#91. The Secret Shame Too Many Healers Carry - and How to Change It.

As a therapist, I’ve often felt like my job was to say out loud what everyone in the room was thinking but no one could say.

I’ve learned over time that - as uncomfortable as that can be in the moment - it helps sooooo much to just say it out loud.

Because here’s the thing.

We can’t change anything if we keep hiding what’s wrong.

If we’ve got a problem and we don’t tell anyone, or even worse, barely admit it to ourselves, we can’t do anything about it. Right?

Not only that - we often find that a lot of other people have the very same problem - which means we’re not so crazy after all.

And that same principle applies to our business.

It’s no wonder that so many therapists, healers and other wellness professionals are suffering in their private practice. Most of us have little or no business training or experience. And all of us are trained to put our clients first - even if it’s to our own detriment.

Add to that the fact that we are shamed for wanting to make $ at ALL, and you’ve got a recipe for burnout, disappointment and a business that is nothing like you wanted it to be.

So that's what I want to talk about today.

In this episode, you’ll hear not only about some of the struggles I’ve had as a private practice owner, but those that I see way too many of you suffering with as well.

I think you’ll find that whatever your hidden challenges as a business owner may be, you have a lot more company than you think.

But I want to change that. I don’t want you to suffer through private practice. I want you to enjoy it.

So I’ve got a solution. Full disclosure: in today’s episode you’ll also hear about EVOLVE, a really special experience I’ve created that will help you feel a whole lot better about things and that I hope you’ll consider being a part of.

I invite you to tune in, and just hear what I’ve got to say.

Much love,

~Wendy
    Xoxo

P.S. As you listen, are you recognizing yourself in any of the stories I’ve shared here? If so, I would love to hear what resonates. Would you send me a note? Just send it to Wendy@WendyPittsReeves.com, I’ll respond personally - and thank you!

GREAT NEWS EVERYONE!
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EVOLVE offers the community you long for and the guidance you need to develop a well rounded, fully grounded, comprehensive private practice that functions well on all levels, so that it’s profitable, sustainable and - can I say this? - enjoyable.

This experience is only offered once a year, and is specifically designed for practice owners who are tired of just tolerating their practice, and ready to make it their IDEAL Practice©.

Are you a therapist, life coach, wellness professional or other healer in private practice? Tired of just getting by and ready for something better? Wondering how to make more money, have more time, serve your clients and still have a life?

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're listening to ideal practice, episode number 91. You know, as a therapist, I always felt like my job was to say out loud what everyone in the room was thinking. But no one would say. And, inevitably, once I did that, once we acknowledged what hurt, what wasn't working, what was really going on, then we could do something about it. The fear was real beforehand, the relief was real afterwards, and that's what I want to do today. So stay tuned.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Hi, I'm Wendy Pitts Reeves and, with over two decades of experience in the private practice world, I've built my six-figure business while learning a lot of lessons the hard way. This is the first podcast that shows you how to apply the principles of energy alignment and strategy to build a practice that is profit-centered but people forward. This is the ideal practice podcast. Hey guys, and welcome back. This is Wendy Wendy Pitts Reeves, your host. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Ideal Practice Podcast. How you guys doing today. You're having a great week. We are into February. I would like to talk about something other than the weather, but I seem to be especially affected by it. Anyway, how you guys doing. I hope you're doing well, I hope you're having a great week and I hope life is going good for you. I've got some cool stuff going on I'll be sharing with you here in just a moment, but I want to tell you, I want to take a moment to give just a little shout-out to someone, to one of our listeners.

Speaker 1: 2:02

A few weeks ago I had posted something on Facebook that I had said in one of my an earlier episode, and I had. I was talking about how running your practice I said. I said running your practice really is a creative wonderland, and it is. It's a creative wonderland because you can do just about anything you want to do in your practice. And I said, of course, that can be both a curse and a blessing, because you really can do just about anything you want to do. And I love this because Sasha Sasha Hockberg commented on Facebook and said that she totally agreed with that. She is an expressive arts therapist, so I can totally see why she would get that. And she said that she loved listening to the podcast. She said that listening to this show every week was like getting a warm hug and that she was really grateful for the work that we do here on the program, and I love that. That just made it kind of tickled me a little bit.

