Breadwinner

 Recently I spoke with a practitioner and they asked me a great question that few have the chutzpah to ask so directly. 

She asked, “Do you now, and have you, ongoing in your career life, supported yourself financially from your practice?” 

She went on to say, “I know so many people who are practitioners in holistic health of some kind or another who don’t, and couldn’t, support themselves on what they earn in their practice. They usually rely on a spouse or partner to pay the bills.”

Her follow up question, an implication that I LOVE she didn’t just leave hanging there but actually asked it, was, “Can people really provide for themselves as healing arts practitioners working for themselves?”

I love super direct, all cards on the table questions- 

Short answer: Yes, I have supported myself through my practice for 24 years now. And yes, people really can provide well for themselves as self-employed practitioners. 

Long answer time- let’s tuck into the details! Totally honest financial details from my life, incoming:

I am a good case study I think because I am a single mom, and have been since my son was 2 years old- he just turned 18! Woohoo! 

So I have provided for myself and for him all those years as a Rolfing practitioner. 

Summer camps, tutors, preschool, our annual family vacation to Seattle (where my brother sister in law and nephew live), and of course all the regular stuff- housing, food, laptop, cell phone etc etc. Raising a kid ain’t cheap! 

While my son’s Dad does pay monthly child support, and so contributes financially to raising our son, it is not a large fancy alimony amount. I don’t have, and never have received, alimony.

I don’t have a family trust fund, and my parents have never supported me as an adult, or given me any money towards “start up” type costs for my practice- what I mean here is they have not given me money for my self-employed work life at all, ever. 

They did generously allow my son and I to live with them when he was a toddler and I was going through a divorce and had moved to New Haven from Brooklyn, and started my Rolfing practice all over from scratch. That was a temporary arrangement- one that I was very grateful for, and that is a financial donation of sorts to my start up costs, because I didn’t have to pay rent. 

But I’ve been paying my own rent, by myself, since my son was 4, I’ll just keep doing this by his ages I guess…

I sent him to private school without financial assistance for 5th, 7th, and 8th grade. 

I even managed to buy us a house in a great neighborhood when he was 12. I did that only with Rolfing income- again, no family assistance or loan co-signing or anything like that. Though I did use the first time homebuyer incentive program so that I could buy with less than the 20% down that is usually required for a mortgage. 

The good fortune that was on my side in becoming a sole earner self-employed home owner was timing. I managed to buy at the bottom of the market and, to be fair, I would have a difficult if not impossible time buying in my neighborhood today even though that was only 6 years ago. There is an element of luck there. 

All of that income, and the income that has paid my bills, came from running my solo bodywork practice all these years. 

I have had a number of side projects, and I will tell you how the money flowed (or didn’t) from those next, but first I just want to take a beat to emphasize this because I’m really not doing anything special. 

I’m not the most ambitious person. I’m not a “hustle all the time” person. I’m really introverted. I love time off. I don’t overcharge my clients. 

I’m not recording all of this financial information about my life to tell you how I”m amazing and you should try harder to be amazing too. Quite the opposite, I want to tell you that I’m really ordinary and that it should be considered totally and solidly within the realm of what is to be expected that you can take good care of yourself running a small, not particularly ambitious healing arts practice. 

I don’t mean it’s a “make money while you sleep” type deal- hardly- you do actually have to do a few essential things to get to a sustainable practice- listen to my last episode on the most essential things for that information- 

But a private practice has a much less steep learning curve than so many other business models that get promoted as “passive income businesses” for example- one I am intimately familiar with- which is an online course business. 

So let’s talk about my side projects, and how that earning, or lack thereof, has influenced my income. A reminder that I’m telling you this to be totally forthcoming, and also to demonstrate how and why I am such a fan of private practice as a great business model that can take really good care of you financially. 

My first side project was called Practice Abundance, and it was the first iteration of the Healing Arts Practice Incubator- helping healing arts providers in private practice. 

That was 2009. I used my experience of starting up my New Haven practice from scratch as a template people could follow to fill their practice more quickly. I got to wait list client numbers within 3 months of opening the doors as a result of work I did to connect to the local community of other healing arts providers- particularly, in my case, movement and fitness professionals. Gym owners, yoga teachers, Alexander teachers, etc. 

This is when I was, with my toddler son, living with my parents. All that money that came in from Practice Abundance, flowed to paying for a divorce, and rapidly paying off debt. 

Because I had that little extra income wiggle room- I say little extra because it never made anything close to what my Rolfing practice brought in- it did help me to do things like pay for my son’s preschool and to save up for a place of our own. 

