What Works

The Nitty Gritty * The breaking point in Lisa’s life that inspired her to turn to herbalism for answers — and why she decided to study herbalism deeper * How Lisa manages her job as a spaceship builder and her herbalism clients * What specific strategies Lisa uses to plan and optimize her daily and weekly tasks * Who, exactly, Lisa works with through her herbalism business — and how she balances client sessions with the unpredictable needs of spaceship building Lisa 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 — and how she balances working as an engineer and working as an herbalist. In this episode of What Works, Lisa shares how she connects engineering and herbalism, what’s so magical about herbalism, and how she optimizes her week around the energy available to her. We release new episodes of What Works every week. Subscribe on iTunes so you never miss an episode. What drew a spaceship engineer to clinical herbalism “I saw an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, and eventually an herbalist who said, ‘here’s what’s going on, sweetheart.’ And she was right. I said, ‘this is magic so I need to learn more about this herbalism thing.’ 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’t thinking of it as a business at that point — just to learn for myself to support my own needs and my family’s needs.” — Lisa Akers At one point in Lisa’s health journey, she ended up in the emergency room, convinced she was suffering from a heart attack. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case — but doctors gave her Xanax to help her mediate the stress she was under from working long hours instead. Dissatisfied 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. “I’m an engineer. I’m trained to search for the root cause so that we can fix it and prevent the symptoms and the indications of failure from happening,” says Lisa. Through her experience with the herbalist who pinpointed her health imbalance, Lisa knew that herbalism worked — and she wanted to learn more about how she could help herself, her family, and eventually clients. Pinpointing and working with ideal clients “I 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’re struggling with diabetes, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, or maybe even cancer. They need a better solution. They don’t 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 — they actually want to make it better so I’m looking for people who want to understand how that works.” — Lisa Akers Lisa knows exactly who she can help: people who want answers to their health woes that they can’t find anywhere else. One way Lisa attracts those folks is through positioning herself as a scientist.  She’s 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. And Lisa’s knowledge and ability to find and understand scientific studies around plants give her a strong foundation to her herbalism bu...