Speaker 1: 3:01

I do know that my Southern comes through every now and then. I can't quite help that. You know it's who I am. But if it feels good to listen and you guys are getting something out of this, that makes me really happy, because that's the whole point right, and I'm glad you're enjoying it. Many of you have been telling me offline, in lots of different ways, how much you're enjoying the show and I want you to know how important that is and how that lifts my spirits all the time. So thank you for that and anything you do that helps me spread the word, get this in front of more people, share it with colleagues and friends who you think would also enjoy it. By all means, please use that, because I really really appreciate that.

Speaker 1: 3:43

Now, saying all that and appreciating the fact that you guys like what we're doing here, I don't know what you're going to think about today, because we might be going in a whole different direction. I don't know, we'll just see, but I I think it's time. I've actually been wanting to talk about this for a while and it feels like now is the time. So I wanted to talk today about the stuff that we don't ever talk about, which is what I think of as this secret shame that so many healers deal with all the time. I have experienced it personally. I see it in those that I coach. I see it online in Facebook groups and forums, where people talk about the struggles that they're having in their practice, and I want to address that head on, because the truth is, we don't talk about this very much. There's plenty of information out there about strategy and tactics and even mindset and how to welcome abundance I do that myself but no one talks about the fact that a lot of us struggle in ways that we think we're the only ones. Y'all know this. We see this in our clients. We think we're the only ones, but we are not. So I kind of want to tear off the bandaid a little bit and tell the truth about what I see for so many who work in the healing arts. Of course, a lot of the folks I talked to are psychotherapists, but not just that, and I find that the patterns are consistent across many different areas of this kind of work, including not just alternative healthcare, like energy work or yoga work or Reiki or any of those kinds of things. But also, honestly, y'all, in mainstream medicine, I'm hearing the same thing from primary care physicians, right, optometrists or ophthalmologists. Actually, I'm hearing it from chiropractors. I'm hearing it from integrative health physicians. Like this really is a thing that many of us struggle with. So I want to start by telling you about my own challenges along the way. Some of this you've heard before. Some of it perhaps you have not, and then I want to talk about what I'm seeing out there in the world, and then I'm going to talk about what I want to do about it. So I want to.

Speaker 1: 6:16

For those of you who might be new to me, or perhaps you've heard some of this before, when I started my private practice, it was back in the nineties, y'all yes, I've been doing it a long time and there was no such thing as anywhere near the kind of support that's available today. So I literally had no idea how to start a business. I didn't know what to do. There wasn't any help. I didn't know anyone who ran a business I had. I was about as naive as you can possibly get, so I just dove in and started doing whatever I could figure out to do. I rented an office from a psychologist in town for a few bucks per hour. Whenever I saw someone, I started mentioning to some of my colleagues at the, the residential treatment center where I was full time, that I was opening a small practice on the side. I did a little bit here and there and it took a while, but gradually things began to happen. I started to get referrals, I began to start figuring things out and pretty quickly y'all I got into trouble with billing.

Speaker 1: 7:21

So here's the thing I am. I'm a four fact finder, if you guys know what I mean by that. If you've ever taken the Colby's as a test, called the Colby a index, it's a work styles inventory that is really useful. I use it all the time with my coaching clients. That explains how you like to work and one of the things that it measures is are you someone who likes a lot of detail? You really like to kind of get down into the nitty gritty of something, or are you someone who just wants to know kind of the bare minimum? Just tell me what I got, what I need to have, and then I'm going to move on. Well, I'm a four out of 10 on that particular scale. I need what I need, but I don't want a lot more than that.

Speaker 1: 8:03

So when it came to billing, it didn't take to take long at all for me to get into trouble, because if you aren't in the mental health world, let me just tell you that that billing for mental health services is absolutely insane. It is crazy complicated and there are so many games that get played and so many ways that services get kicked back. There's just lots and lots of trouble, and I'm not great at that anyway. So fairly quickly I got behind. I lost track. The as my case load grew, as my practice got off the ground, it got harder and harder because not only did I have my current cases and clients to keep up with, but at that point over time I had former clients and sessions that hadn't been paid yet to keep up with. So what happened was my the billing side of my work got to be quite a mess and I was really embarrassed by that and I was ashamed.