I closed that course a couple of years into it because A) I am a dumb dumb and B) I didn’t want to teach marketing- see point A. I thought, again this is back in 2009, that I would have to keep talking about Twitter forever with the way the growth of social media platforms way growing nad I was like, Blech. Turns out, now I tell people to ignore social media platforms! 

Ok onto next side project, I started the podcast, Liberated Body. I ran that for 4 years and loved it. But it was an unpaid art project essentially. It earned $0 dollars. Though the presence it created for me in the manual and movement therapy fields did earn me 2 separate speaking gigs which each paid $2000. And one teaching gig which paid about $1000

I decided while writing this episode that it would be fun to do the math. So I indirectly earned $5K from the Liberated Body podcast because of the visibility it created for me. 

During those 4 years I published 70 episodes. I spent an average of 10 hours per episode. Let’s ballpark it and say I worked on Liberated Body for 700 total hours all those years. $5000 divided by 700 is $7.14/hour. Less than minimum wage but actually more than I thought I had made hourly! 

Side note: again, this was an art/learning project. It was not a profit earning business. 

Ok next side project- Bliss+Grit podcast with my dear friend Vanessa Scotto! This was another art project. We did set up a Patreon account, but used any money made there to pay our podcast producer. Another fun art project, but this time with the ability to spend time with a bestie. Good stuff, but not paying bills. 

Did anything interesting happen in 2020? Oh right, the pandemic meant my bodywork practice vanished overnight. Big love to all of you who went through the same thing. That sucked. 

I had a few options: sell my house and move into a friend of mine’s tiny studio apartment with my son who was now an adolescent- or like, use my entrepreneurial skills to make something! 

I created the Liberated Being Studio. An online somatic mindfulness space with myself teaching Realization Process (a form of somatic embodiment meditation that I had trained in), another Realization Process teacher, Marika Baxter, and Constance Claire Newman teaching Alexander Technique, Kellie Lynch teaching Feldenkrais, and Laura Banks teaching the Compassion Cultivation Technique. 

And I had regular guest speakers in. 

And shout out to Shatay Trigere for saving my ass by donating her time to me for free as my business coach through that, as you might imagine, incredibly stressful time.

It was good body nerd fun. Those teachers are all amazing teachers and humans. It was a wild ride to be starting that up through the pandemic, and I’m so glad they joined me on that adventure. 

I paid the teachers, obviously, I paid an assistant, Kenya Hooker, who helped me with all the backend upload type stuff, I paid my podcast producer Tom Hanson, and I was able to pay myself enough- somewhere in the range of $2000 to $6000 a month- that I didn't lose my house. 

I was out of Rolfing for 14 months. Much longer than most bodyworkers were out of work. In part because I had created this great thing, and in part because I was in the midst of a very long and- because of all medical things being backed up- prolonged diagnostic process for a neurological illness. I’m doing great these days, but at the time the neurologists thought I might have Myasthenia Gravis for about a 10 month period as I waited for appointments and their tests and tests results to come around. And MG and Covid do not mix. This was pre vaccine days, I couldn't risk it. I stayed online. 

Until I went back- spoiler alert: I love being a Rolfer! I love seeing clients in person and doing meaningful touch based work that helps them. 

I wound down the studio as we all grappled with the reopening world and how we felt about our tiny Zoom windows after all that time trapped on them. 

Catching up to this present moment, I have my Rolfing practice, I do website and branding design for healing arts practices and their schools and orgs, and I have the Healing Arts Practice Incubator. 

I do earn extra income from HAPI and the design work I do through Simple Prospering. It allowed my son and I to take a 3 week trip this summer to Australia and New Zealand! It will allow me to pay for him to go to college- our next adventure. 

But Rolfing continues to be my rock. I love that work, and it also is the most consistent and sustainable earning that I have in my life. 

I’m entrepreneurial, so I’m game for new projects and all the shifting sands and roller coaster rides and mixed metaphors that comes with, but I also like having work that is just super reliable. That’s my private practice (and if you want to hear me talk more about entrepreneurship vs. self employed private practice, you can find that in my episode “Ode to Private Practice”)

Looping back to where we started from: YES. You can support yourself through your solo self employed healing arts practice. 

And no, I am not some random coach who is trying to give small business advice to people on something I have not myself done. 

Let’s get back to that practitioner’s follow up question, “Can people really provide for themselves with their practice, without someone else around to help them pay the bills?”

YES.

As I often say to people when I work with them for coaching: you don’t have to do everything. In fact, PLEASE don’t try to do everything. But you do have to do some things. You can’t sit and hope and wait and assume it will all come together, even though you don’t have to hustle and make yourself crazy. 

If you want assistance putting the most essential pieces in place to take great care of yourself with a profitable private practice- consider joining the February cohort of Bloom: my intensive coaching month.