Japanese Acupuncture and YouTube Marketing for Acupuncturists with Maya Suzuki, founder of ShinKyu University

This week I’m chatting with Maya Suzuki, acupuncturist, translator, and founder of the online program, ShinKyu University.

Maya trained in acupuncture in Japan and lived there for many years before returning home to the U.S. to open a private practice. She’s licensed to practice acupuncture in both the U.S and Japan.

Inside SkinKyu University, Maya teaches fellow acupuncturists to improve their technical skills and clinical results through Japanese-style needling and moxibustion.

In this episode, we have a lot of fun talking about a wide range of topics, including:

  • What’s it like to study acupuncture in Japan
  • Why YouTube is an outstanding marketing strategy for online courses or brick-and-mortar businesses
  • Imposter syndrome and online visibility 
  • The importance of know your audience (i.e., your ideal patients) before creating a ton of marketing content
  • And much more

I hope you enjoy this episode with Maya!

🎙️ Listen to Episode #58: YouTube Marketing, Imposter Syndrome, and Japanese Acupuncture with Maya Suzuki

Show Notes: 

Subscribe to the Acupuncture Marketing School podcast on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify

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Transcript:

[MICHELLE GRASEK] (00:04)

Welcome to the Acupuncture Marketing School Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Grasek, and I’m here to help you get visible in your community, take marketing action with confidence and get more patients in your practice and more money in your pocket every week. We both know you’re a talented, passionate acupuncturist and that acupuncture has the power to change lives. So let’s dive right into this episode and talk about how you can reach more patients.

(00:35)

Welcome back. Today I’m talking with Maya Suzuki, who lived and trained in Japan as an acupuncturist before returning home to the United States. She’s licensed to practice acupuncture in both Japan and the US, runs a private practice in Colorado, translates Japanese to English for multiple Japanese acupuncture seminars in groups around the world, and she also founded an online program where she teaches acupuncturists to improve their technical skills and clinical results using Japanese-style needling and moxibustion, which she calls ShinKyu University. In this episode, we talk about everything from her brick-and-mortar acupuncture practice to launching a successful online program with students from all around the world, as well as topics like imposter syndrome, what it’s like to go to acupuncture school in Japan, the effectiveness of YouTube as a search engine and a robust marketing strategy and much more. I hope you enjoy it.

[MICHELLE] (01:29)

Without further ado, Maya Suzuki. Hello. Welcome. How are you?

[MAYA SUZUKI] (01:36)

I’m good. How are you doing, Michelle?

[MICHELLE] (01:37)

I’m doing pretty well. You do a lot of interesting things. You have a private practice, you teach acupuncture online, so I’ll let you introduce yourself to the audience and then we can dive in with questions.

[MAYA] (01:49)

Awesome. Yeah, so I began my acupuncture career when I was quite young. I knew I wanted to be an acupuncturist since I was like 14, but decided not to go to school because my good Jewish mother told me not to. She told me to get a real degree, and I ended up studying Japanese and moving to Japan eventually to work in their government. Always with this in the back of my mind that I really wanted to study and so I ended up studying acupuncture and moxibustion in Japan and getting my licensure there and practicing there and apprenticeship and all of that. Then I decided at a certain point, really because of Fukushima, the Fukushima explosion to move back to the US with my family.

(02:30)

This is the very short version of my origin story, we moved back to the US, I got my license back here in the US and then I started up my own practice here in the US after I did that. But I run a really small acupuncture clinic called Bumble Bee AcuTherapy, and I treat mainly pediatrics and perinatal health. I mean, I treat everybody, but that’s who I market to. That’s become a really nice little niche for me. Then along the way, I also started to help facilitate acupuncturists to go to Japan and study Japanese acupuncture in Japan and I kept seeing this trend from the students coming over that they were really stoked to learn the medicine and they really wanted to do it, but they had zero foundation to their technical and theoretical practice in the Japanese styles.

(03:17)

It’s definitely different than TCM and so it fueled this idea in me for about 10 years. I was like, I got to, they have to learn these techniques and finally through a lot of pushing through my friends and Covid helped too, I finally decided to start my own teaching platform called ShinKyu University. So it’s a lifetime membership and mentorship program. Currently, I have students from all across the globe, from India to Italy, to Canada, to North America, to Chile, they’re all over the place and it’s lifetime membership and mentorship that’s done in three different stages of first learning online, just recorded information and then online with me and then eventually in person with me. So it’s a very interactive platform, but yeah, that’s short version.

[MICHELLE] (04:07)

I love it. I have so many questions for you just based on that. You said that you moved to Japan and you worked in the government, is that right? How did that come about?

[MAYA] (04:14)

Yeah, so I studied, I actually majored in Japanese in college and so when I was, geez, I can’t remember how old, maybe 20, 21, something like that. I got a job with the JET program, the JET program brings people over to Japan to either be English teachers there or to work in their national government in different areas across Japan to be like foreign liaisons. So that was the job I got, was to be a coordinator of international relations within the port of Yokohama

[MICHELLE] (04:48)

Which sounds really glamorous and fun, but it probably was a lot of paperwork.

[MAYA] (04:53)

It was not, I didn’t last for more than a year before I was just exceedingly bored, so I didn’t last very long.

[MICHELLE] (05:05)

Is that when you decided to pursue acupuncture?

[MAYA] (05:08)

No, actually. I did a lot of odd jobs. I did English teaching at night and I worked in a restaurant and eventually I was tried to convince my then boyfriend to open a cafe with me and he was like, no, you’re going to work in a restaurant for a bit. I worked in a restaurant and I got really severely depressed. It’s a very long convoluted story, but eventually I decided to go into acupuncture school. Again, my boyfriend, now husband told me, well, maybe you should go get an apprenticeship and work at the front desk and so I did that for like a year before I went into Japanese acupuncture school.

[MICHELLE] (05:42)

I think that is probably some of the best life advice that you can ever be given, is to spend time in the sort of career that you think you want so you can understand like what is it on a day-to-day basis and how does it feel

[MAYA] (05:56)

Before you spend $150,000 or $160,000 on education, yes. It was incredible. I don’t like to give my husband much slack, but he was very smart with me

[MICHELLE] (06:08)

It was a good call, especially before you purchase a cafe or make a huge investment like that.

