Thrive in Your Healing Business

Do the Work You Love Without Sacrificing Yourself

Heather Glidden

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781440597732
• eBook ISBN: 9781642795165
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

• Readers learn how to replenish their own energy
• Readers learn how to get even better results for their clients
• Readers learn how to hold healthier boundaries without having to say "no"
• Readers learn how to have more quality time for themselves and their loved ones
• Readers learn how to get the care that they need and crave
• Readers learn the reasons why healers burn out and how to end the burnout cycle permanently

Chapter 1

ON THE OUTSIDE, EVERYTHING LOOKS GREAT

“I feel like this is my life’s work, but I just don’t know if I can keep doing it anymore,” Sidney tearfully admitted to me.

Sidney was a nurse who was in the process of transitioning into full-time work as a life coach. She had an infectious smile and a determined ability to find the good in any situation. She had come to her work as a coach after her husband had suffered a serious injury. Every day for years, she would envision him recovering, even though the doctors said it couldn’t happen. When he finally did recover, in a way that seemed almost miraculous, she felt in her gut that her visualization had made that happen.

But life didn’t return to normal after his recovery. She realized that she had envisioned him healthy, but she hadn’t envisioned happiness. “I was expecting the healing to give him back,” she said, “but it didn’t fix things—my visualization had been for healing; not for happiness.”

She began visualizing happiness, allowing it to unfold without expectation for how that would look. Over time, she began to see the results. She felt happier, her husband felt happier, and they enjoyed their life with their two sons.

After going through this, she realized that she wanted to share the healing she’d experienced with other people.

“It took a lot of years for me to realize why I had suffered for so, so long—now I can look back and see why. It happened so I can connect with other people. I want them to know that we have the ability to create the life we desire through our thoughts and actions,” she told me.

She had taken a life coach training and was ready to build a coaching business to help other people heal and create the lives they truly desire.

I’d been working with her on building her coaching business for a couple of months, and things were going great! She was getting invitations to speak and even finding reservoirs of wisdom to share that she’d never expected she had. She’d been asked to share her message of positivity and empowerment with a local massage therapist’s clientele. She’d been invited to speak at a symposium with hundreds of her ideal clients in the audience.

At her boss’s retirement party just two weeks earlier, she’d spontaneously given a speech about her boss’s impact on her life and the power of people in leadership positions to shape an organization. Everyone was crying by the end of her speech, and management had invited her to a conversation about how she could offer coaching to affect the direction of the organization.

On the outside, it looked like everything was going great. She was building the business she wanted and sharing the message she so wanted and needed to share.

But on the inside, she felt like she was about to have a nervous breakdown. Between working with her coaching clients, juggling her job as a nurse, and trying to be a good mom and wife, she was getting pulled too thin. She was losing her temper with her kids, losing the connection she’d worked so hard to rebuild with her husband, and she had no quality time for herself.

“I keep Googling for retreats or vacations, but I just want to go by myself! I feel so guilty saying that, but I can’t be the caretaker for everyone right now. When my kids and husband are with me, I feel like I still have to be in the caretaker role,” she said.

She admitted that she felt like a fraud, sharing this message of hope and empowerment with the world when her own life felt so out of control. She noticed that she started to resent it when people asked her for help.

“Normally, I just want to give and caring comes naturally for me. But now I feel like I can’t even care,” she said. “What if I’m not cut out to be a healer?”

She came to me for help to get her business and her healing work in control so she could enjoy her life again. Even though she was afraid that she might not be cut out to be a healer, she still desperately hoped that she could make it work. But between all the pressures of her work, her husband, and her kids, she knew she was going to need support.

My heart went out to her, as it does for every healer who finds themselves in this situation. It is a dark, sad, lonely place to be.

But the good news is that I have learned, both through my own experience and through working with my clients, how to balance a healthy life with a healthy healing business!

I’ve actually come to believe that this is a critical phase that every healer must go through at some point on their healing path. In learning how to balance your role as a healer with the rest of your life, you must do a lot of your own powerful healing work. This allows you to be a more effective healer.

I taught Sidney what I’m going to teach you. It allowed her to create the balance that she was craving so she could have quality time for herself and her family while still doing the work she loved. Getting her life in balance didn’t require a lot of time or a vacation to Bali. It was actually a lot simpler than she thought it would be, and it changed everything in how she related to her business.

I wrote this book as a love letter to every healer who finds themselves in that dark, lonely place. If that is you, please know that you are not alone! You can do the healing work that calls your soul and also live a healthy and well-balanced life. This book will show you what I’ve learned about how to do that.

Chapter 2

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BUSINESS MODEL

My first nudge toward this work came very early in my career in the form of a movement client. Dr. Robert was a well-respected holistic doctor in my community. As a new teacher offering an obscure movement method called the Gyrotonic system, I couldn’t believe he wanted to work with me!

I had not yet stepped into the title of healer for myself, but it was something I very much aspired to. Working with such a well-known and well-respected healer felt like being a young actress and getting a gig with George Clooney.

Every Friday afternoon, he would come in for his lesson after his last patient of the day, and I would set him up for a series of movements called “Hamstring Series.” In the Hamstring Series, the client’s legs are supported using a weighted pulley system, so they feel almost weightless. It’s a relaxing way to start a session, and after a full day of being on his feet treating clients, he was so ready for it.

He would begin doing the movements and with each repetition he would get slower… and slower… and slower. His breath would get deeper. Some weeks he actually fell asleep, and some weeks he merely got close. Either way, the message was clear: He was exhausted.

As we worked together more and I got to know him better, I began to see the high toll that his healing work took on him, both physically as well as emotionally. I saw how it had strained his relationship with his wife and seemed to have taken over his whole life. He was always quite honest about this.

