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Welcome to The Health & Wellness Practitioners Podcast! Dr. Danielle and other guest experts talk about everything from getting your practice started, developing your clinical skills, growing your practice YOUR way, and dealing with the real stuff life burnout and work/life balance. Whether you’ve been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you’ll find something here for you!
DR. DANIELLE: Okay, everyone. My guest today is Laura - and Laura, I apologize because I don’t know how to pronounce your last name.
LAURA: That’s all good, I'm glad you asked - it's WICK. Like a candlewick.
DR. DANIELLE: Okay, cool. So, let's get started off with a couple of questions first. What is your go-to, can't live without, must do health habit for yourself?
MEET LAURA WIECK
LAURA: Yeah, for me, it comes back to my breathing. So I have a toddler at home, he's two, and just having a space and time every single morning where I can be by myself. I love to hold my warm coffee mug and simply breathe. And that to me is absolutely non-negotiable. I notice even if some days it's five minutes, some days it gets to be spacious in 25, 30 minutes, but that health habit for me is coming back to the breath, coming back to my body. And just in that space is where the intention gets to rise up. So that is my non-negotiable.
DR. DANIELLE: What I love so much about this is that anyone can breathe and it's free. You can do it anywhere. You don't have to pack any equipment with you. If you travel, you can be laying down and you can be sitting. It's so accessible for all of us.
LAURA: I once heard your breath is the cheapest most readily available medicine and breathing really is a skill. It's something that we tend to breathe very shallow, and in a world where we are stressed and there's a lot of anxiety and unknown, your breath is actually a great tool to just really ground back down.
DR. DANIELLE: Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Next question. What is your least favorite thing about running a business?
LAURA: Oh man, first of all, I love business.I think the hardest part, my least favorite part - and I actually heard you talking about this in a previous, one of your previous podcasts - is not being able to follow all the ideas that I have. Like, I tend to be somebody who I have so many ideas and I want to do so many things, and I now have an amazing team that I love, and I know that I can't follow every single, amazing idea that I have. So that's really a challenge for me, and I think with that, not necessarily my least favorite part, but probably the part where I get to practice my breathing, is patience. It takes time for things to happen, and just knowing that that's part of the process.
DR. DANIELLE: I still struggle with this Laura, even after years of practice, I still want to do all the things. I still have lots of ideas and it is a constant balance. It's a constant like process of checking in with myself to see, is this really for me? Is this a great idea for someone, or is this a great idea for me to bring through? Yeah. Most oftentime, it's not actually, for me, it's a great idea. Maybe I can hand it off to someone else. I had an idea recently that I thought was a really great idea. My husband thought it was a great idea. And then I talked to a friend who's also a business owner and she was like, I'm working on this brand new great idea. And I was like, I have the same idea. I'm so glad that you're doing that because now I don't have to.
LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. We like to talk about ideas that have legs. Like sometimes there's ideas that are just out there. I have an idea monster inside of me, it is always producing ideas. And my team is now aware that if an idea circles back, like at least three different times, the idea is starting to grow legs. And once it starts to grow legs, then maybe we can look at, is this something that we want to implement or not? But if it's just kind of like out there we let it simmer.
TRANSITIONING TO THE CONTAINER OF SUPPORT METHOD
DR. DANIELLE: Awesome. I love it. And it allows you to slow down. All right, so our topic for today is essentially transitioning from single sessions to packages. And there was a video that you shared in your Facebook group recently that I just happened to catch. And I was like, yes, let's talk more about that. Can we please? So where do you want to start?