[MAYA] (06:15)

And he was right. I was not cut out for the food industry, so I’m very glad that I didn’t go down that path. It would’ve been bad.

[MICHELLE] (06:24)

So is acupuncture education in Japan like a similar structure to the way that we have it here? Is it completely different?

[MAYA] (06:32)

Well, I mean, of course it’s school by school based, just like it would be here, but in essence it’s a hundred percent different. Education in Japan is foundationally set on technical proficiency, so being able, actually in Japan, so here in the states it’s a master’s degree or PhD or a doctorate, whatever. In Japan, it’s actually considered a trade school. So you don’t even have to go to college. I actually think that makes a lot more sense too, but it’s very much about technical mastery. Yes, you do have to learn theory, but I love, like one of my very first point location classes, I still remember asking my teacher, and this like really summarizes how it’s so different, I asked my teacher, we had this point location book and we looked in the back and it had all the different point prescriptions that you would have in like a TCM book. I said, I was like, oh my God, I can’t remember that and I asked my teacher, I was like, “Do I have to remember all of this? Is this going to be on the test?” He was like, “Yeah, you only have to remember that if you want to be a TCM practitioner. If not, you don’t have to know it.”

[MICHELLE] (07:39)

You were like sold.

[MAYA] (07:41)

Sold. I’m never remembering that graph, never. I still haven’t. So very different.

[MICHELLE] (07:50)

I guess that leads me into my next question, and I really have zero knowledge of this, which is a shame, but what is the, I guess, like the core difference between Japanese and TCM style?

[MAYA] (08:03)

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. And honestly, I don’t think a lot of people around the globe are, we’re not really introduced to it in acupuncture school here in the US or anywhere else in the world, except for, very briefly in some schools. So really the core difference I would say is that, because there’s hundreds of different styles in Japanese medicine, but the really main, main difference is that in Japanese medicine, the treatment is based on palpation and the theory comes after that. So you base what you’re going to do for the patient based on the patient in front of you and then your theory comes after it to like supplement and cement your ideas around the treatment. It’s definitely, like in TCM, I would say that’s backwards. In TCM you take the pulse, you get your theory, and then you might confirm or maybe even not confirm that with your points. Usually, most people would just get the theory, get the point, prescription, and then just put their points in and they’re out. So it’s definitely a more hands-on medicine and depending on the style you’re in, it can vary quite widely from something very superficial to something very, almost classically Chinese looking and aggressive and deep needling. And of course moxibustion is way more developed as well. It’s just completely different.

[MICHELLE] (09:21)

I do remember watching some of your YouTube videos about moxibustion and being like, wow. I love it. I feel like this must be the foundation of what you’re teaching your students in your online university then as you’re sort of starting them with this whole idea of it begins with palpation. That has to be a little bit tricky to teach online, but again, I’ve watched a couple of your videos, I mean, probably quite a few over the years because I know that you’ve been producing content on YouTube for a long time and you are teaching like a really different approach to palpation. I think it’s a new idea for a lot of acupuncturists that there’s, that palpation can be like complex, like we’re thinking of just like, just put your hands on the person, feel around. Then there’s, but there’s so much nuance, which I think is really new and especially like I have a TCM education that we a lot of people have here.

[MAYA] (10:22)

It’s definitely different. I like to tell, well, I mean, I think, honestly, I was listening to an interview actually today with Bob Quinn, and he was talking about the receptors on the skin and how we know so little about the neurological brain of the skin. It really was a great interview. And I think the Japanese from a very early stage in their medicine caught onto this idea that the skin is perhaps our best teacher. It was more than likely because Japanese medicine developed, was developed by blind practitioners more than those who were cited in China, they weren’t allowed to touch the body in Japan, they had to touch the body. This idea of of taking your medicine, taking the meridians, taking the points, taking your technique and making it really in your hands, making it a manual medicine, a trade, really, and not a doctorate scholarly program, is I think, as you said, very much different from what most people are introduced to in TCM education which becomes a very cerebral event, which I think is beautiful. Most TCM practitioners that I know, I’m like, wow, you could outtalk me any day. Like, I have no idea what you’re saying and that theory is so amazing. You just sounded so smart. Because that’s just not who I am. I’m really, when it comes down to it, my dad was a bus driver, my meat packer and I just, I come from more humble roots.

[MICHELLE] (11:56)

Whenever people ask me, what is acupuncture education like, I usually start by, I mean like, I try to explain it, but to give like a broad picture, I usually mention like, it’s like a trade school in that you are learning to do something. You are learning a very specific skill with your hands. It’s like an electrician or a plumber. You have a situation in front of you, you assess and diagnose and then you have to do something with your hands to make a change. So I always think that is a really beautiful thing about acupuncture, because sometimes I will have marketing students who are like, I just need to take one more class and then I’ll be marketable. They’re graduated acupuncturists. Like they already have their degree but they’re in my marketing programs. And I’m like, but your whole degree makes you marketable from the very beginning because you know this incredible hands-on skill, very particular. It’s essentially like going to a trade school, you might want some apprenticeship. That’s a gross oversimplification. But I’m always trying to encourage people by that fact to be like, you learned this hands-on thing, you could just get in there and start using it and pulling in patience and start a business. Like, that’s incredible and so unique in this, in the education that people are getting today. So I think it’s a good angle,.

[MAYA] (13:27)

Well, and honestly, the reason why I structured ShinKyu the way I did as a lifetime mentorship, it’s not a one-off class. It’s not a two-year apprentice. It’s a lifetime mentorship. I structured it that way because I was really, when I moved back from Japan, in Japan you study with your teachers every single month for your lifetime. You have opportunities to study every week and because they don’t have continuing educational units, once you’re licensed there, you’re licensed for life. So there’s no, I have to take another class, there’s no, I need to have a higher degree. You just have your license and then you try to get good at what you’re good at. That’s what I was really trying to achieve with ShinKyu, because I think when people can have mentorship, especially like they come out of school, and I hear this from so many of my students, they come out of school and they’re super excited and they’re like, “Finally I’m done with school. That was, oh, I’m just so over it and I’m done.”

