You’ve already defied the odds by launching your wellness practice in the first place. And with the wellness economy totaling $5.9 trillion, you’re looking to grow your slice of that pie.

And grow you have. You’ve had to overcome imposter syndrome and other mindset blocks to get where you are today. You’ve had to reimagine yourself as a master networker, an email marketer, and a social media maven.

But what about getting to your new phase of growth?

This new phase may involve reimagining how you package and offer your services, such as group programs. This post and its companion in this series outline the strategic and mindset shifts required to evolve your wellness practice.

Two expert speakers from our Programs Summit shared their expertise for this article:

• Sachin Patel, a functional medicine practice success coach.
• Meghan Walker, a former Naturopathic Doctor, self-proclaimed Entrepologist and founder of Clinician Business Labs.

Escape these thinking traps to maximize your success

Changing gears when working with clients exclusively in a 1:1 model can be challenging. Building an online course can also be a little intimidating when you’ve never done it before.

Cracks in your confidence can let imposter syndrome creep in. Here are Meghan’s tips on how to avoid common thinking traps.

Trap 1: Authorize yourself

Meghan says that many of us fail to grant ourselves what she calls self-authorization. So we won’t consider building an online course, for example, until we receive enough clear and steady signals that clients want one — and want one from us. This kind of thinking can trap you on the time-for-money hamster wheel.

“Too many practitioners think, I’m going to do the thing I was always taught how to do, and I’m not going to question the paradigm that I learned in school,” says Meghan. “The first place I want you to pay attention to is how self-authorized you are. Are you the one making decisions about your business and where you want to deliver care? I want you to know you are the one who can do that.”

“Are you the one making decisions about your business and where you want to deliver care? I want you to know you are the one who can do that.”

Meghan Walker

Trap 2: Grow your conviction

Clients need to feel you believe in your work before they invest in working with you. What differentiates you from someone who completed a weekend course and now calls themselves an expert? Conviction.

“Think about the conviction you have around your family table when talking about the power of food as medicine or treating the root cause of illness. You’re uninhibited and not worried about what anyone thinks,” says Meghan. “That’s the level of conviction and enthusiasm we need to bring to this work.”

Trap 3: Selling time

Everything changes when you acknowledge that you’re selling something more than your time. You’re selling a strategy. Meghan says the fastest way to stop selling your time in exchange for money is to stop labeling your services based on blocks of time. When you shift your labeling, you’ll see many more possibilities open up for for your practice.

• You’ll need to rearrange your working time differently from how you do it today. Right now, even if you only spend 60% of your week seeing patients 1:1, that’s more than 60%. That’s because each of those 1:1 appointments comes with additional admin work, like charting, paperwork, billing, and more. This schedule leaves little room for working on new approaches to generating income.

• Meghan recommends slowly reducing your 1:1 patient care appointments to 25% of your time and making sure you’re charging appropriately for that time. Then, allocate 15% of your time to follow-up activities related to those appointments. The remaining 60% of your time breaks down into 30% looking at new opportunities and 30% investing in the relationships that help you bring your strategy to life.

“You have to create time in your schedule if you want to build leverage into your practice and reach new markets,” says Meghan. “Otherwise, you are forever capped by your time. We get worried that we’re going to charge too much and lose patients, but the reality is, if you don’t charge appropriately, you will simply run out of time. That will be the limiting factor on your impact.”

Don’t forget to leave room for play

One last thing that Meghan finds differentiates creative individuals in their practices is making room to play.

“They’re taking a day off every once in a while just to be creative – to create space,” she says. “This concept is foreign to 1:1 practitioners because time is money. But what if having room to play is the thing needed to start moving the needle?”

Remember: Simplicity scales

As you start changing your mindset and practicing transformation, Sachin recommends keeping three things top of mind if you want to scale smarter.

• Keep it simple. Sachin recommends three things to simplify your processes and offerings. “I believe functional medicine really hasn’t taken off the way it should because it gets overly complicated,” says Patel. “I’ve learned over the years that creating health is embarrassingly simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated; the more complicated we make it, the less scalable it becomes.”

• Be specific. Although you can probably help everybody, you can’t market to everybody. So we aim to solve a specific problem for a specific niche of people in a specific way.

• Ensure it’s sustainable. If your programs and processes are simple and sustainable, your clients become walking billboards for life. They will sing your praises for a lifetime and tell everyone about your program because of the information and benefits you delivered.

“If you’re somebody who deeply cares about their clients, if you’re somebody with a program or a process that transforms people’s lives, it’s time to start being as big as possible.”

Sachin Patel

Mindset + strategy + tools = maximum impact

Sachin started his presentation at Programs Summit with some inspirational words: “If you’re somebody who deeply cares about their clients, if you’re somebody with a program or a process that transforms people’s lives, it’s time to start being as big as possible.”

He’s 100% right about having the right mindset to claim your impact-income advantage. But mindset and a roadmap isn’t enough. It’s time to start creating the programs and products you’ll use to scale your impact.

For more insights and inspiration on the strategic shifts needed to expand your impact, read more about how to scale your practice with online courses.

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