LAURA: Oh my gosh. Well, I think it's always start at the beginning and I want to just make a quick distinction. I actually think for us, it's going from single sessions to what we call a container of support, because even going from we talk a lot in my business with our clients about this unspoken rule of single sessions, this unspoken agreements, I should say of single sessions where I know every single person who is listening has had a conversation with multiple clients where you, where you tell them I'm not here to fix you. Does that ever happen to you? Where like the client is stressed, they're exhausted, they have headaches, they schedule the appointment, they're like, I'm so glad I'm here, I want you to fix me.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. And I literally just had a phone call on Thursday last week. So it was a week ago as we're recording, the person had found me on Google and she was like, I'm leaving tomorrow to go out of town, and I hurt my shoulder this morning and I need to see someone and it's 2:00 PM on a Thursday. And I was like, I'm so sorry that that happened. I cannot help you. I'm not that person for you. You can try to help her find someone that she could get in to see that day. But I don't know that she ever found someone
LAURA: Well, and we sit here and we tell our clients - I come from the massage world where I would spend extra time with my clients, sharing tips and resources and all this stuff, and I would constantly tell them, I'm not here to fix you. Let me show you and you the support so that you can implement this and do it yourself. And that's great. But then two weeks later, a month later, depending on how frequently your clients see you, they're back with the same thing. And so there's this unspoken thing that happens with single sessions that no matter how many times you tell your clients, I'm not here to fix you, when somebody pays you for 60 minutes of your time, there's this unspoken rule that they're going to come in and in that 60 minutes you are going to give them the thing that fixes them. And so even packages I feel like packages have that same unspoken rule, but now it's let me fix you at a discount. So we talk about in body mind coaching, we teach people how to go from single sessions to what we call a container of support.
DR. DANIELLE: And I love the terminology because it words matter, words have meaning. And there's a big shift that I feel just listening to you describe it when I hear you say container of support.
LAURA: Yeah. And a container of support is really, all of that, all of those amazing things that you're sharing, all of that advice, all of the resources, all of the tips and tools. What happens is when somebody comes in for a single, for a single session, like again, I always talk about the massage world and I feel like you and I had like parallel paths of what was happening for you in the chiropractic world was happening for me in the massage world. But in a 60 minute session, there's this exchange I'm paying you for this 60 minute massage. And yes, all of this extra advice is wonderful and amazing, but they're not actually committed to receiving that let alone receiving it and implementing it. So that container of support is a framework that provides the support and the tools and the resources - but it's also about holding space for somebody to decide that they actually want to make their health and wellness a goal. It holds space for them to implement the things that you're actually teaching them. And the other thing that it does is we forget that having an end date motivates people to do stuff.
DR. DANIELLE: Yes.
LAURA: Now that doesn't mean they stop working with you. But there's a difference between “Come in every other week indefinitely, buy a 10-pack that you use whenever you feel like it,” or “Let's come in and over the course of three months, four months, six months, we're going to set a goal. You're going to have the support of these sessions, and at each session we're going to create a personalized action plan,” which fun fact, that's all the stuff that you're already telling them to do anyway. So nothing has to change there, but it's just received differently. And then they have this space between to do the things that you're saying and at the end of four months, you have this beautiful point where you get to reflect, where you get to honor the journey where you get to, to celebrate the things that they've done and the things that they've learned. And you also have this point to say, now what? What's next? So these are like simple things that actually support the client in moving forward and getting better results that don't require you to do more.
DR. DANIELLE: And I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say and I've said it myself, “I feel like I say the same things over and over again, like a broken record and people don't get it. They don't hear me, or they forget what I've said or they just don't implement, they don't take action on it.” And I think a lot of it is because they haven't actually even asked for it. In many cases, they haven't asked for all that advice that you're giving them, nor have they made a commitment internally to follow through or to do something with that advice that you're giving them. And then it's exhausting for you as a practitioner to be saying all of these things all the time and feeling like you're undervalued and underpaid spending all this extra time with people, giving them so much that you're not getting paid for.
LAURA: Yes.
DR. DANIELLE: This is a solution for the practitioner as well as the patient or the client, because really it's a win-win.
LAURA: It really is. And going deeper with this idea of single sessions is for people who are heart centered for the practitioners who are listening, we have kind of been taught that if we want to help people we have to give, and we've been taught that we have to do, that we have to give, and we are actually unconsciously in this single session structure taking on the responsibility of our client healing. Not that we want to, not that that's what we're saying, but the person actually gets to have the choice to commit to it, you know? So I may have been stalking you prior to our conversation today and listening to your podcast, I went and binged a bunch of episodes. You said something in an earlier episode about self care and how a big part of self care is deciding that you want to get better, deciding that you're committed to your health and wellness. And when we have single sessions, we don't realize that people have to decide over and over again, every time they schedule the appointment that they're deciding again to make their health a priority. But what if you have this beautiful container of support where they decide that? And then they step into this beautiful spacious experience where the real transformation that gets to happen is that they show up to themselves. They've decided it. And we love to talk about how the transaction is really that activation point of transformation. So they've decided it, you gotta get paid in this, right? So you actually get paid more, it's less work on your end - physically less work. But the real transformation is that that client has made the decision for themselves. They've stepped in, they've made it nonnegotiable, they've put their money where their mouth is, and then they go and do - they do the damn thing is really what it is. Right? Most of us, it's not that our clients need to learn something new or need to understand something new.