(14:24)

And then they get plopped into the real world and they’re like, now what? Like, I have no mentorship, I don’t have anybody to talk to, and it becomes really, it’s a very scary experience, I think. So for me to bridge that gap between not only graduation and the clinic, to be that like second voice of advice to that practitioner, but also as you say, to just say like, look, you don’t need to have tongue style and this style and facial and this and that. Just like, pick one thing and get really good at, you don’t, in my opinion, and this is so controversial, and I’m sure people get mad at me, I don’t think you need a doctorate degree. I don’t think you need your Ph.D. in order to be marketable.

(15:13)

Now if you think you need that for your own thing, or if you want to work with doctors and hospitals, I get that. But to be marketable to the everyday client, you just need your acupuncture license. You need the degree that you went to school and you have your license from whatever body that your state or country requires. Then in my opinion, you need a mentor, someone who can just stand in and just say, like you do with advertising, it’s the same thing like, I’m not sure how to reach this ideal client. What’s the best way to do it now? Then you find someone who’s really good at that like you and you can now be like, “Well, I was trying this and it didn’t work. What’s your thoughts?” You have someone tell us, my dad says, “Beat it off of them,” as my dad likes to say. It’s just so important to be able to have someone you can consistently refer and talk to. That’s what gives you confidence and over and above that you just have to treat. You have to treat and you have to get good at treating, not at going to classes every weekend.

[MICHELLE] (16:19)

I remember graduating and instantly feeling the lack of a mentor. I’m in a pretty rural area and well, I did work, I worked about an hour from here in the beginning and there were a lot of acupuncturists there, but I really didn’t know how to approach people even to ask if they might be open to being my mentor. It would’ve been like cold calling them, just being like, oh, hey, I’m a stranger. I’m also “slightly competitive,” because I’m in your community, but can I come ask you questions? Like, I have this

[MAYA] (16:52)

I mean, what an awkward conversation?

[MICHELLE] (16:52)

Yes, and I have this really difficult patient, I’m trying to prescribe them herbs, like, do you want to spend an hour with me, like going through an herbal prescription? And for a little while, my acupuncture class, like the other people that I graduated with, we had a, we created a Facebook group and we were very active and that’s where we would like share our questions and get feedback. But I think there’s really something to be said for the, like you said, the confidence that you build when you have a mentor who’s significantly ahead of you in their career and their experience. And I know, I’ve seen emails come from, I think the New York state acupuncture, like the state group requesting people who are willing to be mentors. So I think more and more people are realizing that that is really what builds strong practitioners. It’s really helpful.

[MAYA] (17:45)

It’s really lacking in our community. I mean, honestly I think to build, even just to build ShinKyu University, honestly, I sought out a mentor and that’s what really was able to allow me to build the platform. So I went as I like to do onto YouTube, because I’m a very visual learner, and I found a gal named Sunny Lenarduzzi, who put together a program called the Authority Accelerator. It’s essentially like a business in a box for what I’m doing with ShinKyu, and it taught me every single thing, every step I needed to do, the market research I needed to do, what platforms to use initially, how to present my material, how not to get overwhelmed. Like it gave me all of this information. I was able to really excel quite quickly with ShinKyu because of that mentorship. And I still have that mentorship. Her program is also lifetime mentorship and membership.

(18:39)

It’s just so important because I see people coming in and wanting to study Japanese medicine. I have people who joined my very initial launch of ShinKyu years ago who had been studying acupuncture, no joke, Japanese at medicine for over 20 years and they still felt, they were studying for over 20 years. They probably had spent over $20,000 and they still felt that their foundation was lacking and like the amount of time and money and energy, yes, it’s important that the journey is important, but I think if you can have someone on your marketing path, on your business building path, on your Japanese medicine, whatever you’re trying to learn, to have someone as a guide on that path to show you that quickest route to the top of the mountain is just, it can really, really quickly change your life and it’s so important.

[MICHELLE] (19:32)

I think it does really accelerate both people’s like learning and understanding and their confidence as we’ve been talking about.

[MAYA] (19:40)

Yes, a hundred percent.

[MICHELLE] (19:42)

So you had laid out earlier what the university looks like, so it’s prerecorded videos and then they have access to you online and then they have access to you in person? I think you mentioned that prior to that you were trying to help people actually go to Japan and like arrange to study there. So what made you shift away from that? Was that very difficult or was it just too much?

[MAYA] (20:04)

I actually haven’t shifted away from it. I originally was doing, I was helping on the InTouch Japan Seminar, which I’m also actually hosting in November. It’s going to be a amazing program. We’re going to be studying at my school alongside students at my school. It’s just going to be great. So instead of doing that, what I really realized, and to be, one of the reasons why I followed you for so long, Michelle, honestly because It’s exactly what you’ve been doing as well. There’s this gap in between the desire to learn and the in-person content and then the follow up after that. There’s this huge gap that exists. That gap exists because like, I have a, one of my students, he lives, he’s a doctor in northern Italy, only doctors are allowed to practice acupuncture in Italy and he is not only a regional doctor, but he’s also the acupuncturist for two different towns. So he sees like three to 400 clients a day.

[MICHELLE] (21:00)

Wow. A day or week?

[MAYA] (21:03)

I think he’s also a doctor. No, a day. Isn’t that insane? I can’t even either. But he’s also a western medical doctor and he was, before he joined the platform, he was like, the only way I can study acupuncture is to go into Rome. That’s a, I think he said it was like three or six hours from where he is one way, and he’s like, I’d have to take off two days off of my practice. Like I would be missing how many hundreds of clients by just doing that. And he’s like, I can’t because I’m the only doctor for my area. I can’t physically take that time off. So there’s people all around the globe, and definitely in the US too, as you were saying, even where you are is quite rural, that they don’t have the means to study with a teacher every month in person. They can’t go talk to their marketing coach in person every week like they need to.

