Dr. Alan Akira is a board-certified psychiatrist and founder of Mugen Psychiatry in Chicago. As an Assistant Professor at Rush University Medical Center, he excels in clinical decision-making, medical entrepreneurship, and healthcare management. His clinical work has been recognized by his home institution, receiving the Rush Emergency Medicine Consultant of The Year award in 2020. Dr. Akira's dedication to education is evident through his receipt of the Aesculapius Award in 2021, presented by the graduating medical student class, for excellence in clinical education. In the Fall of 2021, he was honored with the "Psychiatrist of the Year" award by the Illinois Psychiatric Society, acknowledging his exemplary contributions to the field. Additionally, in 2023, he was bestowed with the Roeske Award for Teaching by the APA, recognizing his outstanding and sustained contributions to medical education. Dr. Akira is known for bridging the gap in psychiatric care and serves as an independent medical examiner for Cook County. With a background in Molecular Biology and residency training at Rush, he is dedicated to advancing mental health care through clinical practice, education, and leadership.
“We are what we consume. It's okay to be vulnerable. Say thank you, say I don't know, and say I'm sorry. Because when you're able to say these kinds of things, it deepens relationships, and it shows the other person who's receiving that communication that you're insightful enough to be graceful to yourself, but also to the people that you're talking with.”
- Alan Akira
Website: https://www.mugenpsychiatry.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-akira-md/
Email: alan.akira@mugenpsychiatry.com
Newsletter: https://tftw.beehiiv.com/
Website: Rewire, Inc.: Transformed Thinking
Hello and welcome, everybody, to this episode of The Insight Interviews. This is your host, Jason Abel and I've got a guest today that is, I don't know, potentially outside the realm of our regular guests that we have, but, oh, so special, so good. Alan Akira is the founder of Mugen Psychiatry. He also teaches at Rush University Medical Center. He's an entrepreneur, and based on the research that I did and based on the prerecording conversation, just an all around cool guy. So, Alan, welcome to the show.
Thanks for the lovely intro, Jason. I'm happy to be here.
I will say this. I know, because some of the research that we did, our first question right out of the box, is same for every single episode that we've done, and it's one that I think is near and dear to your heart, based on what I read and some of the videos of you that I watched. But as you and I engage each other today, Alan, who or what strikes you that you're grateful for today?
I would say I'm definitely grateful for everything that's ever happened in the past, because it's sort of like the Rocky cutscene in life that seems grueling and intense and unfair and unwavering. It feels that way in that moment, but as you would get older and we look back, those become the good old days. I find that the older I get and the more experiences I get under my belt, those are just a lot of good old days. Even the times when things were rough. And without those, I don't think anyone would be where they are today. So that's what I would say I'm most grateful for.
Man, you and I could have a whole podcast episode just dissecting what you just said, just that very first answer. So, thank you very much for that. Yeah, we've done episodes, we've written articles, and I've just pondered on that topic that you just brought up. The bad times, the challenging times, the grueling times, whatever it is, we may not be grateful for it in the moment, but it's what led us here or what led us to the eventual success or the eventual just know or some sort of growth that we experience. So, yeah, thank you for that answer. Very cool. I'm even more excited about our conversation now. All right, Alan, there's going to be people in our audience that will listen to us because they are listeners of ours, but they may not know you yet. And so, would you mind just giving us a minute or two on who the heck you are? And why in the world would a podcast like The Insight Interviews have you as a guest? Just tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yeah, of course. So, I'm a board-certified psychiatrist by training. So, I am a clinician first and foremost. I'm also a founder and practice owner of a psychiatric practice where we work with clinicians of all different kinds of backgrounds from all different stages of training. My strengths or my career thus far has really been focused on thinking better as a clinician as well as academic education. As a trainee, those are kind of the things I doubled down on and focused on and got a lot of reps with. Whether it's talking to more patients, talking to more students, I really found my niche in those two areas.
