right? Like, I go out into the world and
I want to do good work in the world, and I want to do
well for myself. And it can be both, right? It doesn't have to be one
or the other. And so
(31:27):
I think the biggest piece of advice is not. Is. Is
to allow yourself to focus on the doing well piece, right? Like,
we've always done good work, I think, in our profession, you know, most of us
can attest it, you know, the fact that we've shown up and we've done
shifts and we've taken, you know, call from people if they called off. And
we've, you know, we've done the work, right? We've sat with the
(31:49):
patients. We've. We've done all that. We've done really good stuff.
And I get a little annoyed because, you know, I don't know that we've always
done well for ourselves in terms of the financial. The
transaction that happens in terms of the work provided, the value created, and
then, you know, the financial compensation on the other end. And
so I think my biggest piece of advice is
(32:12):
doing good is not. Is always. We've always done that.
Your focus is what does it look like for you to do
well? And that's where this concept of, I think, nurses living
a good life comes in. And it's so funny even when
we have a lot of swag, right? So, like, we've got sweatshirts, we got, you
know, you know, we've got, you know, water
(32:33):
bottles, all sorts of shit, right? Like, and I love. I just, I love it,
but it feels still very indulgent sometimes in my
brain to have this thing called nurses living a good life. Like, I
even wear the T shirt. And I live in a huge health care community. We
have three. We have the largest employer here in the city of Cleveland.
The largest employer in the state is Cleveland Clinic with
(32:54):
got something like 50 or 55,000 employees, right? And I
wear this logo, right, on my sweatshirt or on my T shirts or whatever. And
I'm like, people are find out, right? Like, it's this
bad thing to live the good life, right? My old brain is just like, nurses
don't live the good life, right? Like that. And. And so I wear it, I
make a point to wear it, and I make a point to talk about it
(33:15):
because I think and to, you know, con, you know, continue to do the
podcast and because I want us to think about it. I want it to
be first. Like, I want it To. For us to put it front and
center. I want it. I want us to prioritize it. And
it. Even. Even just saying that sounds terrible. It sounds
selfish almost. There's this piece of me that comes up and it feels still, you
(33:38):
know, a little bit selfish. And I. And that's my own work to do, right?
But it's part of the reason that I do this work because I want us
to think about, again, we've always done good work. Now I want us to
do well. I want us to. I don't want those things to be mutually
exclusive. And so I think for anybody
getting into this work, don't worry about the doing good
(33:58):
part. We've always done that. We will always continue to do that. It's just part
of who we are, I think. But I really recommend that you
focus on what does it mean to me to live a good life?
What does it mean to me to do well for myself and
how does that influence. What does
that mean to me in terms of, is it wealth creation? Is it
(34:21):
intergenerational wealth? Being able to pass something down to my kids? Is it investing
in real estate? Is it, you know, being knowledgeable, like,
having a passive income stream so that I, again, you know, I'm sitting on the
beach having a margarita, and I make some money, or I'm sleeping and I make
some money, right? Like, that idea of,
you know, focusing on something that I think could
(34:42):
otherwise feel selfish, or maybe we've been trained to think it's a little selfish or
indulgent, and then to really turn around and be like, what if?
Like, what could that mean if I wanted to live the good life, like, what
would my version be of it? I just think it's like such a juice. It's
like a good question, right? And. And
if you're the person who's been, you know, you've been doing shift work for
(35:04):
a million years and, you know, you kind of got your routine in and like,
you know, you run your practice and, you know, you make good money. You know,
sometimes we don't focus on that. That bigger
picture question, which is like, am I. Am I living a good life?
Like, if. And if I am not, then what would I need
to change? Like, what. What could I change in order to
(35:26):
create a good life for myself if I'm not there yet,
right? And just starting to poke around and ask those questions, I think they're
really helpful, you know, when you're trying to build a business
and get your brain thinking, you know, kind of out of this
mode of which has always just been, like, just focus on the work. Focus on
the work. Like, no, no, no. Let's focus on the. Like, how much do you
(35:47):
want to travel? You know, so
you like speaking my language and I love it. I so appreciate
you coming on today. I really, really, really do.
So until next time, thank you so much for coming on today. So
there you have it, everyone. Until next time. Make sure that you stay
educated, stay inspired, and stay empowered.
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