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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!
Welcome to the Health and Wellness Practitioners podcast. I am your host, Dr. Danielle Angela. In this show, I and my guest experts will talk about everything from getting your practice started to developing your clinical skills, growing your practice your way, and of course, dealing with the real stuff like burnout and work life balance. Whether you've been practicing for decades or just started your journey, you'll find something here for you. So take a deep breath and enjoy the show.
Okay, friends. So this is episode one of the Health and Wellness Practitioners Podcast. This is also probably my 300th episode of recording a podcast. If you don't know me, I'm Dr. Danielle Eaton, soon to be Dr. Danielle, Angela. Yes. I'm changing my name to Dr. Danielle Angela. I'm gonna explain more about why in this podcast. Just a little bit of background before we get started. Okay. In this episode, I am going to share with you why I am changing my legal name and also why I decided to change the podcast name.
So first, let's talk about the personal reasons why I decided to change my name. If you follow me on Facebook, then you might have seen that I shared in October of 2022 that I was leaving my marriage of nine years. We had been together for 13, we have three children together, plus I had a stepdaughter who is currently 20 at the time that I'm recording this episode.
So obviously this was not an easy decision, right? And there were a lot of circumstances around this decision. It wasn't something that I took lightly. But I'm not gonna go into all the details about why I made the decision to leave my marriage here in this podcast. I just wanna let you know that that's what's happened.
Initially, I was going to keep my last name Eaton. I'm already professionally known as Eaton. I have all of my credit cards and my bank accounts and my LLC and my website, my url, my email address, all has the name Eaton on it.
When I decided in September of 2022 to separate from my husband, he and I talked about this and I was like, I think I'm just, I'm gonna keep my last name the same.I don't wanna go through the bureaucratic mess that is made when you change your last name. I'm gonna just keep it the same.
I enjoyed being part of his family, his extended family, my children have that last name. And, you know, I just didn't want to deal with all of the paperwork to make that change. However, once I was about three months or so past the decision to leave the marriage and also living in my own home, and just other things that had transpired, it came to me that I wanted to move forward in a different way. And I had gotten many downloads, if you will, that was the path forward for me. It was to, not look back, to not hold onto the past, but to step into a new identity. And as scary and frankly weird as it seemed to me, the direction that I was given from above was to release all of my former last names.
I love my family. I love my father, I love my stepmom. I love my siblings, I love my Spath family, but I didn't, well, it wasn't even that I didn't want to go back to that last name. It was that, I was specifically shown from Above to release all previous identities and move forward with something new.
Now, I can say this to you here in this podcast, and it might sound simple, right? But honestly, this, like, this is the thing, I get the Guidance and I trust the Guidance and I, you know, I'm human, but I do my best to be obedient to the Guidance. While, also thinking, who does this? Who doesn't have a formal last name? Now, of course, when I legally change my name, my last name will legally be what is currently my middle name, which is Angela. So I will be Dr. Danielle Angela from that point forward. Um, but like Cher, Madonna, Sting, Prince, I'm aging myself, Beyonce, Kesha, , Sia, like, they don't have last names. They have only one name, right? And I thought like I, I'm none of those people. I'm not the kind of person that just doesn't have a last name. That's not for someone like me. And yet, when I sit with the question, it's very clear to me in my body that the way for me to move forward is to just be Danielle, Angela .
There's another aspect to this that I wanna share with you, which I think is, it feels very personal still. But, I think it's just interesting how this came to be. And I actually started to explore using the name Danielle Angela, in 2021, long before I had made the decision to end my marriage. And I wasn't really sure why I was feeling called to do that.
