Oh it is so easy to lull oneself to sleep.

So a few months ago I announced to all ya’ll that I would be kicking off practice number three and regaling you with tales of the tactics I used to grow the aforementioned new practice. I imagined much trial and error- lots of goodies for a blooper reel- and some shining successes. However, the thing about doing something the third time over a span of nine years means that my radar for what will or won’t work is pretty well tuned. (It only took nine years…)

So the grand experiment started well- too well. After sorting through all the minutiae that comes with starting any practice (finding an office, getting licensed, building the website) and running one big old promotion- things were really hopping! I had, and have, a full practice full of delightful clients.

And very little to write about on my blog in terms of real-time experimentation in practice building.

Like you- I don’t particularly want to spend gobs of time on the growing of the thing when I am, in fact, already doing the thing. Especially when the other nooks and crannies of my time are veeeery full with raising my wee one, some work with other clients, and a mega overhaul of the The Well Practice going on behind the scenes (the grand unveiling is probably about 4 to 6 months away- so stay tuned- it will rock. Oh yes, it will rock.)

However, unlike you I’ve commited to being a practice building guinea pig and I’m a full blown practice building nerd (we’re a very rare species). So it’s time for me to rouse myself from my slumber and up the ante. I have loads of practice building experiments in mind that I can (and will) run. These are my upcoming commitments to you with more to follow:

I will:

• Go old school by running a full-blown flyer campaign. That’s right! Paper tacked to bulletin boards! I live and work very near the campus of Yale- so it’s kind of a flyer town. I figured I’d go super low tech and see what happens.
• Put a Rolfing ebook for current and prospective clients up on my website for free download (aaaah, some tech deliciousness).
• Get myself on Yelp and perhaps a few other directories (more tech deliciousness).
• Advertise. Wow, I never thought I’d go for this one again. The last time I ran an ad for my practice was about nine years ago and it wasn’t just a dud of a failure- it was a mind-blowing failure. (story to follow) so I’ve been pretty allergic to the whole ad thing. But so many people do it that I’ll give it a shot and report back.

And you will? Let me be your guinea pig?

All (reasonable) suggestions for practice building will be considered. I’m not going to walk naked through town with a sandwich board for Rolfing- but if you throw some ideas my way that you’re curious about trying, or that you have tried with limited to no success- I’ll dive in and give it a try and report back.

Who doesn’t love having their own personal guinea pig? Go ahead and email suggestions or leave them in the comments section. Let’s get this party started.

I’m not usually the type to dedicate blog posts to people. This isn’t the great American novel, after all. But these people have been such glowing examples of teaching as they learn, that I have to give a shout out to them for their inspiration in writing this post. If you haven’t yet discovered Lissa Boles, Chris Guillebeau, Mark Silver, or Jonathan Fields (and especially this gorgeous post of his that was so moving to me) please go discover them.

I have to come out of the closet on being a wee bit uncomfortable with the “practice building expert” role that I’ve stepped into. Yes, I feel like I have the experience and know-how to effectively (and passionately) teach people how to grow their practices. And yes, I have a deep desire to turn my experiences into something tangible and useful that can contribute to other people’s lives.

What I don’t have is the desire to guru-ize myself. And when you step into a role as a writer and a teacher, there’s this funny underlying pressure to adopt the guru track.

Let me clarify. There are real gurus in the world. By “real gurus” I mean spiritual masters who are kind enough to be patient with those of us who are behind them in our own evolutionary paths. People who are worthy of a devout respect.

The kind of guru I’m talking about though are the false gurus we see everywhere. The people who are eager to step into the “I have this all figured out” role and who want to step on that stage and preach to you about how you can be as “empowered” as they are. They fan the flames of their own egos and work hard to convince the people in their audience that they are worthy of the pedestal they’ve put themselves on.

This kind of guru- who usually has little to no spiritual message but more often preaches about making dollar signs appear in your life- is so ubiquitous now that the idea that anyone should ever be on a pedestal goes largely unchallenged.