WHEN TO MAKE PACKAGES A PRIMARY PART OF YOUR PRACTICE
DR. DANIELLE: How did you arrive at a place where you made this transition in your own practice?
LAURA: Yeah. I would love to tell you that I got here because I'm so wise and smart and figured this all out, and that was absolutely not the case. I was that booked-solid, burnt-out massage therapist. There's a shadow side to being booked-solid, and sometimes we do not talk about that. Like that was the carrot, right? I am a driven person, I want to help people, and the goal for me to do that and what that looked like was a booked-solid business, and I did that. And in the process my husband and I struggled to conceive the child and I was working six, seven days a week and my schedule was maxed out and given all this advice - and you said the hamster wheel, I called it groundhogs day like the Bill Murray movie - that's what it felt like. And so we end it up in a fertility doctor's clinic and basically we need the most expensive form of IVF. And then he turns to me and he's like, oh, and Laura, you're probably going to want to lighten your schedule to increase your chances of conception. My brain broke because I'm like you're telling me I have to put a $15,000 deposit down, plus the meds, plus all of this other stuff, and I'm supposed to work less? I was like, in my brain tell me how this is supposed to work, because at that point I'm a Midwestern girl, I was taught to work hard. If I ever needed more money my solution was to put more people on my calendar.
DR. DANIELLE: Right.
LAURA: And I couldn't do that, that was not an option. And I laughed because I prayed and I thankfully had been receiving coaching at this point. And so I was able to ask myself, okay, maybe this isn't a block. Maybe this is an opening. And I remember I saw something online, I think I watched a free training, and that's when I started to see - all this advice that I'm getting, what if I start to deliver it differently? I got curious about online programs, which I know that’s your jam, right? They're brilliant. And I started to think about, and I realized, I started to think about how I could show up differently while still helping my clients. And I also got curious to what is it that they're really getting from me in these sessions? Because I think as holistic practitioners and hands on practitioners we think that the thing we're providing is like the massage, the chiropractics, THE thing. What we don't realize is that there's actually a quality, a thing about you that is THE thing. And that idea of give a man a fish, feed ‘em for a day, teach 'em how to fish, he’ll eat forever. I kinda realized that this thing that I was doing in these sessions was actually the thing that they could learn to apply in their own life. And what if I actually showed up for them to learn how to do that themselves? And so this idea of like, what the hell am I going to do? Instead of doing because old Laura, would've been like, I think I charged like a hundred bucks at that time I was like $15,000. Like I'm just going to do as many extra sessions as I could. But instead I said, what if I invite a handful of people into this container of support that would cut back my hours, that would allow me to put down this deposit and it would give me the space to actually do the treatments? Now it was not that pretty, there was definitely a lot of iterations around that, but hat was really the beginning of when I started this to see that the time for money structure and the single sessions weren't really cutting it, and that forced that moment when life is like, oh, Hey, you want to be a mom? Let's start to look at this in a different perspective. That's when things changed.
DR. DANIELLE: Well, I think regardless of what your circumstances are, you knew that you had this thing that you wanted. And most of the time, I think our default mode is to feel bad that we don't have it, or we don't know how to get it, or it's not possible for us, but instead in that experience you were able to look at the thing that you wanted. I mean, if we just talked about the money, not even starting a family, but just the $15,000 to put down for a deposit, it could have been for a home or IVF or an RV - instead of looking at it as something that you couldn't have, or that you didn't have access to, you just, you looked at it as like, how can I make that happen? How can I do what I already know how to do, maybe do it a little bit differently so that this is possible.
LAURA: Yeah. And I once heard a podcast I listened to forever ago that said, it's easier to 10x your income than it is to double your income.
