278. Ready for 2024?

Embracing Industry Trends

Hello everyone, and welcome to Mentoring with Geraldine and the Bite Size Podcast. How the devil are you? So when I started with this series of four, I thought it would be a really good idea to talk to you about the innovations that I have personally put into my business. But as I started writing everything out, industry trends, and I realized that, you know, what I’ve embraced, you know, that I’m virtual, you know, that I have plans and packages for my clients.

You know, that I use technology. And so I thought, what other industry innovations are there rather than me just repeating myself. It seemed like a really good idea, this title. And then I was like, no, I’ve told you I’m going to be talking about it. And the first one, but it’s just modifying it a bit to look at some of the other industry trends.

I did a bit of a Google and as well as I’ve got on the top of my mind and what I’ve written down on my list, I found a few sort of other things that are. been there. They’re always there and people talk about them, but we don’t necessarily. So I mean, everything is sales and we are sales. We have to sell our services to get clients to come in and see us.

But when we think about what’s going on out in the market, there’s people touting eco friendly practices. And yet we’re doing that anyway. We want our clients to have to be going outside. We want them to be using natural products. We want them to be environmentally conscious, and we want to be environmentally conscious in the way we work as well.

So, you know, no plastic cups in the office. Everybody gets a teacup. We make tea in a pot so that we can make it for more people who will drink out of a cup that we wash. So there’s all sorts of things that we’re doing sort of anyway. And as you do, and the technology is obviously the biggest innovation, biggest development in what we do because everything now has to be.

Prioritizing Client Privacy

Privacy compliant. It has to be of a certain standard. We are held to account. You know, we have to make sure that all of our client’s information is held securely. There’ve been some big hacking breaches here in Australia of a couple of the private health companies. And that could happen to us. That could happen to where we hold our content, making sure that you’re not holding client information or a minimalist amount of client information with any of the distributors.

What are they doing with your client information? What do they do with KPIs and the metrics? We have to be a little bit careful about that. You should be maintaining it on a strict platform that is purely a platform to hold their information and not anywhere else. And as we integrate these technologies.

into our businesses. We have to be thinking about client privacy and what it’s doing. Is it doing us any good? I mean, I’ve changed platforms for my mentoring content, Heapstorms, and I’ve tried other platforms and haven’t liked them and ended up going back and all the rest of it, but for my clients, for my, Patients, for want of a better word, I use Halaxy, which was HealthKit.

I used it because it’s HealthKit and that came out before SimpleClinic or before PracticeBetter and these other companies. So those are the ones, if you’re starting out, you want to look at them. You want to look at SimpleClinic because although you think to yourself, oh, it’s really clunky, it’s so big, I’ve got to learn it.

Embracing Learning and Adaptation

If you’ve only got one or two clients, it’s a great time to start learning something. You don’t want to be swapping to something when you’ve got mass, totally full. patient books and you’re trying to learn something new. So when we think about the innovations, we’re thinking about the bigger picture, not just us.

Cause I think, you know, my innovations, I think, you know what I have done. And if you don’t go back and listen to some podcasts or come Email me or join me in Strictly Education and Support in one of my training days. But some of the bigger things that have happened, you know, as a functional and integrative medicine, there’s this shift towards combining conventional medicine with the natural alternative therapy.

So not being alternatives, but so much, but rather being complimentary and being able as practitioners to understand what’s going on to be providing products with really good platforms where you can look up products and go, Oh, and they can’t have that product with that medication or with that problem, with that problem that they’ve got, which we didn’t have access to when I was training.

Harnessing Technological Advancements

I’ve got to be honest, we had very limited information and a lot of it was trial and error. There’s all of the companies. You can look up their products on these natural medicine databases. You can look up whatever product you want. You can look up ingredients on the natural medicine database. You can do it all for free.

I often show people that little trick. And those are innovations in our space. That’s having that information right there at your fingertips. Google Innovations, hey, we’ve got Google, we didn’t have Google 20 years ago when I was training. So when we think about these innovations, these innovations are actually a really big picture.

Considering Long-Term Implications

Like genomics, nutritional genomics, that certainly wasn’t a thing when I started training. People have brought out the blood type diet, which I’ve got to say I didn’t get into, but there were all of, is there any science behind the blood type diet? I have no idea. I didn’t get into it, so I didn’t research it, I didn’t look at it.

But now we’ve got genomics telling us what nutritional, what foods people should be eating, what wellness plan they should be undertaking. And this is changing all of the time. And there’s growth in that market. There’s growth in that industry because it’s very detailed and it gives us a longer

Adapting Mind-Body Practices

Mind, body practices haven’t changed a lot, really still want people to do yoga, tai chi, qigong, but now where they do them is different because they can do them at home in front of the screen. So having our own apps or having access and knowing those people that can train them online. is a fantastic asset. I mean, that is an innovation being able to go, Oh, you can do it with this person online. They’re amazing.