The pedestal says, “I’ve completely figured out what you seek to learn.” I’d like to argue that there is no official, concrete endpoint of figured-outness that we attain. In short, the pedestal is bullshit.

If we’re honest and awake to life, we’re always on some new learning curve. Teachers are people who may be ahead of you on any particular trajectory- whether that be growing a successful practice, having successful relationships, or any number of other things that we seek to learn- but they aren’t finished learning.

Without the admission that  we’re still on that trajectory with our students, we get lost in this flashy ego place. Worse, we stop learning because we decide we’ve arrived at the endpoint and we stop engaging.

In truth, there’s always the missteps, the bumbling around, and the epiphanies that come along with life and learning. Don’t buy the “I have it all figured out” guru message that we all get sold. We all learn from one another at our different stages, and we just keep on keeping on.

And so, in the spirit of un-guruing myself, here’s what I had going for me that allowed me to grow a full practice in a month:

Preparation.

Yes, it all boils down to one very un-sexy word. Lately this is the A number one thing on my list of what’s needed for success in anything. Which kind of sucks, because it’s not all the flashy things that we’re told we need (especially in America) like charisma or a a will of steel. And it requires a lot of patience. And work. The myth of overnight success and riches is, well, a myth.

My preparation for this particular endeavour came in the form of nine years in practice, and this being the third time I’ve started a new practice from scratch. So much for overnight success. My ability to grow a full practice in a month wasn’t really about that month, it was about the nine years that preceeded it. 

That means that this time around I got to skip all the wandering down alleys that are dead ends. I cut out so much of the wasted time, the heartache, and the confusion simply because I’ve done it before and figured out what works.

I knew how to pick a town that would enthusiatically greet a Rolfer, I knew how to pick the right office location and the right office mates, I knew how to grow my referral network I knew how to make a website and how to write great copy to attract my ideal clients. I knew what the hell an ideal client was, for that matter, and that I would talk directly to them. All this stuff I learned, slowly, drip by drip, over many years.

On the other hand, with this website and related projects that I’m working on to shine a big ol’ light on the holistic health world, I’m four years into what still feels like a new learning curve (The Well Practice hasn’t been up for four years. But the preparation that got me here has been four years and counting).

In this I’m still that person who is wandering into alleys that have dead ends. However, these days I can look way down that street and see the brick wall, whereas before I would have kept walking until I smacked into the brick wall. Only then would I have noticed that I should turn around and walk aaaaall the way back, nursing the big lump on my forehead. So that’s progress. I don’t fear brick walls as much any more- each lump on my forehead taught me something new that has allowed me to keep moving forward.

Fortunately and unfortunately, there is no over the rainbow. Keep stumbling, keep learning, that’s what we’re all here for. That’s where the juciness of life is. I’ll be stumbling into alleys and epiphanies right along with you.

I’m remembering back about a year ago when I met a woman- she’s an EFT practitioner and now a life coach- and she told me about a phone conversation she had with a marketing consultant. She was wondering why she couldn’t manage to get her practice together and get her clients excited about how amazing EFT was, and he jumped right to it and hit her with a big old blammo right between the eyes.

It made her see red, and shoot fire out of her eyes at him, and sulk and pout for days. And yes- he was right. (and here’s a link to a video of her telling this same story)

So what was the sucker punch he delivered over the phone? Are you ready to shoot fire out of your eyes at me (because, yep, I agree with this guy)? Ok, hold on to your seats because here comes the big Debbie Downer moment: … drumroll…  

People don’t care about what you do.

Yes, I’m cringing and covering my eyes as I write that. It’s brutal, it’s awful, it’s an ugly string of words- but on one level it’s true.

OK- please interrupt your shouting of profanity, or resist the urge to flee this page, or just take a big old deep breath and allow me to explain. Most of you know me by now and you know I’m not so hard-hearted. So on to the juicy nugget that the ugly sentence holds:

In marketer-ese (yes, a language I’m sure you’re not rushing to become fluent in), this is the old issue of features vs. benefits. The marketing peeps will always tell you that you need to focus on the benefits of what you do, rather than the features. What this consultant was telling her was that no one cared about EFT- they only cared about what it could do for them.

