269. DIversify and Thrive

Introduction

Hello everyone. Welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the Bite Size Podcast. How are you? Well, yesterday was my birthday, so When we have a birthday, we do lots of thinking, don’t we? Well, actually we don’t. We do lots of eating and drinking and chilling out and unwrapping of gifts that we may have bought ourselves.

Anyway, these things happen, don’t they? We can wrap them if we want to, or we can just go shopping. 

Thinking About Diversification

So, what am I talking about today? Well, because I went shopping, I was thinking about diversification because some of the shops I went into had, because I’m in, I’m in Europe and one of the shops I went into and a number of the shops I went into, not just one, and I’ve noticed at home as well, is there is a variety of content.

Like if you go to a market, the market stall has to be specific to what they originally signed up for. So, If it’s a jewellery one, there has to be jewellery in it. If it’s a plant one, it has to be plants. But when you go into a shop, they’ve got the jewellery, the plants, the tops, and everything else. And it’s all about diversification.

Because when I walk into that shop, I may want a top, I certainly don’t want a plant because I’m travelling and I can’t take it back to Australia. Although I have bought one and gifted it already, as you do, but when we think about diversifying our practices, we don’t think about past life before we trained.

So if you’re a modern trainee, you’ve only just qualified, you’re about to qualify, then you will have qualified in one aspect. So you might be an expat or. a nutritionist or a herbalist, whatever it is. So you’re going to come out with that single qualification because of the way the universities or the colleges work.

Now, if you’re doing an advanced diploma through one of the other colleges with the possibility of upgrade to a degree, then you will have done a course that’s advanced diploma in naturopathy, advanced diploma in nutrition, and so on and so forth. But to do these things, we all have a past life. Right? We all have learnings from other areas.

And if you don’t, it might be worth thinking about, how can I diversify? So if you’ve left school and studied naturopathy, which is relatively rare, it does happen, but it’s not as common. You will have noticed as you were traveling through your training that the majority of people there were, they’d done something first, they maybe were mature learners.

And we all have trainings from them. So, mine’s nursing. So when I advertised, I was advertised, and I still do, an ex nurse, now a naturopath. So people see me because of my nursing. So I’m not diversifying, and that they are two very separate jobs, but I have that knowledge. But the diversification came. When I learnt hypnosis and I became a hypnotherapist.

The Power of Multidisciplinary Skills

So there I have two different, well, I’ve trained back in the day of advanced diplomas, so I have an advanced diploma of naturopathy. I have one in nutrition, I have one in Western herbal medicine. I have coaching certificates and whatever that is. I think it’s a diploma. I can’t remember. It’s stacked up.

You know, I’ve got the degree. I’ve got all of these different things. When we talk about diversification, It is doing something that a different group of people might be interested in. So, if you’re a massage therapist and you’re becoming a naturopath. You’ve diversified into nutritional naturopathy, you’re a PT and you’ve studied nutrition.

Utilising Your Unique Strengths

It means that we need to figure out how to have both modalities, how to get massage clients to see us for naturopathy, or at least tell their friends that we’re a naturopath and see clients in naturopathy because for massage PT, our bodies wear out. And so we can’t necessarily do that job for Eva, which is one of the reasons people diversify and retrain.

But then there’s all of the other people. So when I was lecturing, one of the other women there, sorry, she wasn’t a lecturer. I was a lecturer. She was one of the students and she was about to qualify. And I said, you know, what did you do before? She said, Oh, I was a copywriter. For one of the TV stations.

I’m like, well, aren’t you using that? She said, I don’t want to use that. I don’t want to do that anymore. Said, I know you don’t want to do that anymore, but you have that skillset and that might be what you need to use to get your business up and running. Because you want to use it in your own business to promote your business.

Unlocking Your Potential

You have those skills. Don’t throw those skills. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Use those skills. How can you use those skills within the business that you have? So it might be that. You do amazing copy for your website, but you could support other naturopaths with their copy for their websites while you’re getting up and running, while you’re promoting to the world what you do and who you are, and you’re getting comfortable in what you do so that you’ve got the money to be able to promote yourself more, spend money in advertising and Facebook, pay off your Hickstip, those sorts of things.

So what other diversification can you bring with you? What past learnings do you have? What future learnings are you going to have? And what are you trying to incorporate? Okay. Because recently we have talked about expanding your offerings. We talked about finding the problem, the client’s problem. And as we talk about these things and we think about what’s going on with my business, how can I diversify and enhance my services?

Expanding Your Service Offering

So I started doing hypnosis and I found it. People wanted to see me for hypnosis, but they’ve got these underlying problems that I can’t just deal with, with hypnosis. I have all this nursing training and naturopathy training, all these years and years of experience. And so I’ve had to specify, you must see me.

