The Influential Practitioner

Every business has two versions: the storefront people see, and the back office only you see. The workshop where four people showed up, two of them friends. The email rewritten six times that barely got opened. Michelle Oravitz has had launches that didn't land and seasons where she doubted almost every decision, and in this episode she talks about failure as it actually feels, the kind where you check the sign-up page three times in an hour.

She starts with the small failures that pile up until they feel like a verdict, and the one that doesn't look like failure at all: saying yes to everything until there's nothing left for the thing only you can build. Then she brings it into the treatment room. You'd never judge a treatment plan after one session, and you'd never write off a woman's fertility after one cycle, so why treat a business that way after one launch?

Michelle explains why the night something flops is the worst time to analyze it, since a nervous system under threat reads everything as a verdict. Regulate first, then separate the data from the drama. From there she walks through the structural question she now asks every time: what was missing from the build? Clarity, warmth, partners, timing, or the offer itself. None of those is something you are.

She also shares why she runs a class even when only three people sign up, and the story of a colleague who told her to aim for five hundred registrations. A summit beforehand and colleagues as paid affiliates got her past that number with the same kind of class. She closes with fifty or zero, how she handles asks that go unanswered, and why the vision stays constant while attempts are variables.

If something you built isn't getting the response you hoped for, this episode is for you.

You Built It. They Didn’t Come. The exact moves Michelle made after walking into that empty office, step by step, plus a 30-day checklist so you know what to do this week.

Download it free: https://www.michelleoravitz.com/you-built-it-ebook

Take the last thing that didn't work, whether a launch, a post, a class, or an offer. Once you're calm, write down the plain numbers, then name what was missing from the build: clarity, warmth, partners, timing, or the offer. Write your original vision in one or two sentences and put it where you'll see it every day. Then pick one thing you've been avoiding because it might not work out, and do it anyway. Fifty or zero.

Website: theinfluentialpractitioner.com and www.michelleoravitz.com

Instagram: @theinfluentialpractitioner and @thewholesomelotusfertility

The Wholesome Fertility Podcast: 400+ episodes wherever you listen

Book: The Way of Fertility

The Influential Practitioner is for acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, and coaches who are excellent at their craft and ready to be seen. Hosted by Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus in Miami Beach, and host of The Wholesome Fertility Podcast. Expect a mix of solo episodes and interviews on marketing that feels like service, relationships and collaboration, finding your voice, growing from alignment instead of force, and keeping going through failure.

If this episode helped, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a review so more practitioners can find the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Posting feels cheap. Selling feels wrong. So a lot of excellent practitioners stay quiet and call it humility. In this episode, Michelle takes that resistance seriously, because it comes from something good: you went into this work to help people, not to sell to them. But silence, it turns out, is not the same thing as respect.

Michelle moves the focus away from how you'll look and toward the person who is searching for help at 11pm and can't find you. From there she breaks down what marketing as service actually looks like: teaching what you already say in the treatment room, being clear about who you help, showing up consistently, and talking like a person instead of a brochure.

She answers the question almost every practitioner asks (won't I annoy people?) and explains why the people who get annoyed by useful content were never going to be your patients. She names the three lies that keep practices small, looks honestly at what staying quiet costs, and explains why being good is the price of entry, not the strategy.

Then she lays out a small plan for this month, including putting content on your schedule the same way you schedule patient hours, and the step most practitioners skip: actually inviting people to work with you. She closes with what she would tell herself standing in her own empty office.

If marketing has ever felt like the opposite of why you became a healer, this episode is for you.

You Built It. They Didn’t Come. The exact moves Michelle made after walking into that empty office, step by step, plus a 30-day checklist so you know what to do this week.

Download it free: https://www.michelleoravitz.com/you-built-it-ebook

Write down the ten questions patients ask you most. Answer one of them somewhere public this week. Pick a rhythm you can keep, and tell one referral partner what you're doing.