But I sat down one day and I looked at the meaning of Danielle, and I looked at the meaning of Angela. I had always felt like those two names, Danielle, Angela, were just two random names. Smushed together by my mom and my biological father. And I felt like they don't match. It doesn't go together. It doesn't flow very well. But when I looked at the meaning of the names, I saw the meaning. Danielle is God is my judge, or God is my highest authority. And in 2021, that really, and still does really, really resonate with me. It, was very actually eye-opening to me. It was like, yes! The government is not my authority. Other humans are not my authority. My children are not my authority. My parents are not my authority. God is my authority. And as long as I am in integrity with God's direction and guidance, then I'm on the right path. Okay? So that's Danielle. And you probably already know the meaning of Angela. Angela means angel. Angels are God's messengers. And then I saw like, oh, actually these names are very cohesive. God is my authority, and angels are God's messengers, . So it almost comes together as if I have a duty, a sense of obligation to say what I feel called to say, even when it's scary, even when people might judge me, even when it might have a negative impact on my business, right? Even when it might upset some of my clients. But none of those things are my authority, my highest authority, my highest authority, my ultimate judge is our Creator. It's being in alignment with that Source. So I know for some of you that might seem crazy, it might seem woo, you know, it, it honestly, it does for me too.
There's a part of me that's very logical and rational and wants to just “do the normal thing”. But when I listen to my body, that's not what comes through for me, . So as I stepped into owning that this is what I'm being called to do. I'm being called to change my name legally to Danielle Angela. Which by the way, if that meant that I needed to change my website, I needed to change my social media accounts, I needed to change my email address, I needed to change my legal business entity name. Like, all these things now are happening, ahead of me. Some have already taken place. Additionally, after hosting a podcast since 2015 and doing hundreds of episodes, and if you've listened to all the episodes, by the way, I apologize, , hopefully you've gotten a lot of value outta listening to them. But they've taken you on a really twisty, windy journey because I was also on a really twisty, whiny journey of figuring out, where am I going with this?
CAN YOUR AUDIENCE FIND YOU ONLINE?
Um, this, I don't wanna say this business, but it's so much more than just a business, right? Where am I going? And if you've listened to all the episodes, you know what I'm talking about. Cause you've heard it. I was like sharing it in the episodes. I've arrived at this place where I was like, you know what, if I'm changing everything else, if I'm stepping into a new identity, what do I wanna do with this podcast? And it was so clear and so obvious that the podcast also gets a new name.
And that new name is The Health and Wellness Practitioners podcast.
So it's previously been the Aligned Women Podcast when it was originally started. I was just speaking to women in chiropractic and then I expanded it. I named it the business of Being Well, which is like a cute, catchy thing, right? For health and wellness practitioners who own their own practices. But here's what I learned from this. All of this that's relevant for you, let me break it down for you. First, The Business of Being Well is not something that people go to Google and search unless they were for some reason to already know the name of the podcast. So what was bringing people to my website, the, the top thing by far, like 95% plus searches in Google that brought people to my website was my name Danielle Eaton, Dr. Danielle Eaton, great, but also not good . So here's the thing, it might feel good to see that 99% of the traffic coming to your website is a result of people searching for your name in Google. But the truth of the matter is that if people don't already know your name, they can't search for your name to find you, right?
But they might also be looking for your services and just not know that you are the person that offers, offers those services. So I would encourage you to be really aware of that as you choose your business name or even reconsider your business name. If it speaks to just your last name in your area, that's a very common thing for chiropractors. You know, it's like, Eaton Family Chiropractic or Eaton Family Wellness, something like that. That is, that's not something that people know to search in Google unless they already know that your business exists. So instead we can name our business something that people might search for in Google or another search engine, we have a better chance of reaching those people or connecting with those people. And let's be real, like that's what this is all about at the end of the day, right?
It's not about the traffic to your website, it's not about ranking number one in Google, per say. The end result is being able to help more people, being able to be findable for people that are looking for services that you offer who don't even know that your business exists.
So this is a lesson that you can take away from my many years of having a podcast that has tons of value in it, that most people who could be benefiting from it have no idea that it was even available because they couldn't go to Google search for something that was on their mind and have this podcast come up.
