Hey there, wellness entrepreneur!
Before we get into today’s blog, I want to remind you that the doors are open for the Awakened Mastermind. This is the room to hit six figures with profit while having time to embody your own wellness practices.
So if you feel like you’ve tried everything, if you’re stuck at a revenue plateau that you really want to break through, if you want to be surrounded by like-minded thinkers and peers to stay motivated every day, this is the room for you. Doors are open until September 4 so make sure you either use this link(LINK) to enroll directly and you can decide to pay in full, which is $3,000, or have a six-month payment plan, $500 a month. Or, if you’re on the fence, just schedule a free consultation call with me. We’ll go over your goals and what’s the best next step for you.
So, I’ll see you in the Awakened Mastermind, or on a call. Let’s get to the blog!
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In today’s blog, we’re going to talk about When Things Aren’t Working In Your Wellness Business. We’re going to normalize this because it happens to every single entrepreneur, and sometimes it can hit you smack upside the head.
Because when you first start your wellness business, there’s a lot of excitement, you have a lot of ideas, and you have a lot of creativity. And maybe you announce your business to the world, you start telling your friends and family and make those few posts, and you get clients, you get people referring, you get friends commenting, you have a lot of support. And then what happens is you leave that honeymoon phase of your business, and things start to slow and quiet down.
What We’re Going To Talk About And Why This Blog is For You
I just want to let you know that nothing has gone wrong. This is normal. This can also happen if you’re leveling up in your business, maybe you’re releasing a new offer, or hiring a new staff member, again, with big transitions in your business can come a lot of excitement. And if you’re entering maybe like you’re celebrating a big anniversary instead of the honeymoon, you’re celebrating an anniversary in your business or a big milestone, again, you can create that excitement in your business.
But once the excitement leaves, the dust settles, things can quiet down again. And sometimes during those quiet periods or slow periods, it can feel like something has gone wrong. We’re going to talk about that, and why this happens, in this blog. And maybe what you personally experienced during those slower times or when things do quiet down.
Must Read: Learn the Simple Path to Launching Your Wellness Business Today!
And we’re also going to talk about when you feel like you’ve tried everything in your business, when you sit down day after day and put out content, when you show up to workshops and classes to teach, when you’re courageous enough to put on keynote speaking events, or do interviews on podcasts or go through many consultations and get a bunch of no’s, and you’re still not signing clients. This episode is also for you.
You will understand why this happens, what to do about it, and how to shift your energy. Because again, every entrepreneur experiences periods of this, it’s just not as widely talked about.
And it’s easy, especially if you’re a perfectionist, or you have elements of being a perfectionist, or you’re ambitious, to take it upon yourself and really beat yourself up with a lot of negative self-talk or experience a lot of doubt. And truthfully, that will keep you in the “hole” or in the slower period or this period when things aren’t working a lot longer than what’s really needed.
Also Read: Discover How Understanding Your Emotions Can Propel Your Business Forward
Some Examples of When Things Feel Like it isn’t Working In Your Business
So here are some examples of when you get into a hole, or when you might start to feel like things aren’t working in your wellness business and you start to experience some doubt, frustration, or maybe even triggers you into hustle mode and you started overworking and trying to do all the things at the same time. Everything is urgent. So you can start seeing clients as fast as possible.
So you might start experiencing no consultations for weeks or months, or maybe you’re getting consultations, but they’re all no’s, so you haven’t signed any new clients for weeks or months, maybe you’re signing clients, those clients are a yes on a consultation call, but then they don’t actually end up paying you and making it to that first session.
Or maybe you have clients that are a yes, or they start the program, and then they end up not following through. They either ask for a refund, or they just stop halfway through, and they feel complete, for example.
So you have clients that have quit, maybe you’ve gone several months in a row without hitting your revenue goal, whether that be a baseline revenue goal or your dream revenue goal, you just are nowhere near it, and you’re stuck at this certain revenue plateau.
So you aren’t hitting these big numbers in the timeline that you imagined, or you’re not hitting even just what you thought were smaller numbers in the timeline that you imagined.