DR. DANIELLE: I just heard the same thing a few days ago. It was literally like five days ago at an event that I was attending and I was like, Hmm okay I hear you - but my ego is coming up with all these reasons why that's crazy.
LAURA: Yeah. Well, our brain defaults to this equation that if you want more, you do more. And even again for those of you listening who yes, you want to make more money or maybe you want to make a greater impact or whatever it is we also in the holistic space have this, not only do we do more, our doing is equated with our worth, with our value and it's physical. And I think at some point we naturally start to block that because you create this neural pathway that says, if I'm going to earn more money, it physically is going to suck ass. So we start to naturally resist making more money because we have this belief that making money physically hurts.
DR. DANIELLE: And it takes us away from the people that are important to us. It takes us away from our own health.
LAURA: Yeah. So when you think about 10x-ing your income, what you have to do is be like, what is this one little thing that maybe this one little thing, if I had more spaciousness or ease around it, maybe that's the key to actually getting there. It requires you to think about leverage. I love to say that simple is scalable and ease is expansive. And if you start to think of how can I 10x my income, you actually have to look at the parts of you that are naturally brilliant and start to think about how can I actually harness that thing.
DISARMING PUSH BACK WHEN DECREASING SINGLE SESSIONS
DR. DANIELLE: So we've talked a lot about all the reasons why offering a container of support as a practitioner is a wonderful thing. What are some of the objections that you hear from people when you maybe introduce this idea to them or they're curious and they want to learn more, they want to know how to do this, but they're all also like, yeah, I'm not sure if I can do this because fill in the blank.
LAURA: Absolutely. There's a couple that come up as you say that. And I think the first one that I just want to clarify is this doesn't mean you have to get rid of single sessions. I'm not asking you to do a 180 in your business. Typically, the way that I like to think about it is three to five people in a container of support at one time. The way that I do the math is that should hit your income goal, like your basic necessity income goal where you as a practitioner can be like, I can breathe. If you know three to five people are taking care of you financially and you don't have to stress, you automatically show up differently. And then you can still have single sessions as a way to step people into that container of support because not everybody's going to be ready for it, and that's okay. Not everybody's made that decision yet. But what shifts when you set it up this way is instead of having to - because I remember having to get a hundred people on my calendar to pay my bills, like that's stressful trying to book that many people and all that stuff - when it was these three people are on my schedule, this meets my income goals, I can pay my mortgage, we have food on the table, and then I feel like seeing a handful of single sessions today - that felt really light. It just changed the energy of it. So and also in that way, you still have people, the next people who are ready to step up will step in. I think the next thing, probably the bigger question that pops up is will people really pay for this? Of course. And just like I said we like to talk or what I like to talk about is there's people who need your help, but they might not know that you exist. They might not know that they have a problem that they want to solve, but they need your help. Right. There's people who need and want your help. So they know that they have a problem. They know that you can help them. They want it, but maybe they're not ready to commit to it. And then there's people who need, want, and are ready to commit to their health and wellness goals. What happens is, and again, I come from the massage world, this might be a little bit different in the chiropractic world, but I see a lot of massage therapists who do this thing, who are like, but everybody needs my help, and so let me price myself, let me be available for everybody. So what is happening is, you're structuring your business to account for people who might not even know you exist, know they have a problem, let alone want to solve it or be ready to commit to it. And so you wonder why you're spread thin and exhausted. So what I'm asking you to do instead is just recognize again, do you know three to five people who have been in your space, these are the people who sign up for everything that you offer immediately, they open every single email, they like every single one of your posts. There are three to five people around you right now who are probably asking for a next step, which is a container of support.
DR. DANIELLE: Yeah. I love it. I mean, what you said is so, so, so true within chiropractic. And I can only imagine also for, I know actually for acupuncturists and for doulas and midwives, it's that we want to help as many people as possible. It's sort of like we've been trained into thinking that that's actually beneficial for anyone when it's not the best thing in the long term. Because as a practitioner it's very exhausting. It's a huge component of why people burn out so quickly in professions like ours. And yet there are not a lot of people out there talking about it and helping to create solutions for it, which is why having these kinds of conversations on this podcast is so important. It's this thought process that we have to be cheap and available and affordable for as many people as possible. So we can help as many people as possible, even if it hurts me to do it.
