Chapter 1
Claim Your Inner Business Owner
You Are a Business Owner
A question: Do you intend to trade your services and skills for money, to bring in income? Then you are in business. If you plan to work for yourself – whether on your own or as a contractor (not employee) to someone else – then you are a business owner.
Just because you love your work (massage, yoga, counseling, etc.), it doesn’t mean you love running a business. You might even have conflicted feelings about ‘business’. Those feelings can include negative attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes of business people and business in general.
Those feelings affect how much you can embrace that unavoidable truth: you are a business owner. Many people in the health and wellness world are deeply motivated to do their work from the heart. This is where the drive to do healing work comes from. They want to help people. They are often described in terms of compassion, presence, and love. However, if the core, the heart, isn’t also in the business side it is going to be hard to survive, much less thrive.
This chapter helps you understand how being a business owner and being a massage therapist, yoga instructor, herbalist, etc., can peacefully co-exist within you (and are actually interdependent). This chapter will guide you through exercises to uncover any negative associations with business that might be getting in your way. It then helps you build your own internal model of a business person that is in line with your core values as a health and wellness practitioner.
Of course, to be a business owner we have to explore our often complicated relationship with money. If we are going to work for money, we have to be at peace with money!
This chapter will also show you how to connect the mental and heart aspects of being a business owner with your energetic self, speaking especially to those readers who work with the energetic body.
You choose how you do your work. You can choose what kind of business person you want to be. Even better, you can choose how to make those two parts of your work flourish with the same set of healthy values.
This chapter has a lot of self-exploration in it: exercises, checklists, quizzes. You don’t have to do them all and you don’t have to do them all at once. Use what works best for you but be open to exploring the nooks and crannies of your own psyche and how ready it is to be a business owner.
Business Head, Healing Heart: The Two-Room Model
Think of your professional life as a house with two rooms. One room is where you practice – massage, yoga, counseling, etc. – and the other room is where you take care of business. Filing paperwork. Doing your book-keeping. Ordering supplies. Completing paperwork to renew licenses. Reading professional publications. Ordering business cards. Maintaining a website. You get the picture.
There are some advantages to thinking of your professional life this way. You recognize that your work is more than what happens when you are with clients. In fact, the things we do behind the scenes are big and important enough to merit their own room. The two-room model is an improvement on some people’s perception of their work, which doesn’t even have a second room!
There are some disadvantages to the two-room model. It can lead us to believe that these two categories of work are separate rather than integrated. More dangerously, it can lead us to ha...