(21:56)

That’s the reason why I decided to not just do the seminars and just do the workshops, but to also add in prerecorded content I think is really important because there’s stuff that you can learn on your own. There’s stuff that you don’t need to attend a live lecture for that you can watch at 5:00 AM or 7:00 PM or on your lunch hour, that you can learn and exceed your practice or your marketing skills or whatever. Then there’s stuff that you need to have that in-person, live feedback, but you might not be able to be in-person, so at least it can be live feedback. That’s what the second phase of my platform really is, which is live classes every month, several of those classes, plus also a Facebook community where we can all chat with each other, answer questions, look at techniques, talk about different approaches and all of that stuff.

[MICHELLE] (22:43)

Then the third phase would be coming to your office to work with you in person?

[MAYA] (22:49)

Yes, third phase is in-person workshops, really. That’s the traditional model I think that most people in the US are used to, which is I’m going to go to a workshop once a year or something and get my CEUs. And for me it’s either you coming to work with me in person in a small group format or to go to something more like go to Japan. And my whole premise is to get you the foundation that you need to have in order to study with a really phenomenal teacher. So my job is to prepare you and prepare the foundation, and then you can take it to the next level. It’s definitely a very in-depth class, in-depth platform, but I think it’s really what’s needed in order to fill that gap in the educational system right now.

[MICHELLE] (23:32)

I think that a lot of people are looking for that, the depth and the nuance, they really want to be walked through that so that they, again, I mean, I keep bringing up the word confidence, so that they can have a lot of confidence that they are doing it well and prepared for that next step.

[MAYA] (23:53)

Exactly. And part of my outreach, you mentioned YouTube, because I have several, I want to call them students, they’re not in my platform, but that subscribe to my YouTube channel. They’re actually acupuncturists in India and in South America. Those practitioners, unfortunately, I live in a first world country and they do not. So my prices are of a first world country and for them, that’s like buying a home. So there’s a lot of people that through my YouTube content, I’m able to really help their practice, even though it might not be to the same degree as I could within the coaching platform, but I’m able to at least reach those individuals and start to spread the word about what I feel my teachers taught me was important about Japanese medicine. To be honest, bringing the conversation full degree back to marketing, YouTube has been hands down the best marketing tool that I have ever found. It’s really phenomenal.

[MICHELLE] (24:56)

And do you feel like that is the case because YouTube is ultimately a search engine?

[MAYA] (25:03)

Yes, I mean, it’s a search engine that’s owned by Google. Not only that, but it’s evergreen content. So unlike Instagram and Facebook, which eventually, on Facebook, and you can look up people’s feeds and go back in history through their content but —

[MICHELLE] (25:20)

But you wouldn’t.

[MAYA] (25:21)

That’s not, you wouldn’t, yeah, you won’t, it’s not made for that. TikTok is not made for that, really in the end you can, but it’s not made that way. I mean, with YouTube, the algorithm creates this evergreen content that consistently pops you up onto people’s feeds and consistently, the consistency, they’ll get reminders of videos that you put out. It’ll say, “Hey, how about this content they put out seven years ago,” boom, they put it in the feed. So it’s just, it’s a really great platform I think, that not a lot of acupuncturists have perhaps utilized up to this point.

[MICHELLE] (25:57)

Yes, I have not seen too many acupuncturists who are truly established on YouTube. You mentioned Sunny Lenarduzzi and her program. I’m sure people will have questions. So in addition to all of your links, of course we’ll pop her link for her program in the bottom because I really do think that a lot of acupuncturists are interested in creating some online course or program, but they feel intimidated by the tech and that idea of what does it mean to create evergreen content for YouTube as marketing. You were saying that she walks you through all of that, right?

[MAYA] (26:36)

Yes, I mean, it’s essentially a business in a box. It’s an amazing program to go through. But I will say that, if you as a person are like, I hate technology, perhaps starting an online teaching platform maybe not the right choice. Maybe just sticking to, like for my clinic, honestly, I’ve only ever run one ad for my clinic. It got me one patient, cost me like $170, she’s still my patient, but —

[MICHELLE] (27:15)

Okay, so it paid for itself. I mean,

[MAYA] (27:16)

Yeah, she’s been my patient for like four years now, but I’ve only ever run one ad and everything else for my clinic, honestly, I just, I’m in a lot of, because again, I do pediatrics, there we go, pediatrics and perinatal. So I’m just in a lot of mom groups. And I’m a mom myself and so when people mention in the mom groups, like, “My kid has X, Y, Z, can it, what do you do,” and I just say, “Hey,” I call shonishin, which is the Japanese version of pediatric acupuncture, I call it acutherapy, acupuncture for kids without the puncture. So I say, “Hey, Japanese, gentle and effective Japanese acupuncture can help with that. That’s totally my jam. Let me know if I can help.” I just tag myself so I’m essentially advertising without spamming.

[MICHELLE] (28:02)

And this is on Facebook, right?

[MAYA] (28:04)

Yes, I just do that on Facebook and just in the mom groups or in the local neighborhood groups. And honestly, that alone has given me almost that, and just networking with other practitioners has given me a very, very full practice. I mean, if you’re just like me and you have a small little clinic and you’re teeter tottering along and you’re happy to be with your one room clinic, then I think honestly that’s enough. That’s enough, but if you’re looking to go a little bit more major scale than unfortunately, tech is something you have to get over.

[MICHELLE] (28:39)

Do you, so do you feel like acupuncturists can have success building their practices using YouTube? Because everybody I think is familiar with the idea of generating content. So you can sell an online class or, but that just the idea of like selling an online program or something like that. But I think that people don’t often think about building a YouTube channel to market their practice. But I could see how it would be very useful in, for nothing else establishing their authority as an expert.

