A decade in, and everyone's looking around

My favourite part of any workshop isn't the teaching.

It's the breaks.

Not because I need the coffee, though I do. It's because something shifts when the formal part stops. The teacher-student thing dissolves a little. People stop performing attentiveness and start just talking. And that's where the real conversations happen.

Last weekend I was leaning against the wall during a break, chatting with a few students who had been in practice for about a decade. Good clinicians.

Experienced. The kind of people I honestly learn as much from as they do from me.

And we kept having the same conversation. Different people cycling in, but the same words underneath.

It's part of why I've been thinking about how I run workshops differently going forward. Less lecture, more of this. More room for the conversation that actually wants to happen in the room. But that's a longer story for another time.

What struck me last weekend was this: these weren't people who were burning out. They weren't overwhelmed or defeated. They were doing the math. Quietly, honestly, with a decade of experience behind them. Asking what the next version of this career actually looks like.

One person put it plainly: "I love the work. I just don't know if I can keep doing it this way for another ten years."

Everyone nearby nodded. The kind of nod that means you've been sitting with the same thought but hadn't said it out loud yet.

A decade in tends to be when the body gets honest with you. The thumbs. The wrists. The low back that shows up on a Tuesday after a heavy Monday. You got good at your job and your clients kept coming and somewhere in there you stopped having space to ask whether the way you were working was actually sustainable. You were just working.

And now you're asking.

What I noticed in those conversations wasn't despair. It was something closer to curiosity with a hard edge. These people weren't trying to escape the work. They were trying to figure out what the next version of it looked like. Whether there was a version that didn't cost them as much. Whether the skills they'd spent a decade building could be used differently. Not just more carefully, but in a fundamentally different direction.

That's a different question than "how do I survive this." That's "what do I actually want to build."

I don't think we talk about that threshold enough. The profession does a reasonable job covering the early years. Scope of practice, technique, clinical reasoning, how to build a caseload. It does a much worse job preparing people for year ten. For the moment when competence arrives and the real questions start.

Maybe you're there. Maybe you're close. Maybe you crossed it a while ago and are still figuring out what you found on the other side.

I don't have a tidy answer for what comes next. I'm not sure there is one. But I think naming the threshold honestly is worth something. Because most practitioners I talk to think the restlessness they're feeling is a personal failing, something wrong with their mindset or their work ethic or their gratitude. It usually isn't. It's usually information.

What is it telling you?

Best, Dr. Jess

P.S. If you're in Calgary this fall, I'm running an in-person Acupressure workshop designed specifically for RMTs who want to work smarter, protect their joints, and add genuine clinical depth to their practice. Details coming soon.