Speaker 1: 9:10

When clients would ask me what they owed, people would say I mean good people who appreciated the work we did. Because I did good work, I'm a good. I'm a good therapist Would say Wendy, I know I owe you. What do I owe you? I want to pay you. What do I owe you? And I would just say I don't know Um, you know what that insurance? It takes a while to figure that stuff out. Don't worry about it. I'll let you know as soon as I have that figured out.

Speaker 1: 9:35

But sometimes I didn't never figure it out and I lost a lot of money that way. Not only was it that terrible because I was hurting my family and I didn't want my husband at the time to know how bad it was but I was embarrassed because it wasn't professional and I knew it. And I I felt like my clients were going to look at me like, good Lord, can you not, are you not running your own business? Like, do you not know what I owe you? So I was really, really embarrassed about that. So I did what any reasonable person would do. I did reach a point where I thought I can't do this, I'm terrible at this, I've got to get some help. And I went out and hired a billing company and that one went south, and then another one, and then another one, and then another one, and y'all.

Speaker 1: 10:22

Eventually, over the over a period of several years, I went through no less than seven different billing services Seven. Some of them were complete organizations that had a full infrastructure. Some of them were one and two people mom and pop shops. All of them fell apart over time Because eventually what I learned is that, for one thing, nobody cares about your money like you care about your money. So they made mistakes too, and I counted on them not to do that. And the the final straw in that area was when I hired a full fledged billing company that had multiple staff that had a history of success to to handle all the billing for my own work and they, after a year or two, got out of the mental health side completely. They stayed with mainstream medicine but they let go all of their mental health practitioners because they said it wasn't worth their time, because it was such a hassle and they lost so much money in the sheer staff time it took just to get people paid. Well, that just about did me in right there, even at the same time that it confirmed that it wasn't my imagination about how difficult this was. So what I do.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Then at that point I hired a friend who was really good with numbers to come in and work in my office in house. I set up a little room for her in my practice. I bought her a computer and a telephone and all the things she needed software, et cetera and got her all set up and let her start having a billing for me, because she was literally right next door down the hall. We could go over it together, I could double check to make sure things were going well. She could ask me when there was help. And I remember one time when she popped into my office like this is always in the evening, like six o'clock in the evening, after everybody was gone. She popped into my office with a red vinyl folder that held claim forms for all of my outstanding insurance claims and she it was thick, it was full, and she held this folder up and looked at me and she said do you realize that you've got like something like over $2,000 worth of unpaid claims here? And I can remember looking at like I could just I could still remember this. I looked at her and went well, yeah, why do you think I hired you? I need some help.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Well, we did eventually clean that up, but it took a while and y'all this is the thing there are a lot of businesses that were like, are like mine was then that look really successful on the outside. I had a full caseload. I was seeing 25, 26 people a week insurance based practice and at this point I had a group practice built as well. Now my group practice was different. In my case. My practitioners all were responsible for their own business. Practitioners all were responsible for their own practice. So it didn't hurt them that I was terrible at this. I just hurt myself in this case.

Speaker 1: 13:36

But this is a common thing, that there is so much struggle behind the scenes. And I'll tell you, even after I brought in my friend to help me then I went through a separation and was headed towards the voice. At that point my kids were in high school. We were began to look at college. They were having a hard time because of what was going on with their dad and I, and then, because of the separation, I suddenly found myself in a situation where I had a lot more bills to pay because I was basically setting up house all over again and I could not make my quarterly IRS payments that year, my quarterly tax payments. I was barely keeping things together. Because of that, I ended up getting into a hole with the IRS, which is never a good thing, and I could not pay my taxes that next year. So it was really terrible. It took me a year, two years total in that whole process to catch that all up.