[MAYA] (29:12)

I do think it would be amazing because if we just take it out of the context of acupuncture, people all around the United States and Canada and around the world really have created really massive local businesses simply by having a YouTube channel. I mean, there’s so many examples of this just within, again, the authority accelerator program that I’m in, but people who, because Sunny originally started out as a YouTube coach and then built it into like a coaching platform. But there was a guy in there who had, I think he was making like a thousand dollars a day just on YouTube teaching people how to marbleize their countertops because that’s what he did in his business. So just with the ad revenue alone, that’s a bonus. But then he also became a leader in his industry because of those YouTube channels, and he was able to start selling products for it and all of that. So, if you can think of it is acupuncture really that different? Well, I’m sure you go through in your program how people have to hear you at least 10 times.

[MICHELLE] (30:20)

Yes.

[MAYA] (30:20)

To even recognize that it’s a name that they should pay attention to. If they hear you on YouTube talking about, let’s say pediatrics, what I do, like this is how you treat kids, and this is what I see commonly in kids, and this is like the related illnesses that I see to acid reflux in kids and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I just do all of that on YouTube as essentially a plug for my clinic, what’s going to happen is when people look up, because you can tag your local area on YouTube as well. If people go into Google and like pediatric acupuncture, it’s going to pop, pop, pop, pop up all over the place. If you’re doing also other marketing, taking those videos and putting them into mom’s groups and saying again, like, oh, my kid has eczema, what to do, you’re like, oh, I just made a video on eczema and kids, why don’t you watch it, now you have so much more content, you become an authority. That’s what really YouTube does, it makes you an authority. That’s why I really, I just think it’s a really powerful platform. It’s a very powerful platform.

[MICHELLE] (31:26)

I know that a lot of acupuncturists have a hard time with the idea of promoting themselves as an authority.

[MAYA] (31:34)

Oh God, yes

[MICHELLE] (31:36)

The way that I try to ask people to think about it is at no point do you ever have to say like, “Hey, I’m really good at this.” And I think this is definitely a fear that we have. I mean, I find that most acupuncturists are pretty modest and we have an awareness of how deep and amazing the medicine is, and therefore how much we, like we know what we don’t know. Sort of approach. And that can be very healthy because it makes us want to keep learning forever and I think that’s another reason that people love this profession, is because they know they can truly continue learning forever and ever. But then that also makes them really reluctant at any point in their career to be willing to be that authority, to be seen and to be “like the person” on YouTube, even locally or regionally, who is the expert in natural skincare or pediatric approaches or fertility. Do you have any suggestions because you, I don’t know if you went through that, but, hopefully you’re on the other side of it with having produced content for so many years.

[MAYA] (32:42)

No, maybe.

[MICHELLE] (32:42)

I’ll admit I’m not always on the other side of it either. I’m like doing my best.

[MAYA] (32:48)

I actually, funny enough, just when I was talking about in the Facebook referencing a video to share your content, I actually made an entire video about this topic on YouTube called imposter syndrome. I think imposter syndrome, essentially it’s what you were for the most part, describing, for the most part. I know it’s a little different, but I think it’s the evil little monster in the closet that most of us acupuncturists don’t want to talk about because. When we talk to each other, of course we’re talking to rivals. So we’re, “Oh my God, my clinic’s so busy and all of this.” But geez, an example of how this is, I mean, it’s plagued me my whole life and everything I’ve ever done, but right before I moved back from Japan to the United States is before I got my license here, and I was, we were on one of the InTouch seminars, and I had arranged for my teacher, Yassida-sensei to treat one of the participants at her hotel room.

(33:42)

So I would go with him to be an “interpreter,” although he didn’t really need it. Mainly it was just me trying to go so I could watch and learn. And you got to take what you can get. We were walking to the hotel and I asked him, I said, “Yass de sensei, I know I’m going to move to the US and people are going to expect me to teach, and I don’t feel ready. I don’t know anything compared to you. I’m a baby. like.” I asked him, I said, “When will I finally feel confident in my skills to be able to teach this to other people?” He was like, “Well, how long have you been practicing?” At the time, I think it was about 10 years, and he was like, “Oh, I’ll give it another 10 years and you’ll have a clue.”

(34:31)

It’s so true that that’s like, it stayed with me because nobody, no matter how much training you have until you’re 20, 30, 40 years into this profession, do you even realize the vastness of our medicine? But on the other side, I brought the same teacher, Yassida-sensei, here to Colorado where I’m at to teach a workshop before Covid happened and we were walking through Pearl Street Mall up in Boulder. I was showing him around town and I was telling you about this client who I had him treat at the workshop and I was like, “This client has ulcerative colitis and I just, I can help him to get his pain to go away, but nothing really helped his UC. Nothing really healed him to the degree that I would want him to be like miraculous, I’m healed. I never need western medicine again. That’s what we want.” I asked him, “What am I doing wrong? What did I miss? What can I do better? I just want to help him so much.”

(35:24)

He looked at me and he went, “Maya, you can only do what you can do today. You can’t do any more than that. You have to accept that.” I was like, “That is not the answer I wanted. It’s not the answer I was looking for. Yassida-sensei.” But it’s true, you can only do what you can do today and if you know what you can’t do today, well then great. Find a mentor who can teach you how to do that tomorrow. But until then, show up for what you can do today and have confidence in what you can do today. If your patient asks you, “Hey, do you know how to do this,” tell them the truth. Be like, “I haven’t done that yet, but I’m willing to give it a good shot if you are.”

[MICHELLE] (36:04)

I love that. I always remind my marketing students that if they are, say they’re putting together like a series of Instagram videos where they just talk about like some basic concepts in like Chinese medicine, fertility, they’re trying to give their audience like a basic understanding so that they can also have the opportunity to say that these are the ways in which I can help, I remind them that they only need to be one step ahead of their audience in order to have something to teach them. You don’t have to be all the way, like 20 years ahead. You just have to know, be able to teach them like one thing that could potentially change their life. Give them one little piece of advice. I always think about the simplicity of teaching people who have digestive issues about skip your frozen smoothie for a couple days, and see how you feel and like, almost always they feel better. That to us is very basic.