Website: https://www.michelleoravitz.com & www.theinfluentialpractitioner.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewholesomelotusfertility and https://www.instagram.com/theinfluentialpractitioner

The Wholesome Fertility Podcast: 400+ episodes wherever you listen

Book: The Way of Fertility

The Influential Practitioner is for acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, and coaches who are excellent at their craft and ready to be seen. Hosted by Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus in Miami Beach, and host of The Wholesome Fertility Podcast. Expect a mix of solo episodes and interviews on marketing that feels like service, relationships and collaboration, finding your voice, growing from alignment instead of force, and keeping going through failure.

If this episode helped, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a review so more practitioners can find the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

There's a version of what Michelle believes about the body that fits neatly on a website: acupuncture improves blood flow, supports hormone balance, helps with IVF outcomes. All true, and all easy to say. And then there's the version she built her practice on. That the body is intelligent and not broken. That a woman's nervous system has more to do with her fertility than most people realize. For years, she said the first version in public and kept the second for the treatment room.

In this episode, Michelle shares the one sentence at the center of her work, the one she was most hesitant to say: your body won't prioritize making a baby until it believes you're safe. It became the reason people found her. She explains the three reasons practitioners sand their beliefs down into something no one can object to, why generic content is armor that mostly keeps you invisible, and why the doctors were never her real audience.

She gets specific about what a voice actually is (not your tone or your branding, but the things you believe that not everyone in your field believes), shares her own list, and walks through four ways to find yours, including the parts of yourself you've kept out of your work. For Michelle, that was art, and letting it in made her more specific, not less credible.

She also draws a clear line between a responsible point of view and a promise you can't back up, explains the difference between being wrong and being different, warns against the hot-take trap, and makes the case that a voice that evolves is a sign you're still paying attention.

If your content sounds like everyone else's and you know you have more to say, this episode is for you.

You Built It. They Didn’t Come. The exact moves Michelle made after walking into that empty office, step by step, plus a 30-day checklist so you know what to do this week.

Download it free: https://www.michelleoravitz.com/you-built-it-ebook

Open a note on your phone and finish the sentence “I believe” five times about your work, things not everyone in your field would say. Then pick the one that scares you most, as long as it's responsible to share, and say it once somewhere public this week. Watch the replies, not the numbers.

Website: https://www.michelleoravitz.com & www.theinfluentialpractitioner.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewholesomelotusfertility and https://www.instagram.com/theinfluentialpractitioner

The Wholesome Fertility Podcast: 400+ episodes wherever you listen

Book: The Way of Fertility

The Influential Practitioner is for acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, and coaches who are excellent at their craft and ready to be seen. Hosted by Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus in Miami Beach, and host of The Wholesome Fertility Podcast. Expect a mix of solo episodes and interviews on marketing that feels like service, relationships and collaboration, finding your voice, growing from alignment instead of force, and keeping going through failure.

If this episode helped, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a review so more practitioners can find the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Not one of the biggest moments in Michelle's business came from an ad or an algorithm. They came from people. A friend who suggested a student acupuncture clinic. A networking group that filled her empty office one referral at a time. A speaker in that group who mentioned her business coach, and the coach who asked one question that changed everything: “Why aren't you headlining fertility on your website? What are you waiting for?”

In this episode, Michelle looks at her whole story through the lens of relationships. She explains why a podcast is really a reason to reach out to people you'd never otherwise get to talk to, and how conversations with guests led to endorsements from Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Lisa Miller, Aimee Raupp, and Jessica Ortner, and an interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton. She's honest about how terrifying those asks felt, and why giving first made them land.

She shares the practical side too: how to make an ask easy to say yes to, why relationships are kept and not just made, how she built referral relationships with other fertility acupuncturists instead of treating them as competition, and how her virtual summits, the first with almost fifteen hundred registrations, grew out of relationships she'd already built.