You don’t hit your goals for workshop attendees multiple times in a row, you release multiple events, whether they’d be retreats or two-hour workshops, and you still keep getting the lower number of attendees that you really desire.
Also Read: How To Grow A Holistic Business Within The Lifestyle You Desire
What You Need To Remind Yourself When These Things Happen
Now, with all of these, even if you’ve experienced it for months on end, nothing has gone wrong. It’s really important to remind yourself of this because it’s easy to fall into compare and despair when things aren’t going as you imagined, especially if you’re on social media or if you have friends who are entrepreneurs and you see these other businesses really take off, it’s easy to think that you’re not cut out for an entrepreneur, to be an entrepreneur, or that clients don’t want to work with you specifically, so you take it personally.
Or maybe you start to doubt your pricings, you start to doubt your niche, and then you start swapping your pricing, you start swapping your niche, which ends up you have to start all over when you change these things in some ways.
Must Read: How To Get Clients From Social Media
So it’s important to remind yourself to stay in your lane. Because especially if you’re comparing yourself to other businesses, you just don’t know the behind-the-scenes circumstances that brought this success to their business.
For example, maybe they were a yoga teacher teaching for a bunch of studios, even employees in a yoga studio, and taught 15, 20 classes a week full time in that studio and developed a really long, really loyal following fan base of students that love them. And so then when they went out to be an entrepreneur, they had this fan base to start their business with a person that is starting from this place, of course just naturally is going to grow faster than someone that was an employee and an accountant, for example, and is transitioning to become a health coach, and doesn’t have that loyal fan base, yet you can grow it, it will happen for you, it just won’t be the same timeline. And you have to respect that. And it’s nothing personal to you.
Another reason why things might happen slower than you would like is if you have something going on in your personal life. Maybe there’s a death of a loved one, or you experience a health challenge, or maybe it’s nothing dramatic like that, or traumatizing like that, but maybe you have three, four kids under the age of 10 and you just want to make sure that you’re prioritizing them and spending time with them. And it’s normal in this scenario to have less time physically, tangibly, to work on your business. That is OK!
We all grow at different speeds, even the entrepreneur who grows quicker right out the gate because they have more time to invest in their wellness business because maybe they don’t have any life circumstance happening to them, or they don’t have any children, they can dedicate more time. But it doesn’t mean that in three or five years from now they’re still going to be growing faster than you because you just don’t know the individual behind-the-scenes situations that really attract those clients to them or to you.
Must Read: Time Management Tips for Thriving Wellness Entrepreneurs
My Personal Challenges
So, for example for me personally, I’ve gone through many life’s circumstances, such as personally having to deal with Lynch syndrome diagnosis, which I take a lot of time out of my business to go to cancer screening appointments, meet with my oncologist, I have multiple oncologists, I have multiple screens a year.
In fact, just this week, I have to go get a bladder biopsy and scope. And I feel fine. I don’t want to go at all, but I’m going to go because it helps me preventatively catch anything early. For example, during my last colonoscopy, they caught a 13-millimeter polyp that was pre-cancer, so is on the verge of becoming full-blown cancer. But because I go to my yearly colonoscopy screens, it was removed, and then I went back again for another colonoscopy six months later, that’s two days out of my schedule when I could have been working both those days, but I chose to take care of myself. But it gave me so much more time back into my business because it caught the cancer from becoming full-blown.
So obviously, that saved me so much that I can be here as an entrepreneur on this journey. Now, having to go through chemo and radiation and all that comes the, I can’t even describe accurately, we’re getting into right now, all that comes with a cancer diagnosis beyond just the time of going to all the appointments.
So sometimes, for your own health, you need to carve out time to take care of yourself. And maybe you don’t have a lynch syndrome diagnosis, or you’ve never been diagnosed with cancer or another debilitating diagnosis, but still, we’re all aging. So you need to invest time, weekly, consistently, to care for yourself, whether that’s going to your favorite yoga classes, or your strength training classes, or going for walks or meditating and journaling, all of which will buy you more time for the future. And you must remember that!