(37:05)

Frozen foods are hard on the digestive fire, but that is brand new sparkly, magical concept for people who are not familiar with it and it can have an almost immediate impact on their quality of life. So you could think that’s just one step ahead of them in this knowledge and experience. And I think that sometimes that perspective is really helpful for people to say, okay, I’m going to bite the bullet and I’m going to make that content and I’m going to release it. I would also add that I know people are very afraid of the trolls and the haters on the internet when they release things. I would say that that really does not happen nearly as often as people are imagining.

[MAYA] (37:47)

Yes, no, listening to what you were saying, I just come back to this really foundational saying of my entire life because at my core being at my core being Michelle, I am so lazy

[MICHELLE] (38:02)

I don’t believe that for a second but I appreciate it

[MAYA] (38:03)

Oh, I really am. It’s like my inner, my inner being is just this lazy, lazy, I want to sit on the couch all day and do nothing person. So my mantra for how I teach people, for how I do things is just that old saying, kiss, keep it simple, silly, or there’s other ways to say it. But it’s just, even when I teach basics in Japanese medicine, you have to keep it really simple and I think if you’re teaching a non-medical audience, they don’t have the capacity or the education to absorb more than one fact per video, to be quite honest. More than one fact, perhaps per week or month. So you could take an entire month to, you were talking about frozen smoothies, take a whole month and make five or six little one minute videos for Instagram that you can make in a half hour.

(39:06)

They don’t have to be perfect, and you don’t have to be eloquent in your words, they don’t have to be scripted, just talking like you would any day and just be like, so you shouldn’t do this, and we’ll tell you why tomorrow and the next day like, this is why you shouldn’t do it in western medicine. I’ll tell you why in eastern medicine tomorrow. And just very simple little things. But what that does when you can approach people, when you can, especially when you’re coming to from, like I’m teaching acupuncturists, so we have a different level of education that I have to approach my students at, but if I’m approaching my clients, I take the adage that my teachers taught me, which is you have to approach them where they’re at.

(39:45)

Your clients do not have, for the most part, will not have any medical terminology in their brains. Even nurses, honestly, they don’t want you to talk to them in western anatomical medicine. They want you to talk to them normally most of the time. Talk to them like they’re your mom. You wouldn’t go talking to, most people wouldn’t talk to their moms about this western anatomical digestive enzyme and blah, blah, blah. Like they would break it down and like we say this term in TCM, stomach fire. Well, what exactly does that mean in everyday language? Let me tell you what your stomach fire is. Think of it like your digestive juices. They’re acidic. They burn things and melt them down. Well, when you cool things down, then those acids cannot produce like they need to and then they have to over, and then you can start to embellish on that language. Just got to keep it simple.

[MICHELLE] (40:44)

Simple, yes, simple I think is always the way to go, especially because people’s attention span seems to, it just continues to become less and less on social media. I agree with you that like one concept at a time that’s digestible, that’s manageable. I also really love the idea of having a larger concept, like I want to talk about frozen smoothies and digestion, but breaking it down into five or six really short videos because I find that a lot of my marketing students, they enjoy writing and they can be proliferative writers. They’re going to write a blog post. It is going to be 4,000 words. It is exquisitely detailed. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I also have, I had a teacher in junior high who I used to write the longest essays for him for history and he was, “Michelle, you have verbal diarrhea.” I was like, “Mr. Gambi, I really, really want that to be a compliment.”

[MAYA] (41:48)

It’s funny

[MICHELLE] (41:49)

Point taken.

[MAYA] (41:50)

I have the exact opposite problem I think, in that I am the worst writer on the planet and I have confirmed this. No, no, no, so I took a writing class in college because I had to take one, and my teacher is, very intro level writing, and my teacher literally told me, “I have never met someone who can speak so well and write so poorly.” I was like, he literally told me that and I was like, thank you. I’m going to take that as a compliment. I literally said that to him because there’s no change in it. It’s funny because I can do video content all day long, but when it comes to writing out the blurb for your graphic or your, oh my God, I’ve actually started farming that out because I’m such a horrible writer and I don’t want to do it.

[MICHELLE] (42:41)

Well, I think that for anything, any business that we run, we have to lean into our strengths. Yes. And eventually we have to be willing to delegate and release control and let other people manage the things that we either don’t like or are not very good at. That will, I think it’s instantly liberating.

[MAYA] (42:59)

Oh, it’s amazing.

[MICHELLE] (43:01)

When I think of those marketing students that I have who love to write those 4,000 word blog posts, I always encourage them to simplify if they can and if they just cannot, because some people, you wrote something beautiful and it’s hard to like, it’s hard to simplify it too much for feeling like it’s losing the essence of what you were trying to say. In that case, I encourage them to break it into 4,000 words, break it into eight separate blog posts, like 500 words each, short and sweet. And part of that is, and this is a slight tangent, so I’ll be brief, but part of that is like you’re writing a blog post on your website, every post is a new page on your website. And Google is paying attention to how often you are updating or publishing new content, so instead of taking that enormous effort and writing, publishing this huge essay in just one page, get as much mileage as you can, get eight new pages on your website for Google to index with all your keywords. Then in addition to that, yeah, I think it is a beautiful way to break down video content as well. If you are thinking about this big concept, break it into much smaller pieces so that you have something to publish next week.

[MAYA] (44:21)

Exactly. Well, —

[MICHELLE] (44:22)

You don’t put this huge work into creating something enormous and then publish it and then be like, well, my God, now I have to do that again for next week, no, no, no,

[MAYA] (44:30)

Well, I mean, and I think too, I love that, I love exactly what you said. Again, if you had eight pieces of that 4,000 word content, and now you can take each one of those pieces and you can make them into two to three different Instagram and Facebook posts by summarizing different parts of that blog post with a graphic or with a small video, whatever you want it to do, and you can, I mean, you literally have to, for the most part, just copy and paste. Right now I’m taking a little hiatus from YouTube content, simply because I’m preparing for the InTouch Japan Seminar. I have tons of translation to do, but when I am making YouTube content, I will make a YouTube video, and then I’ll take maybe five to 10 screenshots or small video splices of that YouTube video, and I’ll bring those into reels for Instagram and Facebook, shorter ones for posts for Instagram and Facebook.

