Ep 231 – Things I Wish I’d Known!

Episode Introduction: Let’s Look at Common Mess Ups Starting Out

Welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the bite-sized podcast. 

How the devil are you? 

I thought, here we are at the beginning of the year. 

Let’s have a few ‘reflection back’ podcasts, and a few ‘funny’ podcasts – something that will make you chuckle, and:

•  make you realise: 
  • you are not the only one in that difficulty boat
  • in that lacking confidence boat 
  • and in the boat that means that you’ve got some work to do

Because we’re all there. 

I’m still there. 

We all have shiny object desires.

We all have moments when we lack confidence and think:

“I can’t do this”

“I don’t know the answer” and we need to ask somebody else. 

I thought, let’s have a look at some of the mess ups that we all start with.

* Plans that are too big

Now, I never had this problem because I’d honed my skill as a nurse.

In the UK, we had to write nursing plans for everyone. 

And we had far too many patients, and very, very little time. 

So you got very good at honing your treatment plan skills, for all of your clients. 

That has come over into my naturopathy studies, and so I was able to give very succinct, short plans, that involved very little for the client to do. 

Because clients find it hard to do things

and if you give them a huge plan

then not only have you given them everything – they don’t need to come back and see you

But they won’t do it

It’s great to have all that information there, but we are coaches. 

At the end of the day, we are coaching people to, ‘well health’. 

I can’t say it enough. 

Those rugby players didn’t become amazing rugby players, football players – they didn’t become amazing overnight. 

Your kid isn’t going to be the most amazing baseball player ever, unless they go to regular coaching – unless the coach is there helping them, supporting them, and each week. Showing them how to hold the bat, even though they showed them how to hold the bat last week.

And it’s the same thing with our clients. 

We have to see them regularly, so that we can constantly be telling them, (for example):

“This is the right food”

We can wean them off the foods that are not supporting their health. 

Yes, we might have to go in a little bit hard with supplements to start with, to get them over some of those fences at the beginning, and show that it really is worth doing this work.

But then it’s up to them. 

The ongoing part of our relationship as practitioners 

is to support our clients going forward. 

I can’t emphasise enough – return clients are wonderful!

It is wonderful to still be working with people 17 years later. 

I cannot express enough how wonderful it is to see these people over and over again – to watch their children growing up.

I was talking to someone the other day and I realised that the client I was talking about, those problems she came to me with, have all been resolved. 

Yes, she has menopausal problems now. 

Her two eldest children have grown up. I don’t see them.

The youngest child I’m still seeing, but very soon he will have grown out of his problems too.

He’s getting better all the time as he grows and gets fitter and healthier. 

So I’m still seeing her. 

Things have changed, but I’m still seeing this family 17 years later, and of the 2 eldest children – 1of them has bought a house; he’s in a long-term relationship. 

Very different to seeing somebody just a few times, and not being able to support them ongoing. 

The diet has changed with this family. 

Everything about this family has changed over time, because it takes time. 

So one of the things we want to avoid when we’re going out into practice are huge treatment plans. 

Let’s just not do the huge treatment plan. Okay? 

* Niche’ing:

Now, something else when we’re going out into practice, is we want to niche.

Because it’s easier to get clients in.

Yes, I do agree, and we should niche.

But at the beginning it’s often easier to know what we don’t want to do, rather than what we do want to do. 

Some people go into training college, very clear on what they want to do. 

They have their gut issues resolved, and so they want to be a gut practitioner. 

They may have had their anxiety issues resolved, so they want to work in anxiety.

It’s very clear to them which area they want to work in, so it’s very easy to niche. 

For those of us who literally stumbled into that first class, we don’t know what it is we want to niche in.  That comes with time.

But we know definitively what we don’t want to do, which actually makes some of the advertising easier.

So what we don’t want to be doing when we very first qualify is all of the different training courses. 

I did all of them! 

I did kinesiology as soon as I qualified, to discover I’m rubbish at it. 

I did more iridology. I got a camera to discover that that isn’t me either.

And so on and so forth.

So I spent a lot of money.

The Value of Mentoring

And yet the most precious thing was going to see my mentor. 

So he was one of the lecturers from college. 

I would drive for an hour. 

I would take my manila folders with my files. 

I would go down, and I would talk to him once a fortnight about my clients.

I would go through them and say,

“This is what I’m doing with this one, that’s what I’m doing with another”

“ What do you think about this?”

“What do you think about that?”

We would go through them. I would book one of his patient’s appointments with him, so that I could go through my clients, and that’s the way it worked. 

Then I started doing that, once I was confident. 

I was lecturing by then, and I’d had a lot of clients, and so these things go on.

Now of course I do it online.

But that was the most valuable thing to me, because I knew I was going in the right direction with the clients I had.

Those clients were coming back. 

I was getting results, and so those clients were referring me to other people. 

Now when I started out, I had a tiny baby. 

I was breastfeeding and I had a toddler.

So I couldn’t see more than 2 or 3 clients a week – which of course affects your confidence, because it’s really hard to stay up to date when you are exhausted.

When I was doing all my study – I’d be studying into the evening, I’d be studying at night. I’d get up, I’d breastfeed – I’d read while I was breastfeeding.

All of the things to get all the college work done. 

So we’ve really got to think:

“How is it that we can maintain that confidence through those initial stages 

when we’ve got very few clients?”

That’s where I come into the picture, and that’s where others like me come into the picture.

Now, if you are listening to this, it means that I somehow resonate with you.

I want to connect with you. 

I want to stay connected with you, and I want to support you as much as I can. 

Whether it be in my free groups, or whether you come and join one of my other groups.

Book a focus call – let’s find out what I can do to help you.