Speaker 1: 14:38

And the big picture of all of this is I was dealing with this constant sense of struggle, of shame and guilt. I felt guilty because I should know better by now. I was running a business that I'd been in for a while. I why was I still having all this trouble? I felt ashamed that I couldn't manage the number side of my, of my business better. I was exhausted with just trying to kind of make ends meet while while seeing plenty of people right and managing all the stuff that was going on the family. I mean, it was tough, it was crazy. I'm not telling you all this so that you one either feel sorry for me or two look at me and think, well, good Lord, wendy, what right do you have to be here talking to us today? I hope you're not going to do either one of those.

Speaker 1: 15:35

The reason I'm sharing this with you now is because I know for a fact that my story is not unique. I know for a fact that far too many of us suffer from that same constant struggle, that same sense of shame I should know better than this that same sense of guilt. Why aren't I able to take better care of my family, provide for my family better? Why can't I do a better job as a business owner? What is my problem? I know that this is common because I hear it in your voice when I talk to you and y'all I have worked with, consulted with, spoken to, counseled all kinds of practice owners, literally from New York to Seattle to Arizona, to Tennessee to England, and there is a common thread that I see connecting so many people. This is what I want to share, and I want to share this because I want you to stop feeling bad. First of all, I want you to know that not only are you not alone, but this is so much more common in our world, in the healthcare industry, in the private business, private practice side of the healthcare industry, than anybody knows, and I want us to fix it. I want us to stop being ashamed of it, I want us to stop feeling guilty about it and I want us to learn how to do better.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Let me just give you kind of a sampling of some of the things that I have seen and heard and experienced over time. I can't tell you how many therapists I've spoken to who, on the outside, have really healthy stated rates in their private practice. They may charge anywhere from $125 a session to $200, $300 a session. It looks really solid, really healthy and quite appropriate for the work that they do. But when you start digging into it, when I start saying so, how many clients do you have who are actually paying your rates? It would surprise you how often they will tell me two, three, none one. I have so many people who instead, when we really look into it, are making anywhere from I don't know $30, $40, $50 a session, maybe $75, $80 on average. That happens for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it happens because they are discounting all over the place rather than holding a firm line. Sometimes it happens because they are working with so many different third party payment systems and there are so many challenges to getting paid that that's what it averages out. It happens for lots of reasons, but it's really common that behind the scenes folks are not getting paid anywhere near as much as you think they are.

Speaker 1: 18:55

There was the therapist I worked with who had tremendous, had great policies in terms of how she structured her practice what she expected out of her clients. But she worked with a population that had a lot of chronic pain, who would often cancel at the last minute, and she felt sorry for them because they genuinely were struggling in their own life. So she rarely enforced her own policies out of pity and sympathy for her clients and, quite honestly, out of a lack of healthy boundaries and not taking good care of herself. She has something like a 50% no show rate. That's a lot of money left on the table that you think is going to be coming in and that isn't Well, you know what that's going to do to your sense of confidence, your sense of efficacy, if half your clients are canceling every week. Even with that particular audience, it would be easy to think I'm not a very good therapist. But that wasn't the case. It was that she didn't understand that the payment itself was a therapeutic issue and that as a business owner, there are strategies for handling that kind of thing. But she didn't know that, she didn't want anybody to know how bad things were, so she didn't talk about it. Of course I get that. I could relate. I didn't talk about it either when I was in that kind of situation.

Speaker 1: 20:22

Then there was the massage therapist I worked with who saw I don't know five or six people a day for like two hours at a time, often six, sometimes seven days a week, and was charging 50, 60, $65 per person, not per hour, which meant that she was usually broke and exhausted to the point that she made herself sick. Bless her sweet soul, because she was doing really good work. But she too, like so many of us, struggled with the guilt of asking clients to pay. There's this constant sense of I hate to ask you for this, but there was a yoga teacher that I worked with who was getting paid $2 per person per class in a community setting, wanted to start her own business and charge appropriate, healthy rates that were quite a bit higher than that, but was really afraid to because she was afraid she would be criticized by her peers in her community. There was the therapist who had so much guilt around asking clients to pay her and had such trouble just collecting again. Always out of compassion for the client this always comes out of compassion for the clients she ended up having to take a second job just to make ends meet to provide for her family.

