EP 128: Melding Disparate Passions with Herbalist & Spaceship Builder Lisa Akers
The Nitty Gritty\n\n* The breaking point in Lisa\u2019s life that inspired her to turn to herbalism for answers \u2014 and why she decided to study herbalism deeper\n* How Lisa manages her job as a spaceship builder and her herbalism clients\n* What specific strategies Lisa uses to plan and optimize her daily and weekly tasks\n* Who, exactly, Lisa works with through her herbalism business \u2014 and how she balances client sessions with the unpredictable needs of spaceship building\n\nLisa Akers is both a spaceship builder and herbalist (really!) While this might sound like an unusual duo, Lisa demonstrates just how closely the two are related \u2014 and how she balances working as an engineer and working as an herbalist.\nIn this episode of What Works, Lisa shares how she connects engineering and herbalism, what\u2019s so magical about herbalism, and how she optimizes her week around the energy available to her.\nWe release new episodes of What Works every week. Subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode.\nWhat drew a spaceship engineer to clinical herbalism\n\u201cI saw an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, and eventually an herbalist who said, \u2018here\u2019s what\u2019s going on, sweetheart.\u2019 And she was right. I said, \u2018this is magic so I need to learn more about this herbalism thing.\u2019 If she can do that over the course of 90 minutes then I need to know how this works because I could be really helpful and support other people. I wasn\u2019t thinking of it as a business at that point \u2014 just to learn for myself to support my own needs and my family\u2019s needs.\u201d \u2014 Lisa Akers\nAt one point in Lisa\u2019s health journey, she ended up in the emergency room, convinced she was suffering from a heart attack. Fortunately, that wasn\u2019t the case \u2014 but doctors gave her Xanax to help her mediate the stress she was under from working long hours instead.\nDissatisfied with that solution, Lisa sought additional professional opinions. Every doctor she saw recommended Xanax. At that point, she explored alternative routes in an effort to understand and fix the root problem. \u201cI\u2019m an engineer. I\u2019m trained to search for the root cause so that we can fix it and prevent the symptoms and the indications of failure from happening,\u201d says Lisa.\nThrough her experience with the herbalist who pinpointed her health imbalance, Lisa knew that herbalism worked \u2014 and she wanted to learn more about how she could help herself, her family, and eventually clients.\nPinpointing and working with ideal clients \n\u201cI work with a fairly narrow group of people in midlife and later who are finding that the lifestyle they lived as young people no longer works for them in their more mature adulthood. They\u2019re struggling with diabetes, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, or maybe even cancer. They need a better solution. They don\u2019t just want to follow down this pathway where they take this medication that makes this other symptom happen that they have to take another medication for that causes something else. They have this downward spiral that ends in their death and nobody wants that \u2014 they actually want to make it better so I\u2019m looking for people who want to understand how that works.\u201d \u2014 Lisa Akers\nLisa knows exactly who she can help: people who want answers to their health woes that they can\u2019t find anywhere else. One way Lisa attracts those folks is through positioning herself as a scientist. \xa0She\u2019s someone who not only understands plants, but someone who also thinks with an engineering perspective: that we need to get to the root of the issue to truly fix it.\nAnd Lisa\u2019s knowledge and ability to find and understand scientific studies around plants give her a strong foundation to her herbalism bu...