For over a decade I have practised at Project DAO in Sydney, first as a solo practitioner and later as director of a busy multidisciplinary clinic. My practice did not begin as a thriving one. I started where many practitioners do: half-full weeks, anxiety about money, and the quiet hope that if I just became more skilled in the treatment room, everything else would sort itself out.

It did not. Not until I learnt how to build patient flow on purpose.

Bit by bit, I figured out how to bring in new patients through real relationships, how to hold clear treatment-plan conversations so people understood what was needed, and how to create simple systems for rebooking, follow up and referrals that felt honest rather than pushy. Over time my practice became full and steady, and I saw that it was not because my needling suddenly became magical. It was because I combined good medicine with clear strategy and consistent action.

As the clinic grew, I mentored many practitioners. Most of them were already deeply trained. When they struggled, their first instinct was to do another clinical course. What they actually needed was simple, grounded ways to find and keep patients, and support to work with the fears and stories that stopped them using those strategies.

Alongside my clinical work I have trained in Compassionate Inquiry, Dr Gabor Maté’s approach to working with the mind and nervous system, and now integrate CI based self-inquiry into my mentoring and retreats. For me, business is never separate from inner work. The stories that shape how you show up in your practice are often the same stories that shape your life.

In 2024, during a sabbatical year in Korea with my family, I wrote Roadmap to a Thriving Practice. It distils the strategies that built my clinic and the mentoring I have done with practitioners over many years. I also led my first practitioner retreat at a Korean temple, where I watched acupuncturists remember why they chose this medicine and begin to meet their resistance with compassion rather than shame.

Roadmap to a Thriving Practice is the container I wished I had: clear, practical systems to build a thriving practice, held inside a space where your mindset, patterns and nervous system are not an afterthought. You are not just given information and left alone. You are supported to actually do the things you already know will help your patients and your business.

My core belief is simple: presence is medicine. When you can be present with yourself, your patients and your practice, strategy finally has somewhere solid to land. It is my honour to walk beside healers like yourself as you build a practice that truly reflects the power of your medicine.