Well, as you know, and this is why you and I are talking right now, Rewire as a training and development and executive coaching company, we focus on the brain and how people think first and foremost, before we get to the different actions that they're going to take. That's why you and I are talking right now, because you work in that realm. So that's something that we're very interested in and thinking about the way that people are thinking and the “why” behind some of their thinking is super important to us, and I know it's important to you, too. And in fact, I don't know, you said something to me prerecording about, gosh, Jason, I'm just super interested in the “why” behind thinking when it comes to the topic of leadership. And so, I'd love for you to expand on that. I know that's kind of a wide-ranging question. You can take that wherever you want to, but how would you respond to that?
I think with my background in clinical education, the thing I see often is explanations of the “what”. In my experience, if you can read, if you can consume content, we can all learn the “what” quite easily, whether in any topic, whether it's educational, academic, or some kind of hobby. I think what's harder to teach is the “why.” And when I think about how to think this way, it always comes down to what are the core beliefs at the base of the understanding. So whenever someone has an explanation, whenever someone has a goal, whenever someone has a desire, you can always backwards think it into the question of, well, what is the underlying belief that's feeding that thing? And in terms of leadership, there's many different things I've come across that help me understand how people work, how businesses work, how you get to convince people that may want to work with you. So, I would say those things were related to things like, why do people work with certain people? Is it because working with them is beneficial to a solo individual, or could there be a value exchange between two people? I found it's always between a value exchange, and those are the things that if you can create a system where everyone wins, that's the thing people will want to do more than one person winning and one person losing, which is something I've seen a lot, in a lot of business deals and a lot of relationships in general.
Well, you know, gosh, our friend Simon Sinek has made a whole career out of this finding your “why” deal, which is related to what you're saying, but I get the sense that you're even talking at a deeper level, and I'm sitting here nodding my head. Of course, the “why” is more important. Of course, having a win-win is better than a win-lose, which, like you said, you've observed. Is there an example, gosh, I don't know either in your activities as a clinician or your activities as an entrepreneur, founder of your organization, where, I don't know, you observed what you're talking about in action?
Yeah. I think this even concept of win and lose is binary thinking. And what I'll share is, as a clinician, I've come across lots of stories of talking to folks, and one of the topics that comes out a lot is the topic of suffering from past trauma. And when we look at folks who have past traumas, sometimes they're unable to move forward because everything in their present and future is clouded based on those instances behind them. But what I find is that that suffering is typically present because there's no clear meaning to the suffering. So, suffering only exists because we haven't assigned meaning to it. And in fact, once meaning can be assigned, one can go through it. I'll give you a quick example, Jason. I talked to someone who had a lifetime history of emotional trauma, and they were thinking, the future is hopeless. And what I asked was, hypothetically, if you were to think about a future, what might you do? And they said, well, maybe I'd become a therapist myself. Well, I said, very interesting. Do you think that being where you are now and the life behind you could give you context and some specialized education on how to be a better therapist than anyone else in the world? Because there are topics that you've seen and you've lived through that might connect you better with the people that you serve, maybe more than someone who hasn't, and I saw the light bulb go off, Jason. They looked at me and they said, actually, yeah. I said, well, isn't that interesting?
"Is it impossible to believe that all your experiences led you to have a very specific meaning and a role that only you could create and provide to others? So that's really what I mean about creating a meaning to the suffering behind us. And that's when kind of that chapter can get closed."
Man, you're making me think of an example. My oldest brother and I, we meet a couple of times a year, and he's just one of my mentors, and I remember a few years ago, I was going through particular rough time, and I was almost in tears saying, this is not how I wanted this year to be, and I really wanted to be growing in this area. And he stopped me, and he said, Jason, you are growing, just not in the area that you thought you'd be growing. You are growing over here. And I was same thing as the example that you just gave. I was just like, yeah, right. It’s a great example. I really like the way that you described that story, Alan, because you didn't tell that person. You were curious with that person, and they came to their own insights, their own lights went off, and that's what we try to do here on the podcast. So, I don't know. I just had some light bulbs go off based on the story that you just gave, and, boy, I hope our listeners do, too. There are some specific kinds of ideas that I'd like you to expand on. When I was kind of doing my research on you, I ran across a couple of things that I just want to ask you about. One, you gave a talk where you talked about the importance of actualizing your gratitude. Now, that just brings us back to the very first question that I asked you. I loved your answer, and I still do, but what do you mean by actualizing your gratitude? I mean, I think I know what that means, but how would Alan describe that?