The first appointment is a naturopathic appointment and there may or may not be supplements prescribed to you because people turn up, no, I just want, you just have to do hypnosis. And I’m, well, no, it’s not going to work. So. So, if you’re a massage therapist and you’re trying to get your clients over into naturopathy, then how can you entice them?

Would it be that you actually need to do some sort of a testing service with them first, a hair analysis, hair tissue mineral analysis, or, or some sort of testing while they’re on the table? You’re massaging them and their stomach rumbles. You ask that question. Have you got problems with your gut? And they say, Oh yeah, this, that, the other thing.

You say, Wow, sounds like you’ve got a lot going on. You really need a naturopathic appointment. So we can go through this separately. If they say, I’ll tell you about it now. You say, well, I can’t write it down. This isn’t where my brain space is at to be able to think it’s a totally different appointment.

Everything happens differently, but I’m happy to give you a quick shoulder massage. Or a pain point on your body when you are here for that naturopathic appointment so that you get a little bit of extra work just in here where you’re saying the pain is right now. Or you’re coming to see me for pain.

Well, we have a lot of things that we can use within natural medicine for your pain, but I need to check that they’re not contraindicated for what’s going on with you. So we need to have that naturopathic appointment. So we’re moving those people from massage to naturopathy because chances are you’ve got enough clients in massage.

And they will come back to you anyway and or that will open up some spaces and massage so that you can take on more clients. So let’s really think about how we can diversify and enhance our services so that we can put more in. So I’ve talked about last week or so it may be creating a group within your niche.

Building a Supportive Community

You know what the problem is. You’ve found the problem for your niche. You’ve looked it up. Use one of the systems to. Think outside the box for all of the ways you can talk to clients about their problem. You’ve perhaps used answer the public or also asked, or you’ve gone to HubSpot for blog ideas. So you’ve gone and asked in these areas.

For the different ways people ask about their problem, the different ways people talk about their problem. You’ve been into Facebook groups and you’ve had a really good look at their problems and how you can promote to their problem. But now we want to think about diversifying and enhancing our services.

To give more to these clients that they pay for, we’re not giving more and being burnt out. We’re providing more opportunities for them to work with us in the way we want to work with them by thinking of other things we can do and using the other skills that we naturally have or have learned over the years of our life.

So it might be that you have a superpower. What is your superpower? One of my superpowers is helping people move house. It’s not helping myself move house. I can empty a house, I can pack up a house and ditch things. Within half the time anybody else would, it’s a total superpower.

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A friend of mine has moved three times, I’ve helped her move three times, and she’s like, I couldn’t do this without you. I had to empty my mother’s flat, I had literally 48 hours to do it. I did it. Okay, this is a superpower. Can I put this superpower to use in another way? Well, it’s an organizational superpower, isn’t it?

Embracing Your Strengths

So that organizational superpower flows into other things that I do. So what is your superpower? How can you use that superpower to support what you do to diversify your practice and to bring in more clients, more opportunities, and ultimately more dollars into your business?

So pounds, whatever your currency is, so that you can bring in more of those to support your business. I’ve diversified. I’ve got the red flags. I’ve got the clinical I’ve got a podcast, a private podcast that you can purchase. So you support this podcast and you get exclusive podcasts. I’ve diversified. I diversified in that I learned hypnosis and so now I have another modality in which they want one, they still have to do the other one, but I’ve diversified my practices.

So what do you have in the background? What do you have in prior learning? What do you have in prior education? And what is your superpower that you can use? To make sure that you are supporting your clients in a broader way so that they’re still giving you money, you’re still seeing them, but it’s making your life simpler, easier, easier to manage.

And it may be that you’re doing something different, which I have to say is really good for you. It’s really good for us to be doing more than one thing. So I was nursing at a naturopath, then I was nursing, lecturing. And a naturopath. Then I was lecturing and naturopath, and now I have my own business and I’m a naturopath and hypnotherapist, so I have more than one job going on, which means I see different people.

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You might work in a health food shop and then still have naturopathy clients, making sure that the health food shop is happy with you handing over your card so that people book an appointment with you. What’s your super, what can you do? How else can you support your business and do more and something different?

Conclusion

Contact me, let me know. I’d love to hear how these podcasts help you, how these podcasts support you in business because it’s motivation for me, isn’t it? When I hear from you. So five-star review would be nice if you haven’t already done it. If you’ve listened all the way to the end, then you might want my email address, [email protected].

Or you might want to hop over to my website, do geraldineheadley.com to find all of the courses and everything that I have on offer. ‘Cause I’d love you in the academy. So happy birthday to me and I hope you have a brilliant rest of the day and the rest of the week, and I look forward to catching you on the next cast.

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 two of the herbal discussions, more clinical learning and case studies to support your clients in practice.

Bye for now. Please let me know if you need anything else!