(45:29)

I can put the reels on TikTok as well, and I’m really just copy and pasting. I’m not making, I’m not, I know you should individualize content, but I really don’t. Then you can take, I can even take what I said in the YouTube video and just make it into a transcript or I can say like, I mentioned, I made a video a long time ago about imposter syndrome, like, do you suffer from imposter syndrome? I know I do and I always have. Here’s some of the, here’s my struggle. Does it resonate with you? Like it doesn’t have to be this overwhelming task to proliferate your blog post or your YouTube video or your TikTok video, even if that’s where you want to have people go to. It can be very relaxed and you can take an hour out of your day once a week and just make all your content for the next two or three weeks and bam, bam, bam and get it done.

[MICHELLE] (46:26)

Yes, repurposing content, I think is really underestimated. I have a chapter inside my online marketing program, Acupuncture Marketing School, that is all about different ideas for repurposing content and I spend a little bit of time convincing people why it’s such a good idea. I think it’s pretty obvious. It’s like you don’t have to recreate the wheel every single week that you are doing your social media marketing. Take something you’ve already written and then just recreate it for all these different platforms. I’m a big fan of the copy and paste. And I am in the process of rerecording Acupuncture Marketing School. So this will be version 3.0, which is very exciting. And I am rearranging some of the chapters and trying to really focus on how can I emphasize repurposing content in the beginning, because I think where it is situated in the course right now, it gets a little lost. But as social media and YouTube and other search engines like Pinterest, as all of those become more and more massive and important for marketing, I think that repurposing content is like the number one way that we can save our sanity and be effective. So I think it’s like, if you’re not repurposing content, like that’s got to be a core tenet of everyone’s social media strategy moving forward. So I’m thinking about ways where I can like, restructure the class and just constantly be like, did you write this already? Don’t write it again.

[MAYA] (47:55)

Please don’t.

[MICHELLE] (47:57)

Please copy and paste.

[MAYA] (47:58)

Please don’t redo yourself over and over again. But I even think like, so with YouTube in particular, you can go back in time and it becomes evergreen content. And I love evergreen content. It is beautiful and again, because at my core being I am extremely lazy and I do not want to repeat myself over and over again. So you can go back and say like, okay, five YouTube videos ago I did an interview with Aaron. Great interview by the way, if you’re interested. It’s a really great interview. A little plug there. But I can go back —

[MICHELLE] (48:37)

We’ll link it in the show notes.

[MAYA] (48:39)

I can go back today to an interview that I did with him six months year ago, and I can read, use that content. I don’t have to consistently make a new YouTube video or a new reel every week. I can recycle it simply by making content today that goes back and references it. Because it doesn’t mean, just because I did the video a year ago doesn’t mean it’s any more relevant than it was then. It’s a great interview. but it’s now been a little lost because It’s old. So you can go back and you can even repost on Facebook and Instagram. Honestly just repost it. No one’s going to know.

[MICHELLE] (49:21)

That’s probably my number one secret for success on Instagram is on the weeks where I’m like, man, I am busy, I do not know what to post, I will scroll back into my feed and just look at what content seemed to do well and get some engagement. I will copy the caption and all the hashtags and then I will maybe find a new image. If it was long ago enough, like a year ago, I will just use the same image and repost it again. So that is, that’s my probably my number one hack for when you feel stuck and you have no idea what to post. In particular on Instagram, just find something that did well in the past and repost it. You could do that for like, several weeks of content and I guarantee no one will notice. Or because it was such a long time ago and it disappears on your feed.

[MAYA] (50:10)

Or just splice it in. You can make with, one of Sunny Lenarduzzi things in which I haven’t enacted a hundred percent, I’m not the best student, which is like you take one day a month that you block just to make content. So you would make Your four or five YouTube videos and all of the ads and everything that goes with it in one day and you would just block it. You change four times if you don’t want people to see that you’ve making it in a row. You just block and make your content in a row. It’s a really great idea when you can do it. But something that you can do is you can say, I have enough time to make, if you’re going to do blog, let’s say, or a YouTube video, I have enough time to make two new blogs or videos per month. So what I’m going to do is this month, the first week I’m going to have something new, the second week is going to be something recycled from two years ago, the third week I’m going to do something new and the fourth week I’m going to do something recycled from a year ago.

[MICHELLE] (51:05)

I love that.

[MAYA] (51:06)

So you can, again, I really want to encourage people to just be lazy.

[MICHELLE] (51:12)

Save your sanity.

[MAYA] (51:14)

Yes, enjoy life just a little bit. Enjoy the medicine. You’re working your tail off in your clinic, I’m sure for your clients. Advertising is not why any of us got into this business. I mean, maybe Michelle, you love advertising, I think, but …

[MICHELLE] (51:27)

I found it later, so it’s certainly not the reason I went into it.

[MAYA] (51:31)

But it’s, I would say it’s not like my happiest place in my job. Advertising is not my happy place, but it’s something we all have to do. So you have to wait to make, just like find a way to make it doable and relaxed and informative, reaching that target audience, all the things that you teach are just so important. I think before we do any of that, honestly, and something we haven’t talked about yet is what really is your target audience? Like let’s just do some market research about that before you start making all this crazy content. Do some market research first and save yourself some anxiety and a lot of wasted time. Because a lot of times who you think is your target client really isn’t.

[MICHELLE] (52:22)

I always tell my students, because target market and your ideal patient avatar get a really bad reputation. They’re like very unsexy topics and people are like, do we, do we have to do this? It feels like it’s theoretical and I don’t know how to apply it to my marketing. So that’s a big part of Acupuncture Marketing School as well is here’s how to define these things for yourself and then here’s how to take that and make that leap and incorporate what you now know into your marketing message so that it speaks to them. I think it is really intimidating for people to think about doing that whole process on their own because they don’t know where to begin. So I would tell people who are listening, just begin by, if you don’t want to join acupuncture marketing school, which totally should, you should, shameless plug, just begin by Googling target market worksheet and ideal client avatar worksheet. There are lots of things on the internet that will start the process for you.

