Hello and welcome. I'm here today with our coach Heather who wants to share a little bit about her background. Now, Heather wants to share today her regrets and her private practice and I think that's such a helpful conversation to know about mistakes that we make and sharing our experiences to learn from others. Heather, can you introduce yourself quickly for those that might be learning about you for the first time?
Yeah, absolutely. Hi, there I am coach Heather. I am a naturopathic, retired naturopathic doctor and specialized in cancer care. So is board certified in naturopathic oncology and had a private practice group coaching online courses, a book that you can still get on amazon etcetera, all of those digital ways to connect with the people that needed my support, amazing and innovative that you, you have done that even before Covid.
Right, so you really were an early adopter in your virtual private practice is one of the many reasons you're such an asset to this team because there's so much that you are aware of as we're going through and helping our clients with starting their private practice. So if you were to reflect on some of the journey that you've gone through with growing your private practice, what would you say are the top couple regrets.
Even just the first things that come to mind about maybe what slowed you down, what hung you up with your mind or if you would have gone back now, what would you do differently? Yeah, I mean there are so many ways that I could answer this question and I think some of my top regrets were spending on tech that I didn't need yet.
So there's a lot of technology bells and whistles that you can use in communicating with people digitally. And I think I used things that were too expensive and too robust to early on because I had this mindset that I only wanted to do this, I only wanted to set up something one time and so I might as well start with the most complicated expensive thing now, so they don't have to set it up again in the future.
So that was a big regret. And actually we're actively going through some of my digital platforms and complicating them and now it's costing me time and money and effort to do the reverse process of making things less expensive and less complicated. So that's a huge regret. And then another regret that I think really speaks to why I love the dietician boss method is that I focused on one on one way for way too much of my time for way too long.
And I experienced burnout. I experienced time fatigue, I didn't have enough time to do the things that I wanted to do for the rest of my life outside of running my clinic. And it took me about really like eight or nine years of seeing people one on one to really be able to take a step back and say, okay, actually I do see the commonalities between a lot of these patients of mine and I can do um more impactful group program that is accessible to more people at a lower price point than working with me one on one can actually impact the group of people that I really want to support and still be financially beneficial for my business.
So that is a huge regret of putting that on the back burner for so long. I have a couple follow up questions with both of those, firstly, thank you for sharing. It's so helpful and this is part of the benefit of being, you know, a member of our rebellion program or any of our coaching products is really getting to experience and learn among us, your mentors and among your peers which are your colleagues who are also on the same journey and it's really special because it can feel so isolating being a pioneer in the space of the online world and being one of the few people to be there and one of our clients and our coaching call just shared, like dieticians, don't know sales skills, this is something we're still learning and it's true, we weren't taught these things, we weren't taught about technology platforms in school, we weren't taught about how to package our products and services.
So this is almost like foreign territory and so the more we can talk about it and especially from a team standpoint us talking about, I love that you're a retired practitioner, we're sharing that knowledge and inspiring you to think and reflect on your path. So it's really important to engage in these conversations.
I'm so grateful that we have the platform, the podcast, YouTube, Instagram email marketing to be able to share this with you all. I have a couple follow up questions I think for those that might not fully understand what it means. I need some context. You don't have to list what type of software.
But for the first there's two things you mentioned, I want to go one by one first with the overspending on the software. Secondly with a model which was cause burnout. Let's break those down briefly. So the first one you mentioned technology walk me through maybe from mindset standpoint, you don't have to mention the cost or the technology platform but I'll just share what I see, I see our clients come in or dieticians if they're not yet joining us in the rebellion program. They say that they want to figure have everything all their dot their I's and cross their teas and have everything done before.
They have their first client or after. They've had two clients were in theory that makes a lot of sense in business. That's not exactly how it works because we have to make sure that we're talking to people, finding out what they need and developing some type of a prototype or a beta program to gather feedback before we can really get a better program going to make sure that we're fitting the needs of our clients.
So when I say program that means clarity on what you're offering, who it's for, how you're creating a learning experience which also includes the technology set up. So that's one of many pieces. Anything more you want to add to that heather? Yeah, well I couldn't resonate with that mindset for sure.
And like I said, I wanted everything like I just want to do everything once. And so that meant graduating past many levels of where my business actually was at to engage in software that could do email marketing that could do sales that could do sequences that are automated that can do all of these fancy things and to whom like my email list of a couple 100 people, it wasn't the right time to be engaging in that kind of software.
I did end up growing my email list to a size that would necessitate that kind of software. Some more complicated bells and whistles once I got past 5,000 or 10,000 email subscribers. I think some of those email marketing tools are really helpful and necessary. But I really engaged in that was very soon in my business.
Yeah. And I really appreciate you reflecting on that and sharing and I just want to mention it also is a personality type. I know there's a lot of different personalities in the company. I think we're going to spend more time. We already had our team take personality assessments, but I love discussing them. Personality traits are not right or wrong, but there is a profile of a health care practitioner and they tend to be higher on follow through and wanting things to be like perfect and beautiful, which is a skill and a strength because you put a lot of pride into your work and in business.
Having that knowledge and understanding can help you think about like the fact that there's going to be several iterations and it's okay to not have it perfect. And I know that we say that a lot that done is better than perfect and just get your stuff out there. But it's really hard if you have this mindset that things have to be a certain way and in business there's just so much agility required to create a product that will evolve as the needs of the market evolves.