When we think about telemedicine and doing it all online, the companies that hold our data, they’ve really had to upskill their patient compliance. With some companies, you’re signing away information and you need to double check what you’re doing with clients information. So part of my intake forms is you understand that I’ll be giving your email address to a distributor, but for some distributors, They’re emailing clients.

Prioritizing Client Communication

So do you want your clients emailed by the distributor? I don’t. As a client, if I started getting emails from a distributor I didn’t know, looking like it was from my naturopath and then when I spoke to my naturopath and she said, Hey, you know, do you want me to tell this stuff? And they were like, what? I would be really annoyed.

So do be careful who you’re sharing your client’s information with. And you know, do explain to your clients if you are emailing once a week that you will be emailing at X time the next day. And is that okay with them? Because these innovations are great. Sometimes innovations can add more work and that’s what we don’t want.

So we’re, this is going to be a short one today because I want you at the end of this, this you’ll get a job after this podcast is to go and check that you really are compliant, that your privacy with your client is good. You might just go off. I’m a simple clinic. I’m a goodbye friend. I’m a practice, but I’m a goodbye friend. I don’t have to do anything. I can keep walking the dog.

Taking Action and Prioritizing Compliance

But what about the other systems that you’re putting your client’s information onto? Are you using chat GPT? Are you Googling stuff? Is their name anywhere else? Are you writing out information for them and emailing it? That is safe. What system? Are you writing it out in two? Are you using that system? How are you emailing them?

Are you using an email system? Is that a privacy system? What are you using to record your conversations with your clients? These are all innovations and they’re all incredible innovations and they’re really helpful. Are we setting ourselves up to be hacked? It’s like, Facebook, have you got your birth in there? You’ve got your day, your month, and you’re saying 45 today. So you’re giving somebody your year of birth, right?

So just think about this thing, there’s all these innovations out there, there’s all these wonderful innovations, but who were you sharing with maybe a little bit too much? And remember, you’ve got your client’s information and who were you sharing that with? What updating of information are you doing? So what updating training and information are you doing? And what do you then do with that information that you get at that training?

Encouragement for Reflection

Your clients, are you just putting it on Facebook? Are you just putting it on some sort of social media platform? That’s not safe. So we’ve got to think about how and where using content, how and where we’re talking with our clients. So there’s lots of things that we need to think about within these innovations that we’re really happy to use, that we’re really happy to learn about genomics.

It’s always changing. It’s developing more and more, but we’re handing somebody’s DNA over. What if you’re doing a child, you’re doing a child’s DNA. And then in 20 years time. That child decides it wants to, I don’t know, join the Air Force. And so the Air Force says, Oh, I’ve entered your DNA, Dad. And they can’t lie.

And they’ve gone and found it. They found the kid’s DNA. And they discover that, yeah, the kid’s really smart from the DNA, but they’ve also got a heart, remember? Or the possibility of one in another 20 years time. So they decide not to take them in. They say, Nah, sorry, you can’t wait for us because you’ve done this DNA test and there’s lots of inconclusive stuff there.

Mindful Innovation

Or in 20 years time, they’re able to look at it and go, Whoa. We can really see all this stuff. And so that child is devastated. Young person by then, obviously, not actually a child, but you did it when they were a child. You did their DNA when they were a child and here they are, a young adult trying to get, I don’t know, into the Air Force, trying to get into the Secret Service, trying to be the next James Bond.

I have no clue. But they’re trying to do something and they’re rejected because of that DNA that you did all those years ago. They can come back and sue you. So really be thinking about, or that company I was doing gut testing with an American company and they didn’t pay their taxes and they were closed out.

Conclusion

What happened to all that information from my clients when they closed out? We’ve got to think about these things. It’s like, Oh, there’s a bigger picture here. There’s a, there’s a long term discussion here about. Um, these innovations that we do take on, that we do leap into, that we do think, yeah, this is going to really help my business.

But there’s the longer term discussion and information about where it’s going. I mean, everybody’s talking about GPT chat and my daughter, we were talking about it the other day and for their exam, she said people got zero because Turnitin now has an a chat, you know, now has a AI filter. So we’re just going to be careful.

So my innovation discussion with you is to sit down. And go, yeah, I’m innovating. Yeah, I’ve learned this, that, and the other, but what did I do with the information? What do I do with client’s information? Who am I sharing the client’s information with? And how far is the future is it going to be used? Am I going to get wrecked by doing this?

So to think about, so it’s a little bit different to what I expected this podcast was going to be. But. Every single podcast, I think of a title or sort of think of an idea, you know, that this looks really good, but no AI was harmed in the making of this podcast. So have an absolutely brilliant rest of day, won’t you?

And connect. If you want to chat, connect. I’d love to chat with you. I love chatting with people. I don’t know if you can tell, I’m more of a talker than a writer, but let’s catch up sometime. I hope you have an absolutely brilliant rest of the day and catch you soon. Bye. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Podcast Support

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Final Goodbye

Bye for now.