DEMONSTRATING BOUNDARIES TO UPLIFT YOUR CLIENTS
LAURA: And I actually think the way we need to start looking at the way we serve is demonstrating boundaries, demonstrating self care. And I personally believe that how we structure our businesses is one of the best ways that we serve our clients. And we have to, like you said, shift this story that means be available, price ourselves low, all that stuff. We get to show what it means. What if your clients looked at you and they're like, she knows how to capture, she knows how to own her brilliance. I want to be like that. I want that energy. So I see these like need, want and commit - I see them as steps. A lot of times people are structuring their business for the lower step and hoping that by doing that, they'll lift everybody up, which again puts the healing responsibility of your clients on your shoulders, not theirs. What happens is if you hold the bar high and say, Hey, this is how I can really serve and support you. And I have three to five spaces available in this container of support for those of you who are ready. What happens is the people who want your help, they now can see that next step for themselves. And they can start to make choices for themselves to step into that next level. And for the people who need your help, maybe you have a free resource. Maybe you have something that you create once and reuse a training, a PDF, whatever that can help the people who need your help to step up and decide that they want it. And so it's a different way to think about your business that lifts people up without you having to carry it. I have one more thing on reasons why people don't do this if you want to hear that too. So will people pay for this? Yes. The third thing is I'm already doing this for free.
DR. DANIELLE: Oh, well yes, of course you are.
LAURA: Right. How can I actually charge for it? And I have a little story. So my very first container that I offered I'll change her name. We'll call her Catherine. That's not her name. But I had this client that I had been seeing for years, she had a car accident. She had had neck problems and I never thought in a million years she would sign up for one of my containers of support. And when she did, she made that investment, the next time she came into her appointment, she showed up with a notepad and a paper and she took notes. And all the things that I had been saying for years ad nauseum, she actually received it. So I think what changes in this container, stop thinking that you have to go and create something new and different and bigger and blah, like that time for money structure is going to creep in in so many ways because if you create like a $2,000 container of support, your brain is going to think that you need to do a lot more things to provide the value - you don't, you don't. What changed was she had decided and made the commitment to herself. She changed because of the investment and that's what allowed her to receive the results. And by the way we did a lot of work, she had some stuff around her throat and this is part of what we teach in body, mind coaching, just helping her tune into these messages in her body. It was really about her learning to speak up for herself. So in our container of support, she actually spoke up for herself at work and ended up getting a promotion. I look at this, like if I had sat here and continued the way that we were working, what she would've missed out on.
DR. DANIELLE: What's cool about this specific example with Catherine, I think you said, she invested in a container of support with you and then she got a promotion. I'm assuming with the promotion, she also got a raise. Let's hope that she did. And so she made this investment in herself and then she started making more money. And it's, it's not that we can necessarily say this is a result that you should expect, but it's just a thing that happens when people make the decision to invest in themselves and, and to commit, you've used that word several times to make a commitment, to improving their life, whether it's their health, their wellness or something else, when they make that commitment, things start to change. And without the commitment, things don't change. And then we're so frustrated when things don't change for them, but they haven't actually made the commitment.
LAURA: Very well said, yes.
DR. DANIELLE: Okay. I am sure that we have a lot more to talk about. So maybe we'll do another episode at some point in the future.
LAURA: I would love that.
DR. DANIELLE: Tell our listeners where they can connect with you. Where is that place for them to go to learn more about what you do?
LAURA: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're interested in our body mind coaching program we teach holistic practitioners how to incorporate what we call the body mind method. That is our coaching process. You can go to TheNewBodyMind.com And I would say I spend the most time on Instagram. So @bodymindliving is where you can find me.
DR. DANIELLE: Awesome. I am so thankful for your time, your energy, and your expertise and you being willing to share it with our audience, because I think that this is a really amazing, brilliant concept that you have to offer to a lot more people who really actually need it.
LAURA: Thank you so much for inviting me and I absolutely love everything you're doing. We're here to really help people and it's needed now more than ever. And I think if we're going to fully step up into that role, we have to reimagine what our businesses get to look like.
DR. DANIELLE: Awesome. Thank you so much again.
LAURA: Thank you.