For the introverts and the quiet ones, Michelle makes the case that you don't have to be good at rooms. You have to be good at people, one at a time. And she explains why relationships are the most aligned form of growth there is, because they're built on what you already do in the treatment room every day.

If you've been trying to grow on your own, this episode is for you.

You Built It. They Didn’t Come. The exact moves Michelle made after walking into that empty office, step by step, plus a 30-day checklist so you know what to do this week.

Download it free: https://www.michelleoravitz.com/you-built-it-ebook

Write down five people you'd like to know: a practitioner whose work you respect, a referral partner you've never met, someone whose podcast you listen to. Give something to one of them this week with no ask attached. Then make one specific ask you've been avoiding. Fifty or zero.

Website: theinfluentialpractitioner.com and michelleoravitz.com

Instagram: @theinfluentialpractitioner and @thewholesomelotusfertility

The Wholesome Fertility Podcast: 400+ episodes wherever you listen

Book: The Way of Fertility

The Influential Practitioner is for acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, and coaches who are excellent at their craft and ready to be seen. Hosted by Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus in Miami Beach, and host of The Wholesome Fertility Podcast. Expect a mix of solo episodes and interviews on marketing that feels like service, relationships and collaboration, finding your voice, growing from alignment instead of force, and keeping going through failure.

If this episode helped, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a review so more practitioners can find the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

You can be excellent at what you do and still be invisible. That was Michelle a year out of school: a fertility acupuncturist with real skill, a brand new office with her name on the lease, and not one appointment on the books.

In this first episode, Michelle tells the whole story. The years she spent in architecture feeling like a bird in a cage. The afternoon at a student acupuncture clinic when she felt a calling instead of a career for the first time. Caring for her father, losing him, and walking into an empty office with over two thousand dollars a month in rent and no one to treat. And the one thing she had that carried her through: she had seen other practitioners do it, so the question stopped being “can I?” and became “how?”

From there she walks through what actually worked. Joining a networking group and speaking every week while terrified of public speaking. Choosing to specialize in fertility before she felt qualified. Starting a podcast that forced her to become a better practitioner, put her in rooms with people she had only read, and eventually led to endorsements from Dr. Christiane Northrup, Dr. Lisa Miller, Aimee Raupp, and Jessica Ortner, and a conversation with Dr. Bruce Lipton. None of it because she was special. All of it because she asked.

Michelle is honest about the “who am I to?” voice and the myth that only certain people get to grow in this field. She explains what “being yourself” means in practice (stop editing out the parts that make you different), why relationships are the engine behind every jump in her growth, and what a launch that got one or two sign-ups taught her about failure. She closes with three things you can do this week and the simple math she runs every time fear shows up: fifty percent if you try, zero if you don’t.

If you’re great in the treatment room and unseen everywhere else, this episode is for you.

You Built It. They Didn’t Come. The exact moves Michelle made after walking into that empty office, step by step, plus a 30-day checklist so you know what to do this week.

Download it free: https://www.michelleoravitz.com/you-built-it-ebook

Pick one uncomfortable action you’ve been avoiding. One post. One email to someone you admire. One yes to speaking somewhere. Do it this week. Fifty percent if you try. Zero if you don’t.

Website: https://www.michelleoravitz.com & www.theinfluentialpractitioner.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewholesomelotusfertility and https://www.instagram.com/theinfluentialpractitioner

The Wholesome Fertility Podcast: 400+ episodes wherever you listen

Book: The Way of Fertility

The Influential Practitioner is for acupuncturists, holistic and wellness practitioners, healers, and coaches who are excellent at their craft and ready to be seen. Hosted by Michelle Oravitz, fertility acupuncturist, founder of The Wholesome Lotus in Miami Beach, and host of The Wholesome Fertility Podcast. Expect a mix of solo episodes and interviews on marketing that feels like service, relationships and collaboration, finding your voice, growing from alignment instead of force, and keeping going through failure.

If this episode helped, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a review so more practitioners can find the show, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.