In 2007, when I quit my stable and lucrative job as an overworked, unhappy, chronically ill full-time physician in a busy managed care practice where I was expected to see forty patients a day, I had no idea what the future would hold. My then husband wasn’t employed and I was the sole bread winner. It wasn’t until about nine months after I quit my job, after some rest and recovery time, that my calling to serve came back with a vengeance. I sensed that I was being called to step up to be part of healing our broken health care system in some way, but I had no idea what that would look like or how I was supposed to serve. I just knew that the feeling in my heart was calling me forth, and every cell in my body vibrated with the urgency of what I was being called to do.
I labeled the next two years, which were painful in many ways, my “waiting and becoming” years. This time was filled with a lot of uncertainty and accompanying anxiety, but I comforted myself with the strong intuitive sense that I was being called into something unknown which would one day make sense, even though nothing made much sense at the time. I dreamed of writing books, and I spent a year writing a whistleblowing book calling out the mistreatment of women in medical training and the corruption I witnessed and experienced in the hospital. I hoped that would be my ticket out of debt and my gateway to a new career. But that book got rejected by 30 publishing houses because, although the editors loved the book, the marketing people dinged me for having no “platform,” a term that was foreign to me. That’s when my literary agent said, “Lissa, you have to start a blog.” A blog? I barely checked email and had never even heard of a blog.
But I did my homework, and like a good little doctor following orders, I launched my first blog post in April of 2009. Within three months of starting my blog, I had attracted a large “platform” and been recognized by Forbes, and some of the very same publishers who had rejected my book only months earlier started offering me book deals. My book went to auction, and four publishing houses made offers on it. I started attracting the attention of New York Times bestselling authors, and collaborating with other visionaries with a desire to reform corrupt systems and influence health care. I went on a book tour funded by a large corporation, and I gave lectures at colleges all over the country.
But I still couldn’t pay the bills. My website wasn’t earning any revenue because it was never meant to be a business. I thought writing books would pay the bills, but the book advances I was offered were small, and in order to grow my platform, I had hired staff to help me, so my overhead was quite high. I never even considered leveraging my platform to earn revenue from my blog community, because I had no idea that was even possible. I wound up $200,000 in debt, looking “successful” on the outside, but with a depleted bank account and a demoralized spirit. I had never worked so hard and earned so little revenue. Although I had a strong intuitive sense that I was on the right path, there was no clear evidence that I would ever pay the bills. I started to lose hope and question my instincts.
January of 2011 marked the beginning of a very scary time, peppered with many dark nights of the soul. I was full of self-doubt and fear. After finishing my 20-city book tour, turning down my next book deal because the publisher wasn’t going to pay me what I needed to earn in order to cover my family’s bills, losing my literary agent, and deciding to close the integrative medicine practice I had just opened, I felt very frightened.
I spent nearly a year in what I called “the narrow place," that place that feels like you’re being squished from all sides, where you’re in a small, tight, uncomfortable place that makes you feel like you can barely breathe.