Must Read: The Unknown Stress Relieving Hack
Why You Should Not Compare your Own Challenges to other Entrepreneurs
But it could be easy for me to compare my entrepreneur journey with another entrepreneur who doesn’t have a genetic mutation like I do, and has to go to all these appointments and be like, “Well, that’s just not fair. She’s going to succeed faster than me because she doesn’t have to spend all this additional time driving to doctor’s appointments, making doctor’s appointments, going to those doctor’s appointments, down-regulating herself, following triggering tasks, etc, etc. dealing with the fallout of any diagnoses that might come up or surprise, like why I have to go get a bladder scope, because I had red flags pop up on a screen,” all of that another entrepreneur might not have to deal with.
But it’s an energy leak to compare yourself to those people because the situation is just not going to change. You really need to learn how to accept and find peace with the deck of cards that you were handed or the life you chose.
If you want to prioritize your family, I applaud you. That’s courageous. If you want to become an entrepreneur with multiple children who are of young ages, it is possible, but it’s remembering like, it’s okay to prioritize your family, yeah! And realize that yes, for this season, for this phase of your life, you might grow a little bit slower, but it doesn’t dictate that you will continue to forever grow slowly in your business.
Several episodes back, I have an episode, it’s called the Compound Effect. And it applies here. If you’re taking consistent action in your business, all these actions pile upon each other. So it adds to a compound effect of where you see more results with the same amount of action that you put into your business, so you can go through periods of having to take care of your spouse or take care of your children and family or focus on other priorities outside your business and your business can keep going. That’s why there’s no reason to compare yourself to another business because you don’t know what’s going on in that entrepreneur’s life.
Must Read: How to Improve Emotional Intelligence as Entrepreneur
And yes, their business might be steaming along ahead of yours right now. But no one can dictate the future. And plus, what’s the point of that anyways? In fact, I have a lot of entrepreneurs who are in similar fields as me, and I look at our work as complementary because I know that one person could hire both of us. And even though our marketing might have overlap, even though our programs might have overlap, they would still get a lot of benefit from working with the two of us because no one can replicate each of us. We are our own individualized person with our unique ways of solving problems for the same entrepreneur, for example.
Instead of comparing one another, the question to possibly ask yourself when you look at their business is to say, “Okay, apply them, lift them up, because I bet If you were in the same position, when you are successful, you would want peers and colleagues and other people looking at your profile to celebrate you as well.” Lift them up.
How can we support our other entrepreneurs and ask yourself, “What do you think created that success for them? What am I doing to create that success for me? Can I follow some of those principles, some important to apply to my own business?”
And remember, what you see on social media or even e-mail newsletters are highlights of typically someone’s successes, someone’s wins in both their personal life and their business life. So you might not know of the times that they were stuck or really suffered. But I guarantee, the reason why they’re successful is, regardless of what’s happening in their world, that they take consistent action that they keep going. And I don’t mean this to beat yourself up, because we’re not robots.
So, as I mentioned before, it’s important to take care of yourself, to have rest time and downtime. But it is important to show up to your business consistently, even if you have an off day.
Also Read: Can You Grow Your Business Too Fast? Let’s Find Out!
How To Show Up To Your Business Consistently Even on Your Off Days – A Personal Experience
So what might that look like? Let’s talk about that right now. So I’ll start with a personal story. So several years ago, I had a successful brick-and-mortar business where I was helping individuals overcome pain, get stronger, be more flexible, be able to participate in activities like yoga that they love, without fear of aging. And it was very successful. I taught a number of classes, I lead great yoga teacher trainings, which I just loved, I had consistently booked schedules with patients and clients and semi-privates and yoga classes. It was wonderful. And I started getting a lot of requests for business coaching, and I loved business coaching, I wanted to do more of it.