Another thing that I did that others weren’t doing when I was at college, all those years ago … was I’d grown up in a family that had a business. 

I was used to that business aspect. 

My father was a salesman – now he would be called an Advertising Executive, but back in the day, he called himself a salesman.

So I had a lot of this background.

Then I worked all over the UK for 15 years. 

I trained to be a nurse there, but I worked in restaurants and I’d managed those restaurants.

So I’d run businesses, and I’d grown up in businesses. 

So while I was training, I was creating my website. 

In terms of social media – it existed, but it wasn’t the same as it is now. 

If I’d been savvy enough at the time with social media, then yes, it was totally like it is now, and I would’ve been better at it, and I’d have those numbers following me. 

But I wasn’t savvy on the social media thing at the time. 

Student Downtime?  Get Started:

• Now I think it’s worth being savvy on social media
• And create that website
• Think about that business name

Start that stuff, because when we’re studying for something, and we need to take a break, that’s when you can go into Canva and create stuff. 

That’s when you can go onto that website you are creating, and do some artistic work, so you use your brain in a different way, if you can’t go out to the garden and work in the garden, or play with the children, or whatever it is.

We have to be developing this background business stuff before we qualify, and right at the beginning of our business. 

So when I qualified … I have a college friend all these years later, and a lot of us from the college I went to became practitioners, and are still active practitioners, and a number have retired.

A close friend of mine, she said:

“I remember you in some of the classes where we’d done it all before, or because of your nursing background, you thought you were up to date, or when you didn’t agree with the lecturer, or it wasn’t your thing”

( we have to do subjects that aren’t necessarily our thing), 

and she said: 

“You were creating your website, you were doing other assignments”.

She said:

“You were the only one when we went to that business weekend …”

(we had to build a business weekend)

“ …who’d written a business plan”. 

I was the only one who’d done a number of things towards it, because I knew that as soon as I stepped out the door, I was going to start my business.

It was going to be small because of my situation with small children, and a husband who’s always at work, and having to nurse to pay for the education, and nurse to pay for childcare, because there’s no family here. 

So it really was a juggling act. 

I knew I could take 2 to 3 people a week, and that would be my limit.

I was lucky in that my husband was off 1 evening a week, so definitively I had 1 evening a week, and that’s when I would see clients. 

But initially, before he definitively had that afternoon off, that evening off, I was juggling everything, and trying to see 1 or 2 clients a week.

There were maybe weeks with no one, because it’s so hard to do, when you first come out.

So without that person that I could ask – that person that I could go to – and without having done a lot of the things while I was at college – all of the website, and those sorts of business building things, I would’ve been already 5 steps behind once I’d qualified. 

Join the Associations:

The other thing is, while you are heading into qualification, it’s free to join the associations. They’re all free. 

So join all of the associations for free. 

Join the whole lot!

• Because then you can pick and choose:
  • which one is giving you more support, than the others
  • You can choose which one aligns with you and your values
  • You can choose which one is making you feel more welcome than the others
  • Which ones are easiest to interact with, perhaps?

Those things are really important and you have to check that you align and your values are in alignment. 

So as a student, it’s really important that you go out and join those associations now for free. 

Part Time Jobs:

The last thing I was going to say was about the part-time job.

Make sure that the part-time job that you have 

– because you’re going to have to support yourself initially – 

that the part-time job doesn’t have homework

It has definitive hours, so you know 

exactly where you are

what you’re doing

but you can switch off from that

Because when we run a business, we’ve got lots of background.

You’ve got several hours a week of background work. 

If you get your systems up and running properly, then you should only really have a couple of hours of background work a week. 

But you have all that background work. 

If you have a lot of clients, the more clients you have, the more background work you have.

So when we start out, we all have a part-time job. 

And that part-time job needs to make sure that there isn’t homework. 

There’s definitive hours.

I always say 2 days a week, maximum 3, 5 a fortnight is perfect, because then you can still have 2 definitive working days seeing clients, and you’ve got that spare day to do business things, to be with people, to have a life.

That job, if you can, if it’s related to the industry, is fantastic!

So working in a pharmacy, or working in a health food shop. 

Working somewhere so that you are talking health with people. 

If you’re a nurse, that’s great. 

But something that has homework – like if you’re a teacher – then you probably need to bring that down to 1 day a week because you’ve got homework. You’ve got marking, you haven’t if you’ve got the little ones, but you’ve still got planning, you’ve still got lesson planning to do.

So if you’ve been at it a long time, you can probably just regurgitate your lesson plans from 2 years ago, and that’s great.

But jobs that we have, that have a lot of homework … as part of your school, you have to support a school team doing something, then that takes you away from these things.

So you do need a side job. 

You do need a side hustle, and it helps your brain.

And it means you meet people in a different environment, and you can tell them what you do. 

Have you got your elevator pitch sorted out?

It’s really, really important – so that you can say exactly what you do, exactly, who you help. They will either be them, or they will tell other people what you do and who you help.

Summing Up:

So those are my top tips. 

I think that’s 3 top tips. I think that was the intention. 

Might have been 4 actually I’ve ended up giving you.

That was the intention of this podcast – to realise that you are not alone and that we all struggle. 

We absolutely all struggle in the business that we do.

And running a business.

And all of the things that are going on with them, and dealing with the things that are going on with them.

Signing Off:

So do not feel alone. 

Know that I’m here and that if you want to reach out – I’d love to catch up with you. 

I’d love to have a chat and we’ll leave it there today. 

You enjoy the rest of your day and I look forward to speaking to you on the next cast. 

See you soon. 

Thanks so much for joining me today. Don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast, for the weekly episodes. If you’d like even more support and learning, then The Academy is for you. Here, you’ll find part 2 of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning, and case studies, to support your clients in practice.