I'd say just like any other emotional, you know. We've all felt things like gratitude before now. I think it's one of those things where it requires mindfulness to really be in the moment and enjoy that feeling, which might be quite rare for a lot of people. The way our brains are wired, we tend to remember the painful and negative events first. So, if I were to say, hey, Jason, name five times in your life you were super stressed out, that would be really quick. But if I say, name five things that were really great in your life, you'd still be able to answer it, but it'd just be a little bit slower, probably. So, when I say things like actualizing gratitude, it's about learning not only to notice it, but hold it and then share it. Because any emotional state can be felt, but not all of them are shared. Gratitude is one of those things that really compound once it's shared. An example of that would be, you might feel gratitude, but if you never verbalize it, it's like a gift that that's never been given.
Dude, I don't really use Twitter very often, but that's tweetable right there. Gratitude is compounded when it's shared. Man, that's good. Okay, again, I'm going to ask you for an example, either in your own life or one that you observe, maybe with your patients or your students. Take me by the hand like I'm a kindergartner and get super tangible with an example.
I think I'll kind of frame it super general and give you a very specific example. I think right now, the way the world is, we are what we consume, and a lot of the things we're consuming now make us believe that things should be a certain way. And this idea of should or should not, it's really driven by what we are ingesting, whether it's from our social media feeds, the news, what we consume, et cetera. I think that one of the things I've learned is it's okay to be vulnerable, say thank you, say I don't know, and say, I'm sorry. Because when you're able to say these kinds of things, it deepens relationships, and it shows the other person who's receiving that communication that you're insightful enough to be graceful to yourself, but also to the people that you're talking with. So, gratitude is not only something that can be shared, but it can be reflected based on kind of humbling ourselves. So, one of the best doctors I've ever worked with, one of my mentors, he always used to say, the best docs in the world are quickest to say, I'm sorry, I was wrong, and can you teach me something else? And I think being able to humble yourself is a very important skill in a world that's inundated with this idea that it should be sort of glamorous sort of thing.
Yeah, that's good. We are what we consume. Another hot quote from Dr. Alan. Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for that. I don't know if it was an article that I read that you wrote or how you answered one of our booking questions, but we asked you, or again, maybe you were writing on the topic of leadership, and there were three pillars that you expanded upon: responsibility, leverage and operations. I was really curious about that. I love what you wrote about it, but when you think of the topic of leadership and those three pillars, would you mind running through that with us?
Sure. Yeah. So, these topics of responsibility, leverage and operations are the pillars I think about when trying to build and sustain a business. So, for all the folks listening who might be in that camp, I see responsibility as a great filter to find opportunity. Because this is not my quote, this is from Dr. Peterson, “opportunity lives where responsibility has been abdicated”. So, it's not the low hanging fruit that everyone's going for, it's that fruit at the very top that no one wants to go for. And if you were able to see that as an opportunity that can decrease competition, that could have a much higher output than some of the other things that everyone is running towards. So that's a filter I use to look at business ventures.
Before you get to leverage and operations, is it cool if I ask you a question just about what you just said about responsibility there? Your business that you have at Mugen, I think it's your vision, mission and correct me here, but empower individuals to unlock their boundless potential. That sounds like not low hanging fruit to me. That sounds like pretty like that might be at the top of the tree type of thing. Is that an example playing out of what you're talking about around responsibility?