Speaker 1: 21:53

There was the therapist I worked with who had a full practice, plenty of business, but was seeing people at all hours, pretty random a day, evening, weekends. There was no pattern, there was no structure, there was no consistency to it and, as a result, she didn't have a life. Her whole life was basically in reaction to her clients. She didn't say this is when I'm available. Her client said can you see me at this time? And she said yes, and so her, her life was not her own and y'all. Those are just a few examples. That doesn't begin to address healers who themselves are fighting ADHD, depression, those who have lost a loved one, are gone through a divorce or have a special needs child that takes up so much of their time, or are caring for aging parents. I could go on and on and on.

Speaker 1: 22:57

The problem is that as healers, we somehow are magically supposed to be there for others and we are not allowed to need anything for ourselves, and the result of that kind of thinking infiltrates everything we do. You add on top of that the fact that most of us do not receive any kind of training or support or guidance or mentoring around owning a business and you've got a recipe for burnout, for being broke and for being ineffective. I don't know about you, but that's not why I started to practice. That's not why I run a business today. That's not why I could not no matter whatever go back to working a J-O-B. I am an entrepreneur. I run a business or three because I like calling my own shots. I like having the freedom to be as creative as I want to be, I like having the responsibility for when things work and when things don't work.

Speaker 1: 24:22

But I have learned that I, like you, need help, I need teaching, I need training, I need mentoring, I need guidance, I need accountability, I need support, I need safe places where I can tell the truth, as do you, my sweet, sweet friends. For those of you there now, I know that there are exceptions. There are some of you I've also spoke to who are rockin' and rollin', who are making good money and having a good time, and I love that. There are those of you who are finally figuring things out, who are beginning to see the light of what's possible for you, as I mentioned, I think, in last week's episode about the client of mine who said that she was leaning into the freedom of her practice and realizing how what was possible Like that also happens and golly. I want to celebrate that. But can I just say that, no matter where you are on this spectrum whether you are where I was in those early years with a quote thriving practice unquote that wasn't making any money and that was wearin' me out, or whether you are where so many want to be or could be or maybe are, which is enjoying the freedom of your practice because it is profitable, successful and fulfilling at the same time, I want you to know that, no matter where you are on that, you will never, ever outgrow the need for support, for guidance, for mentoring, for accountability, for learning. The most successful people out there that you follow, I guarantee you they have that. They have that in some way in their life, always, always. So I am going to tell you what I want to do and what I hope you will do, because, even though we are magically supposed to be there for others and need nothing for ourselves, that's just not how things work. We are though it may surprise some of our clients to find out we are human too and we need support. So I want to tell you about what I'm doing and offer or invite you to join me.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Some of you know that last year, for the first time ever, I created a program that I had wanted to do for years and, for lots of different reasons, had not. But last year I finally said enough is enough and last spring I opened the doors to a brand new program called Evolve. Evolve is a small, targeted, focused, highly interactive group coaching mastermind for healers in private practice that I offer once a year. Last year was the first time. I am ready to do this again and I want to tell you about this, because I'm not doing a full blown, all out marketing campaign. I don't have the bandwidth to do that. I myself am caring for aging parents. I myself have a full life and my own challenges. But, god Lee, I love this work. I love this work and it is indeed it is what lights me up like nothing else Y'all, and because of all the things I just told you, I know how much this is needed. This is not work for me, this is joy for me, and I want to bring it to you. So here's what Evolve is.

Speaker 1: 28:31

Evolve is a group coaching program that lasts from. We're going to start at the very end of this month, at the end of February, and we're going to go into early October and to twice a month. We will meet online on a Thursday from 1130 to 130 Eastern. That's 1030 Central, 930 Mountain, 830 Pacific, and that even works in the UK. So 1130 to 130 Eastern on a Thursday. Twice a month. We will come together as a group and here's what we're going to do.