And so it's a new skill and a new mindset to learn. And even though we talk about it, it's one thing to know it and it's another thing to do it and that's what we offer. You hear a dietitian boss when you work with us is the transformative experience of moving from knowing to doing and so you can know everything to google how to start a private practice and have everything written down and download every free guide on the internet, but it's not the same as taking action and doing and as you take action, learning about your mindset and your personality traits and how to use your personality to your benefit and how to adjust and adapt.
And so learning from your mentors is a great way for you to reflect on your journey as you're taking action. So I really appreciate your vulnerability with that heather and I will share on the opposite and I always like to create things that are not fully finished and I think that's a huge part of my success in business as I'm able to start things and then luckily I'm able to also hire help and really have people help me finish something and get it to where it needs to b but I'm a starter, not a finisher, so I hire finishers on the team and we work together to create an amazing product, but I'm really good at getting it started. So again, it's not about what's right or wrong, it's about knowing your personality and being able to leverage your skills and grow with time.
Anything you want to add to that or do you want to briefly touch on the second piece of the burnout with a model? Yeah, well I would just say that you brought up a really great piece Libby where I did have to talk myself out of perfectionism and I would say things to myself like, okay, an excellent researcher perfectionism, like really getting down to the bottom of this question or this problem makes a great doctor and not such a great entrepreneur and so I would have to catch myself when I knew I was approaching things from like more of a clinician perspective versus an entrepreneurial perspective where you just launch and you keep learning and you keep evolving and growing and knowing that the first attempt at something is not going to be perfect and not gonna quite hit the mark and you're gonna be continually perfecting that model over time, that level of self awareness that you just shared about you, knowing that you have perfectionist tendencies and putting on your entrepreneur hat but also maintaining your clinician hat that's a journey.
That level of self awareness is something that we support you with here in this company because a lot of us, like we're really not aware of our skills or we underestimate our skills and so understand when to double down on our entrepreneur hat and still preserve our clinical hat is important and it's just something to think about.
So I really appreciate you sharing that heather. It's a journey, it's truly a journey about learning with that alignment about and my purposeful with how I'm acting in the business and how I want the business to run because that goes right into the next topic which is you mentioning that you were burnt out and you wish you would switch from the 11 model.
I do want to mention that there are a lot of ways to grow your business. And so of course we are fans of products digital prod such as courses, memberships and group programming because those products allow you to reach more people because those products build the inherently build community because those products give you your time back and they give you freedom.
But that doesn't mean that one on one coaching is inherently bad, but only offering one on one coaching can cause burnout if you're not incorporating other models that can allow more access more reach. And then of course increased profitability and their strategy that comes with that. So that it's not that we think that it's good or bad to run a certain way.
You can combine them. But there are pros and cons and it's important to identify what those pros and cons are and then think about your personality and how you function within those models. So can you share a little bit about that heather before we wrap up in terms of burnout? Yeah, for me it was really about accessibility because my one on one pricing had gotten to the point where I wasn't accessible to a lot of people and their budgets for their health care.
And even though I was in a area of cancer care where people are willing to open new credit cards to survive their cancer really, literally I wanted to have something that was accessible to anybody and everybody who was going through the cancer journey and there was just no way for me to do that one on one and to be able to pay my front desk staff and pay for the overhead of having a clinic and all of the things that it requires to have high touch point clinic that is providing really good customer care.
So the group programming helped me in a variety of ways. One is help me deliver something that was accessible to what I think anybody's price point would be able to achieve. And number two is that it did help create more of a community and it took some of the pressure off of me when I was meeting with people one on one.
All eyes on me, right? All the pressure of carrying their mental health, their physical health, all of the different pieces and points of wellness fell on me and then maybe my front desk staff and when you open up to group coaching, what the beautiful thing that happens is that it takes some of the pressure off of you as the provider and allows the community to support each other and to answer each other's questions or cheer each other on.
And that was really liberating for me. I loved watching the community forum and I also love to have some of that pressure lifted off of my shoulders. Yeah, thank you for sharing that from your perspective. So the burnout did I miss that? Let's talk about that before we wrap up. Where did the burnout?
I understand the accessibility. I think that burnout I started pretty early on in my clinic. Also, I mean burnout is actually an expectation like in residency you're expected to experience burnout and just push through it. And I think that I had gotten to a place where I was no longer okay with being burnt out.
My life has hit a point where it's like okay I cannot continue to be tired and exhausted and on edge. I can't continue my life working 12 to 14 hours a day. Like none of this is working for other aspects of me as a human being and not just as a medical machine. I called this period of time of my life re humanizing because the process of becoming a doctor is so robotic.
It dehumanizes us in many ways. And I think the training for a dietician is very similar. So when I kind of woke up to this isn't working for how I want to live my life as a whole. I had to reassess my business model and how I was delivering my services. That is so incredibly helpful.
Thank you for sharing that. I think I made a note for our next podcast to be about your re humanizing. I'd like to talk about that a little more. But this was plenty for today. As a recap. We talked about heather coach heather's experience with thinking everything had to be done without some testing and maybe overspending on tech platforms that were a little bit of a premature investment, which was really a mindset piece.
And then the second area was accessibility, having a model that could help more people by building a community that would be accessible for more clients and waiting to do that. And then the piece that I asked at the end there was about, you know how heather felt with the burnout piece and we'll talk more about that in a future episode.
But I think that's plenty to hear experiences from private practitioners and I love that you're innovative and you did this before. It was cool. Like it's really amazing that you've been a digital entrepreneur for so long and now you're able to be retired and then give back to the dietician Boston, we couldn't be any more grateful.
So thank you so much for everything and we'll see you. We hope you tune in for the next podcast episode where we talk about re humanizing, we'll see you next time.