So, I started to bring in this second offer into my business. And during that time, I really transitioned a lot. The brick-and-mortar commercial space didn’t feel right, the leasing didn’t feel right, I wanted to spend more time at home with my family. I personally just love working from home, and I made the mistake of transitioning. So transitioning from leasing a brick-and-mortar to moving into my she-shed from teaching a lot of yoga classes and teacher trainings to downsizing those, and then the pandemic forced me to stop those. I also transitioned from focusing on marketing, my one-to-one program to now marketing group offers, transitioning from marketing practitioner type, healing type work to business coaching.
It was a lot of changes all at once. I do not recommend doing that to anyone. If you want to make changes in your business, do it one at a time.
And that might seem like common sense. But at the time, I didn’t realize what I was doing. All these changes felt like I needed to make them right now. Plus, I was going through a few housings that were really taking a lot of my time. And so my numbers started to drop. Most importantly, I allowed those numbers to shake me up. I had a lot of doubts. I had a lot of fears about moving to the she-shed, like, “Will they want to work with me, because now it’s not as professional, there isn’t a bathroom on site, will they think less of me?”
I had a lot of fears and hesitations about being a business coach, like, “Who am I to be offering this even though they’re asking me for it? What do I know? What advice can I give them?” I just had a lot of mindset stuff going on in the background, even though I was successful.
And I think I could have pivoted with more grace and more ease had I done one thing at a time and really worked on the mindset of believing that these pivots were not only the best thing for myself and my business, but the best thing for my clients if I had focused instead of focusing on me and all my fears and doubts and reservations, instead of believing in my capacity of always delivering beyond my clients expectations, and always focusing on helping them to get the results because I do that time and time again, just naturally. It’s always my focus.
So instead of beating myself up, focusing on what is best for them, how these changes can allow me to better serve them, I could have entered all those changes with more belief, and I don’t think I would have been stuck in the hole. And on top of this, the pandemic hit. So I was very fortunate, and I will admit that I was in a very privileged place to have access to my she-shed that I had done so well the previous year that I had enough profit to buy myself a she-shed and work from that. I am so lucky and grateful.
But my business still slowed down like many others who were in the in-person space. And again, I was privileged that I had already started some online programs and working in the online space. So, I was a leg up than some of my other peers that were 100% brick and mortar. So, the loyal client base that I had built, and the work that I had put in, it gave myself a place to work, even though all the commercial spaces were closing. And the fact that I already started an online program allowed my business to keep going. But I didn’t see those positive things at the time, I was really freaking out. And it was that mindset of freakout really caused my business to plateau for a period of time and start doubting all that I was doing. So it slowed my numbers down.
And that was my key takeaway, because even as I pivoted in the future, and now I’ve pivoted my offer slightly, I’m adding in my group mastermind program again this year, the launches and the pivots have felt so different. And what has made all the difference is my mindset, is the belief that I feel in my bones that I know I can help people that offer the price point, the type of program of which I’m forgetting in, those are details.
How Nervous System Regulation Helped Me And How It Can Help You When You’re Doubting Yourself
I also did a lot of nervous system regulation. I think this is really underestimated and not talked about a lot in the entrepreneurship space. And as a wellness and health practitioner, you have such a leg up on any other industry out there because you know how to regulate a nervous system, you know about journaling, you know about breathwork, you know about meditation, it’s so important to investigate for yourself in a period when things aren’t going as well as you hoped to really get inquisitive with yourself.
Also Read: Learn the Simple Path to Launching Your Wellness Business Today!
Take the time to look within. Write it out. What are you feeling in this down period, in this plateau? Are you feeling frustrated? Are you feeling doubtful? And write it out? Why? Why are you feeling that sometimes when you write it out, it’s enough to kind of dissolve some of that fear because some of the fears may be irrational.
My brain always goes to catastrophic things with my business, like, no one’s going to come to see me, the revenue is going to completely dry up, which truthfully has never happened in my business, where all of a sudden everyone quit at the same time, and I had no revenue coming in. That’s never happened in my six plus years of business, but my brain still likes to throw it out to me every so often. And just acknowledging what you feel gives you an opportunity to process through it.