Yeah. Because from an individual level, the topics of things like self-love and confidence, you know, there's millions of videos on these topics, but I might define a little bit differently. I might define self-love or self-gratitude as putting yourself more accountable to yourself than anyone else will put you. And that's being more responsible towards yourself than anyone else would expect you to be to them. Because as human beings we teach others how to treat us based on how we treat ourselves. So, Jason, if you were to see me as an individual who is accountable to the things that I say, to the things that I do, I then teach everyone who's around me, hey, Alan's an accountable person. So, there is a certain way that I have to approach him when I'm talking about things. That's sort of what I mean.
Yeah. That's so good. Thank you. I know that statement was inspirational for me when I read it. Empower individuals to unlock their boundless potential. Anything that you can do that's in that direction, gosh, that's just good for people, individuals, and, I don't know, good for humanity, I think. Okay, let's move to leverage and operations. So, you talked about responsibility, and again, I think I could guess at leverage in operations, but how would you describe that when it comes to the topic of leadership?
So, leverage, just as a basal definition, is getting more out for what you put in, right? So, something that's a one-to-one ratio is not really leveraged, but something that you put one in and get ten out that might be very highly leveraged. The business that I work in, Mugen Psychiatry, we use two levers a lot. So, we use people in the form of our clinicians, and education, which is kind of my background. This kind of ties into that third pillar of operations and I'll share a story, Jason, of where I even came up with these things. I learned pretty quickly, at least in my business, that I, the founder, was my own bottleneck to my business, because there was only so much that I could ever do. It wouldn't matter how efficient I became, how much more experience I had, how much harder I was willing to work, I was always going to be the bottleneck to the business because I'm still one human being. That's when I started thinking about, how can I leverage my skills in education and teach other people to do what I do? It's kind of the network effect of teaching, right? This idea of, I've had a fifth-grade teacher who was very beneficial to me. They motivated me to think deeply about science and even go the premed route. Without them, I might not even be here. And it's just so interesting if you think about how many thousands of students were affected by that teacher. Okay, and all the lessons that they taught, the network effect of those thousands of people, they then taught more people.
Sure.
So, we started using education and people that kind of go together as levers for our business, where I could learn to multiply myself by using those skills.
Yeah, leverage. Yeah, really good. You know, I've heard leverage talked about relatively the same as that, but with a little bit different twist, is how can I get the most output from my people? Okay, great. That's fine. The way that you just described it to me at least, was unique because you started with yourself. Going back to your self-accountability thing that you were talking about is saying, okay, yes, I'm the founder. Yes, I help create this organization. I'm also the biggest problem. I think you said bottleneck, but the biggest bottleneck, but I got to figure out a way around that. And it's this leverage piece that you talked about. It's just kind of the same thing, but a little bit different twist on it, which goes back to something else that you said earlier, just about vulnerability. And so, I'm sensing that what you teach, you also walk yourself. And so, there's some authenticity that I'm sensing there, which is really cool. Okay, the last one, operations, how would you describe that?
I think with experience in any singular thing, you start to see there's a lot of reactive problems that show up. But if you think about reactivity deep enough, you learn that most things probably could have been prevented. And it's very important to me to always look at the number of times mistakes are being made or the number of times the same outcome is happening with a similar situation. If it's not optimal, it must mean there's something wrong with the operations. And in the beginning of my career, I was very much a go-go guy, meaning, if a problem happened, let's solve it and let's move on, but that short term thinking that works great in the moment never works great long term, and it's a quick fix to a long problem. And then what I found myself doing is finding myself trying to put band aids on this wound that kept bleeding until I said, well, why is the bleeding even happening? And if you take a giant step back, learning from people like Sam Carpenter and big operators that I've read on, it was glaringly obvious that there was something wrong with the systems that we had built. And it was another reflective point for me to say, wow, you can't just out manual problems, sometimes you have to take 1000 miles view and then say, okay, the problem is actually the system around it. So, how do we fix the system to be more proactive?