(53:22)

And then they can understand exactly what you mean when you say it’s really rough to start creating content and then realize that you were not speaking as ideally as you could to the people that you’re trying to reach. It’s rough to realize you could have done it better. So it’s better to have a strong foundation and awareness of who you’re talking to so that you can tailor that message to them. Then I really believe this to my core, that when you are speaking directly to your target market, that makes your marketing so much more efficient, that you have to do less of it overall. So it’s more work on the front end, and then you can sort of let it roll and snowball and build upon itself in the future.

[MAYA] (54:05)

A hundred percent. Before I created ShinKyu University, again, it was something that the Sunny program, the Authority Accelerator taught me to do, thankfully, but before we even begin building our program, our teaching program, the first thing that they require you to do is they have a worksheet saying like, write down all the things that you think are your strengths. What are the struggles that you’ve been through? Now ask your parents, ask five other people what they think your strongest, your strength, your weakness all of that. Then you can get an idea because when you teach something, when you treat somebody, they’re going to come, really, you’re going to start getting, initially you get clients that are you to a degree.

[MICHELLE] (54:48)

Yes, they’re very much like you in your experience.

[MAYA] (54:50)

They’re very much like you in your experience. If you don’t really understand you and your experience you’re going to be marketing to the wrong crowd. Then on top of that, you need to do 50 different interviews with people who want to try acupuncture, but have never done it. Ask them why they haven’t done it yet. Like I interviewed 50 different acupuncturists of varying degrees of education before I even created ShinKyu University because I was like, okay, this is what I think you need to know, but what do you really want to know? What do you think you need to know? For patients too, what practitioner, actually ask every single patient that comes into my office, what care they’re looking for? Do they want someone who is strong? Do they want to be told directly? Do they want to be really cared for? I have all of this wording in my first-time paperwork because that what it does is it allows me to do market research on every single client who comes in the door.

[MICHELLE] (55:47)

Ooh, I love that.

[MAYA] (55:47)

So it’s just part of my first time paperwork and they can just tell me like, I want to have someone who just takes care of it and doesn’t talk to me. They never say that, but they always are looking for some.

[MICHELLE] (55:58)

Thank goodness. You’re like mmh

[MAYA] (56:02)

They’re always looking for someone who is willing to take the extra step and willing to talk them through it and care for them and be very direct. I mean, essentially, they’re looking for me because they’ve come to my clinic and, but it allows me to confirm that with every patient.

[MICHELLE] (56:20)

I think that we would all have a lot more fun marketing if we remembered that it is the intersection of psychology and data. Psychology is really fun. Like what makes people choose one thing or one practitioner over another? What makes them sit up and take notice? Then the data piece comes from the advent of digital marketing where it’s really easy to run a Facebook ad and then get an avalanche of information about all of the people who were interested so that you can course correct and say, wow, I used this wording intending to attract these people, and then these are the ones that I got. Like, do I need to fix it? Am I happy with this? I just think that’s so fascinating, especially when it, when we consider that it starts with the psychology of the human mind.

[MAYA] (57:09)

Well, I mean, and I think bringing our conversation back full circle, my very first day of acupuncture school in Japan my teacher, kudos sensei, walked in and he had a box of needles and he had some moxa and he asked everyone, the students, he said, “What do you think is the most important tool in an acupuncturist toolbox?” People were like, it’s acupuncture and someone was like, no, it’s moxa, someone was like, it would be herbs, but we can’t use them anymore because they’re not allowed to in Japan. And he was like, “You’re all wrong. It’s your mouth.” So they literally call your mouth the mouth needle, is the direct translation for that. But really, I mean, communication is the most powerful tool in an acupuncturist toolbox, is to be the psychology, the therapy of it, the talk therapy, I guess you should say. If you’re able to translate that into your advertising, I mean, that can be a really powerful treatment or even initiation for someone into treatment. So if you can think of it that way, maybe it takes a little bit of the boringness out of advertising.

[MICHELLE] (58:14)

I love that. So I have one more question for you that I like to ask everyone at the end of the interview and that is, what is your definition of success?

[MAYA] (58:25)

My definition of success is financial, emotional, and physical. For me, being successful at something, at least as a job, like in in the context of work, means that I can financially support my life, that I love what I do, and that I’m also physically getting the results that I’m actually aiming to get. So for me, without one of those concepts, I don’t think I could ever be successful. It’s probably one of the reasons why I could never just be a director. I know a lot of acupuncturists at a certain point, usually 10 to 15 years, they step back from the clinic and say, “Okay, I’m just a director now. I’m not going to treat in the clinic anymore.” And oh gosh, that would be so boring for me. I would not

[MICHELLE] (59:20)

You like to be hands-on.

[MAYA] (59:22)

Yes, it’s so, like, I don’t think I would feel successful in that.

[MICHELLE] (59:27)

Yes, because you need to see the results.

[MAYA] (59:29)

I need to see the results.

[MICHELLE] (59:30)

The fruits of your labor literally. Well, thank you so much for being here and spending time with us. Where can we find you, your university online?

[MAYA] (59:41)

Thank you for having me. I’ve been digitally stalking you for a very long time.

[MICHELLE] (59:47)

I was going to say, we’ve been talking back and forth for a really long time.

[MAYA] (59:50)

I love what you do and I think it’s just really important for our field to have people like you in it. Yeah, to find me and more of the platform, you can just go to ShinKyuUni.com, which is S-H-I-N-K-Y-U-U-N-I.com. ShinKyu means acupuncture and moxibustion in Japanese, so ShinKyu University, acupuncture, and moxibustion university.com. Then yeah, you can put in ShinKyu University on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or just into Google and it’ll pop me up so you can find me any there.

[MICHELLE] (00:01:23)

Especially YouTube, especially

[MAYA] (00:01:25)

Oh, and YouTube as well.

[MICHELLE] ] (00:01:26)

Awesome. Well, thank you again.

[MAYA] (] (00:01:28)

Thank you for having me. It was such a pleasure.