I did not have these tools when I first started off. So I held a lot of emotions in my body, or I tried to resist them completely, resist the feeling of failure, resist the feeling of disappointment at the same time. Those vibrations were stuck in my body because I was trying to avoid them so much. It was like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You, as a health and wellness practitioner, have access to other practitioners to help you process that through if you’re unable to do it with yourself, with techniques like EFT or pranayama, again, or meditation, or just going for a walk and acknowledging it for yourself. You know what to do out of any other industry. But you really need to take the time and get curious too as to what you’re feeling and why and write it down.
And then the next step is to process through those emotions. Acknowledge what you’re feeling, acknowledge the frustration. Yes, it’s normal to feel frustrated. When you have a $5K revenue goal, and you’ve been stuck at $2K, $3K for six months, it’s normal to feel frustrated. And that’s also normal in business. It’s not always a straight line up.
Must Read: Why Many Entrepreneurs Don’t Hit 100K: Common Problems and Fixes
I hear so many wellness entrepreneurs saying this motto, and I used to say it a ton myself that healing isn’t linear. The same is true with business growth. It isn’t linear every month. You don’t always grow from $4K to $6K to $8K to $10K. It doesn’t work like that. There’s going to be periods of getting stuck at certain revenue months. There’s going to be periods of hitting a high revenue month, like $8K and then dropping back down to $3K maybe for a couple months after that.
It’s noticing when you’re expecting that, or maybe experiencing a bit of entitlement like, “Well, I did these workshops, I made these posts, I had 10 plus consultations in the last couple of months, so I deserve to hit a queue month.” It doesn’t work like that. You have to believe that it will happen for you, and keep going with all those positive actions that you are doing, keep going and just let go of the timeline.
Must Read: Discover How Understanding Your Emotions Can Propel Your Business Forward
The Importance of Letting Go of the Timeline and Just Keep Going
My coach also says to let go of the timeline and let go of the house, which is what helped me personally to get out of that hole that I was mentioning. Back then, I joined a Mastermind, of course, I highly recommend, if you are in a hole or feeling stuck or even better prior to that, so you can get out of a hole much quicker, to hire Masterminds, invest in Masterminds, hire coaches, they will help you through it with so much more ease. So I did, I joined the 200K mastermind and at the live event, my very first coaching, because it was offering one-to-one and I was offering group, but I was stuck.
My very first coaching was to let go of the group, to put a pin in it, focus on the one-to-one and come back to the group. Now, I didn’t want to hear that coaching. It was really hard coaching. But it was the right coaching. And because I invested a lot of time and money, I wanted to follow through with it. So I did the hard thing of putting a pin in my Mastermind and I focused, I went all in on my one-to-one. And it wasn’t a quick turnaround. There was a big jump, I would say the first couple of months, I signed a bunch of new clients one-to-one, I got some more confidence back, I got some more momentum back, I got some great testimonials and referrals. And then it kind of slowed down again, a little bit like I was just describing.
But I kept going, I kept tweaking things instead of stopping. This is what I see a lot of entrepreneurs do when they feel frustrated, when they feel stuck, they kind of hit the brakes, they pull back on a lot of the positive things that they were doin. They pull back on making invitations to your audience to come to a workshop or even releasing and putting on retreats and in events, or just making offers for your consultations, they stopped doing that, they stopped showing up to their stories, they stopped sharing their personal life, they stopped sharing their personal story or their wins, they stopped thinking of their clients and their patients as much in writing stories and love letters to them through their newsletter, and all that contributes to getting stuck in the hole longer.
Whereas for me, because I invested in the Mastermind, I was on to myself when I started to do that. So instead of putting the brakes on everything, or switching my price or switching my offer, I committed to myself, “Nope, I’m doing a six-month one-to-one offer for business coaching.” And I stuck to that price for six months, and I booked out my program.
And so, at that point, I raised my price, and I stuck with that price. I’m still at that price right now, over a year later. And I’m maintaining that price. Even though I am right now fully booked one-to-one, I added in a group program, and I’m going to stay at this price for a little bit of time, we’ll see how it goes. And when I want to pivot and make a change again, I’ll raise the price of either one to one or my group, one at a time. And I’ll measure, and I’ll see how things go.
