The Most Essential Things

Just like when we are working with our clients, when something is off in our practice we need to spend a little quiet time discerning what is the symptom of the problem, and what the actual root cause is. 

As healing arts professionals, we know how this presents in our client’s health: We all have examples of this based on our own training and modalities, but to give a few examples: 

Someone presenting with asthma who is helped by attending to their leaky gut. 

Someone with persistent plantarfasciitis who is helped by attending to their perimenopause. 

Someone with bruxism and tension headaches who is helped with trauma therapy. 

The list goes on and I’m sure we could all geek out with one another! 

But I want to turn my attention to sorting out root cause from symptom in the realm of our private practices. 

I often hear common assumptions from practitioners about what they need to do to have a more stable practice. 

But the solutions that people jump to are not always addressing the heart of the matter, which is often at the level of the foundation.

For example: 

• “I need to have more clients.” could be “I am undercharging” in disguise

• “I should grow my audience on social media.” could be “I am nervous about reaching out to potential referral relationships with my colleagues, pushing post feels safer” OR maybe you’ve been made to feel that it will be more effective… it won’t!”

• “I should get another certification or training”, or “I should add a new offering to my practice.” could be “I am feeling burned out” or “Why are so many of my clients making me crazy lately!?” or “I’m not earning enough”

I covered one way of drilling down into your real needs in my past episode titled, Should I Be Branching Out? 

This episode is oriented around how to determine if it is the right time or a good idea to take on a new offering or business model and branch out from private practice. But that strategy applies equally well to addressing the assumptions we have about what will make our practices more stable, and what will make us happier in our work-life set up. 

In that episode, I covered what I clunkily called the assumption busting question tree. Rolls right off the tongue! Which is basically a way of seeing what your assumptions are, and, from there, what you truly need to address at the root cause level so you aren’t just slapping bandaids on things. 

So you can go listen to the should I be branching out episode next if you want a detailed tour through the assumption busting question tree. 

In today’s episode I am going to take a different approach, and just straight up tell you what the main stumbling blocks usually are, and what you need to have in place to have a totally solid foundation for your practice. 

Consider this a Cliff’s Notes guide to the most essential things you need to put in place to have a practice that is successful and can therefore take good care of you and your clients. 

It is also what I will go through with small cohorts for group and 1:1 coaching in the New Year- introducing, HAPI Full Bloom….

HAPI, if you are not familiar, is my go-at-your-own pace online course- short for the Healing Arts Practice Incubator. 

Some people love a “push play” online course which gives them the tools to work through it themselves. 

Some people want more support- that's what HAPI Full Bloom is for. It’s a focused coaching cohort which includes:

• Lifetime access to the Healing Arts Practice Incubator and any new courses I create there

• one month dedicated to getting these essential pieces set up and out the door. My first cohort will be SOON- this February. 

• It is limited to 20 people maximum

• With weekly group coaching calls every Sunday

• And includes 2 1:1 coaching sessions with me which you can use during and/or after the focused month together concludes. 

So what are the most essential things to get set up? Aka, what are we going through in our intensive month inside of HAPI Full Bloom this February?

1:Start with listening- to your clients and yourself

2:Earn so you can take care of yourself- You have a business, not a hobby or a charity

3:Communicate effectively

4:Connect with your right people

Let’s go through each! 

Listen- If I were to paint all healing arts providers with a broad brush, I’d say we are pretty great listeners. We have jobs that require deep attunement to our clients. And usually we got into this work because we had either a natural ability in this domain, or a deep interest in attuning to people- or both! 

So why do I start with listening with a group of people who are good listeners already? Because I want you to listen to specific things! 

When I work with clients privately, I begin with a 2-hour interview. 

This is by no means to grill them, but rather to allow them to get into more of a stream of consciousness space as they talk about their work and their clients. 

This interview, and the golden nuggets that I pull out of it, frame all following work that we do together whether that’s an earning plan, a practice building plan, or a full website design with all text written for the website. 

My clients tell me I’m brilliant for figuring out exactly what they need, and/or exactly what they need to communicate to people about their work. 

I’m not! I’m just a really, really good listener. And I know what to look, aka listen, for. 

The brilliance comes out of their own mouths. And it usually allows them to see with clarity what’s off in their work, what’s off in themselves about their relationship to their work, and what their clients are truly seeking them out for. 

This process- a deep long form interview- is born out of my many years of interviewing people on my podcasts- and it is so different from many of the things you will get in a small business and/or marketing course where you are asked to put your work into a formulaic bullet point, and asked to sort your clients into rigid boxes like their “demographics and psychographics”. 

I think that works for certain kinds of businesses, but not for businesses like ours which have a couple of things which are unique to them:

1: The thing that is “for sale” in air quotes, is actually a therapeutic relationship. Not a done-for-you service, and not a product- but an intimate trust-based relationship that helps people with their health. 

And 2: We do work that is outside of the mainstream, and so often requires some education to our potential clients and referrers. 

My brother trained in architecture, and he never needed to explain what that is. But if no one had ever heard of architecture, they would be a little confused: 

“So you build buildings?”

“Well no contractors and construction crews build the buildings. I design them.”

“So you make a nice design but then other people need to make sure it’s structurally sound and functional”

“Well, no, my training includes making sure it is structurally sound, if I’m doing my job right, and I need to account for all those functional things like plumbing and electrical, etc, etc, but I’m not a plumber or an electrician- so that’s their speciality”

“Oh…. ok?”