One day he told me, “You’re a very talented young healer, but if you are going to make a living of this, it’s not enough to just do the work. You’ll have to figure out how to take care of yourself too.”

I was equal parts elated and sobered. On the one hand, I had just received genuine validation of my healer credentials from an unassailable source. I’d arrived! On the other hand, I realized how right he was.

As a movement teacher, I often worked with people in their fifties, sixties, or seventies who had pain or other chronic injuries. What I frequently noticed was that the ailments these people experienced had roots in some event or habit from their early adulthood. I could clearly see that if they had addressed this issue in their twenties, thirties, or forties it would have been much easier, faster, and less costly to correct.

I rapidly extrapolated this insight out to my whole life and decided I would not become a burned-out healer. I would learn the secrets to healer self-care early so I could avoid that particular pitfall entirely.

What I think the Universe heard when I made that bold statement was, “Hey Universe, I want to learn everything there is to learn about healer burnout, and I want to learn it on a really accelerated timetable. Please fast-track me for some tough-love self-growth lessons!”

And let me tell you this: Always be careful what you ask for. Because you will get it.

Another benefit of working with Dr. Robert turned out to be that he was a great referral source. Before I knew what had happened, I had a full-to-overflowing clientele of people, most of whom had significant injuries or health concerns. As I helped them get better, more and more came.

I left the studio where I had been renting equipment and opened my own studio. Within the same year, I grew to a staff of five, expanded the new studio, and attended an 800-hour massage program to give me more tools to help my clients.

Within two years of opening my studio, I was completely burned out. I was teaching six days per week, six to ten hours per day. When I went home, I was managing emails and coordinating with my staff. I often stayed at my computer until midnight. I hardly saw my husband. I hardly saw my friends.

And the worst part was that the work I had found delightful and engaging only a couple of years earlier just felt flat to me. I would struggle to stay awake through lessons and count the hours till I could go home each night.

I knew I couldn’t keep going like that, so I started searching for solutions. I noticed that I would get a boost of energy and inspiration after attending a training, so I started taking more trainings. Of course, trainings cost money, so when I was home, I still needed to work just as much in order to be able to afford the next training.

When I look back on this time now, it looks like an addiction to me—always saving up for the next hit and hoping it would get me through until I could afford the one after that.

After a couple of years using that strategy, I could feel it getting less effective, so I started looking for the next thing that would keep me going. I decided to partner with another woman to run the studio, hoping that if I had less studio work to do then I would feel more refreshed in my teaching work.

In order to create the partnership, we merged our two studios, creating one much larger studio. It turns out, and perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, that having a much larger studio is much more work. So of course, you can see that I wasn’t out of hot water yet. Moreover, there were new conflicts involved in the new partnership.

I started having panic attacks. I spent my entire thirty-fifth birthday curled in my bed hyperventilating. I remember another time when I was hiding in a closet at my studio shaking uncontrollably and telling myself, “You have a client in five minutes. I don’t care how you do it, but you have to pull yourself together now.”

Somehow, I always did pull myself together for my clients. To the world, I looked like I had a successful business and like everything was under control. But inside, I knew it was an act—one that I couldn’t sustain. The longer I wore that mask, the more it felt like my soul was dying.

“Obviously, I just need to teach less. If I teach less, then my life will feel more spacious, and I’ll be happier and feel better about everything,” I thought. It sounded very logical.

So I hired a business coach who helped me revamp my business model so I could make more money while teaching fewer hours. I finally had free time!

But a strange and totally surprising thing happened once I had free time. I had no idea what to do with it! I had no idea who I was when I wasn’t working. I felt more anxious than ever before.

I ended my partnership and built a new studio. I was determined that I would finally get it right this time. I was going to build the studio around the concept of joy, and it would finally give me what I had wanted from my work for so long.

Can you guess what happened? Of course, the studio didn’t give me joy. Weird catastrophes started happening. The husband of one of my instructors suddenly decided he wanted a divorce. She moved out of town as a result, and we were left short-staffed. Our landlord suddenly decided that he didn’t want us to put a sign on the front of the building. Despite having a highly visible location on Main Street, we couldn’t get any traction on awareness-building campaigns. It was the hardest I’d worked on a studio in my life, and I was getting fewer results than I’d ever had.

Every day I asked myself, “What’s wrong with this studio? The whole plan for this studio was to feel more joy, and the dang thing is just making me more miserable than ever!”

It was in my grief after one of my instructors whom I dearly loved had told me that she just couldn’t stay anymore and she was leaving to work at another studio that it finally clicked.

Before this point, I had learned all the pieces I needed in order to make my work sustainable for myself—the marketing, the business model, the scheduling, the boundaries, the delegating—but I was missing the one key piece that I needed to bring it all together and make it sustainable.

The studio wasn’t going to bring me joy, and I had to stop expecting it to do that.

Changing my schedule wasn’t going to make my life feel spacious.

Going to trainings wasn’t going to make my teaching inspired—not in a lasting way.

All of those things had to come from inside of me. Learning how to create the internal state that I desired—to be the joy, the spaciousness, the inspiration—was the final step. I had to learn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: On the Outside, Everything Looks Great
• Chapter 2: It’s Not About the Business Model
• Chapter 3: Learning to Walk
• Chapter 4: The Cabin
• Chapter 5: I Just Wish Someone Would Take Care of Me!
• Chapter 6: The Practice
• Chapter 7: Resistance is Futile
• Chapter 8: Moving FORWARD
• Chapter 9: A Busy Life vs. a Full Life
• Chapter 10: The “M Word”
• Chapter 11: The Excavation
• Chapter 12: The Vista
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Thank You!