Speaker 1: 29:14

I am going to be providing for you a high level training on each of the seven pillars of an ideal practice. I can talk about that if you'd like. I can also. I'll tell you what I'll do is. I'll link to the show notes below. I'll link to an episode where I went over all of those so you can go listen to that. That will tell you about that. But each month I want to make sure you know about all of them from the beginning. But we're going to take kind of a deeper dive, close look at each one along the way. That's what the first call is going to be. It's not going to be a training. I'm not going to sit there and show you a bunch of slides. I'm going to make sure you have that information in advance and then we're going to discuss it so you can ask questions, so you can implement what you're learning about each one of those seven pillars. This is one of the things that folks told me last year that they really loved and wanted more of was time to ask more questions and time to do more implementation. That's what we're going to do this time. So that's the first call of the month. The second call of the month is an absolute true mastermind.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Now, if you've never done this before, let me explain to you a little bit about what that works like in a true mastermind the way I like to do it, the way I learned to do it, which I love it is a structured peer coaching experience where each person comes to the table with something to give and something to receive. Each of you will be given an opportunity to bring a specific problem, an idea, an opportunity, a question. It can be a strategy that you're thinking about implementing. It could be a mindset issue that you're having trouble getting through. It could be a client question that you want to figure out how to handle. This is not clinical. I'm not talking about that. This is not a case discussion. This is about your business. But in a true mastermind, each of you will have an opportunity to share that with a small group that you've gotten to know and we will do a group brainstorming, coaching, guiding discussion and you will walk away with ideas that you were like, oh, never even thought about that. That's a great idea. I guarantee that's what's going to happen and what will come out of this is a kind of support that I suspect you've never experienced before.

Speaker 1: 31:54

I want to share with you, if I can, some feedback that I got from one of my students who was in last year's cohort. She wrote to me. She said, and I asked her. I asked her. I said what would you say to somebody about what this has been like? Because, other than I had maybe one person in last year's cohort who had been in something like this before. For everyone else it was a brand new idea and they're like what is a mastermind? I don't even know what to expect about this. Well, this is what one of them wrote afterwards. She said to me as an established therapist, a new practice owner and a first time mastermind, I found the evolve mastermind to be an incredible, warm, informative, engaging and inviting experience. I wasn't sure what to expect and I definitely walked away with insights, with a haas and with a clearer vision of where to focus on my business next.

Speaker 1: 32:57

Some of the key. This is Roseanne Carter, who was in practice in Seattle. She said some of the key shifts for me included learning how to focus on systems that serve me and letting go of the ones that don't. Learning how to think like a CEO and not just a therapist. She said I developed a deeper understanding of my relationship with money and with comfort and I would absolutely participate in evolve again because I know I would walk away with even more the second time around and I love this. She said Wendy is a dream to work with compassionate, thoughtful, knowledgeable and a wealth of wisdom. It was such a gift to learn from her.

Speaker 1: 33:48

I don't want to toot my own horn, but I'm going to toot my own horn y'all. There are lots of coaches out there and whether you choose to join me in this or not, I hope you'll find somebody who resonates with you. It doesn't have to be me, but, as I talked about in last week's episode, we all need a coach, I think we all need a mastermind and I think we all need accountability partners and those who join this year's cohort of evolve. You are lifetime members. You can come back every year if you want to. Those who were in it last year have the same invitation. So as this program evolves, I expect that we will have a nice mix of experienced folks and new folks and those in between, which will bring even more depth and richness to the experience. I love doing this work and I did in fact, see this among my people last year.

Speaker 1: 34:48

In the beginning it was kind of like what are we doing here? By the end, they had indeed grown close. They had learned to speak truth to each other, including celebration as well as any other kind of help that they needed. We always start a voxer group so that people can reach out to each other in between meetings and so that when you've got a win, you can go on there and say hey everybody, guess what I did today I'm really proud of? And when you're having a difficult day, hey everybody, I'm having a tough day. I just could use a little support. That is invaluable. Well, let me go back to those stories that I was sharing with you. At the beginning, I told you about what a mess I was in the beginning. Well, let me tell you, after I went through all of those billing companies and hired an in-house billing assistant. The day came when I said enough was enough with all of that and I completely switched over to a self-pay practice, and I never looked back and my life has been a thousand times simpler ever since. I don't have any of those problems anymore at all. I still have a small counseling practice. Most of my clients pay me before we even meet and if not, certainly by the day of their sessions. A lot of them pay in advance, sometimes weeks or even months in advance. I don't have anything to keep up with anymore. There is no paperwork to keep up with.