But no one needs to go through that because they hear “architect” and have an immediate impression of “something to do with designing houses and buildings”

When people hear “Rolfing” or “Rosen Method” or “EMDR” or “Naturopathic Physician” they do not have an immediate impression of what we do, and they are going to have some questions (or if they don’t have questions, they still need some basic explanation so that they aren’t assuming something totally off-base)

This is where listening to people in my interview, who are just speaking off-the-cuff about this work they love and have deeply trained in- comes in handy. By listening to, essentially, yourself, you can pull out the most important, and most clear, ways you can explain your work. Without getting into the weeds of trying to make people understand the most detailed possible version of what you do in their first encounter with you. (which is usually on your website…)

Week 1 in HAPI Full Bloom I am going to take the group through the exact interview process I have fine-tuned over the years with my 1:1 clients, and I will teach you how to pull out the key information to shape the future of your practice. 

Week 2, aka essential thing #2, Earn so you can take care of yourself- You have a business, not a hobby or a charity. 

In the Simple Practice Earning course- which is a part of HAPI- I walk people through hwo to know what they need to earn, how to use informed pricing of their work so that they can be sure to get there, and how to set up their financial systems to be set up with safety net savings for taxes, sick and vacation time for yourself. It includes spreadsheets that do the math for you. 

But some people hear “earning” “finances” and “math” and are immediately overwhelmed. I know because historically I was one of those people!!!

When I need to tackle clarity around earning and my personal financial life, I need support. I just do! It is, for some, so challenging and emotionally daunting to take this on alone. 

But it is so important! It is not fun or sexy to say this, but the numbers part of your work is actually the true north compass point of your work. If your practice can’t take good care of you financially, it will at some point have to cease to exist. And I want more healing arts providers not less! 

So if the thought of looking at your personal finances to get the exact number you need to earn…

Or setting up an automated tax savings account…

Or understanding how to pay yourself a consistent income- no matter the fluctuations in your practice…

Or any other income, earning and practice finances stuff- if this makes you get a little ugh in your belly- you might just need some support to get through all that. 

That’s week 2 of HAPI Full Bloom this February

Third most essential thing: Communicate effectively

We often feel like we have to either reduce how we communicate about our work so much that it turns into the robotic elevator speech

Or we feel like we need to more or less take people to school with us to they can understand the in-depth nuance of everything we do in the same way a fellow practitioner might. 

There is a middle ground! A vast middle ground. 

The way we get to it is by revisiting that long form interview- taking a look at it with fresh eyes- and learning how to be a good enough editor to pull out the key phrases and paragraphs. 

This is perfect for writing your website, business cards and postcards. 

But it is also perfect to get more comfortable with certain key things you know you can say when, for example, that person at a friend’s BBQ asks you the inevitable, “What do you do?” question. 

Getting all the writing DONE is week 3 in HAPI full bloom

Lastly, essential thing #4: Connect. Reach out and connect with your right people. 

Just like looking at and planning for our practice finances, we also tend to do everything possible to avoid this one. 

Usually the 2 things I see people doing instead of reaching out and connecting to people: 

Are either spending time and money on things that feel creative and fun (or simply easy) to do. Some type of thing you can spend time making, alone in the privacy of your home. And then send it out into the digital world- whether a website, a social media post, a video- and hope the algorithm gods help people find it. 

Or waiting for the slow burn of word of mouth referrals to finally hit a tipping point. Even if it takes years. 

To each:

If you make something alone in your home atht will go on to live in the digital world- it is not enough. You still need to do things to make sure the right people find that resource. 

And you do not need to wait and wait and wait for word of mouth to catch on. You can nurture it so that it happens much more quickly. 

Both solutions require connecting to real people in the real world who you actually want to know! 

Think: your colleagues, local like-minded businesses that serve a related clientele with a different service, other providers who tend to enthusiastically recommend the work you do (rather than those who you need to convince and prod…)

So in week 4 of HAPI Full Bloom we map out who the best people are in your world to connect to- actual names of people and businesses you know or want to know. Not generic, “yoga studios” or “wellness podcasters”

We create your win-win-win outreach offering which is a way to give people an experiential peek into you and your work- which is NOT a lecture about your work. 

And then we write the emails you will send to your right people.

Connecting with people is what we are good at. It is what feels genuine and not like salesmanship- if we take an approach that is authentic to healing arts providers. 

Those are the true essential pieces to having a healing arts practice with a solid foundation. Which means that there is labor on the front end to set it up- and then you can rely on that foundation for the long haul. 

From there, it is rinse and repeat- you check in on your earning, you reach out to people. If something is off and suddenly your practice is quiet, you go back to step 1 and listen, maybe you re-craft your website copy. 

But for the most part, this is set it and forget it stuff. 

If I were to add a 5th essential thing it is the work of fine-tuning that we do in our practices more long term. This is how we set up systems and processes (SIMPLE systems and processes, this does not have to be rocket science) to make sure we feel well taken care of, far away from the brink of burn out. AKA, what are the tiny tweaks are that you can make so that anything that is annoying you in your practice can be alleviated. 

This will be in the HAPI simple systems course coming in 2025. 

So in short, you can use this cliff’s notes guide to the most essential things and set it up for yourself. 

Or you can get a self-paced course with Q&A and coworking support through the Healing Arts Practice Incubator

Or if you want a focused month to put the essentials in place, with group and 1:1 coaching with me- apply for HAPI Full Bloom!