1 - The Journey

Toye Oyelese

All right, let's, uh—let's start with a picture, if you will. Just imagine this—seven thousand square feet of empty medical office space, sixteen exam rooms, two big treatment rooms, all set up for… what? Twenty doctors, maybe? But for four years there were just—three of us rattling around in there. Rent due every month, most of the rooms sitting there, collecting dust. I mean, that does something to you. You start betting on a future you can’t see, right? And you kinda wonder—am I nuts, or is this faith? And, honestly, through that whole stretch, the only thing that kept me steady was this—six words, said mindlessly, hundreds of times a day: I will survive. I will thrive. Not rocket science, not belief—just repetition, survival. We'll get to that. But to make sense of why those words mattered, I have to take you back a bit.

Toye Oyelese

So, 1985, I graduate med school in Nigeria. Big moment. Many years of training, finally a doctor. But I move to Canada—and suddenly, none of it counts. My credentials? Not recognized. In the eyes of the system? I wasn't a doctor. Not yet. So, I'm on social welfare for a month—yeah, welfare. Then security guard, night shift. I remember those three months clearly—lots of time to think at 3 AM, let me tell you. After that, I land a factory job, all the way on the production line in Toronto. One day, the compounder leaves, quits on the spot. I hear someone say, "Who can read chemical formulas?" I put up my hand. And next week I'm mixing industrial chemicals—a doctor, back in Nigeria, now triple-checking MSDS labels in a factory basement in Canada. Funny thing, that careful reading? It's like, even now, before I record a podcast, I still find myself triple-checking medical terms, worried I’ll trip over them. Some habits stick. Anyway, I'm not telling you this for sympathy. Honestly. It’s just—when everything you built disappears, you start to learn what you’re made of. You strip everything down to basics and figure out what actually works. That’s the bit I hope people take away.

Toye Oyelese

The real turning point? That came through the Canadian Armed Forces. They had this Medical Officer Training Program—perfect for someone who already did the work, with nowhere to practice. So I joined up. Did my internship in Saskatoon, took all the licensing exams. Suddenly, I go from security guard to Battalion Medical Officer with Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry—try saying that five times quickly, I still get tongue-tied. Later, I was Deputy Base Surgeon in Calgary. Over a couple of decades, I moved all over—Milk River in Alberta, tiny towns, big emergencies, rehab clinics, pain management, you name it. Everything from Norwegian offshore medicals to running travel clinics. Lots of hats. But if you asked me then if I'd ever build my own place, I'd have said no way. But then, 2010, I get this itch—wanting to set up something meaningful, somewhere I could help put down roots. So, British Columbia. West Kelowna. I wanted to build a practice that wasn’t just about one doc in a box, but a proper team—a place where families didn’t have to drive all over the province to get care. So, I built for scale. I figured—“if you dream, dream big,” right? Or maybe I was just impatient. Either way, it was a gamble.

Toye Oyelese

Looking back, it's easy to say, “Oh, that’s vision,” but the truth is—it was part vision, part pure stubbornness. What keeps someone going through that, past all the paperwork and skepticism? Part of it was honestly the obstacles. There’s the licensure maze, sure, but then there's people looking at you—an African Canadian, funny accent, maybe a bit too eager—and you can see it in their eyes: “Is this guy for real?” You get good at reading skepticism. That’s probably the biggest lesson in leadership, if I can call it that—not just having an idea, but learning how to get people on board when they're not sure you belong in the room. The only way through that is persistence and, well, sometimes just putting one foot in front of the other.

Toye Oyelese

But here's where things really got dicey. I had this whole space for twenty docs, and after all the effort—all those years—I could only ever get two others to join me. Four years, carrying that rent. That gap between vision and reality, it's…it feels enormous. That’s when my method stopped being theory, and became survival. Every day—multiple times—I’d walk up and down those empty halls, muttering: I will survive. I will thrive. Not because I believed it. I didn’t, half the time. But I noticed, just by saying it—out loud, again and again—I stayed just functional enough to keep moving. Some days, I’d do two hundred repetitions before lunch. My poor receptionist probably thought I’d lost my mind, honestly.

Toye Oyelese

But those words, the articulation, they didn’t fix everything, right? They didn’t magically make new doctors appear. What they did was buy me time—mental space to see what was actually going on. And at some point, I realized—look, the real problem wasn’t market forces or bad luck. It was bias. My background was scaring off some candidates, and the usual channels weren’t working for me the way they might for others. Hard thing to admit, but once I saw it, I could start working around it. So, I flipped the script a bit. I went looking for doctors who came from underrepresented backgrounds—people who would see my struggle, maybe even value it. I used a bias to solve a bias, in a way. And you know what? It worked. We grew, slowly at first, then the momentum built. By 2022, we had six physicians. By 2024, we hit full speed—twenty docs, rooms filled, lights on in every wing.

Toye Oyelese

So—did that repetition, those articulations, fix my situation? No. What they did do was let me keep going long enough to work it out. Didn’t change reality—but changed my head enough so I could keep fighting. It's not about belief. It's not about positivity. It's a tool, when you’ve run out of other tools. And next time, I’ll break down exactly how this method works. You’ll see why it’s not wishful thinking—it’s just action. That’s all for today. I appreciate you sticking with the story. I’m Dr. Toye Oyelese, and we’ll dive deeper into the method in Episode 2. See you then.