Speaker 1: 36:11

The yoga teacher that I mentioned she did in fact leave that situation, started her own business, created a really healthy pricing structure, learned how to become a leader in her community and to inspire others like her. She went on to raise her prices and her impact even in the middle of the pandemic. That massage therapist I talked about. She raised her prices also because they needed to be raised y'all. It's not like that's always the answer. It isn't always the answer, but in this situation it was. She put stronger, healthier policies in place. She got a handle on her schedule. She cut back her hours. Thank you, so much Pickier about who she worked with in a way that was very appropriate and really good for her and she got her health back.

Speaker 1: 36:57

That one who took on a second job Well, she became. She came to understand that money was a therapeutic issue and Began to address it in a much healthier way with her clients and as a result of that, by golly, she started getting paid. So she not only was able to quit that second job, she actually bought a building, a small house and started her own little group practice, which was so fun, so fun to see that happen. That therapist I mentioned, who had hours and rates all over the map when we cleaned that up. It took it took about a year to work through, because there's a lot to this is emotional y'all, as well as strategic. None of this is simple, because it involves our soul, it touches who we are, but we doubled her income. She doubled her income in one year, started traveling and bought her first house. There's so much good that happens when you have the kind of support you need and the training and teaching you need on how to run a diagram practice.

Speaker 1: 38:09

So I want to invite you to consider joining evolve. Yeah, this is a full out plug. Y'all not gonna apologize because I believe in this. I Believe in this, I love this and if there is any part of what I'm sharing today that touches you, that resonates for you, that you see yourself in some of these stories, please don't beat yourself up about it. I honor you and celebrate the fact that you've got a business. I gotta do is learn a few things. Learn a few things and keep learning, be open to learning, be Coachable and things will get better and come join us. So you've got company, friends, colleagues along the way. I don't think you will be sorry To get all the details.

Speaker 1: 39:03

You can go to my website windy pits Reevescom. Ford slash evolve. Wendy pits Reeves comm. Ford slash evolve. You can read about all the specifics there. I Will tell you this is not a small investment. But then real growth usually isn't, and If you take your business seriously and your own growth as the CEO of your own show, aren't you worth investing in? I think you are.

Speaker 1: 39:37

So go check that out if you're interested, if you are Curious about it. But you've got some worries, some fears, some. I just don't know, Wendy, how do I even figure out? This is right for me? Shoot me an email, wendy. At Wendy pits, reeves, comm, those of you who've worked with me before no, I don't push that way. I do. I. I want to be careful about this. I am not into arm twisting. If this isn't right for you, don't come. If Everything about this is turning you off, I Would invite you to be curious about why that is, and then I would say if it's not right for you, it's not right for you.

Speaker 1: 40:15

This is not personal. Go find what you need wherever you need to find it. Just take care of yourself somehow. That's all I ask. But if this is speaking to you and there's a part of you that's like I think I, I'm, I don't know. I promise I will help you figure it out and I I have said to people when I did not think this was the right time for them. I have done that and we'll do that again, because I want people in this program that I know it is right for now, that I know it will serve now, and I that's I have an intuitive sense about that as Well as some practical things. So if you want to talk about it, send me an email, let's hop on a quick call and let's talk it through.

Speaker 1: 41:03

No worries, we will be starting at the end of February, so the doors aren't going to be open long. You got maybe a few days to make this decision. All right, y'all. But no matter what, what I want you to know I want you to stop carrying this hidden burden that so many of you carry. You are more. This is more normal than you expect. It is part of the growth and evolution of any practice owner. It can and will get better. You will learn, and it's so much fun when you do so much fun, seriously, can't tell you so much fun. So that's what I got for you today.

Speaker 1: 41:45

Thank you for if you made it this far. Thank you for sticking with me. I appreciate you so much. I hope I want to inspire you. I want to inspire you that things can get better. You just need to learn. So go do what you gotta do get taught, learn, grow, evolve. Have a great week, everybody, and I will see you Right here next time on ideal practice and maybe I'll see you in the mastermind. Have a great week, everybody. Bye now.