My dear friend and colleague, Lissa Boles from True Callings, has recently been interviewing me as an associate faculty member for her True Callings Tribe*.

In our most recent chat she and I were talking about how I got into Rolfing and my experience trying to grow my first practice. Yes, trying to grow not growing. As most of you know, it was three years of stumbling blindly into brick walls. I’ve always talked about the cause of this clusterf*ck as the result of my total lack of knowledge about how to grow my practice. Which is true. However, what Lissa illuminated for me is that something else had gone missing in those years- my Why.

Because I had had such a profound healing experience with Rolfing as a client, when I went to school to study it, my number one, super potent Why was clear: people don’t need to suffer so much- and I want to do the thing that taught me that lesson and helped me to heal. (it’s worth noting that this is the same Why that has me teaching practice building- maybe we all just have one over-arching Why?)

However, once I got out of school and was faced with the fact that there weren’t lines of clients waiting for my services (hard to believe they weren’t shoving fistfuls of bills into my hands just to experience this thing with the wonderful name Rolfing), my Why became a stranger. Suddenly my panicked subconscious was whispering a new Why in my ear: “I need to figure out some way to convince people to pay me so that I can do this thing I love.” Um, yuck. Desperation + manipulation + self-loathing = no clients.

When I, in my new-grad-strapped-for-cash-lost-in-space state, believed that this was my Why, I went running from it. How could I possibly follow through on a Why that I was so averse to? And so I didn’t try to convince people to pay me to do the thing I loved. I hid. I hoped people would somehow find me and benefit from my work. Did that work out? Not so much.

When I moved to Brooklyn to start from scratch (after 3 years of hiding out and scraping by in Napa) I got busy and decided not to hide anymore. As many of you reading along know, this is when I fell in love with practice building and it all clicked. However, my conversation with Lissa reminded me that the decision to take action on growing my practice started with re-framing my Why.

After the move, I was surveying what my options would be if I didn’t make a change- another 3 years of silently suffering, another place where I had to work 4 part-time jobs on top of my Rolfing practice, another 3 years barely making ends meet- I got pissed. And when I got pissed the booming voice of my true Why came yelling out at me, “Heeeeeeeeey! Listen up you self-loathing, pain in my ass! (my inner Why can be kind of a pain in my ass) You’re offering people a gift for Gods sake, not asking them to do you a favor!” And with that it was like someone had flipped the light switch on. What if the Rolfer who had helped me- or the myriad of wellness practitioners who had saved my bacon since then- had never gotten it together to get the word out about their practices? Think of how I would have missed out. Which begged the question- who might be missing out because I’m not putting myself out there? Getting my Why back was the rocket fuel behind the whole thing. Once I had that, and I started taking action, it was 3 months to a full practice. In 3 months I accomplished what I never could in the previous 3 years.

What’s your true Why? Are there any false Why’s floating around in your beliefs?

*The True Callings Tribe is Lissa’s way to share insights from people who are living what she calls the ‘callings led life’ in other words- those of us who are both crazy enough and wise enough to live the life that follows that inner voice. If you want to listen to the full interview I had with her, you can find it here.  

Tags: Lissa Boles, practice building, Rolfing, True Callings

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under For When You Feel Like You Can't Keep On Keeping On, Practice Building in the Tangible World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.