An example of a ridiculously successful product may help clarify here. Let’s take the iPhone, which last I checked is doing pretty well. The simple benefit of the iPhone is that it makes your life easier. That’s what Apple is selling- making your life easier with that device.

If, on the other hand, they were to geek out on features they could talk for days about the perks- everything from the benefit of having your phone, music, and internet all in the same place, to apps that do everything from find the cheapest place to buy that shirt you’re eyeing, count your calories, or even (for real) count the time between your contractions when you’re in labor.

Yes, they could go on and on about the revolution of the apps and the many delicious features that they’ll bring you. Imagine the dizzying ads listing all the endless features. But they don’t have to. Instead they convey simply that this device will make your life easier, and with this approach your eyes don’t start glazing over when they hit the story of app number 3,084.

This affects us as wellness practitioners because we all have a tendency to talk features when new clients are seeking us out for a pretty specific benefit that they have in mind.

The benefit they seek is always some version of, “Can you make this hurt go away?” The hurt can be physical, mental, emotional or spiritual but it all boils down to seeking out our services in order to “hurt” less. It could be said we seek out everything to hurt less, but I digress…

I think our tendency to get feature obsessed is because we all fall so head over heels in love with what we do, and then we go to school where we drink deeply of the Kool-aid and fall only more deeply in love. By the time we get out into the world and need to grow a practice- we’re in school mode (otherwise known as minutiae mode). And when talking with clients, all we can do is tell people how amazing the features of what we do are.

And they don’t care. Because learning about acupuncture, or homeopathy, or Thai massage is not why they’re calling. They’re not enrolling in school- they want to know if you can make the hurt go away.

Ask yourself how many people have come to you for your services saying, “I don’t have anything that’s causing me pain, difficulty, fear, or existential angst. I just want to experience the magic that is [insert modality here].” Not that freaking many. Some, perhaps, but veeeery few.

Yes, there will be clients- especially those who are already working with you- who will have the information junkie in them awakened and who will want to dive more into the how of the voodoo you do. Most of my clients do, at some point, get fascinated about connective tissue since it’s the medium my particular modality works with.

But my first conversation with them, and my practice building materials (website, business cards, etc), don’t focus on how fascinating connective tissue is. They focus on the main reasons people seek out Rolfing: to decrease pain, to move more easily, to increase flexibility and improve posture- these are the benefits.

Start listening carefully to the “it hurts here” behind all your client conversations. They won’t all be the same, but they’ll usually fall into a group of things, like my Rolfing example above. Every modality is different, and different practitioners within each modality will attract different kinds of “hurts”, so it’s the listening that becomes really important.

This whole shtick about people not caring about what we do is just another way of saying that you must speak to people’s actual needs. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and grief if you clarify and understand what these are and then speak very directly to them when growing your practice.

It’s essentially the same thing that I think makes for a successful Rolfing practitioner (though it extends to all practices, I think). When you’re working with a client you can decide what that person’s body needs and get bossy and pushy with it to try to meet this goal you’ve set for them, but all you’ll achieve is both an exhausted practitioner and client, with little benefit.

However, if you can decide to become an expert listener and follower- you can work magic. Not because you have a secret magic wand, but because you’re addressing what that human being in front of you actually needs, rather than fulfilling some agenda of your own.

It reminds me of my new favorite quote, “Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness.” (from the poem St. Francis And The Sow by Galway Kinnell)

While I may be going out on a limb here- and this probably deserves its own post- I would argue that we’re all really in the business of re-teaching people their loveliness. That’s only possible when we listen to where they got disconnected and offer to them the tools we have that we believe can re-introduce them to their loveliness. To do this- we have to listen and be able to connect with them by talking about the benefits.

But listen comes first.