Yeah, pull the lens back for the long-term fix, which isn't always easy or fun or sexy, but rather than just being a firefighter pulling the lens back and going, why is the fire even there, and could we do something different? Because of the day and age that I grew up in when you said, if there was a problem, I'll solve it, I have to take a hard left turn here. It just made me think of Vanilla Ice. “If there's a problem, yo, I'll solve it. Check out the hook while my DJ, DJ robot.” Anyways, anyway, sorry to go there, but I can't help it. And I don't want that to take away from the point that you make, because, man, that was good. Now I see the responsibility piece, leverage and operations. Those are not just kind of keywords that sound really good. Your explanation of those is, at least for me, unique in the way that you're putting all those together, and it sounds like living it out with Mugen. And I know that these are topics that, you know, I've seen your newsletter, and I know that these are topics that you're hitting on. Is it weekly? Are you doing your newsletter weekly or monthly?
Yeah, I just launched a weekly newsletter called Thought for the Week.
Okay.
And we just sent out the first one last week, and we're doing it, yeah, once a week.
Okay, okay. And before we hit record, you and I had just this little back and forth of input versus output. Will that be one of the topics of one of your newsletters maybe in the future?
It was, and just to give the audience some clarity, it really has to do with the topic of goal setting or goal making. Most people measure those based off of a result or a specific output, but what I find, Jason, is that when people chase that output, two things happen. They reach the output only to realize it wasn't what they thought it would be and they don't like the person they became while going there. Or number two, they reach the goal or the output only for the goalpost to be pushed back again.
Yeah.
"And when I reflect on that, it kind of leads me to this conclusion of, it actually doesn't matter as much what the output is, but the person you become whilst you're on the journey."
Oh, man, that's good. Yeah, we've been doing this coaching people for ten years now at Rewire, and very often somebody will come to us or will give us their team to coach, and it is, we want to be better at communicators, we want to make more sales, we want to be able to give better feedback, whatever the particular goal is. And sure, we can help people reach goals, and we do that all the time, but what we're much more interested in is just what you said. Who are you becoming along the way and are you becoming a better communicator, or did you just use this script and communicate good in this moment? We're much more interested in you actually becoming a better communicator, in that instance. And it goes along with exactly what you said there. Well, good. I'm not subscribed to your newsletter, but I want to be, so I’ll make sure that I get information on that. And by the way, listeners, we'll put a link on how to subscribe or to the newsletter in the show notes, so you'll be able to see that. I sense from reading a lot of your background, Alan, and now having this conversation with you that you have a different and fresh approach, and so, I don't know, man, I predict really cool things for your newsletter, for what you're looking to do, and the person that wants to not just attack the low hanging fruit, but to look at the top of the fruit tree and go for that instead is exciting. And so, man, I wish you all the best of luck and the most success in the future, and thank you for being on our show. I feel like our conversation could go on and on, either an episode just about the gratitude piece that you brought up in the beginning- I feel like I could go deeper on the responsibility, leverage and operations and then this input versus output thing. I don't know. I feel like we have three more episodes that we could do together, but anyways, for now, we'll put a pin in it. And I really can't thank you enough for your time today.
Thanks, Jason. And thanks everyone in the audience for having me.
Until next time. Wow, that was such a good one. Dr. Alan Akira of Mugen Psychiatry. Well, besides the Vanilla Ice reference, there were some insights there that I took. I don't know if you caught them all, but this whole idea of gratitude is compounded when it's shared. Boom. That one hit me and hit me hard. And I'm making a commitment to myself today to share some gratitude with people that are close to me, and we are what we consume, man. I know that that's the case, but it was just a good reminder today, and for me in particular, when it comes to either scrolling on social media or the news cycles that we're in right now in a heavily political year, man, I don't know that I want to become all of that. And so, I'm going to recommit myself based on some of the things that Dr. Alan was talking about and just make sure that I'm consuming things that will help me with my own self-actualization. So many, many other insights as well from Dr. Alan Akira. We'll put all of his information in the show notes, but as we say at the end of every episode of The Insight Interviews- Powered, doesn't much matter what my insights are, dear listeners, but what are your insights?
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