So I’m learning from my mistakes of the past of making too many changes in my business all at once, to now making one change at a time, implementing, allowing my business to stabilize, allowing my new capacity as an entrepreneur to stabilize, to be in the having of all this success that I’ve created.
Must Read: Can You Grow Your Business Too Fast? Let’s Find Out!
So that when I do hit slow periods, I can assess, I can analyze, like when I was going through that period, where things did slow down a bit a while back, instead of changing my one-to-one offer because I hit that success early on, or changing the price, I dialed into my message. I dialed into my copy, I looked at my workshops, and I said, “Okay, what workshops didn’t feel so well in what topics,” or, “How was I delivering those workshops, maybe I could have delivered more value, or maybe my call to action at the end of the workshops could have been more compelling.”
What You Can Dive Into When Stuck in Your Business
There are so many factors that you can dive into your business if you are stuck when things aren’t going as planned. Instead of putting on the brakes, or changing your price, or changing your offer, instead, keep going and now digging deep, digging into the areas that you possibly haven’t investigated before. Like, what’s your messaging? How many times are you posting? Maybe the platform that you’re posting on might need a little tweaking.
Must Read: How To Get Clients From Social Media
Not that you have to abandon Instagram, for example, and hop over to LinkedIn full-time, but maybe you want to start to play around with LinkedIn. What’s the audience like there? Have you played around with the copy in your calls to action? And most importantly, what are you feeling? Are there any emotions that you’re resisting? Like doubt, fear, overwhelm, scarcity, mindset, anxiety? Are you acknowledging? Are you processing that through? Are you able to find confidence in your body, belief in your body, so you can tap through those uncomfortable emotions and, when appropriate, bring more of the more desired resourceful states of emotions into your business?
Because that will keep you going, and the more that you do that, I have a coach, she calls it kind of the popcorn effect, where at first, when you’re doing all this, it’s quiet. Like when you stick the popcorn bag into the microwave. At first, for the first minute and a half, nothing happens. It’s silence. Then all of a sudden you hear pop. And then the pops start getting quicker and quicker and quicker. And then all of a sudden, you have a full bag of popcorn. That often happens with your business. And again, if the bag doesn’t fill up completely right away and the pops slow down, that’s normal, too. Nothing has gone wrong. You have the capacity to be an entrepreneur.
Must Read: Develop Your Client Attraction System
Conclusion
Again, it’s remembering and looking at those successful entrepreneurs instead of thinking, “Oh well, they have some It factor that I don’t have,” or, “They have some privilege that I don’t have.” It’s remembering what you do have and it’s knowing that the only reason why they created that success is because they kept taking action, because they are probably having bad days too. You just don’t see it on Instagram and Facebook.
And sometimes, you need to do the hard thing of letting go of the timeline when you thought you had to hit a certain goal. Maybe you need to let go of how you think the goal should happen. Release the veins, open your mind. Hire someone or just talk with a friend to get out of your own perspective and see more opportunities or potential.
Use the nervous system work or your own self-care tactics that you teach your clients and your patients. I promise you, the more that you actually utilize these tools for yourself, the stronger your own program will be. Because you’ll embody that work, you’ll have experienced the benefits of that work.
I think that’s what makes my business coaching program so compelling to others sometimes because they actually see me living and breathing the techniques that I teach others, and they see the transformation and the success that it’s provided for my own life.
So you know what to do. Utilize your resources, your friends that you’ve met at trainings, do peer trades and sessions with them to help regulate your nervous system and find belief. You have so many tools resources and people available to you because you’re in the health and wellness field. Utilize that. Heal yourself, and your business will grow, I promise you.
And most of all, keep going. Even when you’re in the hole, even when you’re stuck, even when you feel like you’ve tried everything and things aren’t working in your business, keep going again, not in a hustling way, not in a robot way where you’re forcing and shooting yourself, but consistently show up with belief.
When you’re able to shift into that energy, it will pay off. And, of course, if you’re stuck, then just book your consult call. I’m here to help.
All right, I’ll see you next week. Bye for now!
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