STAGES OF BUSINESS
Another thing that I want to share with you in this episode is around the stages of business. And if you've been in my membership program aligned women in the past, you know that we talk about these phases of business and how they help us plan for what to do and like what we need to put our focus on knowing these phases of business. But for those of you that are thinking about starting your own business or who are in the first, let's say like zero to three years, maybe a little bit longer, like zero to five years of starting your own business, you might be hearing this like search engine optimization stuff and think, oh gosh, like there's these other people in my local area who rank number one, I'll never be able to beat them on Google, right? I want to just take this moment to remind you that I grew a multiple six figure online business while also having an in-person local business, without being intentional about any of these things, because I focus on what mattered the most during that phase of business, which is about building relationships with other professionals, practitioners, and providers.
So this is a beautiful thing because it doesn't matter what your budget is, it doesn't matter what your level of understanding is of SEO. It doesn't matter if you have the time and energy to put into building and optimizing a website so it ranks really well in Google because what it means is that you, your most valuable efforts, , the most valuable thing you can do to grow your practice is to focus on building relationships with other people in real life. Yes, even though we have Snapchat, TikTok, Google, Facebook, Instagram, whatever else, right? Those things could all be taken away in an instant if you violate their terms of service or if they just end for some reason. But what can never be taken from you is the relationships that you've built, the trust in other words that you've built with people, the no like and trust factor, if you will.
“...the most valuable thing you can do to grow your practice is to focus on building relationships with other people in real life.”
There will come a phase of business where like you've really become the go-to expert. You've become the person that other people are referring to. You become the person that is getting recommended in the local moms groups all the time, right? When someone says, I have a kiddo with an ear infection, who should I take them to? Your name comes up in the comments over and over again. There will come a time that that will happen for you if you focus on building those relationships. And at that time, then it might be time for you to give some time, energy, even money to invest in optimizing your website, improving your ranking, and Google, leveraging technology so that you can reach more people. But if you don't have that foundation in place of solid relationships, so that you are the go-to expert, so that people are recommending you, people are referring to you often, and the majority of your new patients or clients are coming to you from people who already know you then that's what you need to focus on.
No matter what phase of business you're in, no matter how long you've had your practice open, that's the foundation. By the way, if you need more support with this, if you want to learn a strategy to help you build relationships, that's easy. It can actually be fun. It works for introverts, , because I don't know if you know, I'm really introverted even though I have a podcast and I have a big following on social media. I'm an introvert. I need introverted strategies to grow a business. I have a group coaching program that is coming up that will be a six week experience. It's going to be called KNOWN, Become The Go-To Expert In Your Community. And whether you work with people in person only, you see clients or patients virtually only, or you have both offerings, you have a hybrid business model, this program will work for you. It doesn't require social media , it doesn't require search engine optimization, email marketing, advertising. In fact, what you'll learn, the system if you will, you can implement for next to nothing, if not literally no money.
So again, if you want to learn more about known, find me on Facebook, find me on Instagram. I'm @drdanielleagnela, hit me up. Send me a DM. Let me know you're interested in KNOWN. It's a six week group coaching experience. You're going to love it! You will be amazed at how simple and easy it can be to grow your practice and get more new patients or clients by referral.
All right, friends, this is it. We are back! I'm back! This podcast is back, even though this is also the start of a whole new experience. Be sure to join me next week for another new episode. I can't wait to talk with you then.
Hey, thanks so much for joining me for today's episode. If you love this podcast, then be sure to join our free community, The Health and Wellness Practitioners Group over on Facebook where you can continue the discussion and get to know other people as well. We're a group of chiropractors, naturopaths, acupuncturists, massage therapists, reiki practitioners, energy healers, doulas, midwives, mental health therapists, counselors, and the list goes on. So come join us! Come build some personal and professional relationships. You can do that by heading over to Dr.DanielleEaton.com/community and requesting to join the community. I can't wait to see you inside.